My worn, wilted words
Still hang on a cork board
By an espresso grinder;
Some say a woman came
And with white silken sleeves
Swept away kittens lost
A missing purse, jobs sought
To smile as she read aloud
My dregs stained verse.
Month: August 2013
Requiem for a Poet Who Died Obscure
If any where, you’re walking
Into the grand stadium of Valhalla.
Crowds cheer, chant, and roar
As if you were a football team
After a last winning goal.
You stride confident and strong
To a raised spot-lit podium
And soon will be ready to start
As hushed thousands await
Your verse to voice their hearts.
Gift of Itself
Life makes Life a simple gift,
wraps in parable and myth
a thing not so large it cannot
fit into a single lotus seed;
not so small it couldn’t bulge
and expand the cosmos,
not so near it does not shine
on numberless galaxies beyond sight
not so far its breath doesn’t
touch your ear on a warm night
all around and flowing within us
the heart’s blood of waking buddhas
who open their eyes laughing,
having dreamt we are glasses of water
deep in wondrous, rhythmic seas
Working from Home
Window installers tear out
Old window frames with ganas
And the whole day they do that
I lay on a sofa and herd data
Along in the electronic mist.
Their work is warranted for 30 years.
Mine vanishes before it exists.
Home for the Homeless
San Francisco’s best
To be an unclaimed corpse.
Every six months or so
A chartered excursion boat
Sails off with orphans of ash
Waifs of bone, blind and dumb,
To where gulls and buoys peal
Welcome welcome welcome!
Painter of Screens
Forty years studying bamboo
With brush and sumi ink
And capturing nothing at all;
Not sunlight slanting through
A grove’s greenness
As herd boys return at dusk
Nor choirs of tall stalks
Swaying in a dragon’s song
Of winds and rains.
🌱
Yard Sale
Just sold my nineteen sixty
Something ragtop, volumes
Of Ferlinghetti and Ginsburg,
An orgasm lamp that painted
Ancient nights crimson,
Posters from Fillmore and Avalon.
What else is there to do
With cats you depend on?
Carp at Dragon Falls
No hooks nor lures
On that shimmering line
Which, fin over fin,
Out of crystal turbulence
They climb to soar
And glide into baskets
Woven of fig bark
And lotus root, happy
In each other’s company.
The Balking Dead
I’ll never understand the living
Why they run screaming from us
And make god-awful homicidal
No-budget movies depicting us
Mucking about at a menacing
Tortoise’s pace instead of lying
In green long abiding ease
Or sitting on a cool marble slab
Having a smoke and telling jokes
Of who the hell we were.
The Hoover Sutra
Karma is a big living room rug
That looks okay, clean enough
Can wait another month or so.
But when you finally vacuum it
The see-through chamber teems
With feral herds of dust bunnies,
An aggregate of one’s thoughts,
Words and deeds. We all wonder
Where does that all come from?
Has it something to do with me?
Words at a Funeral
from dust to atom
and neutron to quark
Life blossoms forth;
karma is the spark
Cats
They live in each other’s
warmth, side by side
by a window box,
absorbing sunlight
to share only with themselves.
Can you remember
we were once them?
