Away We Go.

First off, it was Alexi Murdoch.
That's who sang every song
to the driving scenes, and
drove the scenes to unrepentant
romance, but without triteness,
nix the sogginess of the heart,
only the warm and serious,
but not so serious to drag,
but perfectly tender and good
in its message delivering,
the romance that romcoms
try so hard to manufacture,
but only create a sick parody of,
with a laugh track
and roll credits.

A syrupy house built with toothpicks,
a gently silly example, overshadowed
by the feeling behind it, bursting out,
each word seems triumphant,
a victory of expression of what it is,
that fickle, often cynically scorned
intemperate monster we seem to miss
when it leaves us.
How does it enter us?
Was it there from the start?
Is it romcoms and roms
and the immense bulk of
the cult of media over our heads
that deeply imbues us with
standardized madness,
that fetishizes love, even more than
violence?
And they're linked and primal,
and sometimes base and shallow,
and often glorious and sublime,
and one was primordially essential
and one was not,
and now one is essential
for our existence,
and the other, similarly,
is not.

He blows slowly, but with force
the bulb glows fuller in time.

Telling it it must persist,
he puts the glass on a shelf.

The ornament is just that,
and he grows tired of it.

The effort is light upon him,
but the stress is too much for some.

The best ones, placed on highest shelves,
to one day fall and shatter, more completely than the rest.

Holding each gossamer-gilt item like a child,
he is tender and feels love, but without perpetuity.

Its alit in his eye each moment it's conceived,
and after forgotten or impugned, the love.

To love his art is important, as it loves him,
but incomplete in reckoning their lives.

One's just a glass bulb, sitting on a shelf,
the other a man who makes them.

They can never hold a light to time,
darkened their love's door is by impermanence.

Graying the light of the bulbs reflection,
the bulbs cannot see how he walks in doors and halls.

His dimensionality is a mask,
setting himself above in erudition.

Tossed and caught, the bulbs are his toys,
a fire burns in his eyes, despicable, humane.

Golden moments are hollowed out with spite,
virgin pools sullied with disenchanted clouds.

What a cruel master, quelling his thirst,
telling himself it is beauteous creation
knowing really it is a farce and cruel,
leading his works past insignificance,
believing his own twisting ethos,
only later to fall back in disillusionment.

My All in Your Nothing.

I saw a boy
riding his bike,

a cigarette hanging
from his cold wet lips,
as the rain came
shattering down,
and the black
shimmer of asphalt
shot up.
The street accepted
the boy as he was.
'Those things will kill you,'
he imagined hearing.
'What won't?'
he replied to no one.
Sometimes, I think that boy is me.

Time's Folly.

Entering time, one must take care.
I slip into natural chronology,
at risk of believing what I see.
People and things wash through me,
very little sticks to my bones,
even less to my soul.
Ideas draw me in, take hold,
rearrange my mind,
befuddle my soul's oeuvre,
and my bones weakened, rattle in dusty halls.
All this draws me through a fog,
to the edge of a cave,
looking out to nothing.
Fortunately, I sleep.
As I disconnect from time,
entering the anti-conscious and the metanatural,
those distressing worldly features are decompressed,
and can now slide into my psyche as they are,
denizens of my mind, objects of understanding
and not of time and matter.
Here my seeking roves freely,
culture, natural law, my own meaty shell
are anathema in time,
dragging down my seeking mind,
but here I move and think without walls.
In the moment, the clearness is incomparable.
But as I wake and enter time,
it clouds and fades, and the moment
becomes a dream, and I fall into it all
as the Myth becomes a moment.

A falling buckle

The brass coat buckle severed, drops
dangled as it was
dying slowly, drifting down
as its purpose does

Colliding through with rushing air
artful as it turns
time is slowed, seconds arrayed
as wholeness frail adjourns

And now the clasp splays falling light
last eulogy speaks Sun
the buckle's dead, the coat is lost
the grimmest struggle won.

Pleistocene Swamp

Give me a spear and a primitive bow
drop me in a pleistocene swamp
and let me hunt the eryops and meloposauraus
I wish to eat a soft-shelled turtle
on a bed of prehistoric spinach.
Send me to the tar pits
when they were fresh and hot
I'll taunt the dying dire wolves
howling and flailing in their petrol graves.
Let me be drowned in a crackling storm of ash
streaming from a mountaintop, split and spewing death
I 'll be buried beside a giant palm, immortalized in stone
I can die 10 million years before you, happy
if I never see a car
an asphalt spread or
hear a horn or engine clack.

