a moose and squirrel
loiter around the same tree
I find it suspect
“Nevermore Raven,
You’ve sullied your last bust, Sir!”
[Feathers everywhere]
parrot’s bright green back
head stuck in a bore burrow
take it like a bird
a park: ducks floating,
who wins if there be bloodshed?
Donald or Daffy?
Donkey or robot?
Whose sadness rivals human:
Eeyore or Marvin?
Source: Wikimedia
One soul said, “Don’t take to flight.”
A vision: landing lights fade from sight.
But those lights never appeared.
Just a figment of all he feared.
The plane never did arrive.
A hundred families mourn & cry.
How, oh how, did they get lost?
Not a moment tempest-tossed.
Madman or mechanical fluke?
An evil genius at once a kook?
Maybe a magician or a black hole?
A flipping of magnetic poles?
The riddle stupefies and confounds.
Why no plane upon the ground?
If never the day comes when we know,
perhaps we’ll have to learn to grow–
outthinking the narrow confines
of our simple 4-D minds.
I ride a dragonesque world line.
Worming through a block of time.
I’m dancing atoms in a roiling pot.
So energetic entropy forgot
to increase, and cobbled together
a self-aware “it” of clever blether.
In my youth,
in a cubby under the stairs,
there sat a big rag-bag.
Chaotically stuffed.
We’ve no rag-bag.
Our rags are store-bought:
laundered and folded.
Our cast off garments sit–
caked in dumpster chutney–
in a landfill.
Rag-pickers will scavenge them.
Some will be stuffed into craggy concrete holes.
There to keep the rats out.
The rats will make a nice meal of them.
And maybe a nest.
Some will rub rims clean–
if only for a monsoon moment.
Wiping, wiping–they’ll one day
dissolve into component threads.
Leaves scattered widely
Monsoon rains fall every night
You’d think it autumn
4 A.M. bird call
Ceaseless screeching through dreamland
Please, shut the fuck up
Banana leaf rains
Like an old tarp pulled tightly
But drips in my ear
Life, at the moment, was a dumpster fire.
But all roads lead up when stuck in the mire.
So one smiles with the rock-bottom delight,
lifting one up to the highest of heights.
But up top, amid those beauteous views.
You’re on the cusp of receiving dread news.
In the best times sits the seed of the worst.
In moments of elation, you’ll find yourself cursed.
Hemingway off’d himself–
curled up under his
own looming shadow.
What loomed beyond
that shadow was the
great unfathomable.
Peering into it might
have been a comfort,
or might have killed
him in pre-greatness days.
***
Kesey’s Chief wondered
how the Irishman could live
in his own grandiosity of being.
McMurphy’s sanity was surely
built upon a foundation of delusion–
sanity and delusion forged iron-clad.
Meanwhile, those free of such
delusions huddled in the fog,
unable to step out into life.
***
Heller’s Yossarian summed
up the whole damned mess:
claims of insanity are a
recognition of one’s sanity.
Who else seeks to turn down
the volume on reality?
Other than one who can
hear it well enough to know
when it peals thunderous?
Stand atop the wall.
Feel the conch sound.
Watch the arrows sail.
Survey the killing ground.
Know you’ll someday die.
As will all, I suppose.
For those who die well,
it is no tale of woe.
Land ends in a wall of fog.
If you were told it was the
end of the universe, you
could not prove otherwise.
It glides up to the cliffside.
Stealing sight. Silent theft.
Ears ring. Seeking sounds.
Mind searches sensation.
Senses wet cotton dulled.
Solitude sweeps over one.
What would happen if one
stuck one’s arm inside the
fog? Would it expand into
infinity? Or disintegrate
into a lawless zone free of
mathematical certainty?
a vessel cracked
an act of ransack
a pile of shards
one can’t discard
but swept aside
never to be eyed
under the rug
like Kafka’s bug
