A prose poem to be published by summer, 2025 in  KINPAURAK: Creative Institute for the Study of the Esoteric, Absurd, and Sublime

The Archaic Torso of Rilke

How can a god do it? Maybe he can’t. Though I’d like to know which god. We do know the cause of beauty isn’t as humble as justice, it doesn’t hide. Its shape needs light. It requires donors, even tourists. Its verse needs to come up for air. Its price is high. And these mysteries won’t stay whole for long as each marble arch loses limbs. Mystery curates the shards of what we intended.

But this is not a poem saluting divine antiquities. This is a lament of inaccessible lives. A reckoning posing as what the elite sees on holiday. Even if this poem, too, has original intents severed at the elbows in its hubristic claim of remaking art, it acknowledges (I acknowledge) that only the broken can know the broken in ways to repair the earth. Tikkun food stamps, not Apollo.   

Tonight in the museum of oligarchs and algorithms, the role of god is played by the poet who thinks he versifies where creation flares. His skin drags meter and line length to blocks of angry words. He thinks he reports like a mirror, but the dark center has its own podcast now.  Underneath the clever simulations he’s a cat.  His wild claws rip ribbons in the luminous stony skin of brawny verisimilitude. Truth nestles on these pedestals. Or rather squats.

Real words may lose power in this late hour of our experiment, our prison of pixels and co-emergent affliction; (though surely too, Rainer Maria, the man, not the icon, thought his own body translucent enough with what the sacred power left buried in caves not castles, in row crops and factory lines, in credit card service charges). The parking lot is full at the SUV church of nothing left.  The tide is rising, predicted by both physics and evenhandedness.

It's too late to study prosody, so he studies the notes of Miles Davis and notebooks of Darwin and doesn’t mind the gaps in the logic. He wanes and will never scale the heights of Duino or DNA. He is still in prime movement; in brine he adapts. The solar gusts in gods and all the other hidden places catch the drift of natural selection. Or better yet, when Stephen Jay Gould, the great biologist of evolution was asked what was so special about Einstein’s brain, what evolutionary need caused reality’s metanoia, said, “I care less about the size of Einstein’s brain than knowing there have been thousands of Einsteins living and dying in cotton fields and sweatshops” and prisons, both bricks and pricks and locks, the gulags of cybercurrency and the dark stain that grows larger than history.  This poem is the tombstone on the wall behind the object of our regard, it explains nothing before or after art and its smooth musculature. Neither a YouTube documentary on La Pasionaria or cutting massive blocks at Carrera or quantum entanglement, nothing will save this shitshow.  This poem slithers from the sea to see who still lives.

The darkness completes us (he says, I say). Either way we burn the lyre for light - sendero luminoso for the second god that stumbles. That god’s body made of moons puts up a sail to  catch what’s left. That god can figure it out. From now on there is no god you cannot change.

 Three prose poems published in the Spring, 2025 issue of Everscribe

Alchemy

But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth. II Timothy 2:20.

The ingredients for happiness change in time, but all the elements you need are already at hand -it’s habit that weeds out what you think you can’t use. Myriad vials will fill with what you miss. In the first half of the 21^st century elixirs are running out.  Don’t waste them, don’t flip coins. When can you cook gold like this again?

Soon the intelligence we made will make our native intelligence fade. Soon the habitual moon will deny us love. Yet even true love loves cosplay. So go in fancy dress for couples’ therapy, in a shaman’s get up of Bantu cloth, eagle feathers, vipers’ skin, and Dzi beads.  Nothing is off the table. Orpheus holds the fire extinguisher in the lab late at night promising he’ll be open to how he’s hurt you.  (So much is learned in our 50 minutes.)

Play with the world, steal its gifts, for a last supper. Raise a clay cup suitable for rain, hemlock, ayahuasca, wine or vinegar. (Though among these occult magic tricks a sponge soaked with vinegar works wonders too.) Pursue new wounds to break open the sounds of your purple heart. I guess the old ceremonies fail to ease the ache of underused awareness.  So your swollen feet make the pilgrim’s journey. The phonemes confess it. Make up a chant; who will know? Perhaps it makes the perfect lotus grow from mud. A bloom is exactly  the golden art you need and seek, the secrets hidden in caves for future emergencies.

Because, rest assured, the red lights are blinking.

Listen.  It’s real. You thought you could answer and did not need to steal. All bets are off. The prophecy’s not wrong nor dated. The common cup matters because it’s empty. Might as well fill it with gold, a singing emptiness extracting essence from a suffering that is horribly overrated.

