Tag Archives: ending

NO EASY MEASURE

NO EASY MEASURE

there are many ways
to start a poem
maybe an image, a theme
a rhythm
    bouncing
around in your head
snake-like
    rasp of  word

many ways too,
to enter a poem
linear or
       non-linear
syntactic
or symbolic

feeling your way
set to full tactile

             or up
for helicopter shot
to view
    as mosaic
put
everything
in perspective

then
fill in the detail
                induced, deduced
seduced
at your pleasure

although
          linger on
this thought
if you will, let us dissect
this
dark treasure

only
fair to point out,

to leave a poem, however,
(speaking
      of seduction)
is no
easy measure

here is the poem
here is we are
                     unexpectedly
together

not so many ways down
from that height
this height,
routes
     out of the labyrinth
                              this
labyrinth

safe and
   without cost

hardly enough
    to count on the
fingers
of one hand

so many surrendered
to the poem, dissolved,
got
   absorbed by
poetry

something about
the beauty
    of this python still
to comprehend

as it
   closes the circle
you now mine forever

GHOST STORY

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)

MASS


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

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?