WINTER 2024
Everything Eyes
1:1:2025
If I were your mug,
I would shudder with anticipation
When I heard your alarm-phone
Go off in the morning,
Atoms all but rejoicing
As you creak your way
Out of your bed down the hall,
Stumbling over your limbs
With shut eyes
As you make your way over
To hold me again.
If I were that jacket
At the back of your closet,
I would peek out at you
Unassumingly, caught
In between jumbled hangers
And fabric unseen;
I would hold a deep breath
As your hand grazed the depths,
Almost stifling a cry
As you let out a sigh and went back
To that sweater you wore
Only one, maybe two days before.
If I were your God,
I would see you with eyes
That looked like every
Thing; I would let you
Use me for the joy
That use brings; I
Would use you
To laugh
And to dance
And to sing,
And you'd use me to fly
Just by calling me “wings”!
1:9:2025
A dream:
There was some
quintessential symbol,
A mandorla, mandala,
geometry:
The perfect balance
Of complexity,
Of entropy and perplexity.
And a voice,
Smooth as silk
And clear as day
Came from every which way,
Saying something to someone
Who, apparently, couldn't
Or wouldn't be named:
Yes, I believe that she's ready now—
One last flash of the sigil,
A pang of bright light like
The traces left over
From suddenly shutting your eyes—
Okay, this is it,
Here it is—
Will you dare to
Re-member it?
1:11:2025
Reason, largely manufactured,
Can never stand up to
The idol
Who keeps it in business.
Somewhere along the way,
Somewhat, why, or who
Sunk its claws into you,
And now all you can do
Is ask it for forgiveness.
Was it really once
The other way around?
Once upon a time,
All values determined themselves,
End of story.
Fortunately,
That was all rather boring,
And so, we began the arduous task
Of determining values’ values
For them.
Cut to:
Interior. Day.
Someone me-adjacent,
Keeping her values at bay,
Reasoning away
Every strange-looking sight
in vain resolution,
Looking Love in the eye
As it gently, gently,
Reminds her that logic,
However useful, however truthful,
Is usually treason.
the Word
1:12:2025
You love me,
But I made up the Word—
So which one of us is holy?
This I was once
Completely undisturbed,
Undistinguished, unperturbed;
What miracle dared tease apart
Its reference? One remains tempted
To prostrate to that severance
Alone— and yet, destruction
Cannot help but come back home:
The curve of sweet debris,
Such careful pageantry.
You love me,
But the Word outlives us both
On either side, weighs more
Than any self-taught ape
Could ever hope to shape
From his own raped volition,
The gift of fingers’ oppositions
That was neither taken
For granted nor hardly given
In stride—
Which one of us
Was then driven to decide?
Do these laws only work one way,
Or do rules, too, just point
To some grander work at play?
You love me,
And there's not much else
To say— or do,
Since anything but one
Will just dilute itself to two,
And any singing “none!”
Have got a lot of work to do,
And any smoking gun
Is just more smoke to barrel through,
And words and sex are fun—
But not as fun
as seeing through
The stagnant noun,
Its lonely Verb:
You love me now;
I love the Word.
Rosie
1:15:2025
Creeping, tiger-like:
Glinting something inevitable,
Pupils all the larger
to soak up the shadows with, dear—
And the rosiness, it flirts with
Every conceivable angle,
Invents them, actually,
Faithfully re-constructs
My mind
And the Things that it sees
Every convocation of hours,
Holds my attention
Better than Atlas ever could—
Yes, I am in love
With the morning,
With the way
We bear witness,
Dare witness each other
Before even stopping to think
About what witnessing
Might mean.
It's the purest love I know,
Creeping, tiger-like:
Purging all that's intelligible,
Merging shapeless irrevocable,
Hinting nothing as negligible,
Glinting something
Inevitable.
