Tell me

About the Universe;

The one you invented

In your sleep last night

When all the birds

Had gone on to theirs–

The branches like scratchmarks

Against a window

You couldn’t see–

These instructive clouds

That sail by in the black

Filtering a little moon

Or other splinters of lost light

You can’t see those, either

They are imagined

In a chance encounter

Down some hallway

In a bright school yard

In the Sixties

When a teacher reluctantly gave you

The pink hall pass

For a feigned illness

And you ran down

the stairwell, forever

Laughing.

At a street corner

In my proper town

After ten pm last night

I saw a handful of big cockroaches

Scurrying for all the world was worth

Swarming candy wrappers

And Starbucks cups

Acting stealthy, or so they thought

In their shiny brown-black shells

80 million years of survival like this

Thriving, actuallty–antennas testing the air

For sounds and for smells

Beneath them, rats almost certainly

Were feeding on similar reams

Of discarded pulp;

I could not see them, felt

Their little, purposeful feet

And black, dragging tails;

A rat’s whiskers, like a dog’s

Or cat’s will tell him

How narrow a space

He can squeeze through

In pursuit of their goals

Sizing up the universe

On a daily basis as they do

For its tidbits, scraps and leftovers…

In NYC, ambitious designers

Are trying to put

The World Trade Center back up

Right where it fell

Amidst the ruin and discord

Of our century; a flower

rising among death, destruction

And Hell: how long until

The gleaming towers of Progress

And Commerce are built?

And how long, after that

Until someone

Will knock them back down?

Main St.; 4:50am

Dark restaurants

Quiet denizens that hours ago

Had hungry people in them;

Shapeless forms in streets

Men crossing with carts

On a quest for permanence

Soon, it will be garbage trucks

In unison; blue and green

I have seen red, too

In certain neighborhoods

Disposing of what the fortunate

Don’t want

Here on Main Street

Near 5am

A world between extremes

The early passerby

Threads.

Spitting out bits

Of skin and stem

Against the rain;

Whittled and chewed

To a thunderous, subtle pattering

On dusty wood–

Much needed moisture

And drink…

If I had enough courage

Or reverence

I would fling

The old terrace door open

And let the wet morning in;

Witness filaments

Nailed to their crosses

Caught there

In sedentary acts

By a sudden storm

But, in fact, no disturbance

Lasts long here

In brutal, lovely summer

This chain of transience

Links results of my actions;

These tracks I can sometimes follow

Words and deeds

Kindness–not cruelty

A good word written

On paper in ink

And passed to you

And maybe later, others

Spitting out bits

Of skin and stem

Against the rain.

Manuscripts strewn

Around the house, held

By bent clips

I could not throw out

And stones a thousand years old

From indian mounds at the coast;

If you believed in ghosts

That would be a good place

To look for them–

These ancient implements

Sit quietly and smoothly;

Worn from hands and necessary abraision

Like words

These columns of verse we make

Thought out clearly–set up

And left alone and fallow on shelves

Until an errant trip there

Loosens their lives–

I saw a black cat pause

Outside a white, shuttered church

In Venice tonight

A man on a bench, motionless

In the dark street

And a swollen black limosine

Idling at the intersection and waiting

For its turn to burst into the green

My home is a collection of cards:

Pictures, plates and numbers

Like my city, with its indigence

And kings of commerce;

I will never admit to a thing

Because most of them

Never do.

In the early morning

Of July 4th, in the western skies

Over Malibu, the moon

Appears to be watching over

The early proceedings

But it’s not–

Blissfully oblivious up there

In its codependent rotations

Needing Earth for its orbit

And we needing the fickle globe

For its variety of modes

A face, a trite, escaped balloon, a lost love

Carlos Almaraz’ chipped tea cup

A steady cliche

That keeps coming ’round

Timelessly, now

It’s July 4th, the Big Day

And that moon

Might sooner than later resemble

A puff of smoke, the end

Of a lit fuse, or an ordnance design

All its own, up there alone

In the fireworks-expectant sky

But now, I’m going inside

To meet about the old, familiar issues

And I’m going to leave

That moon out there

For other people’s guesses

And conjectures.

It’s a trail

That has no beginning

And no ending

But we see it as finite;

Limited–starting and stopping

With the familiar, editorial signposts

What if…everything is not

What we think;

Neither Life nor Death

Never ending but always

Beginning, like Life itself?

Just now, a kite across the hill

Red and blue and white

Close to July Fourth, rises

And then falls to a chorus

Of “Oh-No’s!”

The kite will fly again

The journey is never finished

Someone just has to want it

To rise back up.

Disgusted, distracted

Feeling terribly modern

I start reading a book

Halfway through;

Tear a page out

For no reason

Like a wound

A cut just above the eye

That bleeds down

Like frozen, firey icicles

You can’t stop the summer

With a few words;

Even well-placed ones

Oh, you’re so literate

But the coyotes howl

And cry and wail

Their plaintive ripping calls

Pure sheer hunger

In the dry canyons here;

They will find something

To eat, to hunt down

And literally decimate

Epochal determination–

Some unsuspecting, terrified

Thirsty animal, like you

Driven by fear to drink in the dark

It will venture too far

Into those jaws

The night is too black

And yes, you know

Too much.

A mystery

At the corner;

The lamp throws

Its oblong shadow

On the floor

In the shape of an egg

Or a cell

Or a denuded pine cone

You pass by, focused

On legitimate goals–

The Coffee to brew

Tea to steep

A letter to write

All those things, big

And small that you need to do

Or to avoid; the decor

Of bad thinking

Like a comfortable couch

So hard to get off of

And beneath which

There always seems to be

A layer

Of of thick

Dust.

The imaginary world

Is real

As the real one

And just now

As the garbage trucks thunder down

The rotting bins smell

Like flowers;

Maybe Joyce was right

That “In contradiction

Lies our hope…”

This explains why

The rambunctious black lab Cleo

Tried to bite off half

My hand when I fed her some

Of my morning scone

Eva, the little girl

Stood there laughing

Not realizing at age 5

The significance of biting

The hand that feeds

Giving credence as I do

To fantasy

Believing the whims and vagaries

Of too much thinking

Until clouds are smoke

Of Armageddon;

The rumbling of the boulevard

Is the sound of tanks approaching

And left alone

To our own devices

We will–instead of to seek community

Build an impregnable castle

On the highest hill.