Written in the UM Museum of Natural History 9/29/09

A Leaf Alights Upon a Lawn

The drying distance laying long
a leaf alights upon a lawn
through streaming dying splints of sun
the long green ship's path slowly run
as through the light it twists and falls
as old-turned pages drift through halls
of dusty desperate quietude
the leaf-page cries from which it's hewed
the tree its slaughtered father-form
the mansion-forest from which it's torn
to grind and pulp its flesh has made
the page on which this poem is laid.

But what of the tree, and what of the light
that was sacrificed, this gift to our sight
torn down so I might jot this line
a piece of nature fain divine
but what's the value of a poem
compared to a forest in which to roam
that like a spring in a fresh greeny grove
a thousands muses to green poets flowed
and from each mind a thousand poems came
and each one's lines could put this to shame.

So better I write on the back of some scrap
than a new page of paper, a new tree to tap
and let it discarded or untended fall
dropped from my notes to the floor of a hall
let it slip under the great wooden door
that threshold that grew from a dark forest floor.
It sprouted from bodies of dead men and leaves
and grew up in splendor and newness and ease
and each day and second it welcomed the sun
and grew a new branch and new its bark sprung
and as a wood cutter's ax lay not so long
the tree's final leaf alights on the lawn.

Send it all away.

He's the King of Hipsters without trying
rolling filterless cigarettes in his teeth and lips
lighting them with his cold-burning apathy
buttoned down corduroy blazer-vest over scotch plaid
sleeves rolled up exposing varieties of ironies
scarred into his arms and elbows, the ink always fresh
a glass knob on a dressertop
and each scene girl clenches her fists in lust and envy
as his hair is always right and the eyes of parents everywhere
look on and disapprove and misconceive
as everyone else does
his style or flare or generation confusion some say
and the thickly black-rimmed glasses jeweled--
hung on his face like a broach on a queen or a witch
with a spell for uncaring cool
and telling others of his likes or disses
the freely given bikes and accessories
that ornament the front of his greenwich flat
in san fran with garrulous decorations
from the seventies and tie-die curtains like silk scarves
and rolled-up tight black denim around his thin calves
shows his disdain for commonality and norms
but the glitter on his cheeks and in his pupils fades
and in dying sunlight
as the last scene fades
the Last King of Nobody Cares
drops away with the sun of scene
and tomorrow maybe a more sparsely upholstered vanguard will triumph
and the new kind of it-ness
a new in-ness, holding the scalp taut by the hair
of the king wearing his crown of Irony after the blood dries
will reign; a ventureless wanderer, one who holds
his primacy in trendiness more seriously
and his apathy more dogmatically
swerving from lightpost to curb
his fixie with a flat, not caring
never caring, pabst his shirt says
but he doesn't care
and as he rolls his cigarette, slowly
the scene apparates around him
and the king again in his court is worshiped
and despised and demonized and rendered
inconsequential by his own steadily declining
interest in anything of interest until the blackest
nihilist heart within him bursts with flame and verbosity
screaming in a thousand tongues
"I care not, send it away, send it all away."

The End of The Universe.

Tiny angles cross and meet,
dissecting and connecting every inch
of every thing.
Perfect, infinite streams of points,
each a singularity,
from each a universe unfolds--
they all take up
so much space.
Fortunately, they can overlap,
and ineffably always have.
Each tiny point, of each tiny angle,
together comprising what appears to be
an arc, a line, a germane curve, is simply what here,
does not overlap;
it is what mustn't exist any where else,
it's what juts into our space from its own--
extended like a bit of wet newspaper--
and delineates our existence.
Pieces of others, their cosmic edges,
intrude and paradoxically,
constitute ours.
Those germane curves run the slope of your nose,
your fingertips and mine,
each blade of grass and husk of corn,
Mt. Ararat and the Acropolis,
each wave of the brave Pacific,
The whole marble sphere,
Our blue-green pearl elliptically awash
in the sea of noble Sun,
and to the edge of what
seems to be everything.
But what happens at the edge?
How might an edge exist?
Graciously, we overlap,
eternally we overlap.

