stricken

The stricken birds sing of mortal time.
They are singing very serious songs.
If they could simply sing without stress,
the songs would have no beautiful drama.

I "sing" so obsessively because of you.
And time rushes toward the pale horizon.
And your beauty is on me like fever colors.
Your spirit haunts me like a sigh of death.

to my daughter

When you were born I was buried
under a ton of very harsh colors.
I think I was close to breakdown.
It took time for me to recognize
that an uncanny being had come
woven deeper than blood into me.
Someone who would know my mind
and be a friend and not blame me
for being something rather weird.
Someone who would laugh with me.

You are a woman now, so beautiful.
You are so smart that it is an excuse
for my own dumbass clunky brain --
it's like I can ride on your coattails
and gain plausibility being your dad.

I remember when you were three.
That morning when we discovered
you and I had had the same dream.

I remember when I built you
that swingset and slide thing
from a structure of 4 by 4s.
You had a blast playing on it.
And you could fire a baseball
like a boy, not girly pushed.

I remember that night when you were a teenager.
When that ghost or whatever it was freaked us out.

Okay...that's enough for now.
I just wanted to say, "I love you."

Some more of my poems

Peculiar Moods at Issuu

my head

When I was 13,
I decided to sculpt
a head out of clay.

What the hell?

I was a regular kid,
with no art or knowledge,
but I got it in my head
that I must sculpt a head.

So I gathered up red clay
from that spot in the yard.
And I formed from wire mesh
a substrate and stuffed it
with wads of newspaper
to hold the first smearing.

I worked like a monk
in a trance of oblivion
all that day and into the next.

My head started looking
like something nearly human,
and the third day it took on
a forlorn expression.

I made a strange man,
though I think my first vision
was to shape up a woman.
But women are weird
and my fingers were virgin.

And I could never get it
to proper head size.
It stalled between normal
and Melanesian trophy.

I was proud of my head.
I showed it to my parents,
and as usual they loved it,
like anything I made...
even this depressed
head with proportions
askew and sad features
not quite aligned.

Why in the world
did I have to make a head?
It just jumped into my head
like everything since.

Looking back I can feel
what I felt when my hands
were slimy with clay,
lost in creation,
persuading my Adam.

I was trying to make
something out of nothing.

wheeling

Whatever the bird is saying
to the fixed fact of his day,
wheedling a reeded melody
or dark-limbed expression
from flute or picolo tongue...

he is turning around what he is.

And if a fish swims in a blue circle,
massaged by a spiraling current...

he is turning to always face his god.


Higher up goes the Ferris wheel,
until it drops the heart to depths.
And the passenger is changing cars,
in mid-air climbing through structure
to get a fix on one revolving view...

he is turning because of drunkenness.

Turning, turning...always to face
the curving fact as it slides away.

when it happens

It's only happened a few times.
And it comes completely of itself.
You can't strain and make it pop
and be there. It is a sly thing.
Nothing else but a chair or sofa
or a floor or a surface of wall
can hold the happening so well...

when it happens.

If God himself stared at his recliner
and that thing decided to show itself,
God would be nonplussed and shaken,
at least I'm almost sure God would be.

It rarely ever comes to me.
But when it does it seems
all things are simply there
beyond any explanation.

attack of the crazy-8s

Made it through the night without waking up at 3 AM. But the dreams! As usual, so wrong-assed and spirit-draining. One of these nights it's going to be different.

I'll dream of Butterfly people who have come to me for help. To save their land from invasion by crazy-8s. Yes, human-sized 8s, bouncing around all over Flower Land...crushing flowers and making noise. Spreading panic and widespread depression (causes the Butterfly people's glorious, dappled wings to molt). The fairest of all the Butterfly girls will beseech me to rescue them all. I will be so cool. I'll amble into Flower Land like Kwai Chang Caine: swivel-kicking, shoulder-slinging, and just Kung-Fuing the shit out of those bombastic, chaotic 8s.

Their greatest warrior, Gol8th, will present his horrible self and laugh at me maniacally, as if he had hands on hips: an extra-large 8 made out of two over-sized ebony 8-balls. Battle ensues. I bounce off his surfaces. My attacks and counterattacks impotent against this hard billiard-ball creature. Bloodied and weary, I glance over at Butterfly girl. She flutters her eyelashes and the tips of her wings. A dewy teardrop hovers in her eyes.

Filled with a new, heroic passion and completely disgusted with Gol8th's arrogance, I try the move on him I've been holding in reserve: I whip out a calculator, hit a bunch of numbers, and get the result that mathematics has heretofore thought impossible. I have managed to divide Pi's first 8 digits by a secret, intuited fraction. My computation has quickly found the terminal number of Pi. And it is not 8. It is 9. I triumphantly step up to the glistening, now-bemused Gol8th. I show him the result. I tell him that 8 is not the transcendent, ontological answer. Rather it is 9!

He begins to tremble, his two black ball halves start spinning in opposite directions. A loud whine and whir fills the air. Finally...Gol8th explodes into billions of tiny octagon bits. All the other regular 8s flee mindlessly. Their great warrior is no more. Their philosophy has been annulled. With Flower Land free and peaceful once more, the king is happy. He declares a feast and celebration. That night Butterfly girl, with a strange combination of shyness and seduction, confronts me under the great Moon Flower. And what happens next will not be told here. Because I don't know. I just stopped typing.