Last Day on Earth, or Experiments With Time

this is a yellow day
a green day
a sorry day
this is a proud day, this
is the first and the last
day, these are the last
moments crisp and fully
saturated, lost in livers,
erased like bitter bits,
these are days without
memories, released from
time's grip with strings
and feathers to catch
nightmares, we dream
our futures, dream them
like stories, deeply written
scratched into cores like
collective breath, like
rhythm without time, like
precognition, we emit
green light, we know
only green light,
we are dripping
in green light,
we never were
and we are forever

The Mercy Runners

I am a good man
    in a borrowed world,
Said the mouth as it
Fluttered off the face

Connected to its destruction.
     In this case, a drug leper

     halfway through the
Upper intestine of
Lower history—Cleveland

Under northwest winter.
Everything is letting go,
     everything,
Including the snow,

    Which one-ups
The logic of impoverished water.
Letting go of itself,

Landing as unannounced
        and minor
As an obituary

That walked one year to another
And moved no leaf in particular.
Momentum is the drug,
A job, a trip, an arrow

Drawn directly on skin--
    arranges
Generations

Like the smell of closets
        inside clothes.
Appointments, cancelled, kept, with

Nimble hooks of one
     look to another—
Sometimes propelled

By the choices of others,
    sometimes freed for

Sudden leaps forward.

Better to be mobile and
    enterprising, alert

Than slow as the
Problems one can't
           wrestle.
       Kept in speed,
Too quick to be

Grabbed or touched.
Like the shark, racing against
the danger of its heartbeat.
        Circling there,
And in that
way, for what?

...below the surface, out of
Pace, in unison, legs: flowering
    a figure eight current

That swims in place, but upholds
Like mercy on the run,
            everyone.

Of Two Kinds

Real poets harvest like

        angry ghosts.

Unreal poets are

Ambassadors of

     China tea cups.

One can’t sip so

Easily from another,

Can’t be lifted or

      sipped. Their

Worlds joined by

      a poorly-lit

Siamese motto:

“The desperate are

       to be trusted,

Seek their counsel.

When asked for an

Opinion, they’ll deliver it

Like fate.”  Since they

Have nothing to lose, they

have nothing to

grieve from giving.

Their indifference a

Kind of intelligence, a salted cliff

Scaled by naked slugs

Entirely beyond their bodies.

Unreal poets invent the rope.

But real ones?

...Die and then don't,

Wriggle invisible, with head, on a filth pin...

        dropped from

Unpublishable heights

Onto someone else's sharp rocks. To

Yank, and shake, then stand,

     and climb again.