Well this doesn’t feel right for Easter but what can you do? It’s the most close to ready piece in the notebook. And I like the cadence and the weird rhyme between the third and last stanzas. I don’t use rhyme much but sometimes I like to experiment.
Happy Easter. I hope the bunny or higher power of your conception made timely delivery of whatever peace, happiness, or sense of purpose you needed most.
The red-tailed hawk turns on a thermal above the wild brushy ground and cries
There is nothing you need Nothing is precious but time Nothing is worth dying for but love Nothing is worth living for but peace Nothing belongs to you but now
Below is the last poem I wrote in 2022; it was a lean year for creative output, to say the least. My bad. And I don’t know if anyone is still reading this blog. At one time it had 7,000 subscribers but I have been neglectful. I hope that 2023 will be better. One of the things I’ve been trying to teach myself is that writers/poets have to practice their scales just like musicians. Of course that means setting boundaries, protecting the hour or so a day that’s the bare minimum for doing anything with one’s life. And the people around me don’t respond well to boundaries. They see spending time living the life you’re working to make a living to have as a reward for being successful enough that you don’t have to work. Which is like saying a farmer can’t harvest any of his crop unless he harvests enough to throw some away.
I see life differently. I believe that we’re born to live a certain secret amount of time, and that every moment of that time belongs completely to the person whose life it is. Not one second ever belongs to anyone else. It’s ridiculous to think you have to borrow some of it back from your employer, or your family. You don’t have to justify your self-expression, how you spend your time, or deny the fact that being not busy doesn’t mean being available. You should keep your promises and support others, but you haven’t promised to be with them all the time, and they haven’t promised to pay you what your life is worth.
How infinite and amazing a human life is, and how completely we reduce every life we see – even our own – to its most basic appearances. It’s tempting to see only the surface: the hair, the tattoos, the piercings, the clothes, the secondary sex characteristics. When I see people, I try to see the sadness, the gladness, the pain, the fears and hopes and history that has all brought them to their Now.
The way we see each other and our fleeting lives is like looking at a distant galaxy and saying well, that’s not quite enough light to read a menu by. And it makes me sad and I can’t communicate in words how much life is worth loving, how much people are worth their freedom and the celebration and defense of their solitude.
Happy New Year
Human Life
Thinking about a human life makes all the light held by time retreat to the distant corners of the mind. Time can’t imagine such a life, can’t can’t hold it, and time can’t set it free. Eternity is the only – oh, so lonesome – measure of a thought.
And how can I love you, who never arrived, was never found, barely sought: the walled garden unmapped in any world? But I do, I have so for long. I swear to die with your secret name still forming in my thoughts.
If I see the surface of the ocean and think I know what lies beneath, I must be ready to accept a slow death by thirst, shivering and steeped in a cold mist. Eight billion lives is so many infinite worlds.
But for the time being I am in the center of everything that screams and teems. And it’s subtle as the most intangible reality. For now time is the duration of a thought.
Clarice Lispector Agua Viva
Boomer is living on borrowed time. He has very little he can call his own, so he borrows as much as he can. It arrives from the sky in tiny packages that glance off the struggling grass, brush his face and become exactly the just-now moment of a thought.
Boomer is in love with words, even their droplets of darkness. All night and sometimes in the day he mumbles words. He conjures them out of paper and they skitter and lurch away into short lives, meaning nothing to anyone but him. When he sleeps the words fall out of line and make a run back toward chaos. And they are glad to be scattered. They were no good for each other.
Boomer wakes and looks around and laughs – he knows he’ll find his words again beyond the deep blue channel, past the islands, outside of time. And also dogs.
Boomer will be an excellent ghost. He loves to be quiet. He’ll be a spirit of wood – of furniture and windowsill – the vague squeak of a floorboard when no one living is up and moving through the dark house. A phantom of ambiguity and a slight tingle in the nerves. So he practices being forgotten and unnamed.
Boomer will be a friend to sleeping cats, focusing puddles of sunlight on the rugs. His thoughts will float like motes of dust and make the room a little sad, though no one will remember why. And somewhere in eternity, old Boomer will be asleep in his words.
Oh! My (for lack of a better word) God You who are if I am not, You who are not if I am, for for that matter both and neither, I pray to you the unnamable, incomprehensible Being, for peace, for consolation in my inexorable solitude, for my life to light (even if weakly) the lives of those I touch and hold fast, for my moment in the space of time to do no damage, cause no suffering, abridge no freedom, and then for me to be forgotten in the long birthnight of mystery and oblivion. Amen.
We were never lovers and I don’t know if that means everything or nothing since so much of everything I imagine remembering is meaningless now. It’s not important but maybe
I saw the moon one night last week. Alone, I just stood there and thought it looked strange, smoky as it rose over Rincon. Later I realized I’d unseen the blood moon in its flight.
