When Other Work Fails You

Here's a little box with your name on it.

It was presented to your life at birth.

Birth is a scary transition from one
(One container of two brains) to one more,

More gradual than the screaming habit
Habituates us to think. Here we are,

Are we not? Write on the walls of your box,
Boxed in as you are, I am that which writes,

Writes and wrote what others could never speak,
Spoke what storytellers could never tell,

Told what prophets promised not to reveal,
Revealed what's true. Nothing's everything here.

But We Need to Forget

Sukha says. Sukha says
A lot of things, now that
Sukha's three. I obey.

Sukha's painting water
Colors at the dining
Table. The motion of

Her brush suggests, counter
To thought's best behest, be

Your best, yourself. Forget.

Heart to the Plaza Hotel

A mercy and a miracle are one

And the same. Low sun over the shoulder,
Illuminating incapacity,
Lets a body know both necessary.
In a short story it's harder to say
Why "to provide" has to rhyme with "to hide,"
While characters and plots detail wry clues.

What will have become of us by the time
Our tale appears to wag our dogged lives?
Spring will festoon the Northern Hemisphere.
Taxes will be coming due in the States.
Heat will be blossoming in the desert.
But what will have become of us, writing
Our way out and about the Town of Dust?

Mesquite Dunes, Death Valley

The last day last year
A little buzz on
Tourists everywhere
Sent a lovelorn note
To impossible

Invisible selves
Of the future lost
In contemplation
Of the past notebook
Turned up in the car

Were we wittier
Then? Did we exist
Making wry comments
That made us feel wise
When we wrote them down?

Enough revision
And speculation
Occurred when the past
Presented itself
As a world en pointe

Asking you and you
What have you done since
You thought you would be
Better than you are
When you know you are?

This Poem

"Which recounts what will soon be seen."

A fine web ghosts
Me as I bend
Down to retrieve
A dropped object.

Ugh. What was I
Trying to find?
I've lost my mind.
I rub my eye

Where the cobweb,
Too fine to see,
Itches again.
There. Gone. No. Close.

Continue Without Loyalty

What sweet cynical monkeys we are,
And we know it. We love each other

So easily and with such fervor.
We fully exploit each other's love.

The person pumping self-serve tankfuls
Of unleaded gas feels a slight tug

On the emotions when the machine
Offers a stark, silent choice between

"Use my Maverick loyalty card"
Or "Continue without loyalty."

That Moment

"If these chivalric ideas did not carry with them all my thoughts, there would be nothing I should not make and no curiosity my hands would not create, especially cages and toothpicks."

I can pick apart a house
As well as I build a cage.
When there's little to disturb
The thoughts from homing on home,
The mind returns. We don't go
Swooping lightly to darkness.
We have our hesitations.

The copper steeple gone green
In the snow and the rain, hope
Sifting through hope's ashed remains,
Silly externalities,
Sillier abstractions dust
Our outlines so we can see
Our true selves loved like our dreams.