Like Joan of Arc

In a Perfect World, and Right Mind
 
 
In a perfect world, and right mind, if it was
I would charge with an invective of questions
With some militance, the stuff of Joan of Arc
 
Manifesting a certain power, moving masses
Armored in dark, but righteous Armani suits
Against the climate crisis, or my failing nation
 
Instead, numb to it all, a stolid distraction
Are these olives still good? How are my stocks?
Is Mom ok, or even getting my texts?
 
Without audience, I play the strings of poem
Mining symbol deep into the cerebral desert
Holding paradise with the salacious tongue
 
Playing Jesus to the menstruating woman
Racking up points in another hallucination
Spearing the infidels of indifference
 
In a focused world, on some clear hilltop
I am Joan of Arc, of salubrious mind
Lifting a torch to a pyre of radiant screens

Here's how to avoid nightmares

How to Avoid Nightmares
 
 
Nightmares, like werewolves, always uninvited
To the neural afterparty, hairy and gnashing teeth
Always wearing their matted furry cloaks  
When the dim moon’s miasmatic reflections
Penetrate our rooms with fury and distress
As we hide under the most defenseless sheets

How to avoid the teeth and claws of nightmares:
Look out a window, preferably at the dusky sky
But do not see a bird on limb or in flight, or else
Your dreams will soar into the realm of sick or die
Tell a child it’s all a scam and to not grow up
Observe a cancer patient, then look them in the eye
 
Touch yourself with honey up to your collarbone
Lift three fingers of each hand to rub along
Your skull’s protruding bumps that you’ve forgot
Imagine how it weighs on a shelf in a catacomb
Lick the back of a photograph of you as a child
Dial an anonymous number and sing a tragic song
 
Cross your fingers in the tightest clench of hope
Begin to shine like you are a newly minted coin
Then count backward the days of your life
Inflate your lungs as if blown into by a fan
Considering why you often jolted in your sleep
Ponder as you exhale your one fragile lifespan
 
Finally, to avoid the chilling ones you most fear
Those that lie in wait in your alleyway of night
Where you are most vulnerable in the deepest way
The ones that make you hemorrhage open wide
Make sure to grind your teeth until they crack to bits
And sleep on your left side, or was it the right?

Happy twenty-eighth to everyone!

 The Twenty-eighth Day of August
 
 
I know you celebrate this day too
With a planet of kids who quiver with glee
for the 28th of August. How lucky
We are to have the Twenty-Eighth
 
A very special day around the world
Like it’s our very last day together
Fires lit for dancing around and around
Wondering, arms raised, how to live
 
Today, 367,000 umbilical cords will be cut
Final signatures dashed onto papers for divorce
The last breath for some, 173,000 sized-up in
Shrouds, furnaces, caskets, pits and pyres
 
Such an important day we revel in
Parties in such lovely nations that we live
And other places, Chicago, one and a half
Persons will be murdered by handguns
 
Today, countless excruciating paper cuts
With nearly 500 organs lifted from cadavers
Set into the woozy chests of the unconscious
Who will awake to sons and daughters dancing
 
For me, it's just a day. I’ll take my coffee
With milk on the patio 6 days into retirement
Work the garden. Otherwise, on this special day
I will try, beyond all odds, to give birth

Memory, tail of a primeval beast

 It is as if    It’s not enough   

 
 
The babbling brook of the fish tank in the kitchen      That’s enough
Dreaming fish      who do not know they are enough      and are enough
Is enough      The eleven sixteen on the clock      of Thursday night     enough
After blueberries have fallen in the street      the size of hail
 
Not enough the young woman who asked twice     to see my fruit trees
Not enough     those fruit trees a year away    from fruit    not enough    a chat
With Gabriela    on a screen by the Mediterranean     Definitely not enough     to lay
Naked in a bed of human sheets     with storm drips      the tap and groan of drains
 
Note the sound of each bubble rising     with the deep fish    See how moonlight
Coats color upon them    Enough light    floods the kitchen floor
Pouring a little wine across the evening floor    A percentage enough
To share    if my children      my girlfriend      and friends    were here
 
Let’s concede the condor is enough     The pepper and salt    together, enough
Probably neuroscience is enough     Enough for now of climate change
Looking up at a blackened sky that pops with beams of stars    so we are told
Will always be sufficient to be the way     it is
 
And it may just be enough     to swallow the wine     bitter, but loud      
As memory     tail of the primeval beast     loneliness     that haunts present
With past     that is as acrid as it is empty    as the fish floating in still motion
To the time honored horn     of the urban train

On a flight to Tunis

 Beautiful Blood

 

On a flight to Tunis

You are sleeping on my lap

We will awake in a bed

Beneath a prayer to Allah

 

And eat dates

At the shore for lunch

By the Phoenician walls

Where migrants dash

 

How cool your skin

After these Andalusian days

Days of fortress and climb

Of conquest after conquest

 

War in Gaza, bombings   

In Tehran, migrant raids

A tax bill that will, again

Cripple the poor

 

