01-08-2018

I saw a picture of a Buddha head being cradled by a banyan tree
And was reminded of the couple on the train from Rome
During hour five of our eight-hour delay
I could not see their faces; just her head belonging in his arms so beautifully unremarkably
His hands resting on her as though she were his own name
The banyan tree, despite its century-old head start, was rather more strangling
And the Buddha rather inferior in divinity

10-21-17

I cannot make sense
Of the words you have not spoken
I cannot make sense of your absence
Nor the tenderness with which you politely walk away
I cannot know
So much of you
And so I search the words of poets who have seen more than I
In hopes that one of them has seen you before

January 2016

みかんを剥きながらあなたを想う
道を間違えた時にあなたを想う
思い込みでも勘違いでもあなたを想う

みかんの油が爪を汚し
サアーっと頑固な香りが吹き通す

4/1/15

I wish to live in a whitewashed house
Perhaps by the Mediterranean
Where everything smells of late afternoon sunlight and nothing reminds me of myself
Where the only ghosts are lovers that once spent a summer there and let a candle burn down and scorch the windowsill
Where enough indulgent asceticism will bleach the voices from my head
I wish to live inside a slightly depressive modern poem
So jaded and self-important
As though the world exists only when we think of it

1-13-15

The quiet days
The momentous days
Impressions of one person and weather
Storms, gravel, waves
Dandelions celebrating their allotted existence
Next to a ragged telephone pole
Waving in the dappled light as we walked by, laughing
Such are the gently insistent memories
Unpredictable, mundane
Such more will come
I have fortune enough to be found by them
And talent enough to keep them
Even foolishly, but gloriously
For hope dies last, as the Russians say

12-30-14

Number our days to give them inconsequential names
Diagram my soul, give it an anatomy
Eviscerated and neatly labeled
In order to expedite it to mundanity
A poor parody of the scenes inside my head
Violated and plagiarized, bleak in its commodity
Make me stand and write and repeat
I am better than human
I am better than human
I am better than human
I am better than human
I am better than human
I am better than human
I am better than human.

12-24-14

As though our daily explanation were buried in the script of a lonely nebula
Singing its comfort across impossible years of distance
Unraveled and transliterated, would it blueprint my heartpatterns
The mathematics of our poetry
Transcribed in inorganic dust storms
Or is perfection too regulated for such trivialities
Is it instead the tainted soil beneath that curates the mundane probabilities
Do I seek homogeneity with the breathless
To reason away my own precipitate breathing

***I wanted to see how many multisyllabic words I could cram in. As it turns out, a lot, and transcribing this now was like eating seaweed salad with a spoon.

To The Strange Little British Men Inhabiting My Pencil Mug: An Ode

Oh, how gleeful your faces
My flat, flimsy companions
Startlingly so, you are
With wide eyes and fanned fingers

Your subjects shall ne'er be
Conscious of your grins
Static til the ink fades and your bodies crumble
For being made of paper

I shall not mourn you when you go
No affection is recognized in your printed eyes
But for the moment you shall live
Among pencils that are more useful than yourselves.

Cognitive Dissonance

In case we've forgotten how to write our self importance
Equations lost in mathematical spirals
Perhaps they're all just patterned lights
Has it been as long as it seems and as far as it is not
To pick up a frame of mind we thought we'd outgrown
Is it tight in the shoulders
My feet seem sturdier now
Finding the inability to be lost in sentimental incandescence
Shall we come to terms with it before long
Reconcile the scattered parts
Until your minds, your hearts, your thunderstorms
All draw their breath in one

Porcelain

As though, by many outpourings, one might be healed
Let us replace one sort of distance with another
One less pretty, perhaps
Could strength and fragility coexist somewhere
Without pulling apart and crackling
Like a poorly placed glaze
Shall we call the cracks pretty
Full of character
Or simply leave them as traces of something for which foolish seems too harsh a word