faceless journal

Lonely Man

2011-06-16T11:36:00.000-07:00

The ways of the world are breaking me in two. One half is drowning. The other half is swimming. One half is helpless. The other is happy. The happy man worries about the drowning man. The happy man is good with words. The drowning man detests words. He never talks. He met the happy man at a party. He had no idea what he was going to say. The happy man had stolen all his words.

"We will fight the worst of our fears," the happy man was saying.
"I can't even make sense of a stop sign," thought the helpless man.
"Sometimes I feel like there's something missing," says the happy man.
"I feel like there's something missing all the time," says the drowning man.
"What brings you to this party?" asks the happy man.
"I wanted to steal my words back," says the drowning man.
"I can't give them to you that easily," says the happy man.
"My life is a mess. I've said that much. Now all I want is a few words."
"What makes you think words are the answer?"
"They are my foundation. Without words I am bereft of life."
"I always thought there were more important things."
"Well there are not."
"O.K. Here are some coins. Here's a penny, a nickel, and a dime. Start out with the penny. Let things fall down on you. Let wheels, bottles, and bowls fall from the sky. It might hurt, but you have to get used to them again."
"Here, take this."
"What's this?"
"It's a dollar. These are my struggles with a novel I will never read, a trip I will never take, and a person I will never meet."
"Thank you. Your goals are within reach. All of them can be done with pennies, nickels, and dimes."

Both men went away happy though neither knew truly how to swim. One was the water. The other was the coins. One was the dollar. The other was an idea. One was the water. The other was the swimmer.

Night is Broken

2011-06-10T14:14:00.000-07:00

I remember my dreams in the lines between an article in yesterday's newspaper. There was more interesting news on the front page. The article was buried in the cold zone of a weather report. It was the record high for the city where it happened. There are 200 dreamers in the metropolis. It never rains when I dream. My eyes are brown and sometimes green in my dreams. The night is broken by my footsteps. I am walking slowly into the news of my melody. I am partly blind and sometimes sunny. My dreams are humid. I am occasionally in the city of my thirst. The roads are being paved while I dream. The traffic turns left into my dream. They drive new cars into my past. They sleep at rest stops while I write letters to Dear Abby. Over 200 dreamers subscribe to my newspaper. They are sound asleep now. They dream the newspaper cover to cover. Their dreams are reprinted in the pictures. The pictures are sent to the sleepless nights of the city press. The deadline is the home team's last at bat. The 200 dreamers are on the visiting team. Their manager wakes up when the traffic comes to a stop. He drives an old car lost in the city's network of dreams. He asks a reporter for directions. The reporter writes a story that the home team went to work while the dreamers sat out a rain delay. Their uniforms are clean and sometimes dirty. The grass of the infield grows high so stories will be slowed down. The paper of the scorecard is green so the pitcher will remember the color of his eyes. He throws a curveball that curves right in my dream. My infield wakes up in the dawn of our victory. The smell of the fresh cut grass undoes the deadline of the home team. A dandelion appears in the outfield. The loss outshines any escape the dream is able to make.

A God and a Dwarf

2011-05-23T12:34:00.000-07:00

The ocean is calm and wild. It is forgotten and remembered. Its memories seek their source. It is a child at play and an old man at prayer. Its leaves are rivers in a tree of sea. It is a higher power and an ant. The worker ant builds a home for the higher power in the waves. It is a country and a porch. The porch sails around its house like a great star. I am inside the house. I look out the window and see many boats.

The ocean pulls me between a language and a word. It is one word said a billion different ways. The ocean is a god and a dwarf. I am that liquid oddity so much more your neighbor than empty space. You yearn for me as if I could solidify your dreams. I am a mystery not because I am immense but because I exist. I am a dwarf who is older than time and younger than the wind. I know where you go when you dream. I know how to keep you from drowning in the vision of your sleep. Trust me. I have been around since the ocean was darker than a starless night. My skin is wrinkled like the age of dreams. My breath is like God's when he doesn't brush his teeth. My eyesight is dim because I live in the shadow of your dreams. My sense of smell is keen. Good dreams smell like cherries. Bad dreams smell like frogs. When you don't dream I hold my breath - sometimes for more than an hour.

The Form of November

2011-05-19T13:10:00.001-07:00

I met the abstract man composed of ideals
hidden in geometry. He had no voice,
and neither did I. He was strong between his speechlessness
and the form of a book. His despair is in having been
constructed. His hope is that nature will vanish
into industry. I met him in front of a factory.
He had made a choice.
I was subordinate to his voice.
I was a child of production.
The factory employed me in spring.
It was November, and I hadn't made a pitchfork
in months.
The subordinate man was labored with mood.
It was November, and we both began to speak.

Tucson

2011-05-06T15:06:00.000-07:00

The day unfolded. The map unfolded.
We looked at the day. We looked at the map.
The wheel had turned once, and I came to visit you.
Your location was a bike stand in a Tucson doorway.
The spokes of the sun tightened our bond.
A photograph drove the blue into the sky.
There were ants and roads in the park.
We climbed out of the desert into a picture.
Our pedals flew west into the arms of an arboretum.
We cooled our canyon feet in a stream.
The saguaros looked one way when you walked by them
and another way when you rode by them.
In the corner a cliff was getting ready to move.
We rode a headwind home. I stretched. You ate some pretzels.

Modernism - The Shock of The New - and a few songs

2011-04-30T15:59:00.000-07:00

Passed you on the road today. Looked like another Lesson. Got Nothing to say. Wish you knew it was funny. God's a fragment in my pockets. I told this lie to my precocious friends. I found this fame in the infinitive lees of Norton's old port. The decorations of summer are a lonely creature. The only escape is through a Senator's entangled town. It allegros through my delirious way. I will not be reticent this time. My mask has slipped.

Schizophrenia, writing, things that are affective, have never been explained. I am and always will be falling as my creative charge is exiled. The transition itself becomes the state where behavior is undone. I venerate a quietness that can almost by heard in ashes and shallows. I find the surface of my being every time I go outside. I hear warnings. Being part of the small element does not always succeed. It is not that the outside does not exist. It is not possible that it does exist.

I am powerless with my powerful ideas about unheralded rescue before great works of art. The Ecstatics were chased from heaven not withstanding. Lesser Pathos, worn to a frazzle, is leaving the corridor of congruent pride, the evanescent sound of production. Restless timepiece, I am what you are. We are outlets in a restless world.

The ancients had no name for park. They were filled with terror, and you found them there. They laughed, and you heard them live. They spoke, and you listened to them dream. They never flew at night, and they never yammered during the day. They believed in SorrowZ Pegasus because you laughed so seldom. They hunted, and you smiled at Sparrow. You were both narrow, but only one was proud of it. You traveled everywhere, but you forgot to look in the tire swing.

By the river I find my moorings in the glimmer of a utility tower caught like a leaf in its reflection. Follow your bliss. Not someone else's bliss. I track the mote that is 'thinking' and favor it of all motes that sit on my window sill. Reduce the Other to units of creative spirit. My tension falls away. I get an angle on the degrees some say are time. If you find these degrees in the forest, then return them to men with lanterns. Record these units in a sketchbook.

The bright outbursts of comrades have spurred me on to broken dreams. In the moonlight, I enjoy the pieces falling into place. I turn the corner with a Visor absolved out of iota. The distant traveler walks barefoot in the inner world. I walk with three pairs of shoes. Falsify the tide. Find no beauty in emptiness.

The canvases stretched out from here to Eternity. A Few of them I had done. It would take until the end of my life. The Moderns are finally finding their way into my life. I believe they have finished little of what they had to say. The next obstruction has come between our dance nigh to the Elders. They have joined the rest of us as artists! I will teach you how to heal the unseen cheek.

There is a paper that wants to cover Memory as if it was a building. No, it is more like a mountain. No, it is less than a mountain. It is only a String. It is a string that has never been wound. It wonders toward desks that are not anymore in a building where blotters have been left to fade but for some reason didn't.

The meaning of something depends where it ends. Undone weaving - for all my mood, you will find an anchor. For all my slowness, you will find a lake. The Meaning of a Lake depends where it is woven. I have pointed out colors hours away from the center - the way - the journey. Tall cables, kinetic blends... sketched here, there a tree.

A painting that has no Hands seizes me by the temples. Pulls me into BLACK. It is a magnet living with a Silent Guardian. I am caught in a graveyard past midnight. A hazy yellow reminds me of my Will and where it walks. I walk with a hammer back to the graveyard. A piece of music plays while I smash the stones.

My philosophy is rapture stung by failure. Verbal witnesses wonder why the pictures are falling apart. Fisherman rows by inviting you for a ride while the branches of a Mondrian distinguish themselves, once and for all, in the five branches of philosophy. Pier and Ocean is partial. Always the foundation of The Red Tree. Always the iconography of The Grey Tree.

Over yonder the Ageless, on the deck of Best Wishes, are quiet homes belonging to missionaries in a luminary's land - mirthful sailors in a missionary's house, gardners steering in a sailor's bunk, lost souls in a gardener's mind - looking for better waves in waters uncharted, fiery resistance in the stars.

Heavier than a Katydid Fossil, I'm on the loose. Three brickles west of your scene, I'm thatchin' your Roof - trustin' it's gonna rain - I'm washin' your kettle, foldin' your ladders, listenin' to you howl - whisperin' the weather on this Roof in this Sky, restful and bleek in this orchard lemon and wise.

I got the eyebrows of a Skald. Got no nest. Got this net. Lift my stripes for words of gold. Running back now to the occasional Twig. Walking slow now with the Thrush. Flying now since there's one rush. I got the eyebrows of a lover. Got no future. Got no past.

Dancing and divided, washed in tri-contemplation, but only in body, speech, and rhythm, the over-man points at noon. I will briefly be fire if he feels he can balance on such a thing. He has become the mutable line and its eighths, a figure in a triangle, and the gesture of dias in a circle.

Accretion is against the action of chipping away. The ankles withstand the whole attribute of truth. Portrayal mixed with slumber approaches mood of tremulous feet pronged with fanstasy.

I am jealous of Mayakovsky's supreme boredom with the classics. Even ornamental grass has meaning. In the insufferable schematics are guidebooks. The art world is drafted in a few forms. The crowd is perfect in their mediocrity. I am mediocre in being perfect. Place the setting in the wild. I'll prove to you that it needs to be portrayed. The door of the church houses the slipstream in the institute of our pleasures swept in belonging. At what point does the art world overtake the real world, and how far are we from this pleasure?

