Three “Invisible String” poems (after Jim Moore)

I do not like 

polishing the tea pots.
	My face, already 
		grotesque, reflected, distorted 
	even more in their surface.



~



I have nine books

borrowed from the library.
	Still, I am reading the one
		new book of poems
	I found at the thrift store.



~



We don’t know

the length, the breadth,
	the width, the height,  
		and certainly not the depth 
	of our unknowing.



~

Swimming

“If you do something in the spirit of non-achievement, there is a good quality in it. So just to do something without any particular effort is enough.”
Shunryu Suzuki



To make something of these times I 
must make something so I will find 
a frame in which to nail my thoughts. 
I cannot beat this lone silence

and I cannot take this seedless 
greening anymore, this yearning 
growth that knows only down and in,
only dragging my thoughts into 

the night where I cannot find them 
though I remember having them, 
remember how they felt if not 
how they looked, remember them close 

and warm, and thought them somehow grand 
or at least telling at the time 
I barely had them, but now? Now 
I barely have them even less. 

Now I am not sure if I have
them or if they have me. Now they 
are lost in their own depths, swimming 
silently in the rolling black 

medium of their making. Now 
they haunt me in their bare being
and unmake me and swim through me
and I will make nothing of them.

Counting, a shadorma

We both drum 
our fingers. He plays 
keys that aren’t 
there while I 
count imaginary feet    
and sole syllables.

Not the first wagon I fell off….

I’m afraid
I’ve fallen off the 
shadorma 
band wagon.
I’ve been draggin’ my ass but
enjoying the ride,

enjoying 
it well enough to 
keep it up. 
I reckon 
I’ll write some more, if thoughts fit 
form and times permit.












Shadorma November, Day...something or other.....hermits aren't good at keeping 
track of the days.

The palmist

The palmist
has cursed me always 
to wonder, 
did i miss 
that one thing that would have made 
me truly happy.










Shadorma November, Day 8 (late again...)

out here

so many 
more roadside wreaths out 
here where youth 
have so much 
less to do and yet so far 
to drive to do it










Shadorma November, Day 7 (six days late....)
(...or does that make it five?...)