Dear students on a cliff about to fly

Dear students on a cliff about to fly, 

       (Commencement Speech, 2021)

 

Channel the wisdom of a gnarly-bearded god in flowy tunic:

Seek your heaven from the sky down, from your own dump site, or cry pit, or privileged cage. Do not bury your heads in your hands, confounded students, but look deep within. No, not that deep. Avoid that memory. Look beyond certain feelings. Much of who you have become is a web of ten-thousand illusions. Keep most of them.

Scan the horizons of your future. Not so far. Not that horizon. Skip certain vistas. Be completely honest with yourself and others. Except for the truth altogether. Tread water between those shores.

Delight in the moment. You only have that moment. However, struggle. Plan. Envision. Scratch at the surface of the ice as if you have fallen through and cannot breathe. Take a breath with the urgency of screaming under the surface. Adapt your game. Smile a little when you scream.

In fact, smile always. Your smiles are authentic and robust. Practice into the sky until they feel fake.

Do not bury yourself into your screen. You lean in into it like a plant at the window. Break the window, to be abundantly outside, and sculpt a crystal ball. Only bend over your crystal ball.

Don’t forget to brush. Ignore death, or, think a ton about death. There is no gnarly-bearded god. While on your precipice, know that you are the sage. Do the right thing, and be yourself. Break the rules; fuck around like there’s no tomorrow. In fact, there is no tomorrow, and yesterday is a blur. Move carefully—no, exquisitely! Whatever you do, keep moving, unfettered. Cast your bread upon the waters.

Congratulations.

Dear bones on the lake, half poking out and half frozen in

Dear Bones on the Lake,

Deer bones on the lake
Half poking out and half frozen in
Had you ambled to this barren center?
Been dragged by a wolf?
We are the deer, wondering how
We have arrived on this cold berth
 
Another day of pandemic dread
I have read the news to death
Healthy and delicious meals, check
What’s the matter with following
Birds for a raison d’etre
In their arithmetic of destination?

This sterile expanse, we call our checklist
Staves off choices until our dreams
Unmistakably point the direction
To the center of it all. We might as well
Wander out too far to be discovered
Like following birds to our terminus

When words will matter as nothing does

Some Poets' Words

 
Some poets’ words imbed in concrete
Some hewn in would, or spewed in blood
Are just cliché enough for walking over
 
No prescience from their trite run-ons
Except for thought bubbles, uttered as
We scrape and shovel them in lines
 
I could write a thousand poems more deft
And never see one typed into proud slabs
Or scribbled on banana peels, tossed in my grave
 
You could write forever in the ice, fierce
And lonely tongue, yet never see the street
Light your arrogant and beautiful remark
 
We could scrawl all night on the Great Sphinx
with hip-hop paint and CNN, and the words
would wash away; we’d post bail in gineih
 
Once you see the Jesus Christ Lizard
Dance across a rio like Fred Astaire
Its ripples dissipate quicker than you or I
 
Only then can you cure concrete envy
When all poems sweep into the sea
Or space beyond--the weight of walks
 
Their pounds will be replaced by calm
Pouring buoyant on the entrails of clocks
When words will matter as nothing does