The sweet drapery of a Muslin weaving in the other room is clutter. I will go back. Make it radiant. Take machinations out of an apple. The objects behind the mist are known only to me.

Every day, painting less than I am known for, calling to a vibrant canvas - the task of health availing, the task of losing myself becomes more rather than complete beginnings.

I visit a Pride of Lions parachuting in The Void. No act. No condition in insignificant deeds. A roar lofts the descent from heaven to hell. Hungry for a body, I await death. Elder modernism shoves rescue out of great art. Younger modernism strengthens our newly acquired bodies.

Clouds dither. They are closer to me in the promised valley. Come down from the cross. Purchase the hollow of the knees. Riches, come to me. I am done with this room. I am only shaped by rain now or the love of a summer day. It is terrible to be lost in the catacombs of honey.

The continuity of my existence is forgiven by industrious disconnects. This somewhat precarious shell cannot alway envelop me. I am slow to sunder the view of the dunes. Soon I will groove through time with less defenses. I have thought as coral and thus in a small way felt happiness.

Divine errors, minute and multiple, trudge the streets like poets without gospels. They adjure us to tear heartache with a comb. The unquiet measures of my soul give helplessness a form. The other half of me is joining forces with The Void. The evidence is water wearing down my ambition. All tasks wait patiently to get done. The complete word is always the ladle. Conversation is about syntax. Poetry is about poetry. I do not know where the twain meet.

The medicine man must swim as if he had the formulas. The visionary must swim as if he was beginning them. I'm gonna breathe so as to yolk and not contort. Narcissus, obsession - I'm not going to invent being careless. One eyelid is like the slide of a microscope. The other dwells less and less. There are no treasures. There is no translation. It was as if I had never slept there. Your characters are grazing beyond your kitchen window. One eyelid is like the slide of a microscope. The other is like the Mediterranean sun. Litners, unfurl our eyelids. Only because they are treasures. Only because they are treasures.

I was flattened, fed on pancakes, an index of blame, a rabbit who fought to take shape. Apart from my past I have not survived. Apart from my possible past, I have not been seen. Controlled by being seen, I have blended into the present. Restricted by my foundation, I am what is left - I am what is left.

The mighty are not decieved. Do not interrupt their loafing. Stride daydreaming into the midst of reverence.

The separate yet not dissociated matchsticks of my body will strike the weak sister into the dance. Fight with religious lillies.

What's bad is good. You'd know if you understood. My plate's not made for crumbs. It's equal to potatoes. It's got a picture of a lake. I'd tell you to vote, but you gotta feel good.

Hey scholar, something about a photograph brings dignity to a moment. I'm meltin' that photo like it was Gothic silver, I'm traveling to a MuseuM in a town that doesn't exist, I'm transforming hope into points about your heart, and multiplying your day into divinity fading into the milieu of your scholarly line.

I'm un and able to gross the lanterns of the land. What's the Party on this Planet to do? The sundial found in the forest is pointing to my Eden. This world will not sleep. It might wake up. It might wake up.

Dear Mr. Wilson

2011-04-30T15:02:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Wilson,

I am unemployed. I am a poet. I hope you don't take these facts about myself in a bad way. Mr. Wilson, you may have known my father. He had a 32" softball bat and a left-handed glove. I think it might have been fun if you coached one of his college games. I could always make six out of ten free throws from the foul line. Our family was a secure one and a happy one. Now I am revisiting those two words.

Saturdays have always been my favorite day. In the old neighborhood I wore a red sweat jacket with a patch of the Chicago Sting sewn on where a shirt pocket might be. The Chicago Sting is a soccer team. I was a great soccer player. Unfortunately, my pep never got utilized thoroughly in baseball. I would wear that sweat jacket on Saturdays and rake leaves. I often got paid for chores around the neighborhood, but I don't especially remember if I got paid on Saturdays. This memory is permeated with the smell of leaves burning. I would often spend my Saturdays alone. I had no friends at the time. By evening, I usually began to get lonely. I would walk home thinking of one pitcher especially. My dad usually had a game on television. His favorite team was the Boston Red Sox.

In the seventh grade I took a position at one of our local baseball camps. I taught outfielders to turn their back on the ball and chase it down with glove outstretched. One of my students is the current centerfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals. You may have his baseball card.

Upon graduation from high school, I took a job teaching carving for a dollhouse company. My salary was paid by an endorsement I did for the LimeDime popscicle product. I often traveled. I made a point of walking into the rougher neighborhoods on these trips. I was not scared. I found people were usually happy with an explanation such as, "Hi, I have a little girl. It's her birthday, and I'm snooping around for some rags to make her a doll."

It's amazing that people never mind their own business once you're friendly to them. On one porch I sat down on, two little boys were tussling over a piece of curtain that the red-headed one worked from his friend's shoulder. He had been using it to attach a tree branch to his back. As I walked up the stairs, I passed him marching around like a soldier. It actually would have made a good scarf for a doll if I had been creative in those days.

Dear Mr. Wilson,

My favorite baseball team in those days was the New York Yankees. My dad and I both saw Dave Winfield play. My brother and I both saw Don Mattingly play. You have not heard of those names so I will give you a hint. Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Dave will be in the Hall of Fame, but that doesn't matter. He had an ear to ear grin which was worth more than any amount which he did give to a charity he created for inner-city children. Have you ever been to a World Series? If I lived at your time, I would have taken on three paper routes to see the Gas House Gang in the World Series. Here's my take on the game. Baseball is a pastoral game. The players in your day, and definitely before, were strong because they worked on a farm or else in a factory. The players today are strong because they hit the weights. This allows them to run faster, but it says nothing about their skill.

Dear Mr. Wilson,

Creativity has been one of the great strengths of my family. It is a weakness in each of us. I thank Walter Anderson for teaching us how to thrive in a house where the artist's room is no more important than the pantry. One of my favorite Spanish poets wrote a manual on how to raise a tiger in the family room with the creativity we need for public relations students giving us a dry account of how to feature their desks in the company newsletter. My father works at a small business. Their overhead is paid for by the caster wheels carpenters use to construct the stands that Orson Wells needs for his panning cameras. Mother is the secretary.

Their office is in the other direction than my walk home from school. Sometimes my brother and I have exhausted strategies for our skirmishes. I walk a few extra blocks to their office. Mother serves tea. I always ask for a chipped cup that is next to one of the others with pencils and pens. She smiles and says, "A Dixie Cup will do just as well."

I drink the lukewarm tea. Father uses a tin cup. I settle up to his drafting table. I take the pencil out of the cup that I wish someday to drink out of. I go over his drawings of the tilt-boards he uses to compartmentalize the knobs and reels of the cameras. Sometimes I have just begun doodling. He walks in, messes up my hair, and says, "Ain't that the truth."

I usually walk out the side door after that. My train of thought is interrupted, but sometimes it's a good thing. On my home from the office, I stop at a basketball standard. It is made from a tree hit by lightning. Mr. Wilson helped my father bolt a metal rim to the stark face of the tree. Mr. Wilson is one of the men who supplies my father with film reels.

A Small Heaven

2011-04-30T14:45:00.000-07:00

Give so that you may not be rejected. We don't know how to treat ourselves. You will find us in shallows, ashes I always need to talk. You and I count on substance. He walks with a book that weighs more than any you have in your knapsack. She sweats through the first few pages of a letter. My father is a recluse. My mother weaves the family crest. The clues are well-placed. We have not succeeded. I am tired of looking at things that are well-made. God is not composed. Let us pray.

My best friend doesn't know how to spell. My father is a generalist. I am a reformer. We are both guests and housekeepers in this hotel. As Dad, he struggled with me until math was simple. As son, I forgot the pressure of the classroom. The bricks of the schoolhouse passed through me on the way to the library. I read underneath the painting of a pen on the stage. It is only a painting I remember. I prepped my walls and felt black instead of white. I went to the fairground and heard the music of my boiling days. I was a soldier without a battle. Let us pray.

My father told me to run with moderation. My father told me to bicycle until I healed my weakness. I raced an entrant in a T-shirt and rode against an athlete in business clothes. I played games until they began to seem like a classroom. My dad and I played tennis at the same level. We followed baseball with the same passion. I sought to make a masterpiece in art. It took me years to learn that repetition is an element in art. Masterpieces are made once. Let us pray.

The Yellow Letters

2011-04-30T13:32:00.000-07:00

No part of a bicycle is made of glass. Great is the pull that controls me. Finished is the grain inside me. Stop is the wrench that forces me. Great is the pilot who flies me. Mercy is the mop I clean with. Coasting is the bike ride to street. Real is my hope to vanish like thief. The end is near. The start is miles away. Do you find that your mind is in a kitten? I wasn't banging up on you. I was in the middle of a rote.

Luff, that was tuff. The playoffs were a curse. You knew that. I didn't. No money could bring us together. I got good, and you got better. At noon it was complete. Some year the best will do nicely. How fluid everything is. Better than most, that's what we said. Ride the trains or don't, what does it matter to me.

Four of the days of the week are commas. Three are apples. Find out how many nickels, buffalo. Frog told hummingbird to go down to the third world. She brought him nectar in a cup. The Grail, peculiar there is only one. Some small medicine I suppose. I do it for the reds and the blues, sometimes the yellows, but let us not speak of things that are beyond us.

I was the one destroying the good times. Yesterday I was depressive. Today I am statistical. Multitasking in a hooverville yesterday, I shut up ten cowboys. Lay down - let the five fingers need. I'll cut you in half with this spoon, this mattress, this nothingness. Play me tennis with a history that don't get tossed.

Hey kid, what's it to you. Wile your body far from home. This injury is a wound I possibly felt. The recovery is a mild pleasure I possibly felt. Fellowship is in a trance. Where is my voice? Where is my heart? Lost in their luff. State nothing, yet say everything. I have no temper, no fitness except when passing through eventuality, reality. My essay on the bomb is creature. What language it threw! Those who are suffering from it are the essential dig out of strategy.

Nearly floated down there one Sunday looking for the White Palace. Summertime it was Yoda, and I was shirt-sleeved, hooded like a bad rip-rip. Saw you rolled through my fire kitchen. I was on the porch on the way to California. Sky prognosis Zen. Alice were the rabbits. Logic was their Pandora. Salad bar toppings fell like cheese through the rainy night. These are my options. Laugh, be modest. Climb Everest. Heal by heart.

