Poetry Update #3

A Song to Dallas
______________

I know your cracked earth and
Southwest sky. The buildings
in the faraway haze my first
compass. You are like a lover or
a deity: aloof. Unknown but familiar.
The black spaces below your overpasses
and the clockwork of ten thousand
casually furious cars. What you taught
me: how to be sad wherever I am,
how to remember pain and man's
artificial masochism. How to want
Truth.


Severance
__________

The dog lies collapsed on the side
of the road, folded in on itself like an
old blanket set aside for no particular
purpose. Somewhere a woman is
upset because there is a dent in
the right front bumper of her new Lexus.


Thought
________

Awake, trying to find something
that approaches Truth. Turning over
old poems, old conversations, shaking
the dust of a former ignorance.
My mind is a mold I cannot feel.
It is a container that breaks itself,
hunting the sharp horizon
in the vast expanse of the known.

Poetry Update #2

    On Holding the Machinery in My Hand

________________________________

There, the occipital lobe, the

frontal, the temporal. Cerebellum.

The mind in my hand smelled of

rubbing alcohol and plastic. Splitting

apart the soft mass to see the white

branching web of nerves cocooned

underneath. Touching it, I felt the ageless

desire awaken, the machinery of

thought trying desperately to understand

itself. Sensing the need to understand. 

Before it is shrink-wrapped in

a plastic bag

that smells of rubbing alcohol.

     Remembering a Rain Song
_______________________

The damp cold air shudders the
lungs, making breath more real than
thought. Water clinging to the trees.
Remembering a rain song, as
always, that sounds like the
pond at Bushy Park with
drizzle carpeting the waterlilies,
that sounds like the glistening stones
of the Hellfire House in the wind.