Monday, November 24, 2008

God must love crazy people

He made so many of us
When we talk to ourselves
on a busy street and we are not
talking into a cellphone
he smiles

When we start arguments out of nothing
and imagine persecution
so person we bleed, literally we bleed
he wants to cry

When we miss the rent because
we had to spent the only money we had
on a Krazy Kat clock with ping pong eyes
it is fulfilling as if this
was what the universe was for

When we weep ourselvbes to sleep
because we can't seem to change
and we drive everyone we love
out into the night cursing
it matters, it matters a great deal to him

Must must love crazy people or why
would he make them the way that they are
impossible to put with
and unhealable as disease

Hhe loves us because
we remind him of him
Incomprehensible
to the heart

Sunday, September 7, 2008

New Found Land

Beheaded

The word has been undermined
so you think of mattocks
and stained chopping blocks

but it should be a term of approval
as in, that that is one well-beheaded young man,
and he will go places

or her beauty was beheaded with
a diadem of roses that pulsed
with fragrance in the dying light

or for use in a vow
when it must be especially clear
what we intend, as I'll
beheaded home to you

The Great Chain of Being

File upon file, every species standing on the shoulder of another species,
every individual within each species standing atop the one almost as worthy as him,
but not quite, like the rings of saturn that go on forever,
and somewhere in there is the least worthy person, standing on the shoulders
of a perspicacious ape, or maybe the ape has eclipsed him already

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Unmitigated gall

The oak tree has a gall around its trunk,
the only exception to its perfect upright lines
but it makes the tree look pregnant
and suggests a shortened life.

But what does a tree think.
The water rises, the sugar is distributed,
the leaves splay out in the sun
like stewardesses on layoff.

Photosynthesis wants no more than this
and the effect of hideousness
at the waistline, a tumor of wood
that throws everything off kilter

is minimal, or less.
Life goes on despite deformity
despite circuitousness
despite all obstacles to our flow.