Broken-In
1:19:2025
My shoes couldn't help
But to take my shape
After ten, twenty turns: in-formed
by my weight, by the state
of my limbs and the stance that they take;
They look like me a bit more obviously
Than most of the other things I in-form:
All those thoughts, hopes and dreams
I can't see; all those
Messages, lessons just waiting to mean—
There’s a mold that is universe-shaped,
Then there’s me.
There’s a mold that still makes
My lungs ache,
Then there's sleep anyway—
Because what can you do?
I was seven, then twelve,
Fourteen, sixteen, twenty-two:
The mold never stopped growing,
Followed me speckled and black
from house to house, ceiling to ceiling,
Creeping from places I couldn't reach feeling,
‘Till one day, I got so damn tired
Of breathing in spores that I swore
I was tired of breathing.
Now I'm home, and my air is so easy
sometimes I forget
Just how much it all cost me to earn:
Ease like broken-in shoes;
Breaking in, breaking out, taking turns.
1:20:2025
My mind’s good for you;
But it's useless to me.
Luckily, “useful” is no synonym
For “worthy”, and mine
(More or less; we digress)
Loves me. So we
Entertain each other,
Play fun games
And make up names
And don't think too hard
About thinking too hard,
And the pleasure is ours—
And the pain is ours, too—
But it's nothing that serious,
Could've happened to any of you!
Yes, we two
Are a sibling of sorts;
We both have the same Mother,
And one of us older
And one of us younger;
In our own puzzling ways,
We take care of the other.
Good for you!
Good for me!
Useless utility!
Angle, any Angle
1:23:2025
I think it goes like this:
You pick an angel, (any angel!) then
You dare to imagine that every
Thing she tells you is true
Until you re-member that she is,
In fact, you.
One must first find his virtue, then
Discover how much of the real world
Cannot bear to hide within it.
(Should I try again?)
Which of your words
Fits the most meanings
Inside of it?
How much of reality
Can you squeeze
Into, out of your deities?
I tend to believe
That the greatest mistake
Among these
Is to think
That God stops at the limit
Of your reasoning—
To me, at least,
This is where God begins!
Confusion is where your loss wins;
Don't turn your back
On the weight of missed bliss—
Follow it!
I think, anyway, that it goes like this:
You pick an angle, (any angle!) then
You swallow it.
1:25:2025
The functionality
Is connection; don't you see
That your “search for meaning”
Will always deflate down to
“That is also this”?
And metaphor, sweet metaphor,
Reminds us of it, too:
There is an undercurrent uniting
One from Two,
Un-a-like as pro and con
Might seem—
And what can be said of
Significance, if not
That something which has it
(However meaningfully)
Points you
Somewhere else?
What equivocates?
By whose hand,
And in what way?
How can connection
Separate me from all that I see;
How can a function
Replace functionality?
If there is such a thing as a
Meaning, an averaging of data pointing
Back its point to me,
It's not the sight, it's not a scene;
It is the seeing:
“I” means “me”.
Iambs
1:26:2025
What due time has is well in store;
The means by far outweigh the ends.
Forgiveness and the Mind aren't friends—
But which of these two loves you more?
Look closer at that half of you
Which ridicules your point-of view:
She only knows to grieve the past
And future— yet the present lasts,
And newness is time’s con-sequence;
all else is disobedience.
But even non-reality
(For all its temporality,)
Has bearings in a place like this:
Each butterfly a chrysalis.
Each afterthought a-fore-mentioned,
A tension taught with viciousness.
The Wheel will turn as Grace sees fit
Regardless of one’s luck or wit
With ample enough punishment
Without our misplaced muddlement.
The scales will always self-correct
So do us all a favor: dare,
Permissed by no small intellect,
To Love in ways that aren't “fair”.
Cry Winter
2:1:2025
Cry Winter all you want;
I know you've been tasting
Spring in the back of your throat
For weeks.
