‘Time is the fire in which we burn.’
—Delmore Schwartz
A weight is lifted.
The earth is round.
The earth is full.
The moon is high and bright.
It lights my way
when the sun is hidden from me.
The sun is a mystery.
The sun is my enemy.
The sun is too bright.
It burns and blinds me and
it cooks me where I stand.
"The words are already fixed in the storehouse of the memory."
--Robert Graves
the poem exists
before the poem is written
a small shard of gravity
pulls from the world
to its center
wisps of passed
and passing things
and non-things
as they pass
throws off words and
spins the written poem
Pressure
Between
crushing pressures
at the centers of things
and pressure-less vacuum, there is
just this.
Just this—
this thin skin of
volition holds our hearts
within our chests and holds its beats
in check.
In check-
ered overlays
on all we see, the mind
beats against the shadows that lie
between.
(We have just opened a restaurant.
I'm averaging 16-18 hour workdays,
and 4 hours of sleep, if I'm lucky.
None the less, I will attempt
NaPoWriMo....No guarantees....
we'll see how this goes.)
the way of the mind is levity
getting always lighter and lighter
for all these hundreds of thousands
of years and now so far away
it thinks
its self
a part
separate
it thinks itself to pieces
and pieces its self apart
it has thought itself into
other planets, other orbits
around other suns of thought
other sources of seeing itself
its pieces
its self pulls
it apart
predicates
abdicate
and
participles
don't participate
but dangle
in odd angles
of mobile meaning
our sense of tense is
tenuousness at rest while
our tense itself is senseless
tensile strength is useless
for holding all this together
(…they make the same sound as turds when they hit the pavement…and I think they have the same kind of sex as snails…)
First they like to start with a bit of sleazy funk music, perhaps a little
You know, something to get the juices flowing…
and then….
Shpronnngggonnnggggonnnnggggonnnnggg
…they bounce down
stretching languourously
on their mutually constrained strand of mucus
guckglickxxchtkxxpft
blue things come out of the sides of their respective heads
co-mingling so….
bluely
as they entwine gracefully tangling
and dangling
in mid-air
phphphpllllllaaaaaaaaatzzzzzzz
…slowly—
eh-eh-eeeever so slowly dropping onto
the ground
under the airy bed
of their copulation….
SSssthlip.-.-.-*pop*
then “she”
(or at least my wife insists it’s a “she” even though they’re hermaphroditic
because “she’s” the one left in the wet spot while “he” has kissed and ran
….well, sort of just slurped off)
snips off that string–the last severing act of their
long
longitudinal
drop of lust.
Disgusted?
Revolted?
Yeah, I was too.
But you couldn’t stop watching either, could you?
It all takes about 18 minutes or so.
I have 67 glossy, digital, time-stamped images to prove it.
I keep them with my etchings.
Would you care to come up and see them some time?
A Prayer Like Gravity 