The Gift

She stood there not long ago
With a rose petal in her hand
And she smiled, said she'd go
Then asked me to understand.

I asked where, my voice a thing
I didn't know was mine: machinery
Asked if she needed anything
And was kind and never mean.

She left the petal and she walked away
And went out into the night air
And I never asked if she would stay
Just smiled in my despair.

And now I walk around and pretend
Nothing's wrong and I'm all fine
But there's a rose I have to tend
And the girl I wished was mine.

Literal Question

The child is father of
The man. But what of
Those who never have
Children who'll make
Them into real men?

Fragment

The only person responsible
for boredom is ourselves -
the only thing that never changes
is who we are, the child inside,
and if we give it room to be.

Quick Poem

Lost things return
In higher ways
Or not at all.

Illumination - just
Turning on the lights
and not squinting.

The decline into senility

The decline into senility
is a simple path to trace.
Born of enough karma to
Replace you, you refuse
To free memory, and die
Daily, spitting back CDs
As nonexistent, or skipping
Pieces of songs when you try.
Your death is a slow piece
Measured in hopes: today, you
Will reboot and not die, and today
Becomes tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Each hope more brittle than
The last, finally reduced to prayer.

Stockholm

And in the dreaming darkness
Things are born, grow up,
And old, and die.
Master won't think you less
if you hide, shut up,
Tremble, and cry.

You've never left the shadows
Don't see, won't leave,
Can't feel the sky.
There's things you'll never know
Lying truly to deceive,
Your head held high.

And when they open up the cell,
Take Master far from home
All you'll do is sigh.
You'll find a brand new kind of hell,
Trapped inside your syndrome,
Grow old, and die.

Cosmic Orgasm

The cosmic orgasm from
Non being	Being
Our first	Duality
Light	Dark
Day / Night	Good / Evil
It is too easy to
Fall into polarities
We come together /
	Break apart.
Void	and stillness
Motion and	sound
We go from place to place
Space to space	land to land
	Never on the bridges
Where life belongs.

Astrolography

Even the highest can rise --
Airless reaches of stars
Say: You will never be alone --
In the echoed silence.

The pull of stars is only
Loneliness in the dark,
Migrations mistaken as
A song of destinies.

Staring in to the night
Light building patterns
Pretending truths as
All dissolves to singularity.

Wanderings II

Each day is movement:
scintillation of lights
- red, yellow, green -
through a familiar world
changing in no fundamental way.

I imagine you telling the tales
like a soldier reliving glories,
tales changing with the teller
to become a better world,
to be a different one.

There is nothing that is new
only
a remembering of what was lost.

I am reminded that all journeys end
Where they begin, and that mirrors
only reverse left to right,
not upside down as well.

I imagine you lost on a street
of the city we both live in,
not seeing it as a wandering
but an aggravation, honking horns.

I imagine that the map has
become the territory, the world
stripped naked, plotted, rendered
pedestrian and boring.

There are always other suns
To wander under.

Fragments

        i.

We are all born
Nameless, only
The lucky depart
The same way.

        ii.

Infinite jesters sing
Finite songs;
The path falls
away to
Embrace the open sky.

Query

Death is standing in line.
Waiting for the sales rep.
Wondering about credit.
Wondering what's offered.
Wondering what you'll accept.
Wondering if they do IOUs.
Death - another form of waiting.

When

When living is taken for dying,
Dying becomes living.
When doing is taken as acting,
Acting becomes doing.
Mountains become hills
And water drowns stones.

Spaces

The space between the words in my head
And the ones that appear on the page is
Vast and seems an unbridgeable gulf, a
Chasm visions fall into to emerge only
As words made text, no bone but meat,
No soul but flesh that hangs, too loose,
Off of muscles that do not move.

Father's Day Haiku2

Fathers's Day is lawns
Being mowed, packing for trips,
Watching the TV

For a brief moment
Only, a meal and cards: not
Mother's Day at all.

Wakening

Wakening

The offering to the unquiet dead
Is a memory, pulled from ether,
Line and hook and reel --
The rest is just posturing,
Only art and nothing real.

Condiments scatter around as
Wards against their rising,
Whispered name, a sneeze, prayer --
The rest just numb fear;
Earth peels back its layers.

