No award or esteem could ever
match for pleasure
the pure electric joy I share
with my dog when we
notice each other
in the same room
Tag: Poetry
“disfruta la magia”
Notes toward a personal essay about the murder of trade unionists in Colombia by soft drink bottlers and about how the political is the personal: “disfruta la magia”
To believe a thing is made from people is to forgive. It’s the things that make the people here: the things made of people there.
I was born in the russet flush of autumn, 1985, in an evergreen place. My growth in the intervening years has been a gut-wrenching display of limbs beating upon membranes of things. That’s not how it feels, of course,
Being alive.
To be in the Round is to Be. Each of us a Rebel. Each of us a Gifted Student. Each of us a Birth of the Cool. Each of us a King of the Lizards.
I became a data point in the carbon rush of 1996, in a climate-controlled room. My reduction in the exaflops since that shining moment has been a substantial work of engineering prowess. That’s not how it feels, of course,
Being golden.
Ink beneath the gloss.
Acceptable loss.
Consummation to Consumption.
Praxis (Monroe Street)
First step to feel alive
Warm from darkening day;
Sundown on your power
Level walk the highway.
Step two Nefertiti
You gaze upon my strength;
Green raiment, yellow stripe
Dignity on step three.
This street by day you own
Coins in the treasury;
I may walk moonrise, though
Step four, slow luxury.
Sixteen Pines
Sixteen pines mark my quarantine transect
this little quadrangle a world of worlds
of being and becoming
of platonic forms shaping
future dream etudes where I
spin in Fibonacci circles to see it all
and always fail
These sixteen pines a Myrmidon crew
serving petulant songbirds dashing
from light to shadow
Their songs the hymns of Ithaca
the hymns I have always known
Well, such is the aviary
these sixteen pines
a mighty dialectic
Verses on a Plague Night Walk
When the sodium lights first come on
Those are the moments
Those moments of departed daylight
Departed vision
Those adolescent moments of endless
Possibility
.
Each footstep a promise to the future
Each breath an assurance of its promise to me
.
Tonight we walked the twenty-something streets
In those adolescent moments
Senses awakening to the edge of night
Inhaling understanding as we each day grow
Footsteps to tomorrow
Cinquain for Plague Morning Walks
Snuff-pouches
bloom in the dark margin
beneath the mid-story screen to-day
when life was normal they were but buds on the branch
enlivened
Cinquain for Summers Lost
Opal
we called the lake
where X-ray sunlight cast
shifting pillars of warmth into
jeweled depths
Happy Thanksgiving, Grand Marshal Andrew Jackson
King Mob on the Meridian claiming
this land is ours
in the affirmative mode which animates even
the Communists here
the three-pounds of flax
who wax zen on the temple mounds of the erased
Shuck oysters and weave the
folksonomy of despair from threads golden like
the ever yellow afterglow over the bay below
you sing of this place like you own it, you
like you could own Cassiopeia and
Wite-Out the inky spaces in between
Inverse Walk of the Fallen Leaf
We passed the time in shade unaware until
Russet skin descending in winter
to carbon upon the pavement, it
Caught the corner of my eye
Red passing to brown, falling
gray black dust in my lungs
Passing again I could not point to the fallen leaf
but it is part of me
Chlorophyll in the oxygen viscera
Lost Innocence, Tharpe St.
a butterfly backpack glows
aquamarine, upright
on the centerline of Tharpe Street
empty, illuminated
by the orange cream dusk at one end of the road
against purple green nightfall at the other
I watch it shrink in the rearview mirror
C.B. Crenshaw 