There is rage inside me

For Mary Shelley  

“There is rage inside me the likes of which should never escape.” Frankenstein

Canvas can be draped, and you’ll be my Grecian

Closures carefully stitched echo in twine below ground

Some rearrangements are more thoughtful than others, you see

Token, token, talisman, tether

A younger me haunts this ghost story

Looking at me looking over my shoulder, wondering if we’ll make it and always the amateurish attempts at taking things apart

Holding it so close I can’t see down any road

Time is orbiting all of us like we’ll care again

A candle that burns twice as fast costs just as much despite increased productivity and that’s the motherfucker

First came cloaks lined in fur, then came marriage

Houses into homes and cities and towns

There was a services sector

Everything placed between every other thing

Defenses were constructed

Mistakes were made with fences

And we all went on living.

What Could Be Done

Showers soon show something significant

How many miles north by west

Those three phases heard here

More the pressure, more the heat

Someone had to be the first windsurfer

It all comes out wrong except the sun

What makes it matter makes it count

The weight of it all as it collapses

More of the Same

How Many Pieces How Far

At some point the angles stop adding up

Torque meets time rather than try a little tenderness

And waves of whatever drown out the wonder

Graying figure and graying field

There’s no way home now

So we stick and move till we make new spaces

Thread threats to whose trouble now

But every matter leaves a mark

Sounded seams on covered ground 

Two of us and then three of us and then more

How does it end

What You See or Feel

Pressure nailed

Erased in column

Air and sea and certainly stone

Following faithful to heart

Fast-found the squandered castaways

Call it what you will

Deep breaths, calisthenics, cardio

Overhead and through it

River water again

And the first and second rails

Miles of perspective

What Says Who to 60

You are a measure of distance

You are a clearer day

I am a spinning full stop

I am a forgotten cache of grapes

They are amassed and stamping

They are suddenly and uncharacteristically clear-eyed

We are fields left fallow, carbon capture, renewable resources

We are going nowhere now

You are many in the face of despair. So many.

Captured Class

What a difference a definition can make

What a cake, what a day, what a beautiful bride

Picture don’t last forever and memories are always being refigured

And so the light falls on the walkway just so

And so falls an entire way of life on a particular day

Or maybe it’s a million airborne interlopers.

No room for parachutes here and no room for prayer.

Nothing for rent, nothing to borrow, and still, sea-levels rising everywhere.

What to order when one is facing down the end?

Not to fear, the world doesn’t end, they say,

But we certainly do.

And again the backup singers queuing for auditions.

And look at all of Nashville holding its breath.

If we can’t finally slip these strings, all is lost.

When the Weather Was

When the moon mists, let’s say

Or when you’re steering into the groove of a hard turn

And there are stiller truths waiting for you.

What is bad? What must rise?

I fall asleep before the visitors arrive

Again and again I’m myself all over again.

How would you have it? Whole-hearted but also quick

All the days in a pile, all the nights on a string.

It’s the sea that begets mist, begets fog, begets centuries-old sentinels.

And you, laughing in the face of any silence.

But you’re saving the best jokes for Permanence

Because all our lives are braided into the End of the World.

Every decision made as the plates shift beneath our feet

And spaces already impossibly far to cross are only getting farther.

What Address Is

Is there still life to be lived in six?

The problem in what goes back goes forth

As empty clubs lead us to lonely singers.

Italian would surely drift in at this point

If not earlier, if not the time of day

When the sun is slanting and the canals are aging

If not the weight of this life or its habits

Or the asymmetrical beneath all these symptoms.

It is the Great Uneven that brings me here

Again and again brings me to you

Leaving equations and details and derivative behind

Because before every road there was a path and before every path there was dust.

You have boots and I have boots, and we have the sun.

We’ll keep making sense just long enough. 

So Very Sonnet

A collection of birds

Keen on adventure

Imperfect mornings, clouds, considerations

Impossible motes in very real eyes

It’s something magnetic this Sunday

Peacetime artillery would require peace

But there is cake and ice cream this time

The sun’s daily retreat, no less fantastic

Carving patterns and byways and that which will be

Let more air in

Welcome restraint

Admit resting, admit error, admit joy

Skywriting my passwords over the crowded beaches of crowded seaside towns

While we huddle around the last fire on earth and make funny faces

Come Again, Please

When we circle the clouds and here we are, safe

Or open one eye after another onto a new day

The sky, a door, a season, a safe

And the intentional way we put our palms to the table

Next, participating and/or breaking bread and/or outright celebration

We’re cycling through all the times of day, here

We’re doing our best with what we’ve been dealt, here

We’re caring for the elderly around the clock, here

We’re making potatoes and making it, both

Don’t bother me with this static, it’s raining

I’m a up to my ears, but will it ever be enough?

What will we be left holding whenh the bell rings?

And so the calls for a little bit softer now

As the real begets the real-real at the end of all things

I Mean We Say Wow

At every turnstile of every subway

And all the points packed tight we call it educational

The Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta, the Babylonians, and the first guy to build a fence

Various clergy, restaurants, and battlefields

If we could can this air

If we could bottle this coffee

If we could slide into the right boat on the right night with just the right drinks in our belly

The nights we dance, the nights we hold onto

We’ve forgotten enough interesting people to field an army

We’ve smashed idols and we’ve crushed dreams

Swollen moments, several sunsets, and you’ve got all manner of livestock

That’s how it began and that’s how it will continue

A pair of pants, some good shoes, and

You’ve got it from here