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…

”Civilization” is the soothing notion that, in it, naturalcallousness has been successfully quarantined. …………………………………………. —Roshi Bob. Civilization.A cat on the pillow of a couch, on the point of a spear, looks out through windows facing south with the fierce frustration of an indoor cat who preys through glass. The squalor of first spring just after…

—on the occasion of an unexpected email from an old friend who'd abruptly withdrawn from conversation some years earlier without explanation Rapprochement Just wondering if worlds seen from a distancereally are smaller than they are.Could it be that when we sleepthe world we leave goes on without us.Maybe you remember the old dayswhen greenhorns multiplied…

Bibliophile They say Hitler housed 16,000 booksin Berlin and Obersalzburg—his dark jewels In Obersalzburg and Berlinhis books did nothing for his soulbut drag it through the muck of his mindso that in the end he became as much a victimof his own immurement as Fortunatodid of Montresor in Amontillado Predisposed, he heaped word upon wordbuilding…

The Buddha’s doctrine is thus proven:nothing in this world is created.……………. —(Octavio Paz, per Dharmakirti) Same DifferenceNothing in this world is created,said Buddha looking into a lotus bowl Nothing is created In this lotus filled to the brimis nothing which has been created Nothing is created From the bottom of this lotus brimming with nothingbut…

Burning Bush At twenty I danced the tops of walls Najinsky of the double top plate bent in-two like an onion shoot unbending up through an earthen gate lifting sticks to be put in place nailing their tails held against my boot walking the wires of gravity’s net as a spider commands the filament web…

3 Small Poems A Good Poet's Boots a good poet's subversive—not to the point of blood in the streets…………………………. necessarily but to the point of burrowing beneathhis garden of conceits like an insistent voleand killing those weeds at their roots everyone in this waycan walk in a good poet’s boots ~~Cabin Fever besides the Biblethere…