Obligato

you ask why I don’t write a poem
about what’s coming down all around
us as we speak

what’s to say about a life in the wilderness?

but it’s not like I haven’t tried god knows I’ve given it
all I had, spent my quota of midnights
so many poems fluttering in the blowback
utterly panicked
rhymes scattered like shell casings
meter cleft in the borning
aground on the shoals of the dead

wanderers always think they have a home
beyond the vapor trail but you and I,
my weeping friend, know we’re already there
the time has come, my dear, for reckoning

‘tis the past and not the future beckoning
and so in this hour of false redemption
we offer thanks for a return
to mere abomination

Oh, Earth, these blemishes

Oh, Earth, these blemishes
Can be scrubbed dead clean,
This unseemly infection stopped,
But to no avail, all the evidence

Points to the scabs bursting open,
Life pouring out again and again
In all its musty bigness,
The anti-entropic urge

Of the womb is doomed
To eternal resurgence

It’s not rebellion – nothing so seemly,
So ordained by high principle –
Just a thing impossible to stop,
A thing in a crack,

A seam in an ocean of atoms,
An imperceptible pause
In the continuous instant,
A suddenness within chaos,

How ice forms from steam
How fire struts across the built and unbuilt alike

How two disparate things join
Into a whole, unbegotten, unbidden.

Down at the deepest level, they say,
Things pop in and pop out
On less than a whim.