Valkyries

We grow old, fail, and reach our ends
In the cities where we are just faces
In crowds, no longer choosers of the slain,
Just fat old women singing for our supper
In Opera Houses, watching the hunger
In the thin children who'll come next
And knowing that sooner, sooner
Than we'd like, we'll be singing
On street corners, dying in alleys,
With no one to carry us into the halls
Of Valhalla, just cold and our songs
Ending on the uncaring streets,
Discarded like litter with no one to care,
A private Ragnarök where the enemy
Is only and ever the need for fame
And the empty ends glory comes to.

Final Smoke Before Fire

I took a last drag of cancer
Let the stick fall to my side.
It didn't seem fair to be living
Without you by my side.

Fifty years of smoking
More than a pack a day
But when the Lord came
He took you far away.

I sat beside your white bed
Day after day after day
It wasn't penance enough
And I'll pay and pay and pay.

Fifty years of smoking
And a heart full of sorrow
I won't be visiting your bed
When I wake up tomorrow.

Age is seeing things you love
And watching them fall away
Until nothing holds you here
And you hurt too much to stay.

Fifty years of smoking
And it put you in the ground
Every time I try to cry
I never seem to make a sound.

It's too late now to mourn
All the things that never were
All I can say is when I die
I can't face the devil sober.

Fifty years of loving you
And now just an empty bed
Only the bitter prayer asking
Why didn't He take me instead?

Ilnya's Life

One for sorrow is the mother
Alone under the hill.
Two for joy - a girl or boy -
Whatever shall be shall be.

Sorrow is outliving youth:
Children's bodies still.
Truth be told too great to hold
Whatever we lose we gain.

But for the mother left alone
Far underneath the hill,
Only breath, a wish for death,
And whatever we see we see.

The Teddy Bear Armanda

The bears are smiling stuffed
Full of hate and loss, lovesick
They recall only and ever what was
Wishing paws had claws, teeth tearing
Slicing open sins, bearing burdens
For all the world to see and softly, softly
Weep - But there's no well wishers
For bloody bears who won't weep
And just wait, smiling so strangely,
For judgement and deserved damnation.

Butterfly Dreaming & A Reply

Butterfly Dreaming

Patterns forming out of chaos
Flitting, fluttering all through time
From beginnings to forever
Singing, dancing, and sublime
If butterflies fly together.

There's a queen mourning loss
Plotting vengeance on a tiger
Hoping to arrange to kill, to sever
And all worship return to her
Unless butterflies fly together

There is one who won't be bossed
Refusing gifts of fates and gods
A hole in a grand endeavour
That lets the dealer win the odds
If butterflies don't fly together.


Thoughts On The Horrid Butterfly Poem

To force a verse when a verse won't come is worse
Than to force a rhyme just for lack of time, I durst.
For I had tried to keep in mind words that were lost
And ended up with some crap fit only for a hearse.

Sphinxi

Was the seven wondered sphinx
Wondered I, the one with a head
Of a man, or the wings of the eagle
And the breasts of the woman?
Was it the father of terror who
Was honoured, or the beast-heads?
The woman was left to torment
Travellers with sexist riddles
And die, throwing herself not to fly
Onto the rocks, or devour herself,
A metaphor horrible real.

Children's Rhyme

The garden was as green
As any ever seen,
And the moon shone so high
Like a candle in the sky.

The garden's beautiful;
The moon makes it so still
And wants only to be near
The garden it loves so dear

But when the sun comes out
The moon hides to pout --
How little the moon knows:
The sun makes the garden grow!

Not Titled

Broad strokes on a canvas
Rough lines spilling past borders --
A child's paint by numbers done
In abstract expressions of joy.
We step 'round floor scattered with paints
Trying to decipher the paintings,
To imbue art with clarity and
A single overarching vision.
Oh! But is there a life
That does not spill into others?
The real painting the space
Between canvases where people
Live and love and learn.

Platypus

In the beginning
Was the committee
Which, after 7 days
& nights, high on coffee,
Decided to do something.
Various sub-projects flourished,
One was cancelled - via meteor -
Due to lack of funding.
In the end, consensus reached.
The committed looked at its work
And it was good.