Buzzing

2011-04-14T14:33:00.000-07:00

It would be nice to be able to read. I'm learning how to read a new way. I hear the letters. It's like reading a page of tiny flies. The s-h-u-z-u-z-z-i-n-g is barely audible at first. It's familiar to me from the u-z-z-i-n-g sound my bicycle tires make when I ride the crushed lime path. I am on the path to find a book. So first I have to go to market before I decipher the letters. Here, the insects will be helpful too. Some of us here are looking for fruit, some for a new pair of shoes, and some for a new identity. I would be nearest to the type looking for a new pair of shoes. As I said, the buzzing gets into my clothes so it follows that it also get into my shoes. The pair of shoes I have now is rather silent. They are a light pair of shoes. I can jump over two feet in the air in them. This will get me to the top shelf. The books still obey the rule of going no higher than the top row at your pedestrian shelves. Most people believe that it was Lodi who gave the books wings. Booksellers began noticing that several of their books, usually the garden variety kind, were missing. The books would be returned by people with serious overtones in their kindness. "They must stay here for the time being. The books need to be incubated," was the cryptic remark the booksellers usually got. Some of us readers, and we are few and far between, noticed usually at the joints, the elbows and the knees, a tingling - not uncomfortable - decidedly literary buzz. It was nothing like arthritis or tennis elbow. I noticed it was like a fly caught inside my elbow. Someone else told me they had a bumblebee in their knee. I zoned out to the sound, several minutes later noticing two pages turned in my book with complete comprehension of the character I'd been reading who carried a skillet everywhere. Others reported taking a book down from a shelf, being lulled by a faint buzzing, returning the book unopened, and understanding new qualities about characters left impoverished turning into friends. One morning the bookseller Hearnszy noticed a faint buzzing as he got ready to open his shop for business. He walked into his shop, and it was as he said, "like the sweetest sound a fly can make." That reminds me of the satisfaction of riding my bike on the path, but back to the story. Hearnszy checked his e-mail. He noticed he had e-mailed himself. The message said, "Hearnszy, open the front and back doors of your shop, let a draft through, and the books will follow." He scratched his elbow. It would be nice to listen to the sound for a while, but might as well do what the message said. The first to leave were several early editions of Leaves of Grass. Several self-help manuals followed. Next a quote a day book took to the air and snored through the narrow passageways of Tilted Mind Books out into the wide afternoon. Hearnszy expained, "the books that took to the air sounded like they were softly snoring through my shop. None of them seemed to be in a hurry. I actually read The Song of Occupations while the book took most of the morning to dally out of my shop." The state of affairs when I arrived at the marketplace was wonderful. Half of Hearnszy's shop was emptied. The air was thick with flies and bumblebees. A handful of books, who had not undergone the transformation, loitered on the sidewalks at about eye level. Most people were attracted to the flying insects because as Hearnszy said, "their sound was so sweet." The sound of my bicycle tires was still buzzing through my body in the background. I found a copy of Song of Myself outside the shoestore. It was an easy jump from the ride to the cosmic buzzing of Whitman's loafing dance. I have led several students into the new age. The key seems to be bicycling up and down the path to get that background buzzing in your body. The eyes still need to see the print, but it is merely an object to meditate on - an aesthetically pleasing one at that. I teach my students to treat their individual bicycle buzzing as the page. There are mainly two characters in this new language: the sonorous buzzing of the bumblebee and the ticklish buzzing of the fly and all their combinations. I tell my students they are reading unique books because each of their pages is formed by a slightly different tire rolling round and round. It really is like zoning out. It's no coincidence that zoning begins with the z that ends in the two z's of buzz. It is a resonant zoning out - a very rich one at that.

Friends

2011-04-12T13:39:00.001-07:00

Friends are an open book. They are the ingrediants of a fulfilled life. Conversation is food. Silence is drink. Personality is a gift. Ideas are candles. Expression is a runaway train. Feelings are like leaves on a tree, responding in the wind. Belonging is like sitting at a fireplace. Truth is gold. Questions are in the shadows. The warmth of answers keeps flickering in the fire.

Read my face

2011-04-10T13:29:00.000-07:00

Read my face. I won't turn digital on you. Brush my eyebrows with your long lashes. Coil your fingers into my ears. Season my blood with your breath. Lap at my nose with your wet tongue. Consume my hair in your fire. Rule my earth with the color of your eyes. Fight my battles with your fists. I have no protection from you. My shoulders are your two small mountains. Your arms of fire dance in my forests. I bathe my feet in your waters. Build your castle on my two shoulders. The horizon of your lips crosses a sea of tenderness. Birth me from the pupil of your eye. Make my bed in your oceans. Love me with your clouds. Dress me in your robes. Give me a scent. Give me dreams in the desert of your creation. Sleep with me in a home. Undo my sharp corners. Silence my mind. Make the sign of peace in all windows. Witness my life. Toss me to the winds. Break my spirit with your law. Feed me to hungry lands. Test me on your vine. Rub mud over my eyes. Teach me how to change colors in autumn. Fill my lungs with tropical air. Make me as complicated as a snowflake. Give me a horse to ride. Give him eyes of crescent moons. Make his hoofs out of the darkest coal. Make his nostrils like wildfire. Shatter my beliefs like thunder. Give me the faith of all animals. Let the races tremble at your name. Lift me out of my body and into yours. Send me a message that will never be deciphered. Say my name in the innermost sanctuary of your temple. Wash my face with the most subtle breeze of spring. Cast me into the wilderness. Wound my with your superior spears. Renew the enviroment with your fertile mind. Enrich the soil with my decomposed dreams. Catch the wildest fox. Turn the army into white light. Patch the injured with new alphabets. Critique the ending of this age, and comment on the beginning of a new day.

Four Forevers

2011-03-31T15:10:00.000-07:00

Inside my heart are four forevers. One is my occupation. The second is my speech. The third is a flower. The fourth is a grain of sand. The flower grows out of the grain of sand. The speech determines the occupation. The occupation is the outlet that calms. The calm is a little louder than silence. The men and women speak a little louder than the calm. I am all those who have this occupation when I am done. I am all the words that these men and women speak. The grain of sand is silence. The flower is all the songs that are being sung.

The Village

2011-03-29T09:13:00.000-07:00

Find the lost time of a train that has already left. She travels on the plains easily seen from a mile away. Her destination is a village I am hurrying toward. It began thirty years ago. I wanted to tell you earlier that I only travel by nature trail. Stop me at this signpost. Enjoy the view through a row of birch trees. I understand you've lost track of time. I'm beginning to save the minutes that are spent by a pond. Even the frogs remind me of traveling. A conductor punches my ticket at the next signpost. He keeps up the tradition. I hope to see him tomorrow. It is only another mile, but I plan to camp here at the birch trees tonight. The village is closer now. I see some boys tossing a football on the other side of the pond. A man walks swinging a briefcase by their game. He is waiting for the train too. A woman yells at her child to tie his shoelaces. They are both waiting for the train. It will get here tomorrow. I lie in my tent and read about the pond where the frogs make chorus like a train punctuating the night.

The Boat Man

2011-03-26T10:49:00.000-07:00

inspired by Langston Hughes

The boat man I am to become is a reachin'
for his oars.
He is a betterin' his place in nature.
He is a swayin' on the crest of the future.
He is a fallin' outside his past.
He dares to flow a moment in the present.
He hears the weary thump-twang of the blues
rollin' in and out of his reach.
He grows strong in the darker mood of his croon.
Tomorrow we'll say to him, "Your song
is still echoing through my head."
"My song, brother, is the old piano moan
of midday mixed with mingling rock and jazz."
Its sound is so near, there's no room for fear.
We are a wave of sorrow out on the river.

The Mice

2011-03-23T18:07:00.000-07:00

All around the ranch the mice race. By nightfall each mouse is a full-fledged mouse. They are shipped to a great brain so big it needs neurons the size of mice.

Earth Day: Heavier than the pyramids is some conscience we hold about the earth. Our planet, her sorrow, and a sky remote in answers all call miracles to be worked. Take into account the bread of many, for answers are in all hands.

The child: The child aspires to live. Unfortunately for it, it is only posing as a code for the body to unlearn. Bound to a puzzle, locked to life, each signal in the sky betters his picture.

Vertigo

2011-02-25T16:55:00.000-08:00

Magician sifts through the deficiently manic. We acknowledge our vertigo with a touch of indifference. Forget the righteous time and place. Foolproof induction is a shade darker than implicit renewal. A face seldom featured judges beauty. Coordinate with the evanescent sound of production. The revolving door between logic and magic terminates the Artist's escape. My mood springs from the pages of mystery. An unknown man doubts gold. Forget peering into faces. Leave window shopping alone. Stay unformulated. Listen only to the sound that moves in secret in your stereo. Walk with the sunlight procession, terms and conditions unmet. The parade is turning onto your street, your musical street. Be in league with the characters in its den. Be there with its floats and your flower children. Bluffing looks at books, I fly about the market. I ape the aptitude test. However, I ingest the insect wings on paper skin of books. On my clothes, on my skin the paper buzzes.

The Sculptor

2011-02-25T16:40:00.000-08:00

Michelangelo acclimates to the new throw away age. Irreducible units of image crystallize. The sculptor removes channel by channel. His chisel slows the dance of the gods and ciphers the weight of time. Channels are erased out of the parchment back into the stone. He scrambles to be conspicuous in the ambient light. Hours, difficult in staying on task, replace mindless minutes. The conditioned response, examined every second, yields portrayal of pattern and possible shape. In method, meet requirements. Accept no completion. Then all rules are complete. In a world of construction, carry only what you keep.

The Hapless Couple

2011-02-24T16:20:00.000-08:00

The hapless couple, knowledge and terror, grows too separate to be apart. You will fool the sharp corners out of edifices. I will bring them to a felicity of opposing samples of history. This is a thinly disguised surrender to the surreal, a gathering of complexity reversed, that the curator has twisted into place. Grant me the second wind of pattern recognition. Fabricate a schedule from the ashes of tomorrow. The castle is concealed in conductors convened at a station. He is as unimportant as a new passenger on the five-forty. We flash by backyards of factories praying to paperless altars. Geography garrisons my point of view. Penmanship is the requirement to gain admission to the fort. The world's smallest rabbit leaves his cage and travels in miniature jumps to historic downtown. A rug collector is living under his last Persian carpet. The minotaur at the center of the salt shaker has been unvanquished for eons. The world's last antelope crosses the Rainy River.The grasshopper puts on sunglasses and understands the fable. The blackbirds barely move crossing the curtain of the road. Autos checker Main Street. I glue my moccasins to my feet. The formless river bends in the dusk. The pathway to the bookstore is paved with red brick. The pathway out of the bookstore is covered with straw. The pioneer speaks of difficult jokes. The sage speaks of funny difficulties. The announcer flies hourly missions between opening remarks at the symposium. The story of our travels bends into the atlas. The sage across the ocean hears the beleagured business men and the pacified patriots. I am poor and resilient, weak and dreamy. I bend ribbons only the willow would know. The computer that survives invention is eating and being merry.

