Tiny Megalomaniacs.being goodyou take responsibility for everythingand credit for nothing,otherwise you’re sliding downthe slippery slope at an accelerating clipuntil you’re taking credit for everythingand responsibility for zip just a short slip down that slopeyou’ve already sloughed goodnessmany times like snake skinfor the sake of some small gainsome little leverage, some edge, some inelbowing out some…

Say Something Obvious The geometry of moonlight is triangularIts pallid glow is whole, homogeneous and crisp,never granular. Moon, mating with Suncries out like a bell, her rings are ecstatic and annular Under a condensing cloud you’ll be singing in the rainif you carry a tune while following your blissIf it falls upon the skin of…

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out…………….. —Robert Frost Safe I'm safeI've locked myself inYou're with me and safe too Through the barred window of this boxthe world has changed, grown more lovely I savor its barred beauty moreas I recall it close at hand…

Picking the World Apart When Lao Tzu(or the composite of poets grouped under his name)talked of Tao, The Way, he said, “If you talk about it, it’s not Tao.If you name it, it’s something else” I don’t think he was being metaphysical He suggested something practical which,if taken at face value, ought to be paid…

Show Moon look out your window the moon is hugebut not bigger-than-life, smaller than thatthough big enough to make life take a look,to admire its yellow flatness with hint of rougeupheld in a mosh-pit of trees, their naked limbsa dark mesh across a field upon a sky of blue-grey steelwhich, as long as nights last…

“And in November 2012, Nature published a commentary by financier and environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging scientists to join this tradition and 'be arrested if necessary', because climate change 'is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species’ existence' .”.Who'd Ruin That don't say we can't keep…

PunctuationPeriod— With this almost inconspicuous dot I wrap things up.Bring all pleasures to an end. Call it off.There’s a tiny tidiness to it, but the muscle ofcessation too —it can stop a truck. Question Mark— With this sinuous hook I pop a questionwhenever I want to reach outside the box I’m in:Why God, for instance?Or…

Falling . Falling's weightlessness is a troubled oneIt's not like the airtime of up-drafting hawksor homosapient gliders hung on wires undersilk billows out of their elementsnubbing gravity putting on airs,nor like the honking camaraderieof southbound geese chasing solar flares To know that speeding massin collusion with collision brings bereavementin worlds of muscle blood and boneis…

Getting to Know You.I’m getting to know you who camewith the first Archaeon’s spark Everything was new then, even you, youparenthetical tail of vital events, youold telegraphic protoplasmic stop, youcallous caboose bringing up the rear of trainsof eloquent clauses, fertile words,grunts and final remains, yousmall but lethal punctualtional dot You came on the scene with…

Leaving gust air once here goes to fill a vacuum there dusk the sun no more, is behind mañana’s door I can’t recall my last glimpse of youyou wentimagination is your wake and here comes Go again blazing her trail of tears while Gone is close behindsweeping footprints with a green pine bough from Going’s…

Making a Home . What I think over and over eventually I do I’ve been training body all along to dance the cantos of my thoughts, how can it not do what it learns? Innocence seeps away through the interstices of neglect— if I have not built a room to house a pure idea it…

at one ment —Yom Kippur, 2013 To find the means to a mendTo try a new take to forsake a mistakeTo unfold the past and straighten its bendTo un-muddy a pool and make it clearTo lift the flat rock of our self and let the sun do its workTo yank the inside out and give…

“Many (ancient) life forms are so hard to categorize that (scientists) call these organisms the ‘Problematica.’” —from: Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, by Annalee Newitz Other Problematica.Here we are, never still, casting linesupstream like fly fishers toward sourcesteeming with what came firsthooking what we can, reeling it inholding it…

Built by Thought all that we are arises with our thoughts,the Dhammapada says, with our thoughts we make the world ………. one, tour the foundation………. scraping down it’s roughness………. with the edge of a hammer head………. dissing the mason who left behind a lumpy job………. who forgot what a trowel is for………. who was halfway…

Amethyst—Puerto Rico, 1960 San Juan past the stone north walls of Morro shanty roofs slide to the sea white below beyond breakers the sea spreads bluegreen north to New York …… strewn across my bed the moon …… through a window …… lies across the sheets like a lover the ship on rippleless lavenderglass swells…

That's It I’d mowed and cut and weeded tips of fingers inked with earth I’d heard our cardinal calling I’d heard our engines down the valley groaning coming up, distant, moaning hands between dry stems of garlic moving, like my mother kneeling, devout, but not in church I’d yanked contentious weeds, insisting, grabbing, pulling —this…

Sleep Between twilight and dawn a breach in something The world stops, but for barely intelligible flashbackswhich Dylan wrote songs about, as many poets have episodes of turns on earth in a collapse of reason with juxtapositions that delightor rip the fabric of everyday distraction In that space Nothing mounts his voida cowboy on a…

Composting.this wonderstuff of natural declination that'll grow my beets & beans and other rations browner than the mere idea: good earth archetypical as second life and virgin birth more promising than the phantom wealth of nations more essential than human beings of highest stations shoveling this wonderstuff into my wagon sifting it through hardware cloth…

East-facing Windows this morning our bed is ablaze in wanton light the sun hammers our windows rimmed by zero wide and open unrestrained by nada it’s really something nothing spoken even oceans are more miniscule than this dawning sea immense and single that starts the day with a silent gong no thought breaks its breakers…

fireflies.every time a new intersection’s builtaround meit winds up bristling with cameras omniscient light poles sprouta cornucopia of lenses spills out a thousand robot retinasrecording everyday ephemera the little things we do in carswe might not want the world to know about all snagged, digitized and set in a binary log for some bureaucratic loutto…