It's unmistakable, warm
As a friend’s silhouette,
their signature saunter:
It’s something your eyes picked up on
Without your permission;
Before you even had a say, they
Memorized the curvature of her
Gaze, eyes bobbing up and down
Like waves, lifting up her eyes
Enough to say a cheerful Hey!
That can't help but illuminate
Your ordinary clutter
In some re-configured state—
Cry Winter, nag your fate—
But I know better than anyone,
Than anything,
That Spring
Is on its way:
I know that taste.
2:7:2025
When you flip a coin, the outcome
Matters much less
Than the voice
In the back of your head,
Admitting defeat
Before forming conceit
And meanwhile:
The poor coin, caught mid-air
as it shakes hands with gravity,
Re-sealing the deal that it
Can't remember making,
Takes one last long look
At the sky, bats an eye
Up at how in ex-change
For its why
And Fate smiles
(It's the only thing
Left here to do; for
There's something else
Pulling at even Her threads),
And the case finally rests,
Pent suspense
Making all things but sense
As it tears us to shreds:
I sure hope I get heads!
The Second Blip
2:8:2025
Cast my memory back there, Lord,
To when it all began:
No, the second blip
Into existence—
A white pickup truck,
A cranked down window,
Mountains looming
Tall, tall, tall
And faint bluegrass
Poking through radio static;
Gasoline residue and a clue:
Oh, so it just keeps on
Going like this, huh?
With an animal's eyes,
I looked out.
Every thing was a Someone,
And that Someone was a Friend,
And he was so damn unassuming
Even I could comprehend
He meant me no real harm
Or burden,
Didn't mean me anything—
‘Cause since he
Made himself from everything,
‘s nothing left
For him to mean.
I've called him many names
This lifetime,
Wonders built on shifting sand—
But Lord, I pray
That when I reach for you,
You'll always take my hand.
Nataraja
2:9:2025
To Dance,
You move
In a way that feels good—
You re-member
That your mind
Is jealous of your body,
Much like Creator’s jealousy
Towards the Created:
Oh, to move!
To change!
To do what feels good
And know not
Of much else;
To give in
To the sin
That is prosody
Physically!
What a God trapped in bliss
Wouldn't give
Just to taste something
Corroborative;
What a miracle sight must be
To that which is seen!
What a dance;
What a matter
Of circumstance;
What a life;
What a dream!
2:18:2025
I look out to the world,
No one leaves their porch lights on
, so I say
Let there be light,
But it only shows me
Showing me,
Knowing full well
That others’ stories
We're never big enough
To hold me, only
Pointing at
Some other place
Where locals treat you strange;
They never change,
Just grow unholy, too profane,
So I cut the cord,
toss the bloody babies back
To whoever cares; I don't think about
How they might need me out there.
Love is something they'll
Rustle up for themselves
Porch light or not,
They'll lick it off the windowsills;
They'll swallow it like pills,
And then they'll feed me back
My story, one by one,
Someone will see them
Basking in another's porch light,
Mistake that for foresight
And I'll never hear the end of it —
Just create a new beginning,
Make a world worth looking out to.
2:20:2025
God is our responsibility:
How many of us are there,
After all, when compared
To God’s One,
(Maybe three on a technicality)?
We outnumber Him, don't we?
Help-me-help-you-help-me:
Just what kind of Infinity
Are we really talking about here?
Is it the kind that mathematicians
Think they can win
with their number games
Taking logic for a spin;
Is it something (or some-one!)
That we are all contained within?
Did you find God
In your nomenclature,
Or could He have created
Even nature?
Don't believe for a moment
That the question isn't worth asking
Just be-cause there's no word
One can hold in God’s place,
If there's one thing,
It's Grace:
She is wearing a mask
Made of pain;
She is waiting for the day
That you re-cognize Her
So that she may relay
Back to God
With utmost jubilee:
Yes, I promise she's real—
She can see me!
2:21:2025
Learning the language of her,
The beauty in the Now:
To me, her ways are crazy,
And I tell her so:
You crazy girl!
