Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Hollow of the Knees

For all my slowness, you will find a lake.
For all my mood, you will find an anchor.
Coming down from the cross,
I journey into the next quadrant of the day.
The pieces of stained glass tell the story
of my work in the garden.
I'm leaving the stones in the sand.
We search heartache with a comb
and purchase the hollow of the knees.
The reaches of the day cross us like a mantel
for the fire slowly dying.
I am shaped by rain now or the love of a summer day.
I have thought as coral and thus in a small way
felt happiness.

Riches, come to me, I am done with this room.
Are there any lost poets out there?
Trudging the street with gospels.

Your metaphors are filling the hotels with guests.
The banks are building interest in your name.
You are pleasing the majority with your tone.
Your sincerity turns the wheel of our mind.
The poets stand on the corner melting
into lost automobiles.

Divine desperation fills the scorecard of the gods.
I strike the weak sister into the dance fought
with religious lilies.
She points out colors hours away from the center.
I am an index fighting to take shape.

The bricks of the schoolhouse pass through me
on the way to the library.
The real world is hidden in the point of a horse race.
One eyelid is like the slide of a microscope.
Reality is struck in the being serene to slowness.
The complete word is always the ladle.

The unquiet measures of my soul give helplessness a form.
I am struck on the shoulder by a force acting
with the shadows that turn off ordinary objects.
I am powerless with my powerful ideas
about unheralded rescue before great works of art.
Painters, unfurl our eyelids
only because they are treasures.
Restless timepiece, I am what you are.
     We are outlets in a restless world.
     We are opponents of central imagination.
     The art world overtakes the real world.

The wick of the moderns is postulated with paint.
I ignite the genesis of our thought.
The anchor of the ancients drops like a falling star.
I'm melting photographs like they are gothic silver.
The years I try to take photographs slip
through my hands like early Rene Magritte.

The black, Guardian painting seizes me by the temples.
I travel to a museum in a town that doesn't exist.
The Ancients had no name for park.
The glow of the stars was the applause of the first stage.
The first, gentle playwrights, close to the particulars
of creation, provoked happiness in the crowd.
Sadness is a recent development.
Look over yonder the deck of the ageless.
Lost sailors in a gardener's mind look for better waves
in waters uncharted, fiery resistance in the stars.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

An Incoherent Response

I accompany your robust models
down streets into a past when they wait
     ugly by doorways. 
I stumble upon them, asking their help,
listening to their incoherent response
in the light of a street lamp.

Look at your models weeping,
and you call it radiance.
If your hurried throng presses any closer,
I might gain literacy in its chaos.
Industrious masses, compare my company
to the approach of sleep.

I cry out to meet the architect of this forest.
I will wear his headdress and his footwear.
I respond with a ferocity of finite adaptations.
My ears return as birds of prey.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Doctrine of Our Times

The entrance way to the city is through the harbor,
never upward toward the skyscrapers.
The windows dance with the doctrine of our times.
The post-modern animal is closing in on infinity.
He feints translation in a spacious room.
He is stealing time from its cradle.
Dance with the post-modern animal.
     Name his decorative objects.
     Go to a feverish meeting. Bake bread.
     Drink his brand of fruit juice.
I see you trip on the dismount.
You need not omit emotion.
I am only a parking meter attendant. Ask the oracle.
I sift through the ambiguous shapes I have become
to travel here.
This is the center. The tail has been in place for centuries.
The skyscraper also has a tail.
Someone has to interpret their multiple sides,
their connected towers that catch the sun.   
     New gods flash in the pan.
     A superhero is born at the side of the road.
My alter ego leans against a puff of smoke which is this age.
There are no solutions to melancholy, only permutations.
A comic mask that chuckles less than twice is discarded
as a thing out of fashion.

The relentless copy cat only begins
to scratch the surface of things.
He eyes the letters on the chart
and glances at the water in the glass.
The departure board blinks
with the awful availability of destinations.
My hometown is a somatic stop
on the superhighway of information.
My elbows are out by the car.
Listen to its faint beating in the next heartland.
Have a guiding light that fades forever each time you close your eyes.
Keep your dreams running in the sunshine.