11:22pm Parable

The boy found the old man sitting
Down beside an old tree, meditating.
"Why do you grow roots?" asked
the boy, taking him to task.
"So that I may learn," was replied
And the boy laughed and denied.
"See?" he said and flew
So very high and true.
The old man watched the boy fly,
Said: "What will you find in the sky
That is not down here?
Minds are just mirrors."
The boy flew away, far and wide,
Looking outward and then inside
Only to find that something
Was the same as nothing
And some say he was tied by roots
In the sky, became a thing to suit
Such a place, the face
In a moon making faces.

Haiku Bless You

The sky molten grey:
Life -- dandelions on grass
Sneezing fits of spring.

frumious bandersnatchi

The task: to write a poem (No Ode, thank God),
Something frumious, not frivolous, no sir!
And in the asking, what would be the odds
That a vorpal blade would know the plural?
As for the bandersnatchi, who spent time floral
Garden arranging, was she, then, to die sir?

And so they came kerslplashing through mud
All bandered and snatched and quite a mess!
And the mother waited, unawares that blood
Would soon be snickered for a luncheon snack!
The old man with the bone let loose a paddy wack
And it was such an awful gloroofus mess!

The bandersnatchi said: "We're bandersnatches,
If you please." The old man shruggled. "Not to me,"
said he! Then he ran inside, batterened down the hatch,
Because the SPCB had come, demanding his license
And refusing to misbelieve the killing was uncommon sense
Because the little banderoos made such good eatings you see.

The Oracle

They make oracles in the darkness:
Shattered chains of flesh and bone
Pinned to machines, the modern cages
Sucking out dreams with drugs.

Voices demand stock predictions,
Tabloid news, times of birth and death --
Demands a welcome respite from
Machines beeping life sighs and signs.

Of those who wait for a seeing
Few see anything beyond a tool --
The chaining of oracles is an old thing,
Faint hope that fate can be bound.

Haruspex

The haruspex has faded
In this too changed world;
What sacrifices can be made
Untainted by chemical additives,
Impurities of air & water & soul?
Auguries become damaged things,
Visions pale reflections foolish as
Those who believe the stars waste
Time foretelling our destinies.
But blood should matter -- and so
The ritual, the knife, & the animals:
Only entrails, only entrails, only entrails.
And the longing for an older world --
Mourning the dying of another art.

Plot Bunnies

No one knows where they come from,
Or why they don't always appear
But for some too lucky souls they come
And shed a hair or drop a plot-born tear.

The dust bunnies gather in
Clumps under the mind waiting to
Find a back door and sneak within
The writer in you knows this to be true.

They hide inside everyone of us
"Eureka!"'s cry is their true delight
Don't sweep them out with your mess
When next you spring clean to avoid writing

Nephilim

People keep asking
What were you, before you were born?
Bringing me to task:
What kind of brand name clothing was worn?
Was there anyone to mourn
When you removed your mask?

Hey, what was unlife like for you?
Hey, do you wish for undeath too?

People keep saying
Are you tired of these times of ice?
People keep praying
That somehow everyone willl play nice
Then we run out of devices
With nothing left for saving.

Hey, you can look at me askew
And maybe wish you never knew.

People keep walking
Down the roads they know so well
But nobody's talking
Since life is just a damn hard sell
Better by far a life in Hell
But I see you're still balking.

Hey, it's not so hard once you try
To kiss that old life good bye.

Hey, even if all goes awry
Just stretch your arms and fly.

Sensibilities

The people sat and wept and laughed
Before the neon gods they made,
Surrounded by the silence
That would never fade.
And the prophets wrote their warnings
Scrawled upon the bathroom walls
And the cats were smiling pretty
Dressed up like broken dolls.
Thee is a brilliance in seeing
Things only as they are --
Graffiti voices never cover
Open wounds that once were scars.

Cyborg Porn - Part X: Home Again

The irony of the future
Is the yearning for
15 minutes of privacy.

A small thing but
How do I tell anyone
I prefer appliances.

At least the dishwasher
Is honest about the things
It wants -- soapy suds.

No one else wants
Anything that pure
From me.

They have love and lust
And the expectations
Of first love and dreams.

Today I just want
something to screw
in the dark.

Motivations

Motivational tapes dance through neurons
-- I am special -- I am worth it -- I can do this --
I can find out where you live.
I can cut you with this knife.
If I am motivated, nothing
But nothing -- I am unique --
I am special -- I am worth it --
Nothing is beyond my grasp.