Your Time As A Leaf.

I.
Hail hail, the young brash-eyed writers of tomorrow,
age is a velvet veil, hiding the daring Rimbauds as urchins,
disguised as the serf washing your car, lifting and carrying
the plates away from your tall table, juggling books on bicycles;
they will write our histories up to the vertiginous cliff,
frolicking wildly,
endlessly scrawling winding cryptic signs into paper,
pen in hand,
digging, laughing, creating,
siring reams and reams of incandescent wit.

Trial by thought sorts them to one another,
seeking a graceful construction as inquisition,
the proportion weighed in connotations and utterances,
gilded in beatific silver and ideologic clarity,
picking up and leaving off and staring
stolidly into the lean, posh mainstream and the box,
denying the urge, decrying the ease, protesting the ilk,
that dishearteningly shallow dive
into what begs and begs
the deepest treatments in keenness and verisimilitude.

II.
The gift of Illumination, granted in driest corners of the mind,
soberly logical, analytical,
touched at their edges with bright beams,
irradiant, the Muse-Sun's gaze illuminates the laborsome reason,
inflaming it in passion, enshrining it in Natural Truth.

Change, change, hail to the new and changeful,
ride into tomorrow with a mirror on your back,
so those stuck in today can see themselves,
and you cannot feel their insistence and irrepentance,
but only the sun at your back.

III.
Eyes in distant admiration of the grandness of life,
feeling at its harsh wooden veins,
the coursing web of
the Earth's green floor, roots of wisdom,
generations bud, bloom, and die, flutter down, crisply,
making room for the next, given back to the ground,
--and so time as a leaf is short,
give back to the tree,
siphon the sun, heave its weight up on your back,
bless it with your leafness, then pass it on,
back to our tree and our Earth.

Grass Green

The dulcet green grass waves,
billows as a sheet,
A sheet upon a wave,
the wave around a ship,
the waves of grass all sway and wave--undulate,
dulcet as the tone, dropping their guard,
their dusty brilliant sheen, the sharply dropping green,
and glossy wave and shimmering slender
dulcet green stalks as shining dust,
struck by light in rays, particles, waves,
and the roots stuck sapping,
brown easy growth through the woody veins,
as a wave through a sea
through a ship
through a soul
through a dulcet field of billowing grass green.

The Rite of Spring.

When finally the terrible ash falls,
when soot-dark hooves pound our crystalline,
light-splintered streets, and drifting in spaciousness,
tin asterisks plummet as blinking lights,
puffing a mushroom in the woods on the horizon,
and the rhythms of the New World break apart,
and the rhythms of the Earth rise in root,
when the Sun is a compass, is a watch, is a match,
and the dogs of old days become feral hounds
and the highways grow like deserts, and shrubs reclaim the roads,
Letting lichen stumble upon projects and high rises alike,
she lashes out in equitable totality, Earth,
and she wills her skin grown back,
where we once peeled it away.
And all the peoples are scattered
and each minute's like a leaf that falls, uncounted,
and all of our bleak worldly treachery, our base treason
that has scarred and eviscerated, has dissolved in ignobility,
when dirt coats our tongues like the smoke the world,
the sun will come through too mightily, and we become
like a pear baking in a warm refrigerator, unplugged and dilapidated,
Spring might be near enough, but our Winter will be rough,
and our diet one of rawness, roots and wild meat.
Our eyes will narrow and sharpen, and our feet will grow black,
our bones will weaken, our limbs losing muscle as they gain sinew,
human bodies will grow hard, stolid and stubbornly crafted to the land,
our children might hear stories of Modernity, but it's just a dream, a fairy tale,
if only our knowledge remains, and all of its dark children die,
I will not mourn.

Golden are the mornings I'll wake,
cool and wet, dewy and bright
with hard tasks at hand,
but without guilt,
and pure driven easiness lightening my feet,
tides of grass and wildflowers that ebbed are now in resplendence,
precious floorboards of our new wider home.