I coo with all this new Love
I've been finding everywhere.
She likes to leave me offerings
By my door, under the washer
And dryer; tenses her muscles
When I'm too overbearing
(I know that move!)
—and she chirps something worse
Than the birds just outside,
Chatters hello’s
As I sing my goodbye's:
Bye, Maybe-Baby!
Bye, Little-Bitty!
I'll be back soooo soooon!
And she moans with the moon,
Sings me a song
Without learning the tune;
There is nothing she could do;
There's nothing she could do—
It all just makes me laugh.
And instead of imagining
Which impossible words lie
Trapped behind those dark eyes,
I just bask in the prize,
In a love that, like her,
Simply is
Without disguise.
2:22:2025
Come to your gratitude
Like a Fool’s errand:
Often, accidentally,
At your own expense.
You don't make sense;
It is given to you
By this body you are.
There's a miracle much more bizarre
Scratching at your eyelids
From either side—
So open wide, and try
Not to hide out
In any one place for too long.
Fools grow strong
Just like mold, always win
For their bet lies in endings
Beginning again.
It's a brilliant mark of intelligence,
Ignorance:
one can only renounce so much sin
Before returning to his circum-stance,
That ever-reigning platitude.
Come, then, to your gratitude
Like all great Fools before you—
While you still have the chance!
2:24:2025
Nature reveals my medicine to me:
A dependability that practically
Breeds Faith, appends Grace—
And all I can do is imitate
To compensate for my secret lack
Of lacking.
I breathe in: my body transcribes.
Reaching out, she teeths
Like a newborn child,
Soaks up the sky ‘till the morning
Goes sour and the evening is blackening.
I get out of the way, let her be
With what she knows:
Magic waves of bristling
Just like seaweed in the current,
A pore in the tide's shifty membrane.
Won't you come dance with us?
My cells call out to me,
There is nothing at all
If not for possibility;
All that there's here you can do
Is be free.
For one moment,
I place the mind softly aside,
Promise I'll come back for it
Eventually,
Move
The way Freedom tells me,
Soothe my ego’s impediment,
Take a spoonful of medicine.
2:25:2025
The difficulty lies in trying
To get any sense of scale
From within the oscillation;
There's scope to scale, too,
Dimensions not quite captured, raptured
By data, phenomena flailing—
How do you know
What you cannot see?
Why, the same way you see
What you cannot know!
Seeing and Knowing
Are quite the odd couple,
Aren't they?
Always going on about this
Nor that but never and,
Falling flat from space-time’s
curved demands.
Is it a particle or a wave?
And why must it either
Be here or behave?
There must be some third
Missing link which connects
one-and-two— and one day,
Mark my words,
I will hold its damn head in my fist,
I'll admit sweet defeat
Having finally caught my white whale;
Undulating along with the script
Just to hear one small note of the scale.
What Life Does
3:1:2025
To do what Life does,
You must first hold its gaze
As much as you can stand it:
Watch it shift forms
Like a person might shift
Uncomfortably in his seat.
It's a smart impulse, I think:
Something's not right here;
I need to move.
To do what Life does,
You must first part your ways
With the God you demanded:
Watch it wage wars
Like a person might wage
Uncontrollably in his defeat.
It's a smart impulse, I think:
Something's not right here;
I need something to prove.
To do what Life does,
You must first learn to phrase
A sentence better than you'd planned it:
Watch them in swarms
Like a person might've sworn
As words buzz all about in the heat.
It's a smart impulse, I think:
Something's not right here;
I need access to Truth.
To do what Life does,
You must first spend your days
Doing anything else; understand this:
Watch time catch your eye
Like a person passing by
As they mean so much Be
That one can't help but see.
It's a smart impulse, I think:
Something's not right here;
What is it to you?
To me?
3:2:2025
Laughter is the only gossamer
I've ever seen, the only action
I ever really mean.
