GHOST STORY
a perfect storm
winds from the East
winds from the South
converge
tearing through the streets
making a nonsense of your hopes
of a full
Mediterranean side-
walk café life
sipping a latte, sitting in the Sun
reading Proust or Sartre
nothing in those books
talk about
how the ghosts, the sins,
have caught
up
with you
(at least none
that you do read
none that you can see)
FORWARD
push
the clocks forwards
ten thousand years
see
what happens
if nothing, the world is unchanged
the feared nuclear
apocalypse
never happened
or it did
and only
set us back
ten thousand years
SONG
Christmas
did not last long
soon
went wrong
something soured
about its laughter
from
what I can tell
little peace out there
to any
or all men
bells drowned out
by the bombs
the bells
masking.
MASS
leaving before it
all gets sweaty
leaving
before it all goes
bottom up
as if
it were impossible
to get exactly this bad
as if things
could get worse
than extinction level
you mumble this in your
corporate-trained best
political voices
as if
for years, millennia in fact,
you haven’t been trying
your best
hitting the highway away
out of town, out
of this dimension
before
there is no
read to speak of
all of cosmic mind thanks
to our level of care
and consideration
rolled
up, and
squished into an agglutinative mass
LAST
this should be
my last poem
the process
has become fraught
protection permeable
hostile takeover imminent
constant suppression, much
infiltrating
you look at what
is on this page
ask: is this how
savages, animals
write these days?
and you fighting with every bone,
every breath
for consensus?
so many conceptions, contending
definitions at play
out of this problemmatic
few crossovers, no
idea miscegenation
things you
believed getting tunneled under
tunneled through
and always, still
same overriding question
is this how poetry, a single
poem should look
and then what about
humanity, in what image
a single human?
FROM THE PLACE
I write
from the place where
dreams come
to be
extinguished
when space, no longer
finds itself available to
generate
a rich tapestry
and all our ideas
what we were, what
we are
comes to be recycled
and the energies that
command, take charge
are
no longer our own.
poems 2 die for