They come for you in the small hours,
in the cracks of consciousness
too thin for even grief
to get a foothold.
It suits them fine,
this arrangement of equals,
nothing to add or subtract
from either side.
There is no magic,
no grand unfolding of design,
just idle chit-chat,
the merits of trivial decisions,
whether this or that thing
has this or that meaning,
whether or not you’re asleep,
and which of you is dead.
I
Daybreak
Orion long since fled,
The new moon cradles the old,
With Venus, that old voyeuse,
Standing watch,
All the sky ablush
II
Temperatures drop slowly
From the unblue, steel-gray sky,
The promise of snow revoked
In response to some
Imagined slight.
Across the low-slung day,
Footprints.
III
Finally, snow,
Fierce and bitter
No longer willing or able
To hold its rage against
The lingering autumn,
At the tress clinging absurdly
To their dead.
IV
A Sahara of snow,
Windblown and duney,
Bereft only of camels,
Piled like so much longing,
Like so many
Cancelled appointments.
I was a captain of the sky
clouds around my head
like a laurel wreath
eyes fixed on the cresting moon
elbows dancing, and then
in the spark of an instant
lost, all lost,
just a vague memory
until time scrubs the words
from this stone
Nothing out, nothing in,
just some vague breeze,
a distant flapping,
not clear, not near,
A reminder
of something unremembered …
Is it time to go?
Is it time to pack
my pockets with
bits of string,
mysterious faded notes,
strange fragments of
other lives?
Or start over,
let the past remain aloft
overhanging
skin and blood alike,
no denial,
no justification,
no recourse to fame and fortune
or disgrace?
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
exiles child 