Harvest

In the gloaming, you are grainy -

less like woodwork and

more like wheat.

You lull, and list, and luff, like seafields

fallow before frisked by my machines.

Yours is the smell of the midwest

- in the dusk of summer -

made manifest for the attempted harvest;

and oh, what seven years' famine

is carved by the sharpest scythe.

This spade, this plow, this pen, presumptuous

inventions, pretend to lend their edges

to a vain endeavor -

And still you lie like tender fields untamed;

I can only grasp you grain by grain.

~9/30/10

The Capitalist Puddle

There once was a puddle
that rained turned into a pond.
The more it poured,
it started toward
a lake with fishes and frogs.
Fed by flowing streams,
it burst along the seams,
and became a sea.

Then with sudden motion
it flooded its banks,
collected some lakes,
and turned itself into an ocean.

~01/2008

Paths

And insofar as paths go,
I generally retrace ones that
as a young and inexperienced tracer,
wobbled.

Accustomed to balance through
years of practice and logic,
my steps are straighter but less
joyful.

Is it a slow loss or one traumatic
point at which our eyes begin to
calculate and plan and lose the
moment?

Would our decisions be worse if we
stepped back in time and forced
our limited omniscience of adulthood onto
them?

And if so, should we approach
complex and unsolvable paths with
the naiveté and simplicity of
childhood?

My path has strayed and
only a child’s mind could
make it logical.


-12/27/08

standing at a bus stop in november

canvas - white out -
the ground is breathing, puffs
of smoke, soon to be torn
by tired tires -
there is a tension, a certain
tension to the taming of the
autumn rainbow -
it surrenders to erasure with
solemn - descent,
assured of mercy -
but apprehensive of its
trimestered resurrection -

canvas - black dot -
the howl of the hunt, the stalking
predator, swallowing its
willing prey -
there is a warmth, a certain
warmth inside the belly
of the beast -
and then an endless need to
migrate - to move,
attracted to the horizon -
life is merely an arc of
transient fantasies -


~11/09-04/14/10