Mao

The collective will is a billion raindrops
one storm.

Our Times

The newspaper lies unopened on the front hall table.
Google news lies open all the time.

Rain falling from the roof
drums me
like this
drip, drip, drip, drip,
drip, drip, drip, drip,
drip, drip, drip, drip,
drippety, drippety, drippety, drippety,
drip, drip, drip, drippety,
drip, drip, drip, drippety,
drip drip
drip drip
dp dp dp
dp dp dp
dp dp dp
dp dp dp
dp dp dp
drip
drip, drip,
drip,
drippety,
drippety,
drip
dp dp dp dp dp
all on top of
pittypitty
pittypitty
pittypitty
pittypitty
pittypitty
pittypitty
pittypitty
pittypitty

News

News is a dash of salt and pepper
or a chocolate cake
or the smell behind the garbage truck.

Big Sound

I write for Fame
and for Jesus
and the State
in that order
and also my inner fish
which opens and closes my mouth
to let all the water of life pass through me
even when there are no eyes pressed to the glass.

Poetry

Thoughtniks gather on the campus and in surrounding pubs,
most arriving from classrooms around the nation, some the world
to discuss the merits of the meretricious
their own ideas on distilling emotion and inserting
tradition, form, age, the oak cask
into words while they eye
each other surreptitiously hoping to look innocent
yet brilliant while garnering acclaim
for most original thinker
in the assembly
for having said best
she's a bunghole
he's acidic
life is short
who can I fuck?

Plain

It is worth knowing
that the truth might galumph
into you, not sleek or hard won,
not studied or triumphant or even
Shaker plain, but perhaps like
stubbing your toe, or nicking yourself with a razor,
or like another rock dislodged from a tumbled down stone wall,
or even like an unbruised apple on the ground,
the smell of honeysuckle at just the right moment,
stumbling on a vacant hornet’s nest,
because you will ignore it and take it for not much
a bit of luck maybe this way or that
easily won or lost
like being alive.

Illumination

Finally, I realized that
my everyday responsibility is to be awake at 4AM
so that I can tell
people what the sunrise looks like.

Today it is rainy and the sun is content to
edge, insinuate, imply, intimate,
suggest, hint, work,
worm its way into morning.

If it was only this way,
no ball, no fire,
I would still worship it
for the way that it slowly reveals the form and color of all things.

Odds on the crows

I was sitting on a rock
at midnight
a low brown mossy thing when the trees began to wrestle
with telling me
until a pair of crows joined us
invisible in the leaves and the dark
and crackled the way that they do,
a language I understand slightly better than wind,
which is so full of murmurs and whispers from everywhere and
the past that I usually confuse it with wants and fears. Tense is a complete mystery.
I knew they were perched catty corner to each other
and the wind was cutting up under their feathers
looking as if they thought I couldn't hear
pretending they were invisible to me
while every click described me
my thinning hair,
my old sneakers,
the emptiness of my hands,
my stork bite for heaven's sake,
(though it took me a while to suss that out
they call it something else altogether
which I ought not repeat here)
and moved them
suddenly to begin their ruckus
bickering about when and where to sleep
and betting (jay eggs and skunk meat are always at stake)
on whether or not they could make me get up and go into the house.

Zen

All things are.
Nothing can be added.
Dominion is one conceit,
abasement another.

Summer

I grew up in summer
among the rocks
and the boulders that made shelters
along the cliff where
fires could blaze all the way to out
and no one noticed or complained
because the waves had never reached there,
although smelly little pools seeped up from below
and harbored crabs that would cook up orange
and captured bleached sticks
and bits of net
and little boys and girls
doing little things.

Aunt Mary

Aunt Mary
is still alive
living with strangers. She
was named for the Madonna, of course,
and her mother
but she cannot remember their names.

Dad

Dad
was a pasty white American
and proud spelling champion
whose mother was hard to love,
like dried brush,
and whose father
died and left him long before he had a chance to think about it.

Uncle Joe

Uncle Joe
was a big brown Italian
American, bald and blustery,
whose head I'd always imagined rubbing
for good luck
which he had
having lived fat
and died well
before his wife forgot her name.

Uncle Naz

Joe,
was a small thin Italian
American whose real name was Nazzarino
who fussed like a cat
and ignored cancer
all the while preventing it with
vitamins and daily exercise
until it killed him
and left us all
nodding
at the way wisdom is earned.