Consolation (Without A Compass)

Down in the calm guts of mind

(but what are you talking about--

what does that even mean, who's

   the size of it--a humanoid 

         halo 

            around a brain? the

slip and flotsam of anything 

that can be sensed or convened?)

intricate blinks of time

dry up into rainbeads of scenes 

that can't think:

the cyrillic alphabet 

was formalized by 

Russian monks 

in the Middle Ages….

Vauvenargues and

De Maistre were

butchers of cold measure,

sharp as aphorisms…

at the northwest base

of Mt. Fuji lies 

"The Sea of Trees", 

Aokigahara,

where yurei (ghosts)

wander the radius of

their suicides. Forestry

workers often find 

bodies

hanging from trees in

various shapes of 

decomposition, cut them

down and, according to

custom, in a small hut

sleep next to the body the night after

it's found. Their means of deciding

whose turn it is? Paper rock scissors

(each in their own way a suicide 

instrument). Out there in the cold

wastes where trees practice disappearance,

compasses aren't reliable, massive 

iron deposits pulse beneath the forest. 

Just the place where a person can go

to lose that despairing energy 

that's breaking them down into

smaller and smaller versions of itself...

or maybe just where they go

to finally be found, untied, carried.

Then laid carefully on a well-made bed

in a room that's one person less 
                      alone. 

Metaphor Before The Fall

A life built on wishes--

   the shape of 

        sculpted air

after a house of cards has fallen. 

All fifty-two have to implode 

to render gravity visible,

even if for one slow second. 

To show how the 

air still holds. Behind

eyes pressed closed, the outline

of that fragile high rise

framing the silhouettes of 

other minds you can't imagine. 

In they went, down they go

and for a zero brief moment 
to stand alone above the

wreckage of hearts and clubs and diamonds. 

La Jollans

Thirty two seals bask on a

crescent beach at La Jolla, 

   molt, flop

against each other like

fat commas, laze in a 

private mist of sandflies. 

A crowd of cameras and sunglasses

   stands over them.

From the voyeuristic heights

of a rock jetty, observers 

in a surgical theatre--cheering on

the patient at the expense

   of

so many doctors. Because

those cows and calves and 

bulls those wallowing clouds

of fudgy sleep fart and budge

like cells exiled from the

    ocean's

dimpled quaking body, we see then think.  

Comedians within, beasts without, 

   washed ashore

without a map of California

that lay there and free 

the smiles trapped in our faces. 

"They're like babies," one

lady says, then again in Spanish. 

So content and safe 

   in their species

           they can lay there and 

weigh not a thing

and assimilate the free innocence

we flounder in, when we

stand above, cheer them on

an hour without envy, 

   no arms, no legs, 

for the art of thriving in one's fat and proving nothing. 

The Genealogy of Horrors

         Demonology of 

discriminate misanthropy, flaws

that feed feeling energy when they're 

cracked or sighted. And on the

other end, the advance of one sleeper leaf

after another, but nary a tree to hang on. 

Between them, 

filiaphilia blossoms like sick phlox, a

fetishization of hug and handshake

and terms of endearment intricately weathered. 

It loves, it loves not, but me, me, me…

killing daisies by yanking their sun-wings off

(like the toenails of wishes). On YouTube

the remains of a

2007 interview

with George Carlin, about his

near objective contempt 

for the human race. Dressed in 

black to emphasize the lack of

wisdom and excess of sharp truth

in his white hair and beard, 

he's explaining how he got here. 

From disappointment to 

      disgust, there's

a short walk; but from disgust to

indifference, the way is long 

and punctuated and strengthened

by paranoia

and anguish. America had some good ideas

early on, despite slavery et cetera,

but for a while there there was this

   golden window when

we could have actually brushed up against

   one or two ideals (which we 

did, and legislated them). But then

we were too lazy, too entertained

to make it stick [so says 

          the entertainer]. His 

conclusion? Suicide 

  is a donation

to a worthy cause. Affirms life

by removing the ruinous clutter. 

A year or so later he 

died of heart failure. Leave it 

to the papers to emphasize. 

But not the obvious: 

given an option, he refused 

   a transplant. 

If They Should Think Ill Of Her

She scared the loneliness in herself

with a homemade Loch Ness--

a monster daydreaming a lake

to create a landborne nightmare. 

Each pill was inexplicable. It

hurt to have a head with a 

childhood, so she crunched 

five or six between her teeth

per day to be flowingly adult

and headless. People are allergens,

with their opinions and desire

to fix things. But what happens

when the hum that binds your

arms and legs and torso and

mental weather together

is also a fatal irritant? Until

you're there and nowhere else

but always elsewhere and 

no one, abandoned on the 

couch in the middle of the

lightless afternoon, looking at

your hands that open before you,

covered in disappearing hives?

If only sitting there were enough

to make her truthful (and it is).

The people who look at her 

and see her and even more than

that, would know who 

they were holding when they

put their arms around her.

And so would she. That even

pain is pure and wonderful. 

Ann In Key Of Carter

The visionary cruelty of nature--

surviving on dimes

      under an alopecian sunset. 

The star daylight lives by

bleeds through space with no hair. 

Five guys break into an office building

to steal computers. How the

       keys were nabbed:

a man named Carter 

beds a friend of his sister's, 

supervisor of the Hayward Building. 

One Sunday out to pick up

her kid's daddy, he 

drugs the keys on her kitchen hook

and clones them at Rook Hardware. 

When she comes home 

with a stress full of groceries

and her baby daddy growing

out of the heart of her kid, there's

Carter, picking a sitcom from his teeth. 

Well enough gets along around them. 

Then 

weeks later, after the night janitor tumbles

    down the steps 

like some last speck of trash, they cut

in quick by the side door

and therein nature takes its course. 

Thirty-five Dells. Monitors stacked

    on mail carts

            and backpacks 

impregnated by iPads. Half an hour

and they flow out the rear door

into a maintenance van and

vanish like friendships in a city. 

Kindness is the quickest camouflage, 

Ann's sister Tia

tells her. Just look at him. Across

the yard Carter raises his beer to 

spy the blank bud of the sun

without scalding his naked retinas. 

He and Tim, her ex, toss horseshoes

in hard arcs

twenty paces

where iron stakes brace like

stingers in the ground. A week ago

he shaved his head and he's smiling.

She could call him out

and he knows it, but 

what kind of proof

would she be calling to? Because

she was there, he was near--

comfortably careful. Staring down 

heaven

through the mediation of beer.

Quick and The Bed

Your mind to the 

left of you, in bed, with the rest

   of the furniture, 

knees drawn up to your chin

and me thinking, this is a 

fine time to remember something--

to come back again and again. 

              All manner of 

shine scouts out its source,

the light on your legs bare skin. 

   What was the joke

you did a handstand on, resting

the back of your shredded bedhead

on the windowsill? Can't remember,

but there was real brown making a 

beeline from your eyes

as you laughed 

   across the 

          punchline, delivered

Chicago-style, deadpan. 

"I don't enjoy raped pizza."

To wit: be respectful of leftovers. 

In short: make me a kiss. 
So I did.