Straying Dog

Sometimes when a dog gets lost
It finds the way for someone else.

Of course this doesn't help you in your distress,
The constant sense of her absence.

Still if she is giving to another
The love she learned from you

She may have increased
Your harmony in the world

He Sleeps in Her

He sleeps in her and she drives him crazy --
Me, I prefer a city that leaves you alone,

maybe gives you inspiration when you watch
its sexy people, its constant foreplay with the sea

but no meddling with your soul
and certainly no enormous appetite to enclose you

into a religion.  

Excerpts from
The Teachings Of Baraka

 

1.


I am Baraka
I read your heart
when you read my words

I am Baraka
wherever there is light
there I am

wherever there is war
there I am not.

I am Baraka
I light your way
when you trust me
and lead your way
when you look for me

I live in your soul
since the day
your soul was born
before you were body
before you were sand.

I am Baraka
I am blessing
and the stopping of blessing
I am the light that is too much
to see, when blindness looms in
I dim, when darkness circles
I am light
I am Baraka

I don't come from the past
and I don't seek the future
I am Baraka
I am not
the present

4.

When I see the innocent child
I cry
from happiness

When I see the decaying old man
whose skin has been eaten
by greediness
I laugh
from sadness

The world was not meant for decay

That's why I have entered the word
Baraka
will create
lights without shadows
shadows that warm the sun
a moon as yellow
as the deepest ocean
Baraka
is silence
Baraka
is gold.

 
* First published in Ygdrasil.
 

Stained Glass

A scotch bottle rolled under a pew,
smacked the polished wood --
an untoward thud, then slivered glass.
Perhaps some choir of blame
without a definite voice.
They pinned it on a lounging vagrant
decked in gritty wool.
Dirt on his skin painted him guilty
and no one thought to
sprinkle some baptismal stream.
Where were the rivers
mirrored in creeds and shimmering art?
Mournful lace in higher
corners out of reach.
Cathedrals swept by hands and brooms
tossing little back at grief.

One finger point, one quick arrest.
A child asks and peers
into his mother's eyes:
"He's in handcuffs; is he Christ?"
Unopened bibles haunt this place.
Her clothes remind her roving palms
of wasted silk and gabardine of edgy lies.
His stocking cap, a hat that said
he was friends with bitter cold,
with symphonies of
hungry organs rumbling.
He was a beggar caught in the deed
of longing for more than churches built.
The rest of us -- silent,
treacherous, and prim --
marching, marching to no drum.

* First published in can we have our ball back?

Yard Sale Blues

I sat at home imagining
the sale of that "trivia"
bridging rivers of your life.
Meat in green pistachios
I couldn't share with
strangers roaming city blocks.
Mother said: "It's all just junk."
Alliteration broke my heart.
I hugged the dusty books you left,
rubbed their scents upon my skin
as women do with inserts of a magazine
because the bottle isn't there.
I held your slippers in my palms
as if the dents where toes once lay
could teach me moral contredanse.
What was simple trash to her
was my immutable truth.

A saxophone without its reed
lay sideways on the sinking bed.
The belly of a violin --
its cherished wood now roamed by ants.
Money couldn't shower sadness,
clot the paper cut of death.
I needed knickknacks of your love.
This a brand of moving on
my hands would never celebrate.
We were selling winter gloves
of apron strings that kept
the chill of hurt at bay --
a rusted trowel that used its point
to pave the way for daffodils.
Your linen towels were ironed flat
like decks of cards.
I had lost the only trump I ever owned;
I wasn't in the mood for games.

* First published in Verse Libre Quarterly
 

Life's Blood

Life perked along,
filled to the line.
Spoonfuls of pleasure,
properly inserted
in moderate mixture,
with mild blip-blurping temperature
resulted in almost delightful brews
slightly watered down.
Then came the inevitable need
for different ingredients
in larger amounts
at maximum temperature,
with expected results:
too hot, too strong, bitter,
delicious.

Let's Drink to Ivan
(to Leo Tolstoy)

Here's to you, Ivan Ilych,
though one bitch
of a magistrate,
you knew how to live.
You sniffed straight
for the goodies, Jean,
for rubles, the huge roof
overhead, the Cadillac-troika,
the never quite abused power.
I tilt my vodka martini to you,
John Smith,
you'd have made a helluvan
American, a gross climber
in Grosse Pointe.
Watch your step on that ladder,
John.