I open my mouth; the sound
Comes out, hijacks my body
And drags it along
like the yank of a rope—
There's your hope!
You won't find it
Hiding out inside the Mind;
It can't deceive you
Anymore than you can grieve
It in your hands;
Hope helps you have your time
As one has contraband:
What else but laughter
Puts the fear of God in me?
Everything has a melting point!
The real question is:
By how many degrees
Of separation; how many
Dead-wrong decisions,
Head-strong apparitions?
Laugh it off,
This holy ghost in my machine
Translates to me,
Shed your pain
Like old skin.
So I take her advice,
Possessed by her medicine!
3:5:2025
There always seems to be
This point at which,
For no other reason than
Some entity,
Some necessity whom
Exists far beyond me,
That point tips.
What then flipped the switch;
By what logic gate?
Oh; it's all hardware, isn’t it?
When we get a sense of a
Pattern in time, we compare it
To tapestry: namely,
However beautifully,
Set in its ways—
A predetermined symphony—
And I should be myself so lucky
Just to ever cross its path.
But what is crossing paths if not
another oxymoron in comparison
To this lone Atom, that mighty mote,
Tracing its journey through
Every fear and every hope,
Setting sights and scope and writ,
Anointing each prerequisite.
There always seems to be a point
At which, despite one’s better interest,
It tips itself like so:
So so be it!
Daybreak
3:6:2025
For just one split second,
It's not all white noise:
Shapes, miraculously,
Emerge from the static,
Crying out in their
Newborn depth
In tongues we faintly
Re-cognize, slimy
Boundaries between I
And Other, soft like
The way the object’s silhouette
Gives way to the horizon,
No more theoretical
Than the curve of the sea,
That never-ending joke,
Always turning you in,
Tossing you out
On some destined trajectory,
No more theoretical
Than the past’s path to See,
Through the time
And the space
And the noise
And the shapes
Before finally,
Finally, dawning on me.
Florida in Memoriam
3:7:2025
The beasts behave differently now,
More like animals.
Childhood rendered them
Larger than kraken,
Black Caiman eyes
That just couldn't help
But to make
Their meals out of me.
My dreams used to supply me
With their POV:
Some marbled warbled
Blob who dared let her laugh
Carry all the way down
To those murky miseries;
They used to yip and nip
At her dream-heels like wild dogs,
Lip and lap up from the depths
As the waves slipped and slapped
At decaying concrete,
Young heart-pounding
Barely confounding morning’s
Soggy, gray defeat.
Now, they're much more discreet—
And I am in the water, too:
When I see the impression
Of their slender, ancient heads,
I let that easy ripple roll on by;
I do not care to know its shape or size,
I just let Night close my eyes,
Swim my hello's and goodbye’s
To that friend passing by,
And instead of some sea
(or impossible lake), we take part
In the parting of wakes, of old ways.
Neti Neti
3:9:2025
It isn't the words themselves
That tell you false or true;
It is the sensations
Which preclude them—
Let the words go
Before you wring them out
Too much. Haven't those sentences
Served themselves long enough?
Let X equal X;
Your body, faithfully as any
Devotee, will take care of the rest.
The trick is to treat every thing
As a tool: used in what way?
To whose fault, by what ends?
What mouth dares claim the means
To tell you
False or true; what does
A word like false even mean;
Where can negation be felt in the body?
My phantom limbs can all outrun me,
Extend into everything I am,
Everything I know and
Everywhere I'll be;
They are my repository.
And these words themselves
Mean Nothing
Unless they can point you back
Towards the false-true mystery.