Restoration

2011-02-24T16:13:00.000-08:00

Eight years of investment in the game, six summers in the sun, only make my old hometown more promising. The formidable shuffle, portentious of the slippery trust with mechanical reality, applies to a puzzle of priceless pieces. The men, drawn direly, land somewhere in rooms. Their past depression funnels quickly into a race of restoration.

The Preacher

2011-02-24T16:00:00.000-08:00

Being recognized and being recognizably different - the same condition? The disparity of a name and its owner - the world's last illusion?

The preacher watches a society still plagued by abstractions. His sermon, packed with fearful lyrics, is heard coast to coast on Sundays. He flies hourly missions between opening remarks.

His suitcase has become to light to travel in, too narrow to live in. He pleads his case in both the dark, old-fashioned hemisphere and the light, new-age hemisphere. He was before the star-gazing romance of the Steve Miller Band.

He steps on the fossils in the gravel and considers the unrecognizable odds. He will teach you how to live in the cosmic waters of your own backyard. Tom Joad is shadow in the wine. The wind machine blows a grin onto Al's face.

We are the clerks who spin Odetta out of obediant yarn. Erosion is a line in the dirt. Faith is a secondary shadow. We are in the depth of field between surface and the promised side.

The Flower Age

2011-02-05T20:02:00.000-08:00

On a planet some years from the Iron Age two wooden ships roll out of the yard. Each joint is closer than the sawdust in Neptune's Garden. Their names are Lily and Sunflower. Their finish is smoother than the smooth side of a skipping stone. One carries maps. The other is abundant with provisions. They are searching for the lost constellation drawings of the star children of the Flower Age. The first mate plants a star fruit in his cabin. It guides them to a lost land of flower calculations. They read the shifting vegetation patterns through a rose primer. The sky shines with evening glories giving way to a sunset like none since Neptune made peace with the dewdrops.

The Circus

2011-02-05T19:45:00.000-08:00

I get my nose pierced by an old lady with pointy knitting needles humming hymns. I get a tattoo of flying dust clouds full of mustangs from an old basketball coach. I buy lemonade and a corn dog. I jump off this real chunk of the circus into the big white tent. I breathe in the sweet, humid air spiked with sawdust. I walk past center stage throwing shadows through the crowded grandstand. I walk by the red awning of a cart hooked to a swinging lantern. Outside, I pad softly across the damp lawn. The strongman practices his shot puts.

Iron Mountain

2011-02-05T19:35:00.000-08:00

Dreaming these dreams of you
it's easy to forget that I'm the fool
of a few revelations.
I'm a boy hemmed in by persistence.
I've read westerns on Iron Mountain.
I've listened to owls in the Blue Palisades.
I've lost a marathon in Canada.
I've aged on the cobblestone
and gotten younger in the chapel.

The Misfits

2011-02-05T19:22:00.000-08:00

I am a romantic, I conjecture, to overrule displacement. Sit down man of much anxiety. The choir is celebrating your birthday in the annex. Parnassus smites a century's madness. The light year overrules the fight year. In a dream, media discovers method. The stars fall. They try to stand. They cannot stand because of their massive weight. The afternoon man struggles with an aphorism in his coffee cup from Machado. Then William Blake resurfaces. The black lines of his drawing are only carefully composed handwriting. The saturnine student of a glum race watches the day escape through a plum. He wonders if he can cross the street. A man gives him a newspaper. He knows he can. He steps into a history cut until the very last moment. Legends spring from the turf and walk stealthy on the green. The advantage of the machine is its division into parts. The misfits spiral ever closer to the core.

Green Highway

2011-02-05T19:12:00.000-08:00

The internalization of a suburb yields the realization that you are low on gas. It is only the wolves who consume. We are taught proper hunger. The last river pilot on the Amazon collects no more dues. An angel saves his imagination. Remove the dashboard from your car. Burn your paper scratches between brass and strings. The title stares at me. The personified road keeps crawling relieving my fears. Pop the tape in and groove. Green highway of easy previews, we need the rain. The multitask listeners are no longer patient. We understand our patterns and fear the truth of them.

Highway 17

2011-02-05T18:57:00.000-08:00

There is a waterfall in nearly every Provincial Park in Canada. A gnome keeps his workshop under glass in the visitor center. An actor and an archeologist trudge down the stairs for photographers and those sorts of people. They have left Highway 17 to find the gold in Rainbow Falls. The gnome knows nothing of gold. He is busy making wheels and pipe cleaners and other sorts of things by the water rushing and his hammer threshing. He is busy winnowing the spokes for the wheel of a wheelbarrow he will use to haul pipe cleaners and water bug fossils and other sorts of things. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the actor and the archeologist. He knows he has seen one of them in a reflecting pool somewhere although he cannot remember the cavern. Faster than a fox trap eluded, he hammers out an epigram to send the two of them on their way to the next waterfall. Then he hastily breaks camp and twists three pipe cleaners into a wind chime.

Olney

2011-02-05T16:08:00.000-08:00

We follow the map from Mattoon to Olney, the renowned home of the white squirrel. We check the business district. We keep a lookout through neighborhoods of modest homes. We search high and low. Our map is no currency in this strange land of the white squirrel. We circle the block two more times feeling cheated. Finally, we slow down to 5 M/P/H on a side street. Low and behold who should cross the street but a diplomat of that rare permutation - the Olney white squirrel. He keeps the claim to fame of his small town alive.

The Bluest Eye

2011-02-05T15:56:00.000-08:00

I stand in the grass and photograph the Walldog pines. The penguin figurines are now quarter size penguins in a winter when football games are going on in a restaurant. Dad started the tradition of taking self-portaits. I walk to the end of the pier with my bicycle and photograph it in front of the lighthouse. The visitor center overlooks Lake Michigan. Now a storm moves in. It's beautiful the way it is now. I find The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison at Door to Door Books. The foghorn resonates in the sudden change of weather. I hear the sound of my tires a few feet in front of my stem on the rails to trails path. It's sixteen miles to Sturgeon Bay. I hope to hug the coast, take a side road inland, and pick cherries. One ship was lost, but all were safe. They carried fencing and grain. Saw only red, green, or whatever color the signals are out there.

Eyebrows

2011-02-05T15:44:00.000-08:00

I got the eyebrows of a Skald. Got no nest. Got this net. Lift my stripes for words of gold. Running back now to the occasional Twig. Walking slow now with the Thrush. Flying now since there's one rush. I got the eyebrows of a lover. Got no future. Got no past.

Dawn of Color

2011-02-05T15:31:00.000-08:00

I sit at a desk that is not a desk. It is a park bench with an abridged heart. With a ladder I reach for the top branch. Build the wall frown by frown. Throw the sky piece by piece.

My best words fail to enlighten. The painter and the Other are seated at the back of a coffee shop. We intently discuss the life around us. We are invisible except for our hot beverages. The coffee shop is now in a cornfield. The cornfield is now in the air. The air is passing over backyards.

The telephone appears strange and wonderful next to my Smokey Joe. It rings. No one speaks. I turn the telephone to the smoke rising from the coals. The party on the other end of the line will hear the smoke. I tell them to listen. I tell them to listen intently. They are calling from across the street. I go to bed aware that I am close to two people.

Circuits

2011-02-05T15:06:00.000-08:00

A flock of geese is in the rings of an oak. Tumbleweed distress rings on the breeze. The spokes of a wheel are twisted in the tree stump. A fox squirrel stands alert before an evergreen. A deer stands a step behind a fallen tree. The calm of the lake is in the jaws of a hawk. An orange dog walks a little white man. Hay bales and picnic tables weather out the fading leaves. Drop shoulders through tall grass. The thunder in the forest preserve moves once more the strings on this marionette.

A formation of geese is followed by a lone goose. My heart jumps to him. Advertisements of islands are stamped in the sunset. It is a private matter as I turn away from you to continue my flight. The words I hang to dry on branches are dying like leaves. I crumble their remains above the cauldron and stir them into soup. There are always end runs around I cannot. The only landscape is east of love. Restless essays twirl in oak leaves. A house grapples on the threshold of renewal. A luminary has an impact on the fettered confluence where exaggeration meets truth branching. My truck's chrome is tarnished like each gruff salutation. Chattering people sprout like dandelions. There is no completeness in shouldering what the storm leaves.

A Tennis Exchange

2011-02-05T14:48:00.000-08:00

In about the space of a tennis exchange, I grow to see the fall face of the clown. I precipitate out of peals of laughter. My awareness engages the incipient world thorn. An ember, indicative of softly spoken indifference, dies on the forest floor. I ride in a carriage canopied by coarse starlight. My island belongs to a tree named White. Like Leo, he anoints his first subject with his tongue.

I holler out of the screen of constellations, crying as a completely different animal. Approximations, disclosed only to us, draw us together on a crutch that belongs nowhere, decodes nothing. The announcer gets in my brain. I share this with you on the certainty that you have not heard what I just said. If you are friends with the announcer, then you will tell him or her that I said hello.

An Incoherent Response

2011-02-05T14:35:00.000-08:00

You find your models acceptable. My errors begin in the desire to follow your robust models down streets into a past where they wait ugly by doorways. You eliminate my stumbling upon them, asking their help. You prevent their incoherent response in the light of a street lamp. Look at your models weeping, and you call it radiance. I reproach you for perfecting my promise before I leave you with your models. You adjust my past actions as I adjust yours.

If your hurried throng presses any closer, then I might gain literacy in its chaos. Industrious masses, compare my company to the approach of sleep. I cry out to meet the architect of this forest. I shall fall through his storefront to wear his collection of footwear. I step with abandon on the overgrown leaf-soaked path. I respond with a ferocity of finite adaptations. The sinister official allocates finishing touches to the intrusion. My ears return as birds of prey.