Gravity

At evening we made a fire at the edge of a blue lake high in the mountains near the border. We made the camp to heed the songs of robins and night herons  -- you would not admit you were cold.  The stratocumulus sunset stayed until dark, and then a black sky of chilled stars fell down upon our world.  A rat rustled in the reeds near us, but that night nothing could scare us.

The dust of a windy day covered us. We looked up at the black dome of emptiness. I said, “maybe wonder will solve us.”  You scoffed, the white puff of cloudy air, the denial inside you, fell into the fire. You would not admit you worried about your death. Instead, you pulled me to it breathing with the fading birdsong and letting a mysterious force draw us together, then to the ground. We lifted arms, heavy as stones, and knew gravity would not leave us alone. Pulled to each other for warmth, our brave fear made us complete and lovely, and we lived by the unspoken trust in what heaves us home.  After another wave of gravity you snored like a duck in your down bag.   I stayed up as the night got colder and the stars rushed away, pulled apart in all directions, their causes and effects chiming with the chemistry unleashed at the moment time began.  From here there was no place that did not pull us to it. 

Tomorrow we climb the ridge in front of us and cross into a new country.  Our weight will hold us on the path until we’re there. But now I raise my hand to the constellations above. My finger traces Orion’s belt. My hand is heavy. Though your hand pulls it to you.

Luxembourg

Before puberty I brought piles of atlases home from the cold marble library, before the screens tunneled me away from the world with the fear of missing out. Historical atlases -- page after page of mysterious oblong shapes unheard of: Savoy, Wallachia, Zimbabas, Xiongnu – delicately colored geometries of Golden Hordes, Knights Templar, Caliphates. The calm seas surrounding the ever-melting forms, joining, then disappearing page after page. Luxembourg, a shape without history, tiny and blocked in a low land, inspired my imaginations.  So I carved out new countries – counties, states, duchies, electorates rearranged in orders invented by alternate history and my pencils.

Why not? I was born in the generation that would see history itself die.

On real graph paper I made up populations, flags, mottos. My childhood hand taught by polity to make uniforms, not yet poems. I sketched broad-shouldered soldiers with epaulets to escape our forever wars. My mind muddled by mutations made shadow states in impossible time. Drawings of nothing real, yet as real as Indo-Turkic sultanates now erased. Ah, those secret histories and cherished inventions formed from the same emptiness that will swallow my falling body. Atlases, screens, blue graph paper lose their proud biases in no substance. To manifest history is no error but does not last. Quiet seas bring no lines and mark coasts I’ve never seen, will never see. So I still limn the lands in their myriad shapes born and dying in time. Small Luxembourg’s mind locked in itself, without the distant blue eternity of pliable oceans where history dissolves in the brine.

 Two poems to be published in ANTAE: a journal of creative writing in Spring, 2025.

The Elders

… smile insouciantly,
though they sweeten the day
when you walk by and mostly
ignore their slow movements.
You catch their eyes briefly
and you both nod as though
some recognition were possible.
 
They’ve tricked you.
You think their smile is a form of ignorance.
But behind your back they gather
to laugh at your own end,
at the destruction of ego
to come in the fire they fuel
quietly.
 
They move slowly
so you will not notice
this rebellion
in their disappearing bodies.
 
 

Before Winter

A registered letter arrives. He tosses it on the laptop.
It’s August, no need to open it yet, he reasons.
 
He wants to open the letter in time, with care.
He suspects seasons will fall out.
 
Spring, green and itchy.
Summer, sweaty and exhausting.
 
Fall, illuminating the body’s sadness.
Winter, the deep unknowing skin.
 
He knows he’s wrong about time --
now that the sunlight falls on its side.
 
He’ll never make it to winter solstice,
but he pretends the days lengthen.
 
He rolls seasons up like sleeves,
and marches up his made-up hill.
 
He thinks the lie we all will tell is hard work.
We say it’s a letter opener, but it’s a murder weapon.
 
Then the letter opens on its own
and the days he does not live spill out.

 Published Nov 26, 2024, in Festival for Poetry

Norwegian Wood

Are these not just excuses to not connect. Our differences are irrelevant. To only name the flaws. - Bjork

Perhaps it was wrong
to burn him in my bucket of ashes.
Perhaps raising fire
was only code for my incompetence.
He is a fine musician, he hears notes
better than words.  I hear
the keys and chords of an unknown man
and my hunger looks for answers 
in blue notes and echoes. 
Words dry up. They always have.
But words are kindling too.
*
Sandalwood oil cools on the tabernacle of your wrist.
No sandalwood grew in Oslo.
Yet our little love nest on the fjord was full of sweet scent
and strong hot tea.  I loved choosing furniture
for you. I loved dropping mint and sugar in your tea.
I loved singing a third above your melody.
You did not notice. You kept singing your lonely song.
*
How many tables did we construct? 
How much experience can be stretched on them 
now for examination?  And how many conclusions 
wow us then are moved like chess pieces?
The usual gambit
grabs your body from my memory
and I anele it with aloe and myrrh 
as scripture demands. Ashes to ashes, you know.
So I clinch the white ash and a checkmate
from plane crashes, canals,
and ransomed songs foreshortened by history.
But the wooden hut we cobbled together
outlasts us. It outlasts even inept love.