Over the Years, My Garden Grows Wild

I wish I was beside her,
but I'm not, I'm gone.
-Bob Dylan

I've made a mess of this garden,
the daisies have gone to pot.
The tulips are fading too.
Pulling dandelions is a pain
like dull clenched fists
rapped upon a concrete door.
The scrapings deep in my knuckles
and the fetid weed fast in my fist,
and the choking fugue,
the dusty, yellowing haze of tiny seeds,
and each pretty little sun-head
perishes into a thousand more,
as the suffer,
my cultivated beauties,
the sweet simple daisies,
blind to lusty propagation,
and the elegant tulip indifferent,
they suffer.
As I pull the milky stalks and race about,
trying to beat the flowing sordid fluff,
Each mellow bursting sun-head is
a fraction of beauty
who's sum is meaningless,
for a thousand dandelions is less
than a pink tulip petal
kissed with dew,
and a daisy cherished in the afternoon.

Still Surface.

Trickling through my heart,
a stream of desperate thoughts.
I once washed my hands of you,
but I ache here, now to bathe in you.
The cool easiness of a still unwavering surface,
one which can be depended on in comfort and confidence.
A mirror laid in a vast rocky slat, reflecting trees and all of this,
an eternally deep and narrow pond, a personal fjord.
We dipped there once, and forever in our minds.

One great moment.

One great poem can inspire a generation
one great song can incite public elation
one great book can induce mass realization
one great painting can evoke personal actualization
one great movie can shift visual dramatization
one great novel can reinvent publication
one great company can revitalize a nation
one great invention can hasten globalization
one great moment can defy interpretation
but one great reaction can obliterate creation.

Here it is.

when she laughs I whisper a prayer
from the bottom of my lungs and gut
a drifting intangent thing, like the ghost of
a halo, the crust of the sun in a million miles of blackness
fortunately she doesn't hear it,
its a secret in truth, and in truth its found.
that each day I see the coronal glimpse,
the tempered heat and light shine from her eye
as her graceful chin rises and her hair falls back
my thoughts a reflection, a bow to her implacable shine.

Trite and Bitter.

As I loosen the ash
of the last cigarette of the night,
I feel trite, and bitter for it,
but dreams leak in
and words leak out,
and dashing through the night,
I feel a peaceful sleep come on
that makes it all alright.
The sleep's not mine,
my eyes are peeled
but my apprehension's gone.
With book and lap
and pen and pad
I quietly soldier on.
My bitterness fades and
lightness comes and
soon things seem okay.
I read some more
and write some more
and light one more today.

I am Witness.

This quiet room exudes,
in smoky memories and tattered thoughts
that drift beneath my senses,
an edifying truth,
a rigid, buzzing wall
of thoughtless facts.
I cannot touch them or see them
or even dream of their light airy existence,
but they make my blond hairs bristle,
and my eyes narrow in shape.
My lungs suck them through the dim light
and they force themselves into my blood,
my very heart.
Even if I leave, never return,
and even if the room turns black and burns away,
and even if I never drift again
in my mind to its shadowy attic ways,
a legion of traceless iota
have burrowed into my being,
an endless source of the room's existence,
and to it 'til my grave,
I am witness.

Think of something.

titled: the deepening haze of meta-fascination,
the work tells on numerous levels of the tools
that can reconstitute some lost sense of oneness,
and in that without this feeling being lost
it might seem tangible, which horrifies against
its very meaning, and its crying mantra:
the more you know, the more you see
that really you know a shred of nothing,
and in this lies the real heart
of a thousand generations of learning and discovery
and the acquisition of, the fascination with,
the devotion unto
knowledge.

Arc Like the Sun

The Eros of the arc

of a red bull can tilted back,

the balance on your fingers

as the biting philter flows,

the last drops curving down the can

and the pivot of your hand

shading the faded dawnlight,

and the exponential grace

of the can's arc is reflected

in her darling curves

through the filter of fresh brightness

in the rising morn dawn's arc,

and the grace is like the can's

and as the swelling vitriol flows,

the curves stir in the velvet pool

and a sun of greater brightness

stirs up and shades the faded light,

the face stirs up and harkens back unto the night

and the stirring curves are rising in the velvet

and as the can tilts back and livens the fluid

easing the roll of the eyes

that rest on the girl's subtle curve

just beyond, the fervid arc of dawn's first luminescence

in the tender

spirited morning,

you smile a bright arc

and are given to laughing,

an easy flow that blows from the soul

and the laugh is caught and she is smiling,

and her arc is like the sun,

all her arcs are like the sun.