Earth Movers

2011-02-05T14:10:00.000-08:00

Earth movers sit at my doorstep. Walk not among their stark machines. Walk into the tread of your past while they disembark on a boring series of cold rooms. Horror-stricken earth movers, what have you uncovered? What part of my past have you broken into? Do you enter the chilling cave where I paced and amounted to nothing that machines would recognize? Do you read the list of attendance I kept from visits of crude intelligence?

View the descent of a feather as the time between a string of letters and the wish for completeness. Hold any remnant that your machines understand. I am already dancing with your machines. Apart from having left the earth, they show no defect of the tireless programs you built into their design.

Doctrine of Our Times

2011-02-05T13:48:00.000-08:00

The entrance way to the city is through the harbor, never upward toward the skyscrapers. The windows dance with the doctrine of our times. He feints translation in a spacious room. Dance with him. Name his decorative objects. Go to a feverish meeting. Bake bread. Tear the page from the column. I am only a parking meter attendant. Ask the oracle. I see you trip on the dismount. You need not omit emotion. I sift through the ambiguous shapes I have become to travel here. This cannot be the center. False gods flash in the pan. A superhero is left to rot at the side of the road. A collision is tossed off in the faint beating of the next heartland. Atlas only wants help. A cartel of cheery monotone sucks us back into its whorls. It is not our breath. It is not our words that peg milliseconds. The minutes go by. My alter ego leans against a puff of smoke which is this age. A comic mask that chuckles less than twice is disgarded as a thing out of fashion. There are no solutions to melancholy, only permutations. The relentless copy cat only begins to scratch the surface of things. It glances at the letters on the chart and eyes the water in the glass. My hometown is a somatic stop on the super highway of information. The departure board blinks with the awful availability of destinations. The helicopter airlifts the building into place. The tail has been in place for centuries. My elbows are out by the car. Have a guiding light that fades forever each time you close your eyes. Keep your dreams running in the sunshine.

The Child

2011-02-05T13:42:00.000-08:00

The child
aspires to live.
Unfortunately for it,
it is only posing
as a code
for the body
to unlearn.
Bound to a puzzle,
locked to life,
each signal in the sky
betters his picture.

Mucha the cat

2011-02-05T13:16:00.000-08:00

Reading Jim Harrison, dreading a bike ride, I want to learn Spanish. Mucha the cat is out in the yard diving into his life. I am a houseboy in the furthest reaches of your empire. Sean has informed me how to watch MSNBC from a hill I should be riding in Ashville. Anton has become Mykha while I ride by her first grocery store. I pass the character I admire from the Last Station. He works for the park district. Three ladies incline their head to look at me from the apartments. They are among the basket weavers on the dock of Irene's paintings. I have a reason to venture into education because I shouted at a cop, and he shouted back at me.

Winny

2011-02-05T13:03:00.000-08:00

Winny tears Starry Night from its frame, hurls it around him like a waistcoat, and jogs hollering into the night. The cypress night of fishtail shoulders his day. A branch less certain, he follows the goblin into the void. The white fuse of words is within the curve concealed by night's beckoning porch. The shine of furniture surfaces in his mind. His fishtail scrapes the owl through which his body churns. His feet have turned into cafes below his knees. He spins a pocket watch around the cob of the moon. Fisherman rows by inviting you for a ride. The two of you are on the water while the branches of a Mondrian un-distinguish themselves. I swim out into the river to meet a canoe that has been waiting for two centuries.

The Ancients

2011-02-05T12:55:00.000-08:00

The ancients had no name for park. They were filled with terror, and you found them there. They laughed, and you heard them live. They spoke, and you listened to them dream. They never flew at night, and they never yammered during the day. They believe in SorrowZ Pegasus because you laughed so seldom. They hunted, and you smiled at Sparrow. You were both narrow, but only one was proud of it. You traveled everywhere, but you forgot to look in the tire swing.

Thunder

2011-02-05T12:46:00.000-08:00

I am a shy person. I take medicine for anxiety. I love thunder. I love national parks. The symptom hides, and when the song is done it has simplified itself. The one snowflake I gave to you hours ago has melted. I am the dark horse in the first pew. Father Doyle eats popcorn at the movies. I am sitting next to him whispering in his ear. I want to be soluble on a moonlit night. The raven perched on my door is tapping a pin into the door hinge with a small brass hammer. The moon is no character only something Christ sees double. I am restless as the bluebird the town is in search of reaching out over the churches. I see this movie in a cobblestone.

Bread on my plate

2010-06-22T07:38:00.000-07:00

What's bad is good.
You'd know if you understood.
Pain and Trouble are my best friends.
I would tell you to vote,
but you gotta feel good.
My plate ain't made for crumbs.
It's fine for bread. Equal to potatoes.
Need a picture of a Lake
and some bread on my plate.

Lincoln

2010-06-17T13:14:00.000-07:00

I stand alone below the Gate to the West. The grotesque image of a bird mounted below me is among the clouds growing too much for my imagination in the keystone I dully feed my youth. Lincoln is in the White House when dreams reside with the people. The rough waters around the White House pond stand in the back of the war. Abe places a willow branch before the headstone where the future will soon lie. Depending on which side wins, depends which lie will be told. Abraham, the manic-depressive, soon sides with the Gothic South, then with the Industrial North. His feelings are resentment for the conflict between a great castle and a lesser clergy. His books of law lay on the table near the kitchen, yet his spectacles are lost in the castle. His illustration of the front is waving in wheat near the principle of this nobleman's sleep. The language of Spanish waves through the horse-drawn plough. It is connected to an airstrip where Barack would speak of candles lighting a country fighting for its boyhood. St. Louis is upriver from the willow tree. His sleep sounds in the river. His message floats by a tugboat. A raft crawls near the shore. His defiance wakes several congregations in Iowa. Lincoln retrieves a painting. It is a bloody ending to a story that now has no end. Babe Ruth is a farmer who is excellent with the axe. Robert Frost knows about tramps. He is lyric in mud time. Casey's song stops at all the small towns. Wake her not last night if it were only music seen through the fire. Speak to Frost. He sends me apples by bushels of extra innings. My company may be melancholy, yet you will find me in river traffic and on railways. You will meet me at Fort Defiance State Park. Here, at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, a willow tree stands. Here, in the age of social science, I find the whole country. If you bring my message to the fringes of society, then I will expect you to cast a line back into the rough waters of the hierarchy. If you bring me to a hypnotist, then I will reverse the sleep of Cairo, Illinois. We have no victory now, only a muse that marches on through generation. If you give me a war instead of a playground, then I will talk to Homer in the corner on the beaches. If you build a sand castle on this avenue, then I will anchor it above the arch of your sleep. If you give me a private driveway connected to an airstrip, then I will fly to work instead of walk. If you bring me to a St. Louis baseball game, then I will leave you in extra innings with the voice of the Cardinals. I will leave you with the fountain of youth and float into the West.

A Luminary's Land

2010-06-15T09:02:00.000-07:00

We were driving back from Wisconsin coming east on North Ave. Out where there's still land for a country house. I saw a house with a sort of solarium in the design of the white frame way up from the road --

A Luminary's Land

Over yonder the Ageless
on the deck of Best Wishes
are quiet homes
belonging to missionaries
in a Luminary's Land
Mirthful sailors in a missionary's house
Gardeners steering in a sailor's bunk
Lost souls
in a Gardener's Mind
Looking for better waves
in waters uncharted
Fiery Resistance in the stars

Scholar

2010-05-25T08:49:00.000-07:00

Hey scholar,
Something about a photograph
brings dignity to a moment.
I'm meltin' that photo
like it was Gothic silver,
I'm traveling to a MuseuM
in a town that doesn't exist,
I'm transforming hope
into points about your heart,
and multiplying your day
into divinity fading
into the milieu
of your scholarly line.

Un - and - Able

2010-05-21T13:46:00.001-07:00

He's Un - and - Able to gross
the Lanterns of the Land
The World will not Sleep
It might Wake Up
It Might wake up
What's the Party on this Planet to do
besides change the Rhetoric left
my empty mind
The sundial found in the forest
Losin'
My Eden
Perfection like a Circle
Moderating other circles
It might wake up
It might wake up

Hours Away

2010-05-17T08:45:00.000-07:00

The meaning of something
depends where it ends.
Undone weaving
- tools - hammers - chisels
The Way
The Journey
For all my mood,
you will find an anchor
For all my slowness,
you will find a lake
I have pointed out colors hours away
from the center

A Few Forms

2010-05-12T07:47:00.000-07:00

I see it all too clear
Used to yearn for graininess
Now I vote for a triptych
Place the setting in the wild
walking the daylight in the silhouette
door of the church housing
the slipstream in the institute
of our pleasures swept
in belonging Outside or in
I'll prove to you that it needs to be
portrayed

in the insufferable schematics
of guidebooks. The crowd is perfect
in their mediocrity. I have known
that dissatisfaction

at what point does the Art World
overtake the real world.

Prayerful Room

2010-05-10T09:01:00.000-07:00

Commentary: JD and I journeyed into the city. It did not become a pilgrimage until he started bringing John Cage alive across from the bar and the bean. I zoned out to a Jasper Johns selection on front of Corpse and Mirror by John Yau = a Massachusetts movie critic. I lost my glasses on the train. That helped me reflect on the rubbed charcoal of my half and the finite streets of John Ashbery's poem. Composing a piece is more than tin pan alley a mile from Carbondale as Cage understood. It is the incessant charcoal of a matchstick, the hundred and one sparks when only a half of the canvas matters at a certain stop on the station ===

Mood with the energy and the canvases.
The separate yet not dissociated matchsticks
of my body.
Mirroring the polarity,
the contemplation
of how to strike the weak sister
of the dance
fought with religious lilies.

He called them his angels

2010-05-03T07:49:00.000-07:00

His letters say they defied the ordinary. He knew nothing of sorrow, nor how to weep. His conversations were halting at times when he was not thinking of his angels. The angels are at peace when he talks. His mind flees, but it always helps to talk. He learns that the storehouse of winter grain is provisional. A crust is always depleted. We trust that our folly has subjugated the earth though our angels tell us otherwise. The angels are at peace when he talks. His conversation is inspired when the storehouse of grain (flashes) before his eyes. Others are more likely to believe his words. What comfort we take from weeping has been unlearned, but some weep quietly. The price of tears has not been spent The fields of plenty have not been fixed X2. I belong to the builders. I belong to the crust of my letters X2. The angels are at peace when he talks.