What the Hell, let's down one more
for poor Ivan. Then I gotta go
play cards.
 

Salt 2

I stand alone on coastal dunes, attentive to the night. My hair is caked with salt. Faint words are blowing over me, briny breathing scouring the sands, crusting me over. A thin layer of syllables, forgotten murmurs, glittering crystals turning me white under the moon.

Salt air on my rope-cut hands, the pain that stings and heals. Rocking as to a lullaby, a shanty washed away by time. An ancient pull, memories of a buffeted vessel that touched no land. And figures floating across the deck, dissolving in fog, not known.

This was before the days of charts, when we looked to the night for help.

* First published in Ygdrasil.

Labradorite

 
Labradorite: a grey mineral with blue, green, yellow or pink sheens, crisscrossed with dark striations. Helps the wearer apply insights learned from the subconscious. Assists people in transition. Good for balance.
. . .

I stand on a plain rimmed with hills. Afternoon fills the basin with emerald air. The smell of humus under grasses, summer flowers, tangled roots. The erratic and compulsive movements of insects. Thick buzzing. Ants forage everywhere.

And everywhere a humming, the purr of great cats. Electric fur, the nervous swishing of tails. Storm clouds gather.

Noah has built an ark. Planks curve out from the keel, two great hands cupped together, opening skyward. A prayer in wood and nails towering over the grasses.

Noah summons the animals. There come:

sandpipers that write haiku on shorelines
astronomer owls
antelope that drum across savannahs
monkish bears
reclusive and fastidious snow leopards

The world seen in a sequence of negatives. Shapes flatten to celluloid films, easily distorted. Time buckles. Black lightning crisscrosses the emerald sky.

A gathering of mammals, birds and reptiles. The steady pressure of currents of flesh. Jerky movements in flickering light. A fierce sky, inaudible thunder. Vibrations announce wildebeest approaching from afar.

Everywhere a low whirring, an archival film telling a story of origin. Creatures tramp up the gangplank and through the great door.

Now a patter, the first drops. They slide down my astonished cheeks, splash into a deepening pool. Inexorable and transparent accumulations. The low humming intensifies, the downpour begins in earnest. I take my place on board, lean over a railing.

Noah calls out. There come:

small boulders bobbing like corks
uprooted trees cartwheeling end over end

And now in deepening water about the curved planks
there gather:

walruses that have lost their way
storm petrels and albatrosses blown off course
tunas and hammerheads
manatees with a fondness for boats
belugas and right whales

As the water rises, the ship creaks and shifts. It will sail without canvas from nowhere to nowhere, wander by night on a foam-streaked ocean, all landmarks submerged. Erratic and compulsive searching for a dawn irrefutable as land.

Night falls on a rising lake rimmed with hills. The great vessel shudders and floats free.

* First published in Arc Magazine.
 

Frozen Tulips

Perfect equilibrium
Colours didn't hesitate
And telephones refused to sing
Anal sex is what she wanted
And a world cup substitution
Wasn't real
Sometimes I hated done deals

But losers always win in politics
And politics rub naked ladies the wrong way
(Look away)

Look away

When was silence "yesterday"

No fool
I break each silence like a shadow
breaks a blade of grass

Tender moments
Not dogma
Raise individuals to God

Oh how foolish I remain human
Among children without purpose
Thinking foolish games are their presentiment
Casting lures for 'tainment...
Where vermin never hesitates
(Had the keeper of God's ethics ethics
There's be no one left alive)

I'll tan God's royal hide...

So where am I to go with this
Poem I can't finish
God won't resurrect me
I won't resurrect God
Just prepare a turkey sandwich
And smoke the edge off stale blue cod...

On My Father's Birthday

Which golden age is this
Dear Father?
I cannot remember your exact age,
nor mine for that matter.
Epochs over the mountain, crucified
on the rocks, rocking me,
your only baby, telling me
to endure like a diamond
and become a good doctor.
You are passing, passing,
like ether through my bones
and blood,
each year, a sequoia-ring,
an orbit our from the screams
of a life sacrificed for God-knows-what.
Some would say that your baby
has become old wine,
but now the ascension
of your ghost,
nearer than my own breath,
I am born to discover the words
we never had the language to speak.

Cliché Poem

Frankly,
(perhaps too frankly)
I don't give a wee-micro
virus of a damn
or even a sudden nuclear scud of a
flying fuck
about what the editors say
or don't ...
whether they pat me on
the head like a good very good girl
or pinch my ass
trying to take me down like
a literary whore

It's my party
it's my paper
and I can cry on it
if I want to.