 To published by Lotus-Eater Literary Magazine this winter, 2025.

Morning

the ragged wolves return at dawn
collecting what they’re due
you don’t remember when
they went away --
you do remember 
you made the wolves
by seeing them 
and you remember the stories you told
sheltered them from slaughter --
those parables of salt
made a world 
they savored in your skin
then at night you promised them
the wounded moon 
perhaps you promised too much
and now the night passes
and the wolves in you
get seriously pissed off

*
before their numbers 
were great 
and hungry packs
chumbled on the hem
of your rough robe
folded on the shore
there you sat on ancient rocks 
by the blackened sea --
and wanted 
a whole night’s sleep --
wanted to be warmed
by a fire of dry grass 
sparking on red coals
you tired 
of making them prey
so you struck a deal --
blessed are those who sharpen teeth 
blessed are the raw 
blessed are the outnumbered
for they will seek shelter in the broken laws
you thought they were multitudes
but it was only you
then when 
you stopped thinking
the wolves stopped
and the night returned
to night

*
whatever beatitudes 
you sold them
must have left 
outstanding debts
you remember sitting
between the wolves’ darkness and teeth --
counting your habits
as the smoke
on an alien shore
rolled across the water
into you
you planned habitual escape --
the migration of wolves
out of your eyes

*
plans are lies
and lies harden your debts
perhaps the many wolves
were also born by the war in your head –
you hoodwinked them
and then promised relief
by silence
but they got history instead
and history would piss
anyone off
your shameless mendacity 
will not hold the pack -- 
wolves pour out of the cut
in your chest
shadows scratching 
at the cockcrow’s windows 
as day insists you open
your eyes --
night’s end framed
in willows and skin
you and they did love the moon --
but dawn stops
the tracks in you, in them
the morning wolves are cranky
they are wet with your blood
and howl at the luminous emptiness
there’s not enough coffee
for the pack
but you remember the story
of loaves and fishes
and how baskets filled
as long as the hungry
surrounded them
so you pay your debts
for free
and the tribes of wolves
lick your hands clean of blood
in a windy sunny morning
by the sea
by what you refuse
by what you forget 
in your body 
still wild enough 
to make good news

 Published in December, 2024 by Periwinkle Pelican

 Loki and His Law Practice

The world is left in our hands.  Its muddy clutter, our clutter, drops on our doorway at dawn.
 
There, the highways,
early in the day,
fill with the delivery trucks:
Pantalla Inc. responding
quickly to the human
need for more,
for anything
that disrupts
any thing the
1,000 anxious eyes set.
 
Boxes of cameras
are left on stoops
captured by cameras
and laws are not
the only thing broken.
 
Delivery isn’t freedom
for our members.
It kills.
 
Loki’s business model,
his scheme of felonious rebellion,
is to sell us on this practice:
 
Smash every screen.  
 
Do not
simply turn them off,
unplug, nor employ
the temporary discipline
of your virtual selves, 
reducing use
in the brainspace’s 
“appropriate use” naming. 
 
Smash: VERB
violently break (some thing)
into pieces.
Then wash the threshold.
Fix the eye on the sun; 
it rises one more time.
 
Loki plans to teach
that in such pieces
we can become whole again.
 
So practice freedom
from suffering. 
Ungraspable smashing.
Smash the open sky too
before it fills with riddles.  
 
We are so close to losing it all.
The lights in the rearview mirror
are not cops.  They are
an ambulance.
 
How’s that for a broken punch line?

A prose poem published November, 2024 in Unlikely Stories 

Sisyphus Invents Justice

Chill dawn breaks a wound in the sky. We wake where the harbor stopped us.   Here a dark sea fills barks of air with salt and sharpened steel. We wake from one sleep to another.
 
There’s no breakfast for us:  the empty iron plate is a last meal. Creosote and gull shit; blisters on our hands. We’ve no rope left to lift the life we did not plan. That life was a dangerous blade made of our minds.  Greyed stone grown in us, of us,  has cooled to the touch.  We reach up to it… from this, the tidal trough. But Providence panders again— we will not last this one and final day.                                                                     
 
Yesterday’s labor emptied us and we fell at night spent on the moldy straw mulled between warehouses on the wharves; we fall off with splinters. We, the army of hills; anabasis again, rolling rocks from the shore. We were convicted of the crime of life.  It’s winter; we make our jury of just gods, paid subscribers all, recruited from hinterlands with jade and blood sports. We named them so they could name us.
 
