It’s always the same
when I write, always
litanies,
lists,
comma after comma,
the occasional
semicolon;
there’s even a period now and then.
Never a swan.
Time, time, time
Reply
Tag Archives: illusion
Music
We spend our lives
trying to mute the noise
unaware that it’s
the very music of the cosmos
we’re so desperate to hear
The hammer of your eyes
The hammer of your eyes
Shapes everything you see
Until reality collapses
From the weight of persistence
The thingness of things is such
That it mutates to meet expectation,
Owes allegiance to the naming ritual
Rolls from the tongue with lilting guile
And slips from the grasp as easily
As money or grace
These things carry meaning:
Sky, sea, mountain and plain
Whose rivers tie the bounds
Of Earth together
These things rip meaning from the heart:
Ash, coal, and smoke,
Zippered into a theory of sky
Beyond the bezelled horizon.
We ignore destiny,
Hoping to write our own stories,
Like Oedipus, like God,
Unaware that fate has no will
But is bound by the sacred law
Of irony.
My country ’tis of thee
Empty, empty, of good or bad,
all equal before the sea-spattered
horizon, the pastures relentlessly
split open undone forever
I gaze on these at last remorse
the withering vine, the trodden soil
all witness to vanity, to regression
since times untold and form unbidden
horses fraught, thin bones straining
against what flesh remains.
As an infant, I was told how this
was my legacy, my inheritance,
all from the wrong ledger, it seems
The one beneath, the one unsmothered
despite the efforts of a cruel century,
the murder of compassion for fear of pain
the sacrifice of love for the comfort of predictability
Fools’ gold, dross, dust.
Fall falling
The autumn sun sweeps
clean the street, forlorn no more.
Even the litter-born history,
so recently past, cannot withstand it.
We think we’re the true organisms,
that to us belong the spoils
of living, and yet,
such marionettes of weather,
our strings showing
in spite of all our efforts,
the sky like water,
our hearts like wind.
exiles child 