Loafing

2010-04-29T07:35:00.000-07:00

Suspect not the steam
roller
by the side of the road
Nor the Rabbit Remorse
I have once crushed
Jumped like a rabbit with a mission
besides a Steam Roller with a job
I was flattened,
fed on pancakes
an index
who fought to take shape
who fought to take shape

It turns on

2010-04-27T08:29:00.000-07:00

the Seretonin
but at what cost?
It is difficult to find strength
I wrote three poems yesterday
but I'm afraid creativity is going
to become a mindless thing
I lay around - stupefied
listening to music,
but it is only a poultice
Malaise is not pleasant
Recently on my walks I have felt
a deeper sense of quiet
I walk in these fields
away from my fears
I forecast a life as a Quietest
Maybe I will attend a Quaker prayer meeting
The Quakers wanted to be left alone
I do not admit to wanting to be left alone
I seek a more fertile place than a Utopia
I'd like to start new in my own Garden of Eden
and make it prolific.
I have been living as most of us
irrespective of history
yet in finding out about the Puritans -
I have admitted to causes

Narcissus

2010-04-22T06:14:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna breathe so as to yolk
and not contort.
Not going to invent being careless.
One eyelid is like the slide of a microscope.
The other dwells less and less.
It was as if I we had never slept there.
We circle the park in the afternoon.
One eyelid is like the slide of a microscope.
The other is like the Mediterranean sun.
Litners, unfurl our eyelids.
Only because they are treasures
Only because they are treasures

Timepiece

2010-04-16T06:48:00.000-07:00

I am powerless with my powerful ideas
about unheralded rescue

before works of great art.

The Ecstatics were chased from heaven
not withstanding.
Lesser Pathos, worn to a frazzle,
is leaving the corridor of congruent pride,
the evanescent sound of production.

Restless timepiece, I am what you are.
We are outlets in a restless world.

The Unquiet Measures

2010-04-13T08:46:00.000-07:00

Divine errors, minute and multiple,
like poets who trudge the streets
without gospels
adjuring us to tear heartache
with a comb
The unquiet measures of my soul
give helplessness a form as much
as it has done away with help.
The other half of me is joining forces
with the void. The evidence
is water wearing down my ambition.
How much does one man need?
All tasks wait patiently to get done.
The complete word is always the ladle.

Industrious Disconnect

2010-04-08T08:24:00.000-07:00

The somewhat precarious shell
cannot always envelop me.
I am slow to sunder the view
of the dunes.
Soon I will groove through time
with less defenses.
I have thought as coral
and thus
in a small way felt happiness.

The Hollow

2010-04-06T07:11:00.000-07:00

Riches come to me.
I am done with this room.
Come down from the cross.
Journey into the next
quadrant of the day.
Purchase the hollow of the knees.
I am shaped by rain now
or the love of a summer day.
It is terrible to be lost
in the catacombs of honey.

Terry Fox Courage Highway

2010-03-25T09:26:00.000-07:00

His message spreads since the day
he takes to his feet.
He takes one day at a time,
one game at a time.
The contest holds no places -
only hope -
a panorama of hope
that is the story of lives changed.
He runs by foundations of old neighborhoods.
He will cross a finish however many relays
it takes to finish his purpose of continent.
Whoever is in his marathon
will collect together their kilometres.

Entertainers

2010-03-23T10:15:00.000-07:00

The beggar cries for the moon
to be a silver dollar.
The rich man empties his pockets,
beats his fists at the prophet's door,
and cries in his sins for a long while.
The dreamer,
unbroken in the meditation of his days,
brings his bow and violin.
He consults the ground,
the animals,
and the fog
that he sees for perhaps the first time.
He entertains the beggar and the rich man,
and charges no quarter for it.
Animals come out of the fog
and reveal themselves
for the first time.
I cannot say what will happen after that.

Coronation

2010-03-17T12:08:00.000-07:00

I catch up to your face in Nashville.
I sit on the off-ramp for hours.
My shoes fit the bill,
yet I fear to speak the globe's guffaw.
I put Willie Nelson at the helm
and coast the rest of the way
to your coronation.
You will run a dark and dusty outfit.
I will be one of your subjects,
secluded in the starlight express.
Address your play list to the fallen angels
of this regime's catastrophe.
Fill their boots with dust
that they might know irritation.

Passing afternoons

2010-03-12T11:18:00.000-08:00

Strikes reach my ear in a succession of falling castle walls
and fell my resistance to effort.
Walls fall all the way to my passing afternoon.
My eyes turn from a camera to behold ramparts
overflowing with overflowing eyes.

Effortlessly, I watch a land being observed,
a land responding to limbs falling
into maps on passing afternoons.
Gradually, I respond to my limbs
walking out of the map into the resistance of my heart.

Caught

2010-03-10T13:44:00.000-08:00

Men press darkly on evening snow.
Newspapers rustle on the tundra.
Snowplows trundle through icy streets.
I am caught off the curb
in their candle glare.
A man in a wagon addresses me
from the pavement. He is kind.
He tells me I am part wolf.
He offers protection to me.
His wagon is open.
Heavy flakes fall in front of me.
Banks of lights turn on and off.
The lights dance.

Few of us are

2010-03-02T11:52:00.000-08:00

entirely present in one place.

Brother, counsel me not with circumlocution

as I apply every ounce of meaning to your advice.

I take the course of action you recommend.

I take the liability to say something funny.

The beautiful dally, composing their conversation

flawlessly.

I soak in climates incidental to my search for you,

my Lord.

I see the scarecrow dance his worries away

in a jiffy.

I see you descend in a cloud to greet me,

my love,

as I climb the steps of the church

with the prospect of water

on one side of the highway.

Train Smoke

2010-03-02T11:47:00.000-08:00

I follow the train smoke of day's approach
through every scrape the brambles have bled me.
The hearts of the champions smash inside
their chests. Hides have been punctured
many times by the lawless mountain thorns.
The giants grapple with the mountain thorns
as they walk from the mountains.
They pull illusions from the clouds.
I take passage on rivers carved
from their toil. It is a great vision to see
the wolf or the eagle that escapes the pull
of the giants. I toil in their shadow.
My sight is temporarily blinded by sweat.
Only then is my vision beclouded by realism.

Popcorn Gypsy

2010-02-26T11:34:00.000-08:00

The popcorn gypsy sells scoops of salted popcorn from the round window of his riveted aluminum camper. He spares no kernels in the white paper bags. The silver lake of his camper looks less like a projection and more like a choppy sea. The wooden spindles of the Riverside Motel are trim as film reels. The red and blue awning of the thrift store sneaks around the corner of a jigsaw puzzle into its dog-eared box. On the cover the motorcycle caravan follows Main Street's wide curve. Two bicycle campers share a bag of popcorn on the curb. In the camper, the gypsy dodges the click of a disc. A butterfly leaves the faded murals for the alleys of Prophetstown. White Cloud crosses the Rock River.

The Outer Limit

2010-02-16T13:31:00.000-08:00

He imagined his days as sculptures
and well they were. He imagined
that he sculpted his days.
He began with the outer limit

of getting a year's worth done in a day.
The day stood a great shape in the afternoon.
He perceived the outline in the dusk.
Wedges and widgets held it in place.

At night he kicked them around
the confines of a book.
He had many recipes for widgets.
It took a fine eye to wrest the variations.

He amplified them with craft.
Quotas obsessed him.
He looked for a paradigm
and a trick to secure production.

Some wedges and widgets he noticed
more frequently. He became friendly
with them and eventually conversational.
Soon their names began with different letters.

He was aware of standing back and looking
at the sculpture when the sculpture collapsed.
Then he was aware of riding away
with the collapsed pieces on his back.

He put the puzzle together again.
Except where the edges once met nicely
now the shapes warped and curled.
He crumpled them into his planner.

Tumbledown Timelines

2010-02-16T13:21:00.000-08:00

We improvise the Speedway
through the Boulevard of Broken Dreams
lost in the star won by the Union...
In the distance, the Native Americans
introduce the European settlers to tobacco.
Citizens rebound the identification of hometown heroes.
The jockey steps on the scale to weigh in.
He parades his horse by the checkered mural.
In the grandstand a pair of strange eyes lingers
and moves on through the veil.
The jockey visualizes the final turn into the homestretch.
The fire hydrant is painted scoreboard green.
I travel through the welcome of Louisville to my boyhood home.
The car is caked with limestone dust. The vehicle changes
into the collection of plates I know it as.
Walk with right.
When right does wrong
walk on your own.
It's engraved beyond the cabin of Lincoln's Kentucky birthplace.
The lowest branches of the Green River run below
the deepest tunnels of Mammoth Cave.
Outdoors I paraphrase more easily
the myth that is out of reach.
Rickety boards and tumbledown timelines are a fortress.
I take the exam on the same day I instill courage.
I brush my teeth. A pitching change is made.
We listen to the Cardinals win the pennant.

Memphis

2010-02-16T13:16:00.000-08:00

Downtown Memphis is a loop of heavy braided metal
rusted on the cobblestone. Western dawn
spells out a structural "M" on the lights
of the Hernando de Soto Bridge.
At first light, painters return to their scaffolding
above Sun Studios. They letter the Beale Street sound
with fresh paint past W.C. Handy Park
to the Riverfront Loop Trolley.
Fenders rust a fleet overnight. Elvis,
embroidered in costumes of sequin and crocodile,
volleys gold records. Visitors are the grounds crew.
The entries on the front wall of Graceland
are the brightest Christmas trees in spring.

Warhola

2010-02-16T13:13:00.000-08:00

I ride the Monongahela Incline to the mountaintop
I am from, conquer my fear of heights,
and dance the dark sky away.
A phoenix sheds a tear as I stop for repair
of chalk variables under cabinet
of dark sky at noon.

Are you Baltimore Oriole or Pirate?
Sail through Pittsburgh glass and steel.

Tradition

2010-02-16T13:09:00.000-08:00

Passing your driveway today,
I wonder why you too are not on the road.
I wonder when we will all gather around
one hearth.
I wonder, out of custom, if you work with your hands
or with your mind.
I wonder at your presence within a tradition
of 230 years.
I wonder at the furniture I see on your front porch.
I wonder at the sounds that have chased you
across the prairie.
A single pearl floats around the corner of my season
into country rusted out of belief.
I wonder if you have any more big decisions to make.
I know I do.

Closer seasons to the heart

2010-02-16T13:06:00.000-08:00

The Niagara River runs even
gallon after gallon
into the summer
splashing the feet
of those who run
and all who wait and walk
with ones they love.
Those who amble
and the dreams they have scrambled for
in the closer seasons to their heart
are a ration of summer
in a litany of all travels left to trek.

