some will speak of loneliness
like a knife tip stuck in bone
some will tell their fever dreams,
that summer they had no home
some have never walked barefoot
through streets strewn with broken glass
but yet they still found themselves
waking, rolled in fresh mown grass
if you gave them each one wish
some would wish it never was
others wish they hadn’t been seen
but see he who saves it “just because”
a flower
became the pivot
of my mind
thoughts form,
float ephemerally,
then burst
quiet came
my mind wordless
as pictures gel
feel emotion,
but don’t ever feed
that old goat
perfectionist?
the perfect can’t be loved,
only vied for
I know you best by the gray of your winters
when road salt coats the sidewalks
and a witch of wind rides down the Danube
whistling around pedestrians on your broad bridges
— except there are no pedestrians
— save for me —
river crossers huddle in yellow trams
or pack into the Metro that rolls under the river
I know your beauty can be unsullied
I’ve seen a Budapest in bloom,
under blue skies and cotton clouds
But your gray days lend a distinguished air
a melancholic miracle is birthed from gloom
a sweep of story,
a piece of poetry,
that would move a stoic to tears
And escape is always close at hand
for Kürtőskalács fires sunshine in my mind
it’s a lighthouse in the wilderness
shining a spray of consciousness
over all that is surveyed
experiencing the world through a window
framed by this meat machine,
which is optimized for chasing down prey
over long stretches of African savanna
maybe there is so much more
as so many boldly claim to know
but neither they nor i have the mechanism to know it
— even if we have a masterpiece mechanism for believing it —
so, i’ll not yet extend my footings into the darkness
of egg coffee and banh mi
to rocky islands in the sea
tiny, tidy market stalls
to the mammoth shopping malls
once a town in ruin and rubble
I saw not an ounce of past troubles
maybe a bullet-pocked citadel
though it be true that war is hell
it’s also a terrible liar
as if the world could be remade through blood and fire.
sitting beside the dark river
watching the inky water flow
though balmy, i feel a shiver
abyss, but for a moon lit glow
in the rippling liquid metal
aside blinding light from the moon
i see loping letters settle
in lyrics of an unsung tune
i don’t fear the talking waters
nor the dirge they write for me
for in life we’re all but squatters
i dread the river’s gift lost to a cold sea
“What is your original face?”
Original? Does that mean I have one now?
Perhaps when I mirror gaze.
Otherwise, if I have a face, it resides in the minds of those who look upon it.
He who takes a scaffold built of patches of matter, varying distances from his eye
and reflecting various spectra of light, and fleshes it out in subjectivity owns the face.
That mean thing,
thing of glee,
that by which cantankerousness is displayed
thing of sorrow,
thing of madness,
that ugly-pretty, disheveled topography of flesh
is a faceless face,
or — perhaps — a thoughtless thought.
I was once a kid in the corn.
News at Eleven ran a story
about a child found dehydrated
and on death’s door — deep in a field.
Any farm-boy will tell you,
you can’t get lost in a cornfield —
not truly lost.
Pick one of the two directions
that your row runs,
and walk.
When the rows re-align at right angles,
that’s the endrow —
you’re almost out.
Sure, it sucks if you hit the river,
because then you’ve got to walk
all the way back past where you started,
moving in the opposite direction.
But a kid has a lot of walk in him.
The only way to get lost in a cornfield
is to panic, and lose all faith
in the logic of a field.
In nature, one may walk oneself in circles
’cause one leg is stronger than the other,
and nature’s chaos is omnisymmetric
to an order-loving human brain.
But, in a field, the rows run true,
and the only way to walk in circles
is to feed your fear
and lose faith in the straightness of rows.
One can’t teleport a harvester into a field,
it needs to be driven there on a road.
Find your endrow, find your road.
The crab! Oh, so apropos.
Claw, grotesque and over-sized.
This death won’t know pain or throe.
It’s tyrannically civilized.
Like a crust of frozen snow,
it girds drift, and melt ‘s unseen,
but still will grow into a floe
as host grows weak and lean.
Later becoming gaunt and sallow,
it starts work deep inside,
building out toward the shallows.
And like all who succumb to pride,
the crab builds in its own image.
It makes its host low and hard —
a fearsome face of scrimmage,
with a shell well battle-scarred.
If you can make those scars your own,
facing that hard shell the right way —
deny cold access to the bone —
the crab may be kept at bay.
fractal echoes
prismatic fire
a world seen through a cracked mirror,
but cracked into perfect patterns —
like the jaali at the Tomb of Akbar the Great
patterns overwrite blank spaces
this reality hates the mundane
and how can that machine be so loud?
a motorcycle rode through my brain from fifty feet away
down on a street somewhere below
there’s a switch
i can’t see it
nor can i touch it
it’s somewhere in my brain
and i can flip it
and it zaps me into a reality, still and banal
that fades into pulsing closeness and periodic sound floods
as soon as i love the mundane an instant too long