It's my ink
and I can play.

You know me,
(or do you?)

a ton of sugar
and the whole spice rack,
with just a homeopathic
dusting of
arsenic,
holding together
this old lace-up lacey
straight-jacket,
formerly known as a girdle.
Soon, if you are careful, or not,
(so please place no condom
over your critiques)
you will find me,
babbling, quite naked,
drowning in the milk
of collective desperation.

In the meantime, there is the air
space, and sometimes dead air
that lets our undergarments
breathe, the poem of perspiration,
pheromones of regret, of careers unrealized,
of talent, un-lauded,
our bodies awkward, stinking
realities,
our beautiful bodies, all.

It's our party. And if you don't cry
I will wail for you.
Lamentation is good for the soul. Yet,
I want you to

Skinny dip,
before it's too late. Be your own brat.
Breathe whatever fills the sky. Live.
Share the errors
and the extravagance. Fight with me, hard,
and then let's kiss any which way, taste each other's
spit and venom and make up, let's
steam up the car windows, scandalously.

They will write songs of envy about us,
after we are dead, for a long time,
after we are dust for the new age,
or they will say "What crap!"
and recycle our poems in the outhouse,
mumbling about the atrocities we
inflicted upon the Lord's
most venerable trees.
Ego, ergo sum. Or something like that.

Wise up.
Celebrate your beauty, my friends,

Or frankly, I will punch you in the nose,
one love at a time.  

His Singular Initial

A single poem, bred well,
will race far ahead of all

the other thoughts in a poet's
mind, for most thoughts are

laden with the cares of our
existence: how to drag these

bones from place to place
while providing them an

adequate nourishment. But
a poem has no such baggage,

and instead gallops through
the brain, never in circles, but

always straight to the finish
line where it rises on two legs,

screaming a horse's thin exclamation . . .
and only then do you see the black-

caped rider who unveils his arm
to slash his wicked sword at your

naked chest then rides off, leaving
you marked with his singular initial.

Artist's note:  Galileo (1564-1642), in his The Assayer wrote, "I say that the testimony of many has little more value than that of few, since the number of people who reason well in complicated matters is much smaller than that of those who reason badly. If reasoning were like hauling I should agree that several reasoners would be worth more than one, just as several horses can haul more sacks of grain than one can. But reasoning is like racing and not like hauling, and a single Barbary steed can outrun a hundred dray horses.

 
If the Dead Must Speak

We miss our limbs, the splay
of arms, the limbo legs, the
intimate positioning of apertures
for sex; all must touch
to satisfaction, even toes.

We miss the inflections from
our tongues and vocal chords,
and where we can now convey
our words much more succinctly,
there is no way to cluck

or kiss a minor statement
for a proper irony; we miss
the sibilance that comes from
talking faster than one's own thoughts . . .
for out here we never run faster

than the speed of thought, it's physically
impossible, you know, yet we would
hiss and hiss, as gulls might whisper . . .
but most of what we miss is you,
or none of us would trade places,

and this, just this, is a fine thing
for you to know . . .

our waiting for your own death.
 

Salome Dancing For Herod

If I was in the great hall
Of the palace
Watching Salome dancing
For Herod
I too would marvel
At movements
So erotic and executed
With animal precision

Her heaving breasts
Swaying pelvis
The white waves of her skin
Moving in soft undulations
Across her abdomen
And I smile knowing
That the king and I
Are both drunk with dance

And the beat of the music
The rhythmic flashing
Of bare thighs
Naked belly
Awaken the pagan in me
Who knows that lust is to love
What poetry is to prose
A sensual awakening of sight and smell
And sound and taste

And I would swear too
At that moment that the bounce
In each breast
Was worth the heads
Of a hundred prophets
And is more moving to me
Than the words
Of all the holy men in Judea

 
Religion

At night we touch
With a host of hands
And hold with many arms
Like Hindu deities

Each kiss a metallic peel
As a bronze striker
Meets a brass bell
And sound is reborn
In the temple silence

I venerate her
Like a holy relic
The tooth of Buddha
A femur of St. John
Enshrined in night

Laying
Naked like the Jain
Twirling like two dervish
Arms snaking
From our torsos

In celebration of
Bodies enlightened
Flesh reborn
And miracles
Performed by
Simple touch