Life is not fair they say,
and then they win,
and then they celebrate,
and then they accelerate
with the faces of the feast
under foot.
And like a rear view mirror,
the weak rise up with machetes.
You just can’t win wars without
a bottle of genocide on your side.
The streets are covered with the broken glass
of head-butted windshields
like melting ice cubes.
Empires pass through here, changing lanes
through wars on poverty, wars on inflation,
through laws which change like secret codes
the war on drugs, illegal immigration,
the infidelity of slaves.
They speak of the Jews, it’s a glass menagerie.
The scientific beatitude, the failure of God;
the Heidegger on the shelf,
the Ford in the driveway.
We will stitch up Iraq with razor wire,
its the sound of Moses snoring,
its the rattling wheel’s of Nahum,
but even these things fall lesser.
The tray of bubbling flutes glitter grimly
all the way from below to what’s left behind,
the top of the whole wide world
screeching into the forgotten,
blackening the street with the most fowl secret:
Death by automobile.
The Inner Tube Tree
The manual laborer of pedaled wheels
pulls around the symbol of his relationship with time
as it hisses, quickly losing form.
A circle of patches to be balanced against the odds,
stuffed with compressed air against long stretches of road
like a rubber band that becomes a black cobra
swallowed by its own tail, then dies, becomes limp;
and so the bike surgeon tries his best,
but gives up on it,
gives it up to the innertube tree.
He swirls it up into the air, briefly
the shape gasps, as though wigling against memory,
and then it slides defeated into the monument.
Its an art form how to toss them up there,
like putting make-up on dead wind,
like fly fishing for black birds
and then the line breaks.
The bulbous tree like a venus fly catcher
never gives up the old carnies;
buds burgeon green, then to orange and yellow,
wreathing the pliant exoskeletons beyond season.
The street is her long digestive track, the wind her juices,
but they stay put like fossils in an inverted cave
across the street from the plasma donation center.
The tired men wait there, with cheap house painting
jobs splattered across their 2nd hand pants and sleaves,
with 3rd read newspapers in their hands, and counting
in their minds their bills, groceries, beer, and cigarettes
from the 25 dollars they will receive for strapping
their arms to the donation machine.
The tubes blow back and forth, the needle in the vein,
the blood platelets go into one containment
while the plasma is filtered into another,
and then the blood cells are returned
if it all goes as planned.
Caesar’s Things
“Render therefore unto C the things which be C
And unto G the things which be G.” Luke 20:22
These pieces of subjected time
in the rendering of history
lay around before me
as I walk the dogs of strangers.
I find these things, see them, what others
ignore as litter, obsolete truths;
I assign the variable meanings
of an untenable Universe,
the of nothing as the of something.
A thing that is a wall,
and a thing of scattered stones.
I enbrace the idea with vigilance
and with vigilance declare its heracy
as I walk the dogs of strangers.
A thing to be born,
and a thing to die,
a thing to plant,
and a thing to pluck,
a thing to kill,
a thing to heal,
to break down, to build up: An old can
that weeps and worries full of what I did;
A faded bottle that laughs under my stare,
and the shattered shards of my mourning
against a sun dancing upon them.
And the dog walks me to the south,
and the dog walks me to the north,
the path whirls about continuously
returning again according to the circuits;
The lifting of her leg, the marking of things.
And all these things run into the sea;
yet, the sea is not full; and from
where all things come from, they return
like the names which children give things
like the names which parents give children.
“I made great works; I built me houses;
I planted me vineyards: I made me gardens
and orchards, and I planted trees of all fruits…
And whatever my eyes desires, I keep not from them.”
Ecclesiastes
A thing to get,
and a thing to lose;
a thing to keep,
and a thing to cast away;
a thing to turn into something else,
a thing to sew unto silence, like words
cast into the garden of the heard.
A thing to love,
and a thing to fear;
a thing of war,
and a thing of art.
I gather up the vexation of ideas
and put them into miscellaneous bags.
I came along the path a fierce white wolf
and my dog pushed me aside, over an embankment,
and where there is one wolf, there are others,
and swiftly we ran along the shore of the lake,
our legs leaping over many uncovered things,
just as the wolves may have watched us for weeks
And then one day made themselves apparent,
perhaps wondering, why had we ignored them?