Tag Archives: irony

The hammer of your eyes

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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

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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.

Dustup

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We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.  ~ W. B. Yeats

This mirror is no help at all,
such a sludge of regret.

I used to think I was either divine
or pointless, cringed at the
occasional glimpse of ordinary,
that hint of sameness
lurking in the corner of my reflection.

This, God’s apple, was punishment enough
for the transgression of being.

Haibun: poetry

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What use is poetry? You can’t drive a nail with it. You can’t heat your house, shoe a horse, build a dam, or pave a street. It’s no good for sewing, sawing, swinging, or finding your keys in the dark. If you’re a baker, soldier, mechanic, farmer, gravedigger, or physician, poetry doesn’t get the job done. Does poetry clean, cut, weld, braise, fry, or distill? Design a plane, accumulate capital, build a stadium? Fat chance. About the only thing I can think of that poetry is good for is changing everything.

“Words,” said Sensei,
“Cannot burn your tongue,”
Spitting ashes.

Time

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Time augers deeply
Its worm-like whim astride
The face of meaning
Blinking wild and faring well
Over chain and bell alike

I think of you
Tethered like that
To your holy ghosts
Those wraiths that wrap your dreams
And fail the promises abandoned
So long ago, all those fine illusions
You love so well

Let go, let collapse
Envelop you
Your grasp contains nothing
But helplessness
Let go