Six Impossible Things

#1. It's time to get up…

Math

Poets deem it heartless,
yet, per Dante,
infinite account
is infinite Love.
There's an equation for you.
.

Amplitude

Emptiest of absence
is companionship all there,
mere displacement of the air.
When touch dislocates touch,
mutual's more despair.

Who Needs It?

In reality, love is seldom.

In reality, backs are turned.

In reality, we need strangers.

In reality, they're too strange.

In reality, we all matter.

In reality, who cares?

In reality, blood is cheap.

In reality, carbon's dear.

In reality, the world's a wallow.

In reality, it's our world.

Bleep reality...

At least that's one way to get laid.

Me, Perimiterred

Falstaffian girth
height of Napoleon.
A brain blown-apart
(to err is aeolean)
Full measure of mirth
and five parts petroleum
will sing for a lark,
(to air is melodian):
If such is my worth,
I prostrate linoleum.

You Should Have Been There

Jack's horn folded space and time out of sight.
Glances. This doesn't happen at Jack's.
We love the man dearly,
but really, he's a bit—
his Place never where
till this unexpected flight
when at once we all knew, this is—
just not where "at" was, no not quite.
Some higher dimension of there and back
a Hobbit's tale rabbit hole journey
into unparalleled worlds of bluesy night.
Himself on the horn had never known grace
till by some blessed knack—
for once then something—
notes twirled a corner not there,
left a smile in the air like a Cheshire cat:
the night square Jack Horner riffed a tesseract!

Bottoms Up

There was a fat ocean of oil,
below that the fishermen toil.
We probed it for riches,
and now, like the fishes,
it's floating atop the sea's roil.

Prelude to a Wake

When I have drunk the English language dry,
Gaelic, Greek, and what beside,
and all is sand, save Finnegan:
Then, I may be worthy of it.
Till then, I have no time for it.

Emily's Way

Is Broad best—for Narrow—
street, needle, view?
Under heart-attack
how draw breath
to sing the bloody logging chains
endlessly dragging?
Bleeding throat
wants a brief line.

Proprieties

Arms are graces to the Fury;

the spinning kick, Terpsichore.

The smile more gleams
that bares more teeth—

'Tis daintiness to use the knife

without the peas.

Network

The loveliest next door
must stand compare to Singapore,
though next door in Singapore
yet somewhere else contest.

The prophet we most know
is dim to so and so—
as thus and such foretold.

At some remove's a there
that overdoes our best—
though here, they say,
is over there's excess.

Request

There was a young twitter, @ilyses,
so fond of a limerick's blisses,
she tweeted one night:
Could you feed my delight?
The answer to which, darling, this is.

Tweet

Now the splinter-right think schism is a patriotic-ism.
They've seceded from their senses. What a bunch of Mensas.
Split, snots, and eat my

Pedagogy

The dimpled spider in my sink

motionless is not trapped

until I loose the deluge;

then stainless slips the scramble

rough hewn nature would leg up.

Beyond its ken I see and close the tap,

coax it onto paper,

and carry it to a garden
loved by moths.

I grasp perplexities of providence

absent designing spider,

its limbs, its appetites.

Advice

Let a smile be your umbrella.

Let a chuckle be your tie tack.

Let a guffaw be your shoe tree.

One Way of Looking at Unity

A man and a woman

are one.

A man and a woman

and the Dow Jones Indistrial Average

are one.

Ambition

I wish my love multiple epiphany,

relativity resolve to quantum theory,

dash off, as I doze, her Nobel Prize—

and I? …a footnote in history.

Transparency

As water splashing bone,

her lucid shrug, wry smile, quirk of brow

washes substrate of words.

You might start to laugh,

until a sudden droplet in her eye

called shimmering from some instant passed.

"I cry when I get angry,"

she said, once, confirming:

even the clearest stream must bend the light.

Risings and Fallings

It is the left-behind who are emptied.

The child who days ago was sometimes

a bit of a nuisance

will not wake you with her crying any more,

but you will wake yourself—

again and again that void,

a lesson in drowning.

The cradle rocks, and we are lulled

by returnings we understand:

coming home, remove your shoes,

five times a day, the call to prayer,

the crucifix on the wall,

Ganesha minding the door,

ablutions, gestures, familiarity.

Of course, there are loves and jealousies,

a living to earn: farms and factories

stalls and incense,

and always and everywhere

people chasing the sand from the threshold,

for we like an ordered world.

You were vexed with your lover

and parted angrily.

Your dear friend turned one way

and you another.

As every morning, your father went down to the shrimp farm,

your mother to the hotel,

your children to school or to play,

and they were rough and smooth in your life,

grains, sometimes, held and shushed,

dear, familiar, irritating.

On a scale too large and too small for our note,

the Earth sped, like a skater folding her arms,

which the braking Moon will slow again

before they come back,

sorrowed reunions in the shifting wrack,

rocking, rocking.

Do not think those doll's eyes behold any truth.

You see how they are clouded.

-II-

Though in grief we cling to "Never,"

that is not a word time knows.

Only forever is forever—

a feather still until it stirs—

again and again joining and unjoining,

joy and grief,

and this, too, is a cradle.

Time and chance:

given enough time...

The beaches that were worlds,

the beaches of those worlds,

shore beyond shore.

And this is no evasion of finality;

it is as real as tears,

only, we are prone to hyperbole,

to our quintessent "nevers."

Time and chance:

On an autumn bluff above a northern sea,

a woman walks in the blowing grass,

looks far into the slate blue merge,

salt wind coldly brushing a tear.

Beneath her feet,

separate by storied stone,

bones of one she might have loved.

Time and chance:

Clutching her flotsam child,

rocking, rocking,

she empties her lungs, soundless,

until the drowning gasp.

Time and chance:

Where the road bends, she pauses, wiping her brow—

stardust of myriads she has loved.

We are surrounded by them always.

They are motes in the air.

They are blossoms in the field.

We breathe them in and out.

The grit of them irritates our eyes.

They are underfoot and in our hair.

We chase them from the threshold.

We could not be without them.

Commerce

She asked for it, didn't she,
this long day's pirouette into—
so agile, a dream's cat-footed flight.

Clutching the fire pole,
she could arch
and all but touch the sole
of one raised foot to her head—
a trembling moment's grace
before the splayed offering.

Now, walks unbeautied into night,
makeup, makeup burning bright.
No, not tigress eyes:
a rabbit's
forced wide and tearless.

Still she can smile as if she was dancing,
and you don't have to lie to her,
or think to bring a knife.
Her dealer has her at knife point, for you:
her grocer, her landlord, her child
her own bewildered self
unraised to any higher pas de deux—
she always knew.

But, ask a thousand:
"What do you want to be?"

A heart whose love is pure,
she looks at you through rabbit eyes
framed in painted symmetry,
wearing a smile like a G string,
and wonders if she should ask for less.