Moonlight

2010-02-16T13:02:00.000-08:00

The warrior carries his bow
to the water's edge.
The last lantern is diffused.
Once, by accident,
an arrow erred,
and a town was born.
The stranger,
dressed in tunic and trousers,
appears sincere to the two chieftains.
The lapis lazuli on the pendant
of Persephone's messenger
catches the moonlight.
Everyone hushes.
We both find the metropolis
in the shallow depression.
Later, developing the image
in separate castles,
I acknowledge
the approaching set of footprints
on the ridge.

Impossible Shores

2010-02-16T12:59:00.000-08:00

Droves of minnows line Highway 61.
Dandelions bloom into the blue expanse.
Yellow carbon copies disappear
into the world's largest freshwater lake.
I initial the forms and fold them into the slot
for the ranger at Eagle Mountain.
Tail feathers disappear around the corner
of Whale Lake.
Water laps at the knees
of the apostle's impossible shores.
Two day trippers beep in agreement
with two road trippers.
On the peak we gaze red crested
into Ontario.

My Ledger

2010-02-16T12:54:00.000-08:00

I slumber steps from the tall desk
where I work with my ledger
in my room off the Great Hall.
My entries stand up to the Arctic Wind,
the joining of the annual Rendezvous,
and the fortitude of the Voyageurs.
In my books you will find the orchestration
of the torn and frayed with the tailor made,
the Montreal water routes and the fur trade.
I dress for my chore of recording sorrow and delight
in the northwest of a young nation's expansion.
In the century of the Cree and the Ojibwe
I groom myself in the mirror above the dresser
you stand before in this re-enactment.

Mark Twain Lake

2010-02-16T12:48:00.001-08:00

The road is a serve.
The game, volleyball,
stretches out over an empty highway.
The wires give way to a net stretched
between here and the Illinois River Valley.
The anthem hesitates.
Years get confused for a few days.
A keep out sign falls to the floor.
Florida lays low.
Hannibal, aware of the filter,
is neither older nor younger.
The mischievous Huck disappears
through pictures of dead trees at sunset
by Tom Sawyer's plaque in an empty yard.
The family cabin is with the loved books.
Mark Twain Lake, water of the Salt River,
turns to wine in the years 1962 to 1984.

Thunder Bay

2010-02-16T12:44:00.000-08:00

Pledge

Bear, path of fish to the sea,
command of tidings from the beginning:

Lead me through the mountains.
Bring me snow.
Canopy the forest.

Answer me with company
of coldest lakes.
Stand with me
high above the canyons.

Climb across the sky.
Shine on promise
of home and firelight.

The Elders

2010-02-16T12:02:00.000-08:00

My Fathers left a keystone leading to a truce.
The agreement faded. We are angry
at running out of space before glimpsing the city.

Dust swirling in our eyes,
marooned under a skyline,
we walk into your city.

The way is scattered.
My name means be a large Blackhawk.
Cross, and in crossing, find the strength to cross.

All are left alone in the maze.
Gaze into the evening.
Find peace at the end of the day.

We invite you to Eagle's Nest Art Colony.
Bring a blanket. Fold your arms with artists
as we stand on the Rock River Bluffs.

Guest Book

2010-02-16T11:57:00.000-08:00

The hobo's prospects drift from the town square -
over every street U.S.A - to the edge of town.
He gathers yellow wildflowers into his steady gaze.
He grabs hold of the ladder and swings onto the platform

of a red passenger car. He walks through the door
and seats himself at a desk. On the desk a guest book
is open to the days when he rode the rails
of the Illinois Central.

He brushes a fly aside, signs a nickname, the number of times
he passed this way, and today's date.
He looks at the last entry. A time worn signature
is scrawled on the leaf. It might be one of his friends.

It might be his own.
It might belong to wildflowers of his earthly gaze.

Century

2010-02-16T11:54:00.000-08:00

No arrows of popularity point here.
I point my camera,
and my reflection appears objectively.
My shadow hurries to cross the strong diagonal.
My real self may be with the water
or sunning with the moss on the tree trunk.
My Ego stands on the stone platform.
I am unwilling to change,
resolute in this century.

The Lighthouse Keeper

2010-02-16T11:50:00.000-08:00

It is an operational myth that each soul,
rich or poor, has to look at their reflection
in the mirror each morning.
Hundreds twist their tie into place.
Thousands solemnly excuse the rule
stating excessive eye contact
with another shows shiftiness, aggression.
Millions have applied to borrow worries
from a self assured smile
that crowds their mirror only yesterday.
Ascend the spiral staircase
to the small room and the radion beacon.
The choppy surface may be a mirage,
only there is so much water.
Chant a passage from an oration,
a summons to those in peril.

The Key

2009-11-06T09:24:00.000-08:00

to understanding my condition
is the knowledge that I have limits.
I feel bad.
It is learning to watch
my brain stop functioning.
I feel bad and desire
to think.
I want badly
to talk to someone I love.

I experience a mixture of voices and panic. I dissociate myself from my accomplishments. It would make sense to take a break, give in for a restful half hour. I cannot bend my will to this simple declaration no matter how my will has been my aid earlier in the day. I call it voices because I lose my voice. I have no power of speech. It is difficult to make my needs known. I'm not asking for much talk. I only wish to say a few sentences.

Crushed Together

2009-11-03T09:03:00.000-08:00

I have blundered and by snowball effect
made a metal music. I travel around a piano,
flute, and violin. Looked everywhere. Stopped.
Hear them grating and scraping.
Maybe you could say I listened.
A searching light on this bike ride
streams to a Douglas on a mountain.

Believing in Torchlight

2009-10-29T09:13:00.000-07:00

A trap lives in my language of misunderstanding

the creative spirit for process.

I am only isolated when believing in the torchlight

with which I make out a planet exerting

its dark tug on me.

I take the fall for this planet

in an embarrassing meeting place.

Sandia Crest

2009-10-27T10:24:00.000-07:00

Our destination is the cabin
at Sandia Crest. We walk
to the bars in the window

that are nothing.
The clouds hold out
our destination.

The stones hold out a cloud.
The edifice holds out
next to nothing.

What hasn't been done

2009-10-23T13:43:00.000-07:00

What hasn't been done, all the yesterdays
all the tomorrows, I share this hammer
with the world. Belongings, from fingernail to bicycle pedal, are given up. Forgive me for the times I have not inquired. It is poverty, and I don't like it. I thought people were being cute who got to their destination and couldn't even look at it. Send me not the tangled thread that secures our story but the sparkling one that invites in the unbearable afternoon. Children of the afternoon are saved between a raindrop and a candle.

A New Office

2009-10-20T13:48:00.000-07:00

Reaching for the switch that turns me off
and my busy mind or flat emotions
felt past dull as more often is the case
is a ledge I might as well dance back and forth
in good time. I spin around in my chair
to face an arm on the other side of a new
office hit on the shoulder by a force
acting with the shadows that turn off
ordinary objects.

Clouds

2009-10-16T11:03:00.001-07:00

You have to stop imagining clouds
and start seeing them. I cut
through so much paper that I would
almost give it all up for one saying
that floods each heart more than I have use
for it. Don't make me do it.
None of them will withstand my life.
I always know not to look to them.
Only their shape makes me alive.

You Won't Wonder

2009-10-14T12:22:00.000-07:00

You won't wonder

at what you can not look at.

Search evermore for that one grain

of sand imagined to be pure.

It might do you good.

Looks like everything is in the way.

It's teaching you to never give up.

History begins to give me

only a slight headache.
U2 cries in the deserted heart of America.

What a strange creature I am!

Old chums make me grimace.

I am puzzled that I hold my breath

with an eye too good.

I lose the grain of sand.

It dances and suffers for me

on the expressway.

Send me not

2009-10-12T13:06:00.000-07:00

The last error is being alone.

Dim my awakening with illumination.

I fall toward humor in the afternoon.

The mind left open exposes a house.

Love sends me in all weakness.

I look in the mirror.

See the one who draws the eye of anything powerful.

I see him leave,

leave me with one who is honest,

and the turtle walks off in the rain.

I have few steps left to open my heart.

Make no fight. It might not be a matter

of days or months. My life is halfway over.

It's unimportant.

I'm beginning to simply be strong.

The Dormers

2009-10-08T13:01:00.000-07:00

It is a hot day.
Jung mops the sweat
from his brow with a cloth.
He hands the cloth to you.
"Stop," he hollers.
You turn back toward the garden.
"You forgot the potatoes."
He hands you a burlap bag.
The sun slanting through the dormers
multiplies the stairs as you climb.

Willowbrook Wildlife Center

2009-10-07T13:31:00.001-07:00

We are patient and more patient protectors
waiting for our sight to repair.
They shuffle identity which I guess
is the nick of their exchange.
Two owls suspend synchronicity
while the third remains motionless.
The bobcat jumps to the floor.
Each darting mind, falcon or bald eagle,
watches, working with time.

The Guides

2009-10-02T12:41:00.000-07:00

I am more a question -
a proposition
I notice two guides who have followed every proof the advanced class offers to this point. I examine my life. I believe I am a great mathematician whose experience has been effaced. Once more, I am trying to learn the rules. As the class takes their seats, they are of one kind, and it is this. This is given to them. The guides walk briskly to and fro. I sit in the front row. My condition is a question. The other students here are the numbers. They exist. The guides begin to teach. They say something to a girl in the second row. A guide explains to the girl that she is the occupant of her desk. If this is allowed to continue, the guide will next tell her that one number is not the next. The guide herself realizes the gravity of the situation.

The Ducklings

2009-09-11T10:06:00.000-07:00

I know I must return to the signpost and follow the trail which I glimpsed earlier. A family of ducks passes the afternoon. The mother ventures into the reeds, and her babies lose no time in following. The father passes by where his children played a moment ago. I venture on myself. At length, I come to a second signpost. I look up from my reading. Behold the grassy, unkempt mound where stone tools, pottery shards, and human remains have been found. I might say here is where I wonder, and here is some line I will stand behind to look across at the sacred. That is more or less what occurred. I define no spiritual greatness that limits itself to exercising its newness or oldness on top of the burial mound where only the grass grows a little thicker than at other points in the wood. I walk a minute more, find civilization, and turn back the way I came. I pass the spot again where the ducklings played. The pond is left to the father who seems a trifle uneasy in his forgetfulness of his family who is certainly not far off. I rejoin the path at which point I pedal the route over the bridge and to the intersection.

