Toast on the Beach

     "I met my good friend, yesterday..."

The wheel of fortune, being
Well and truly loaded, never
Turns well, never hones
Its chops on tunes
A Pythagorean understands,
Makes nothing like the music 
Of a sphere.

     "...The one who is okay..."

It never turns at all in circles,
More in arabesques
Approximating oblong gestures,
But oh my sisters, oh my brothers,
Oh my gods and little fishes,

     "...With driving drunk..."
   
Still it turns, it burns, it turns,
Like the drunkard totters, searching
For a well-lit wallet lost
Long ago and far 
From this illuminating streetlamp.

     "...Without a seatbelt..."

It turns on all of us before the end,
And if it's turned on you, believe,
Somehow it will turn on me,

     "...In the middle of the day..."

And given that our fate's not ours
To comprehend, much less command,
Then I don't know, let's share a drink
Or hoard our own, each dire to each,
In honor of our little ends.

Stop Me if You've Heard This Before

A German, an Englishman, and a Canadian,
Brought together by their love of model airplanes,
Those working ones that can fly by remote control,
And by simultaneous August vacations,

Talk shop convivially under the whining
Of their little wonders looping over the lake,
Until one puts his plane into too steep a dive,
The German, and it stalls and crashes in the waves.

A fool on a boogie board, surfing the creek mouth,
Paddles out obligingly to rescue the toy.
Someone makes a joke about the German losing
The dogfight, and only the Canadian laughs, 

Enough to sound polite, then goes to the German
As to a dumb brother, to give him good advice.

Et in Canada...

I love the play of humaness,
Language hovering like a cloud
Of gnats over bathers chatting
As they enter into the lake,

Three women of bathing-cap age.
"Then the rigor mortis sets in!"
"I could use more rigamarole!"
"It's hard on your boobs, really hard."

It's beautiful to listen to,
Not three women, really, but one,
Co-created conversation,
Being in which I, too, am one.

The Early 21st-Century Meditative Lyric

"here I sit, having some poetic thoughts"

I guess our bodies make us up
Because we help them reproduce.
We tend to feel like we're in charge
And our job's to take care of them.

We're engineered to make the boasts
And take the blame, however life
Decides to treat us. We've been framed.
There's no soul ever planned a life

Much less built and succeeded,
Nor failed in its execution.
My body belongs to me as
Waves belong to the foam they make,

Still I suspect I am useful,
A social self among the selves
Of other bodies. Bodies thrive
On thriving bodies, big surprise.

Sacred Material of the Profane Spirit

This is this, and that is that.
Here and gone goes the only
Spiritual material.
It's not a house; it's a wave.
Ride it. You can't dwell in it.
Or something like that. What is
Intimate, impersonal?

Hundred

Lord, lord how personal our bodies are,
How rare and strange to themselves and others,

Such elaborate instruments of life
In its grand quest for continuation,

Built from (simpler, and more complex than) stars.
I'd trade mine in, if I had my druthers,

Beater that it is, but it's not my life
To swap, only my peregrination

To ride out as its creation, its soul,
Its nothing, its genius, its void, its whole.

Agnostics

1. Möbius Strip

You shall forget the truth
And the forgetting shall
Set you free. That's the truth.

2. Koan, the Smartass Librarian

If you find yourself
Worrying about what
You need to know, you
Already know too much.