Poems

Yesterday I did something I disapprove of. I will do another thing I disapprove of today, and tomorrow too, weather permitting. This is opposite of what I was taught. I was taught to do right repeatedly until I could not help myself, until the habit of rectitude...

I stand at the kitchen counter, knife poised silver over the bamboo board scarred from years of culinary  cuts. In this most recent present I chop carrots, potatoes, parsnips, turnips, and a light green succulent cellulose called celery. Half inch pieces, slice after...

The lamb speaks softly of dying. Dogs repeat verses of meat and bones. Chickens scratch haiku with ancient feet. The pig snorts a sonnet concerning corn. The cat meters her lines in a rhythm of rust. The bones of the horse know the ballads of running, they sing them...

  In L. A. – six days and the city is softening into my body, map lines convert to somatic recollection; this coin operated laundry, this green cracked stucco building, this steel-gated pawn shop, this glass wall throwing off the sun, this broken pavement...

I live well without seed, without oxen, without yoke or plow, without the threshing floor, without fire burning through night, without a watering hole, without the cock’s crow waking the sun, without a shepherd, without sheep, without wind through the rough board...

For reasons unclear to me now, my friend Tom and I sat in a ditch before dawn, neither drunk nor injured, to watch the birth of the sun over the junk weed litter of the world. Knowing philosophy arises from standing at odds with the consensus,  we hunkered among...

Sitting middled & arounded,  in the extreme center  of swirl and flow,  I fight hard  through dense mildness of thought,  for the edge, the boundary, the border,  the place where beyond resides.  I want to live close to distance.  I want to be where B e i n g is...