***
1.
I have asked you and I have asked you
what is the story you are trying to
tell me what is the story you are
lacking a thread to lead me through
the maze of you I have lost my
bearings in the fog cannot make
out the next herm the blazed trunk
you folded that way curled round
gastropod foot tight to where I
could enter you flicker from a
distance that exceeds my fuel
my desire to cross lightyears you
at the galaxy’s edge ever receding
your story flaring behind a comet
dwindling until I can no longer***
2. Silence in the Plaza Hotel: Theme & Variation (Las Vegas, New Mexico)
I.
A public space with no muzak
demands tribute,
thoughts not forced
into brightness,
mouth not fed words
overly simple.
The high-ceilinged room
opens to a park,
room and park
both empty,
allowing the mind
to shake off
stiffness,
stretching sinews
of syllables
until it finds
full extension,
a holding,
then a letting go.
II.
The silence awaits thought,
thought aquiver like a mouse,
mouse awaiting the moment,
the moment of the zigzag dash,
the dash to the ripe round seed,
seed rich to bursting,
bursting through teeth,
teeth feeding the hunger,
a hunger ever unsated.
III.
Window light doubles each object, color and shadow,
plant, table, lamp, chair meeting my gaze in silence,
leaving me to decide if I am welcome or resented,
the room impatient to return to mute colloquy.
IV.
The silence intrudes
like an ocular migraine,
a strobing
spilling from eye to eye,
until the visual field
dances,
retina a plaything
of a brain
refusing to recognize
the known,
reveling
in its perfect storm.
V.
The table offers its back
to the open book, the scratching pen,
accepting the full weight
of devotion.***
3. The Personal is Parabolic Y=x2+1 for domain d= {-4≤x≤4}
I.
Such a cackling from the chicken with each egg as if the world should cheer
celebrating the cloacal, awestruck
by the smooth blankness.
Really?
What
of me?
Am I not also
a wonder at my desk, broody, laying,
each poem pecking its tiny egg tooth, desperate to be released?
II.
She swore the whip-its were for an art project. Many a parent has
believed such an outlandish claim. Why not?
Much easier than
the truth,
for
what is
truth, anyway? I
got up to hijinks and survived. Hip mom,
I cross my fingers and say, Just don’t do art-projects and drive, OK?
III.
Aren’t you as sick of political rants as I am? Admit it.
There’s only so much an artist can take.
And yet, to put our
heads in
sand
now means
a country like Wu Wei’s,
happy to inspire us behind barbed wire,
a cell’s blank walls perfect for screening artists’ dangerous corruption.