My mind was somewhere else while Earth threw a bloody shadow on its bone china innocence. (The only place that Man has ever reached and not committed murder.)
But why did you take my hand that night in the college parking lot under the oak trees, interlacing your perfect young fingers with mine, if everything means nothing?
Never mind: I’m too old now to misunderstand the maimings of love. The great eye of the moon looks down from eternity and they say we’re meeting on the other side.
The maimings of love are endlessly funny, as are the tiny figures of talking animals, being blown to pieces in cartoons. ~ Gilbert Sorrentino, The Moon in its Flight
A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs.… A poem should not mean But be. ~ Archibald Macliesh, Ars Poetica
On every screen we see the smoke climbing reaching for the pity of Christ and we realize they dress their babies just like Americans their children have the same expressions of uncomprehending fear, the same shine reflecting the pastures of Heaven in their Ukrainian eyes and is this some kind of trick?
I watch news in small doses because plague time has compressed my life as well and my dull eyes fill with tears because this is pure evil and someday a screaming may come across the sky for all of us.
I made a few new year’s resolutions, which aren’t going well so far. I intended to focus on every good opportunity to shut the f–k up and stop giving unsolicited advice, to stop sharing opinions about choices or situations outside my own responsibility and control, and to write positive, grateful, hopefully uplifting poems. I’m still taking when nobody – least of all me – wants to hear me, still opining about things that are up to others from my family to global psychotic dementors like Voldemort Pootin’, and here’s another dark sad poem.
It’s not my fault. I would have been more than happy to write an ode to the wind clouds hovering over the coastal range this morning, and I’m not the demonpuke bombing innocent, defenseless people. Art has to meet the world where it is and tell the truth.
I would have been happy. I’m not sure I can see an opening in the funhouse mirrors of protracted chaos to find the exit to happy tonight but I can close my eyes and find reasons for gratitude. That’s something; in fact, it’s a lot. I’ll take it, gratefully, and hold fast to hope for the survivors of the massacre in Ukraine. Maybe they can use our hope more than our sadness and faith more than anger.
“Am well. Thinking of you always. Love.” ― Albert Camus, The Plague
What if there is no I, no not-I, maybe only We, certainly no Them? What if it is all one light, one darkening into death, one ineluctable pain?
There is so much more to write poems about than death, I know. But the birds simply sing as the humans rise and fall on waves of plague. Their music hasn’t changed my mind. There are nights I just want to sit here alone, listening to dogs barking at nothingness, and weep.
So let’s burn it all down, let it shine, sing, walk down old roads, leaving the dead behind to bury the dead as they become more night than day more peace than fight, more joy than struggle. Of course I am afraid. Aren’t you?
I don’t know what God intends to do about it when I die but my house will be occupied by not-Me. Time will stop but continue turning in its widening gyres.
Maybe we will sit in the dim coffeehouse under the shaggy eucalyptus but I will sit apart. Maybe we will stand in the last bookstore of eternity, listening as all the old ink turns to rain.
In the cold kitchen of blue hour I sit drinking coffee, echoing a song you wrote for someone else. The piano answers in a farther room. Communication is impossible, just a myth of the old oceans and their blue-black waves, the early trees and smothered rock. It depended on shadow and gladness. It has always defied us. We pretend, we orate and whisper, weep and entreat the trembling air. We unearth stones, carry weapons to speak for us, beg the birds to sing from the hedges to help us talk. No, it’s not sound that matters. It depends on shadow and the folding of distance. Now the sun is down! Light candles that smell better than reality. Call every memory together but in the sum of all parts, the parts fade away.
Citizens of hope & glory, Time goes by, it’s the time of your life — Genesis
Sometimes space goes on and on as when we were children whose feet didn’t reach the floor from Grandpa’s chair; who grew up and tried for years to reach the sky.
There are spaces where time goes on and on as when we grow older and can’t reach across the field of flowers where a coffin stands and the cold hands of our watch fall still.
These don’t account for the ocean which is infinite space or the night sky or Disneyland’s eternity.
So I measure the distance between us in memories and longings, in the desperate need to be held against the shade of forgetfulness, or simply in hundreds of miles.
The shapes of fear rise up in our dreams like infinite rooms collapsing in on us, expanding forever yet never big enough for angels or lost dogs, or the name we had before the world was made.
There are empty kitchens in this world, vacant houses full of leaves, sheets dripping on the line in dishwater light. If the sheets block the fence and the fence blocks the view of the trees, isn’t everything an empty space?
Look, someone is standing there, waiting – a man in a black coat, beneath the trees. I’m afraid it might be me. What do I want? For the world to stop spinning so fast, for time to return us to people who love us.
Metaphor 