Braininess

2009-09-08T11:46:00.000-07:00

It seems I should have been quoting him Williams instead of Stevens. The process I dispute with J. hopefully is brainy. After reading craft essays, I learn William's braininess only goes as far as function. Stevens has left us some cerebral mirrors that do not reflect much of the world. In Williams the answer lies in both of us conversing first about the object or thing whatever process brings to our point. J. concedes that the preface is usually the place for a brief explanation of process. I like sentences that sketch, summon the strange, and keep sketching the object under consideration. Last night I read Descartes from the second story window where he watches and doubts the beings walking and clothed below are men. He inculcates two fires in my eyes on my bicycle ride to the Elmhurst Art Museum.

"If in the conversation process appears, say it, get on with talking about the art," I tell J. Maybe I am still sharp from the ride. The poems of Stevens, if poems can be called process, are about the subject of poetry itself. This probably does not allow me to shout artist secrets at every corner. The form is still useful if we travel with our dots back to the time of form. I walk as one in a room with hundreds of cats waiting to be let out of their auspicious bags. I'd have some hope of delineating them if they were cats I had seen before. If they were cats I had not seen before I might resist pronouncing their tabby demarcation. If they were cats I had not seen before, then I might speak of them. Wonder at their felicity.

Stance

2009-09-04T12:21:00.000-07:00

My voice cracks which I note for inspiration. I am past the inception. My stance becomes false. I used to speak loud so the lulls were louder. Project determination. Now I am pushing rubble from a height above the crowd where I don't wish to belong. So I choose to speak softly. But there is someone in the crowd saying you need to speak up. The guitar player was asked for loudness on the lyrics when he questioned whether he should give more volume to the playing. Some of my letters sail out into the audience.

I can not center the poem because volume is on the front of my mind. At the previous poetry reading I defined a space where I called on tone which is occupying my voice at the moment. The event was above a pub in a dark rectangle of a multipurpose room. I would not yell though, and I could not sound out that space once more at the crowded reading in the lighted basement last night.

In A Manner Befitting

2009-08-29T13:35:00.000-07:00

I am a formulated self who still has the need to see something exceptional in print. I teach myself of being in the subjective will of the story. Reward is persevering through events that steal me away from my slumber. The nearer I push myself to be finished, the more I peer over the emptiness soon within me. All good things health, momentum, and busyness lead to illusion. I shudder at how vast I am, how I hope to fill a life with accomplishments that are to my liking.

For a while, the commands active and rest have rhythm. I look activity square in the face and fear infinity, then look rest square in the face and again fear infinity. As I stand at the abyss, feelings escape into the future. A trace darts into some word, God, that I use in a manner befitting the ocean of my expression. Another word, faith, I use in place of being desperate. Another word, subjective, I push off the edge of my stopping place making a loud splash in the lake that may be at the bottom of my soul sounding out the sides of nothingness.

These are the plates I will not break yet neither will use for food. Expression is a verb for its own sake, a powerful verb, a power that may be similar to submitting. My choice is to submit to these plates that are no more names than they are placeholders. Find the self who is not in my power to fill, build, and construct.

On the Offensive Part 2

2009-08-15T09:19:00.000-07:00

I wish to keep writing this right through the 4pm low water mark when I check the time after feeding the meter three quarters prior to sitting down to order pizza in Hyde Park.
"I'm spaced out. Are you spaced out?" says Anton.

I am weak with the effort it took to overcome my aversion to the educational methods of science and finally lose myself in the museum. My appetite diminishes.
"You can tell your sister you're in Barack Obama's neighborhood."

This happiness is with me now, but it wasn't with me then. After the meal, we visit the bookstore next door. I drift from one pleasant wall to another. It is still within my ability to recognize names. Octavio Paz is a mentor in times of discovery spent at another library. I sit down. A green volume of John Keats floats nearby. It is within my reach as it had been within the astronaut's reach to reach out and find the book. Whatever is in that book gives me the strength to walk two blocks to another bookstore in this moonscape.

We stop in the neighborhood that is of Anton's grandma and grandpa. I know this neighborhood visually and pre-visually from every story Anton tells of its beginnings. I know that is Vince at the house next door even before Anton yells to me. I know I have a poem in my pocket. I know I can not read the poem. I know it is because I stubbornly refuse to step outside that now Anton and Vince carry on their conversation on the parkway. I know these things, yet I have no understanding of how old I am.

Anton wonderfully illustrated this in his story after we left the restaurant. He had been in a doctor's office in the same neighborhood looking down at the streets. He could feel himself absorb the neighborhood. It was when he was four years old. It is one of his first memories.

We are stopped at the light below the hill to my apartment when I next open my eyes. That is not true. Anton shouted and honked at a van in the next lane. It carried the Polish flag waving in the breeze. The Polish flag is white and red. I know this because yesterday I studied countries in anticipation of an international day at Art Expo. The colors of white and red burn terribly in my retreating mind. This is a mind that was on the offensive at the beginning of the day. I share with Anton an article I assigned myself to read on my last airline flight. It is in the Skyway magazine about an artist who makes stuff similar to what Anton makes. He's a black guy who uses bottle caps.

"Like Mr. Imagination," says Anton. I try to recapture the thesis of the short article as it relates to consumerism. It would have been neater to remember which African country the artist was from.

These are the thoughts I have as peace finds me once more in the dark: 1) I should have seen today coming a mile away, and 2) I walked right into it. Theoretically, I can walk right out of it. There's nobody left to fool - only me.

On the Offensive Part 1

2009-08-12T08:34:00.000-07:00

I sense twenty more dollars falling out of my pocket. It is lousiness. It won't matter how great the art is. "I'm not feeling good about this idea," I speak. "We could walk by the lake instead."

Anton would like to go to Art Expo if we find parking. He mentions the Museum of Science and Industry instead. We park for free by a block of grass and trees. We toss a football. I take a mitt. Anton hits grounders. I understand I am not escaping Art Expo for something much better. Only leaving something for something else.

I have natural coordination at play for those fifteen minutes. In the museum we promptly lose ourselves on the main floor. I am in a display on genetics which is not on my schedule to see. I remain calm in the room with the architectural replication of Chicago. Anton points out the Indiana Dunes, an outlying area, where we were only two weekends ago. The beach and the people looking out at the lake does not change anything. I tell Anton this is too much to see. I will choose three things to see. We enter the petroleum display.

I am rewarded for my specificity in a walk through mirror maze. Structural models of hydrocarbons look to bond by forming chain molecules reflected in the maze. We take the stairs to the balcony where gears exhibit rotary and linear motion. Anton is properly mystified by science.

"Brainy," I agree with him.

We climb the rest of the stairs to the chemistry floor. I read about attraction of atoms. I am at home in the diagram until I walk away from concepts that I have not labored over. Our struggles have been honest to finally stand by the circle defined by degrees, the compass points, and the twenty-four hours. I read the explanation of Foucault's pendulum twice. A pendulum, of course, swings back and forth. It also perceptibly travels in a circle which is Foucault's proof that the earth spins on its axis.

Our final stop is the space exploration floor. I look at an Arthur C. Clarke illustration. A human being will ascend the double needle space station. I understand an astronaut's training for the first time. Maneuvering objects is more important than playing a video game. We see the image on the monitor, on the screen that is also our mind. The figure of an astronaut reclines and reaches out for a floating can of juice. I stop to listen to a video of JFK talking, buoyantly encouraging me.

The Overlook

2009-08-07T08:03:00.000-07:00

I stop to stretch at a shelter in the country along the Military Ridge Trail. I bicycle into Blue Mound State Park which has the highest elevation in Southern Wisconsin. I climb the paved service road to the campsites. I continue on the park road to the overlook. I lock my bike at the picnic table where I will look up from my reading of the spiritual writings of Kierkegaard to behold the rolling forests of the Driftless Area to the west. First, I catch my breath on the staircase of the observation tower. I open up on the trail to find myself outdoing the path. I expect a sleepy town, not a Main Street that requires a traffic light to get across. I hope to bring back a postcard from the Mustard Museum of an old-time mustard jar. I am helpless. I promise myself I will give up at the shelter where I stretched. I have no courage to stop. I feel a few raindrops. Anton calls to tell me there is a tornado warning. I wait out the rainstorm with no power of speech. My obsessive mind will not relent that tomorrow I have to do the same thing over again. Climb the hill at Blue Mound State Park, ride to Mt. Horeb, get a chicken sandwich, and try to visit the Mustard Museum.

Anton wants to drive me on the backroads with my bicycle. We agree to meet each other back at our camp in Governor Dodge State Park. I know the patience of a climb in farmland. Noon finds me at Subway. I don't have to ride all the way to Mt. Horeb to get a chicken sandwich. I order a turkey sub, ride back to the park, and call Anton to tell him we should go swimming. At 6pm we start dinner. I play my new Bob Dylan CD. My persistence with the fire brings us a second course of pork and beans. I read Anton and Therese a story by flashlight from The Sun. My voice finds its way through a circle of fishermen at Navy Pier and their dialogue. The next morning I ride to Ridgeway. I walk the length of the sleepy town that ends in ice cream. I know it is time to draw the white church and a bit of the side road. I eat an apple and find a spot in the shade across the street. We stop in Madison on the way home. I take a picture of beach blankets on the lawn in front of the capital. Anton finds a map with the location of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. I share a pick me up from Starbucks. I center on Return to Function. Scissors make the task of the tailor on the other side of showcased old photographs of production. The patterns are the objects of clothing for today's enviroment. East of 39 on North Avenue is an indoor pool in the country.

Tiskilwa and Geneseo

2009-08-05T08:50:00.000-07:00

I see hay bales around the corner of the Hennepin Canal. I am beginning to learn the difference between a canal lock and an aqueduct. I become the bicyclist according to the time that leads me to the object in the distance. The cafes are closed and the pizzeria doesn't open until 4pm. I get a rice crispy treat and rest in the park. I draw my bicycle in front of the porch next to the Tiskilwa memorial of a flag and an eagle. Geneseo is on the west branch. A Lincoln statue is on the corner in front of the history museum. I read a portion of the Gettysburg Address which dedicates the battlefield. The nice restaurant in town, The Cellar, is across the street.

The ranger has never eaten there. I eat at the Chinese restaurant. The Hennepin Canal connects the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers. The heron lands like a vase. His neck is both in the water and the narrow of the riverbank. I get a call that watermelon awaits me on our last day.
The water is nearly motionless above the lock.