Illustrious and inconceivable

Illustrious and inconceivable!
Disasterous arrangements in the stars
Foretold the conflict of our situation,
Though instead I ignored their advice.

Determinism? Don't I have a choice
Of what I want to do with my own life?
The attributes and aspects I'll pursue
To reach a happiness or excellence?

Don't tell me that the noon is like the dusk
Or that the summer differs none from winter,
Because we both know that's just not the case.

A field of possibility extends
Beyond the purview of the astrologues,
Beyond these tools of name and rhetoric.

I sing of man and of the words he stole

I sing of man and of the words he stole
From prior orators and philosophes
Through forgery or just through plagiarism
That strain the ethic of a modernism.

I sing of when I used to think that we
Were somehow meant to be original,
To stoke the fires of an avant-garde
By building new, divergent artifacts.

I sing of man! The words he taught himself
Were not the inventions of his caprice
But gifts of sound beyond his sovereignty.

I hear a simple phrase a dozen times;
So you who hear within these scattered rhymes
The song of others—criticize me not!

I shuddered and then I remembered

I shuddered and then I remembered
The dangerous heads of the nails
That were squeezed from the mildewing boards
Of the deck behind the house.

I sang it then first when I begged of you
To open the nocturnal flower
I'd gazed at the prior twelve nights
Through a reflecting telescope.

The petals dipped their wet ends
To the sod of the penitent earth
In a vain, lugubrious display.

We'd bend and then close once more;
Another will sob through a cycle
And snag themselves here yet again.

A girl in a canvas dress

A girl in a canvas dress
That often had several giggles
For each of the flavors of cream
We'd find at the Dairy Queen.

I stopped for the yellow flowers;
The straw got stuck in my mouth
Cause I didn't have all of the caprice
She'd hoped to inspire of me.

Two birds swam around in a circle
While I left a song in a .wav file
That couldn't hold how I'd felt.

Again we'll revisit the image,
Pretend we've imagined a story
That none have yet experienced.

A curious story I forgot

A curious story I forgot
Where a girl was a prize of a doodle
And within the indefinite madness
I almost remembered myself.

A meter was shortened a little;
I giggled and woke to a nonsense
Of a conflagration of heart,
Then hummed a brief prayer.

I dreamt of a recessed sand
In a form of her contoured body
And swept a speck from memory.

A page was an empty mirror,
Space without fog of life
From a breath she had unfurled.

It begins with the assertion that the

It begins with the assertion that the
Real created the cosmos as an all-
Inclusive object in which he could con-
Template the entities of his names, but

That until he created Adam and
Breathed his spirit into him, the cosmos
Remained like an unpolished mirror. Here
Ibn al-'Arabi's idea seems

To be that the cosmos as a whole - the
Totality of existent enti-
Ties - manifests all the divine names but

Does so in a diffuse way, whereas man,
As a microcosm endowed with con-
Sciousness, brings them into a unity.

I don't know why the poems come out this way

I don't know why the poems come out this way.
I don't know why I write them out at all,
When many times I've learned they win me nothing,
They bring no solace to my troubled heart.

I don't know why I trouble with the work
Of turning verses or encoding ethics,
Of sharing lust and greed and want. Just what,
Pray tell, am I alive with music for?

For fame? Renown? Prestige? Or public office?
Will words win me the currency I need
To give what a man should to his family?

Will verse win me the woman that I've dreamt
Was lounged atop the green upright piano
Thumbing through a volume of Tagore?