"Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn."
i sing love love to no who hiking
strings and straws and loss of breath
to (and not much to) my liking
speak the word, the shibboleth
lost and found in waves of sand i
sing bath songs of who knows why
do two gandalfs make a gand-i?
can i get that ham on rye?
can i once, before our suppers
skate on fallacies like ice?
no no questions only uppers
worth the cost
at twice
the price
A meditation on our role in the choices available to us
the world’s a store, and
we walk by products that are
arranged to catch our eyes;
our attention often fixed upon
objects not present, the
subjects of our current fixations –
and yet, if economics allow, we often
buy products that we know we may not
need or even want, merely from a sort of
habit of politeness; a feeling that
so much trouble was gone to for us, we
really should show some support –
bringing home these pointless objects, we
find ourselves leaving by-products, traces
of these and other half-optimal choices that
make up most of our days; the things we do, because
we must do something, and so we choose from among
the options available to us
if, of course, by “products” we are thinking of
things like relationship and career choices, this
only becomes more true – and more the
pity, since we frequently either don’t go to
enough stores to provide sufficient choice or
go to stores long after the right choice has been
purchased by someone else
self-important, flaccid jerks telling
others how to live better lives by
investing in squalid ineptitude shaped
by financial advisers best noted for their
tendency to marry progressively younger
women who have given up on love as anything
like a viable concept in this era and society but
who also enjoy tenuous sensuality resulting in
something like floods of where did that come from
feelings turned into sound bites on
illicit videos shot as a form of self-aggrandizement
since brief meaningless pleasures must be lengthened
artificially via technology to memorialize
their pointlessness
where only fallible irons press,
the clothes will never crease;
and much the pain you’ve caused me shows
no token of surcease
you won’t believe in anyone
who feigns they have no guile:
for all your favorite fantasies
lose shine after the while
as all the pills you claim you take
were taken long ago:
so princes dream of common girls
and you –
you know
it’s so
here comes the dripping pouring full
of adventure knowing no boundaries and
i stay laden with my oddities forever or
until such time as my eccentricities escape
this frame of referential deference to
the writers of great poetry and books who
sometimes send flowers to the world and
other times send their regrets for the
villainies of humankind – villainies spilling
over into colors shed on playgrounds in houses
and nobody hears the crying they’re all out
under the banners by the loudspeakers telling
all of us they care more than we can manage
within the dripping hues of environmental spillage
emotional situations that tear into listlessness
like empty phrases torn from the pages poured
out like libations to the local priestess of
broken promises
she wrote her notes in loopy scrawl
and left them floating on the dust;
i read a few, but breathed them all:
her florid style, much discussed
by handmaidens and men-of-means
by power-queens and pawns;
in rows and rows of pecan trees
across a thousand lawns
i asked her if she knew my themes,
and she responded thus:
send purple now by way of dreams –
we have much to
discuss
he asked, but no one seemed to know the reasons
or hazarded so much as a small guess
why wasted time fills up the best of seasons
and leaves him to a life of emptiness
in roil dynamic or in static posing
a tag of nothing but diathermance
to radiate within secure enclosing
with only pallid nonsignificance
he asked, but no one gave him much to go on
he read, but found no clue to get him there
he knows that used or not, the days will flow on
a spinning wheel
that leaves him
in the air