Luckily, through it all

We saw the Museo de Picasso

Learned how to misconstrue

What is seen

 

How to reposition forms

Let go of the elements of color

Calling attention to that

Which you will not see

 

Studied how to annihilate

The logic of nations that fixes

Our species on butchery

And other bad manners

 

Learned how to penetrate

The clouds with lances

Of pigment until they drip

With beautiful blood

A moment that changed the way I see

Stung

 
A moment that changed the way I see
Myself in surf on my trip to Tunisia:
Hardly a highlight it hurt so hard and long
On an evening when the sun was gone
After burning us bad in the day
 
Wading into the cool Mediterranean
Off Hammamet, deep enough where the sea
Moves you where it wants, and you are left
To wonder on its pull. Dark enough the mind
Cannot contend with the possibilities
 
It was in the second I was watching the sky
Lit by a gone day, dark enough for stars
That the creature stung its fiery lash
Maybe it was caught between my ribs and arm
Or just wild bent on cancelling the night
 
Precisely at the moment that I was letting go
Of the worries on the beach and considering
Straight ahead of me, in the far distance:
Gaza, caught between the Army and Hamas
That’s when the thing swam up to strike       
          
I could not solve the war of the eastern shore
Instead, a little agony in my side
And a new way of thinking about the tide
How perilous the calm, reliable waves
How painful the fusillade of stings they bear

The Principles of Earth

The Meaning of Life

To whom can one turn for the meaning of life
When a powerful distraction is a mango and knife?
Turn to the experts:
 
Neuroscientists speak of expanding consciousness
In magnetic resonance with the body at rest
In the sweetest homeostasis
 
Buddhists meditate on sutras channeling clarity
Of fire in mind, orchestrating the eight
Guides on an elegant path
 
Bending thoughts against steel, the ironsmiths
Hammer impurities to oblivion, a metaphor
For purity through elimination
 
Writers speak of pounding away at the keyboard
For plot, booze and cigarette past midnight
Hanging on every word
 
Seamstresses are all about patterns, sizing up
What will be cut, stitching together disjointed
Slices into a future shroud
 
Astrophysicists reconnoiter how tiny you are
Modeling consciousness on a subatomic level
In the universe, infinitesimally you
 
Why not trust the auto mechanic, wrenching
A gestalt of organs in the whole machine
To keep from breaking down?
 
Or the glassblower warping an expanding globe
Of randomly arranged atoms of molten solid
As vague and precarious as you?
 
How to answer this question of life?
Each can help with the trained and worthy task
of savoring with skilled salvo
 
Already there before you, dangling, ripe
Mango of opportunity in red-orange and green
Lauding the principles of earth

How To Say, You're Not Ready For The World?

How To Say, You're Not Ready For The World?

How to say, You’re not ready for the world?
How to say, Beware…/Don’t…/Remember to…?

I’m not sure about your future, son
After making war with the animals, the climate
Wears a hole in hope’s traditional gown
And deep hollows hang in the mirror
Of your Mother

How will you fly the world without my wings
Stretched over yours when you leap? 
Will yours unfurl?

“Look father!” you say, “Papa!”
In the distance:  A speck
Gasping, I see you soar, your shadow careens the city, the world
Your movements, the questions of sages

Our plasticized brains and seas! 
Nevertheless
You have unfurled

When The Fascists Come

When The Fascists Come

If the fascists take over, will there still be flesh
That seizes up in awe on the arms of the sound
Of the boy channeling Chopin's piano?

When the fascists take aim, will the lovers on the beach
Singing from their deep and sturdy gaze
Hear the rifling in their own green voices?

As they leap from trucks (and they will have trucks)
Will they pause in heavy duty boots to listen
To the guitarist plucking the quietest cloud?

Mostly, in these times of fascism, I wonder
If people will clap along with the thunder, if troops
Will outshine the sax, if blooms will turn to fruit.

Will we still sing when we are deep and well alone
Hallelujah? And will it seem to us, when the fascists come
Like cherries hanging on a chorus of song?

You may not see Horaijima

 

All Is Heiwa
 
 
You have had to wait
For the midpoint of your lifespan
To learn about Horaijima, island of
Everlasting happiness
 
Paradise Island
So very close, yet, as they say
You will never get there alive
With all there is behind
 
Behind you, desire
Across silences, a line of ripples
As eight geese caress the waters
In a line of purpose
 
Intrinsically paddling
Around and around Horaijima
White and black and mottled
And you notice, blinking
 
Wide-eyed
At their offering: A collective
Swimming salute to the banks
Across from Paradise
 
Where powerful black pine
The bonsaid pinus thunbergia
Poke the sun that follows the path
Of the curving shore
 
You may not see Horaijima
So close it is so far, its sugi, straight
Cedar Into sky. However, your body
Curves against mine
 
On the banks of Keiunto
Island of the Auspicious Cloud
Where all is heiwa, all is heiwa
Again, heiwa