But the labor’s lost. The misdemeanors broke their rock all day. We felons pushed ours up the mountain of our crimes. And there at the summit the setting sun swallowed us. Even imagined prisoners need rest. The body has limits; bones obey the dark law.  We fell back to this ancient port.
 
Tonight will plug cotton in the nostrils and lay a copper coin on each eye.  So best to stop arguing the case – bloody handprints dry on the cruel rock. The evidence accrues. Punishments hew to the lunatic propensity to name things and our reprieve loses itself in moons.
 
Too late in our day: we’ve been condemned to the guillotine. So our every step up the stairs is pristine awareness, our head positioned just so is luminescent attention, our eye contact with the executioner is sweetly empathetic -- we know how hard his job is.  It’s just the water our gaze tells him & just let it all roll downhill
 
If he does his job our hands won’t need to push the stone ever again. They only need to catch our head now, tumbling freely in the air, dropping further into mystery, losing names as it falls. The day falls too, down the hill, back to shore, a withered moment stumbles and struts –gravity smirks and wants more. More of the sea washing on these old pilings -- a shelter of human sadness that’s become our scaffold to climb. Now, this morning on the pier, exhausted from breathing, we muster with pebbles in our pockets waiting for our slavery to be sold. We expected reprieves – that’s not how it works.
 
We want to choose another myth. We want to execute the plan. We learn the plan is our execution. We look up to the hills –  the help is empty and a feather is carried out on the tide. We wait between land and sea, day and night; we wait for the sharp edge
at the end of gravity
to render
justice.

 Published in the Ouch! Collective Vol. 4, February, 2025.

S’s Complicated Relationship with Gravity

Waves of gravity line up for government cheese.
The sons of gravity itself roll out of cardboard boxes.
The gods we marry are exactly the gods we aim to please.
 
Turkeys on the hillside hide from hikers in the way –
lizards slink away in the underbrush, quick, quick,
and the cops look away from the menagerie at play.
 
Oh yes, both streets and hills are full tonight --
the son of darkness itself is the apex predator.

S can’t resist him.

Published Sept. 25, 2024 in Black Horse Review. (Some details from, and the poem is herein dedicated to, Jascha Kessler, my poetry teacher at UCLA 1972, who was a friend of Jackson Pollock in a legendary New York in the early 50s).

Without Measure

 
My days scatter sums
in the long gallery of matter.
 
They drop on a scattergram
like paint ripens a Pollock canvas,
 
tabula rasa newly stretched
and waiting on the cold studio floor.
 
These wet accidents and raw intentions
are hung too soon in the Palace of Thinking Arts.
 
The show, in fact, is called “Soon”
and its catalog is blank too – empty.
 
But my canvas stays down, ducks for cover.
I guess I’m blessed to track the inchoate picture
 
of those bar graphs, x & y axes
carefully plotting a colorful existential dialectic.
 
Time is the sweetest mystery, solve for X
(though lately the brain refuses
 
to retrieve the name of Jackson Pollock.)
The body’s incomplete artifice; too late to live on pure spec.
 
The algebra of fame and its 21 grams tricks the light;
we weigh the emptiness and show how we got the answer.
 
Yearning? Fuck, don’t you yearn for a time
when science took the knee to nihilism? When accident was sacred?
 
***
 
I guess I should have lived in the early 50s,
Greenwich Village, lending
Pollock pocket change for beers
and accepting No. 31
to resolve the debt.
 
Then I could have lived
in À bout de souffle
 
or walked rainy streets in Paris to/with Miles Davis.
Horizontal stripes on a sailor’s shirt,
 
cigarette smoke rising in straight edge from ashes to sky.
Half my day adds to crime, anyway.
 
***
 
Y plots how to break the screens
or otherwise survive erasure.  But this desire for another life
 
doesn’t give me a blank canvas
and the one I have
 
remains flat on what looks like concrete
waiting for another drop of time
 
without measure.
Temps perdu ready for a deep breath:
 
X axis in.
Y counts the number who will unplug.
 
Round off the mystery
and fold the test in the half your heart hides.
 
Show how you got your answer?
Ha, you’re shot in the street like a dog.
 
Frame it, graph it, measure it just so;
the wild resists, in curation and celluloid.
 
Don’t you lean back to avoid
reading the tombstone too soon?
 
Count on accidents.