Category: Uncategorized

The workweek begins.

February fog swallows

tail lights into town.

Otherwise, Buddha

sits in its reserve. To be-

gin, imitate it.

Suburbanity

my daily portion, flaneur

of neat gardens and

miles of chain-linked fence.

I pass the occasional

black who waves back to

the white guy who walks

everywhere.  If, as I believe,

flesh is the threshold

of wording, we are

already about to speak.

And sometimes we do.

On a cold bright day

in Spring it doesn’t take much

to let hope take root

in my mind such is

its appetite for the good.

Which is not to say

the new Tyrant has

not already claimed Spring one

of his new reforms.

To do my part I

will let hope become a poem

charged with indifference.

Temporary digs–

are all digs temporal?  Time

passes, we pass, truth

passes through open

places we consider home.

We see it then not.

We move on, the urge

communicated by the gods

that live in the light.

Heavy fog, clamor

of crows somewhere in the trees

overhead, my bench

empty and waiting

for my backside.  Life is good.

Flesh, however worn,

locates, along with

others, the absent-minded

self, in the middle

of a foggy day,

a murder of crows above,

the bright void below..

A slow walk within

reach of the Pacific–

I was quite young then–

a stony ridge, host

to poppies in Spring but I

preferred the winter’s

salty mist. Not will

(reading Jeffers), willingness

to step or sit down.

In Spring radiant

puddles with mud bottoms with-

draw underfoot and

you are upended.

The void fills with splendid gods.

You go up then down.

Metaphysics not

physics accounts for how shame

mixes with wonder.

Let the brain people

dominate the mind debate–

it may do some good.

You can’t teach the strange

ways of mindfulness and how

the human senses

connect everything

and the original good.

Ikkyu got it.

I do recognize

mind scattered in the bare trees

this cloudless morning.

The world expanding

beyond myself– what terror,

what jubilation.

The poem’s threshold,

thin, porous at best, the self

open to freshets —

bird song in dawn’s dusk.

Some mornings I turn over,

face oblivion’s

familiar mirror–

hugging the twisted pillow,

last rite of self-love.

It’s snowing back home.

Email pile up saying so.

Cet instant-ci, sans

bornes.  Across the street,

my neighbor’s pink camellia

sways in the light rain.