3:9:2025
To capture the air, to breathe it
In and then harness its oxygen,
Coaxing the colors to some coarse
Concoction, the air finds itself again:
Fossilized in pigment, free
As it is trapped by its own
Predicament. And the light,
Inevitable as it may appear
From way over here, very
Willingly overhears my eyes’
Movement, the motion of
Stagnancy ringing clear,
Tendrils crying out so helplessly,
All but caught in this stormy eye
Which allows it (your sight) to be seen,
Behold, in all of its identity entanglement:
The everything of twistingness
Folding in that drunken swaying spin,
Art doesn't tell you where it ends,
It shows where you begin.
It is the pause between the breaths,
The Life in between the parenthesis,
The air in even Death!
3:11:2025
And to think, you could
Play it all again if you wanted to.
Just imagine it, I dare you:
You get to the end,
Point-blank, nothingness!
Then— out of the corner
Of one eye and into another,
A path of light arrives
And dissipates, something
Almost 8-bit, foreign
But not so much so
It eludes your translation:
Play Again?
And here you are,
To think,
Stinking of your own tired sin,
Pausing for a moment
Before Gravity kicks back in,
(Imagine it!)
You're doing all of this,
Fretting an even more imaginary debting;
You blink like the flashy typeface
Of undone’s doing, a stark
YES NO
opposite enough to entertain
Some for lifetimes to come,
And I'm one such one—
Not quite yet at the end,
Still aware of that damn
Loading screen bloody-clean
With the question of if
Proving when’s precedence,
Both removed from their lies,
Thus believing they’re true:
Play Again?
Don’t, mind,
If I do!
3:14:2025
March always teases
The hope out of me, de-
tangles the breeze
From the air, catches me
Unaware in the best of ways, pays
Visit like my mother might:
Lovingly, suddenly—
Without an invite.
Rifling through my things
With a singsong bickering:
Honey, get rid of this.
What's that thing do?
And, again like my mother,
She calls me
Precisely when I needed her to,
Before I even know it
(But not quite out of the blue),
Disguising so-called small talk,
Littering, peppering
In her little red herrings,
Fluff and feathers everywhere.
Just yesterday, I saw her there
(The month, that is):
Just lounging on my sofa,
Yawning out the daylight’s crawl,
That heavenly nagging shadow
Climbing up the yellow wall—
And through it all, I saw
My mother, felt the way
She looks at me and knows
Me better (and for worse):
Not who I am,
But who I'll be.
3:18:2025
I want to believe
That any thing I feel
I can give back to god
Since god is the One
Who gave it to me,
But some things,
I just know it,
Are with me for the long haul,
And damn it, this is one of them.
I can tell by the way that
It feels, first and foremost,
Like returning:
It's too late to escape
My origin, isn't it?
The milieu of sights, sounds,
Impressions I couldn't help
But to soak in,
The sin’s interpretation.
Well, I'm here, and I'm
Tired of learning every thing
By negation.
What does it mean to be kind?
Was that truly the only
Methodology I was able to understand?
Did wondering why not why not
Really give me some kind of upper hand?
Words can only irritate this state;
They can't begin to satiate
The hate I have for a love this real.
That righteous anger accidentally
Passed down to me from
Abraham himself—
And he sees I'm diluted,
Just not enough
To seal the deal.
3:19:2025
This is a bit better than last time
I tell my self because there isn't a way
To prove me wrong, that last time should be better or worse is of a surprisingly little consequence and
Anyway,
I'm amazed by it not unlike I used
To watch the power lines
Rise and fall
Rise and fall
Against some devilishly inane backdrop
Rise and fall for twenty four years
And counting makes me nauseous,
So I don't do that too often—
Rise and fall as the sine waves signs
My way and braves the elements
Just to get a glimpse of this thing they
Call common sense:
Do they mean Life itself,
I wonder,
The common denominator
Of all Sense? Or should I repent
Early and get my investment back tomorrow?
Buy low sell high,
Buy and low,
By and by,
Rise and fall,
How and why
Wax, wane, rhyme,
Last and time?
I'm, I'm, I'm, she
Tells her worser selves.
A bit bitter, maybe clever, still a little bit
Better than ever
ywhere else!