Moth

attention is nice
but maybe the quietest days
were the best
being slower
watching endless rain
through old windows
it empties my soul
hunting for my glasses
for an hour
gently cursing
these softest distractions
up and down the stairs
over and over
a moth in the night
invisible to myself
and everyone else

Twenty Bucks and a Stone Haiku

the cemetery
a bag blowing past
says THANK YOU

*

visiting Van Gogh
feeling all the people
we didn't

*

as many cracks
as days
a doll’s face

*
autumn morning
somewhere you change color
without me

*

chipped glasses
plates with hairline cracks
not a bad marriage

*

something in you the way
autumn trees
pretend to shiver

*

cool autumn morning
awakened by small feet
racing away

*

children share secrets
clear sap
from an unseen center

*

old porcelain dolls
in the nursing home
every crack speaks

*

autumn leaves
the colors a warning
a celebration

*

autumn leaves
fall on the railroad tracks…
is this a joke?

*
autumn market
different gourds
with the same problems

*

autumn morning
something running fast over
my head wakes me


*

hometown years later
even the creek’s
changed beds

*

groundhog hibernates
our clocks slow down
then reverse

*

the vacant house's
welcome mat
snowflake by snowflake

*

autumn morning
cold finds
a tooth’s crack

*
ANTIQUES store window
autumn leaves reflect
over old metal

*

winter morning
a tree that killed its children
waves at me

*
October schoolbus
autumn leaves board
in a hurry

*

asking what number
snowstorm this is
no one knows

*
autumn morning
the carp turn
slower circles

*

under canal leaves
disgust a century old
wedding ring smolders

*

waking in cold
to write of coldness
warms me

*

autumn crickets
a tempo
tells a story

*

autumn crickets:
imagine dying
without loneliness

*

funeral champagne
tiny bubbles stroke
forgotten places

*
reading obits
an unseen jet rumbles
towards no one’s home

*
in time

the pleasures of time
replace the pleasures
of place

*
my old school
my stomach rumbles
on its stone

*

the kid eating stones
on the playground
is a bird

*
the only thing
weirder than words
what they replace

*

a leaf falls
in the cemetery
a sort of Thank You

*

Van Gogh
freezes the cornfield
before winter

*

Van Gogh's cornfields
just before winter
forever

*

Van Gogh's paintings
lose color every year…
the snakeskins no one finds


*

missing each other
by mere eons
you and God

*

museum room
full of paintings the feeling
we just missed God

*
weather report
from behind icy fingers
on her nipples

*
snowstorm
all the infidelities
need rescheduling

*
Indian summer
an affair that promised to end
shops for skis

*

we visit you
in a cemetery
to talk about debt

*

dead winter
on my dad’s grave a twenty
under a rock

*

winter morning
you wake and your lover
is years away

*

winter morning
all the lovers on this bus
look like boxers

*

winter morning
lost coffees left on buses
tell us their names

*
winter to spring
a bus kiosk’s plexiglas
scratched like home

*
a real home
even the diamond
has scratches

*

autumn light
the clock turns backwards
when we do

*
autumn leaves
I can’t decide
on a collage

*
winter night ocean
still growing colors
in abalone

*
buried love
the night ocean
colors abalone

*

buried love
the night ocean
mothers pearl

*

visiting Van Gogh
feeling all the purple
we aren't

Tuesday

The rain was out in the street
making collages. 

People indoors make collages,
and I don't want to think
first world problems
of time like Proust. Look at their
hands ripping the ages
out of books which stood
for no one has the permission
to steal my pages
when we were kids
and every library had
at least one gorgon.

Let us paste time down
over other time and see.
The mind likes to see things
just ripped out like that,
the strange contours

of a body discovering
how it is a body,

if never quite why.

The collage at night
replaces the dog-eared
lover, a book we were currently
reading, which seems to wonder now
if we would sacrifice it
in this way. For art or some other
abstraction. Just how much
should I trust you, the book
seems to be saying under
its borrowed breath, as we hold it
close, whisper promises
to protect and preserve
what will slowly die
and only be brought back
to partial life by willful destruction.

What we will not tell it:
it is only certain pieces of you
that I will want and those
for the way they will brush
new-torn strangeness.

Monday

You said yesterday was the first day
of autumn everything. It was not. Today is.
Am I a breeze in your mind
as you are in mine? This window glass
through which I watch you is ancient,
possibly as old as Lincoln's forehead,
making wavy gravy of the landscape.
I wanted to send you some old art
along with its resident silverfish. Autumn
prepares to mount its exhibitions. You know
that usually means sex. Art workers
are usually oversexed and on ghosts.
Ghosts cannot harm us. (I would that
they could.) Today, I asked autumn what
she thinks of you, and it was all under her breath,
like a Ouija board. Just push the planchette
so we can get this over, get into bed.

Sunday

Each person is a cup of ghosts.
Each person like a spoon in a warmth
you can stir and drink close to sleep.
A white square in the museum is useful.
A black square in the museum is useful.
You mostly stir the way birds do
around the museum. You listen to the grass
move through walls, without seeing.
You say the word Sunday to hear
the shape it takes. Someone blows glass
far away, thinking as of a child
who will be your first reflection?

Wow! I'm Always Happy When I Find Something Like This...

Sue me, Ironman bro-fans, but Robert Downey Jr. was just fresher back when he was a Democrat.

Dream cast. Wonder if I'll love the movie as much if I watch it again. It's been so many years. Loved it back then. Hope it holds up.

Gum

I wake up in the night, worried about how to get rid of gum. I fear nothing will vaporize gum but a white hot star. I worry about our ignorance. If you put it in a mere earthly incinerator, the wet gum of a mouth will just scream and writhe and turn and pop and then crawl away. Just as Daniel came with a spring in his step out of that Biblical oven. It will lie on the street, charred, and wait for a really low mouth, for little hands to pick it up and pop it in. It might be a child. Or an art dwarf like Lautrec. And if you bury it deep in the earth, it will hold all our cells and spit in those brain-like grooves, and with the weight of all the trash above, pockets will seal over that DNA like amber over 99 million year old ants caught in the act of inter-species fornication. There is no solution. We should have never started with gum. You might swallow it, but then it's going to follow the great Excremental Highway to the sea. Think of all the people who throw their gum into the ocean. Right off cruise ships and PVC rafts made to look like a box of Crayola Crayons.You just know sea cucumbers are mating with our gum at the bottom of the sea. How do you sleep at night?  You probably don't even believe gum has genes, but at the beginning of creation a bunch of water bubbles "got" genes. They had nothing at the beginning. Just a dark dream and a fiction about themselves they told themselves constantly until it became true. The way you can hear gum talking, even when you stop chewing it. So it begins.