shed : May 2005

05.31.2005

Summer begins when yellowing hills marry wide blue sky
It has no name and I can't explain it, but I know it's real

Passion, like a keel, penetrates a soul's current and sails on
When no one hates it more than you, it has become you

05.30.2005

Fool: not a dunce, but a man of small wisdoms who overrates himself
Fool: takes his pleasure in an idea shorn of context and essential detail

05.29.2005

Family life: single | singling; dual | dueling; plural | pluraling
They don't know how to live their grief, they make you live it for them

05.28.2005

Mind: it works the fleeting whats and whos of time into wholes
Neon: a resident presence of flickering words is not so weird

Dead, now and forever; where is your face before you are born?
Circa a very long time ago nothing spun around — then bang!

That's impossible to read, all you can do is take in the words
Giving everything and taking it all away, time stays faithful

05.27.2005

Two crows pick at the squirrel flattened like a pizza on the pavement
Almost thoughtful with hop & peck, unlike flies who swarm on death

05.26.2005

Misheard cold as culled for months after it killed her
The part that wasn't cancer, its unfinished hold on us

05.25.2005

"I'd like to see that again" — and you can by pushing the button
You can't capture the gone, memory is made to order; it's all gone

05.24.2005

He squared up the account
He squared around to bunt

A shape figures a surround
Void swallows intentionality

Space swallowed the nouns and time digested them
They were ground and ground and ground down to dust

The new open space was brash in its particular absence
He accessorized his emotions with everything lyrics allowed

A body's bounty taxes the capacity of language
Time is deluged by cunning's relentless knowledge

The jottings were scrutinized and sifted for their scraps
In the dream he juggled fish while converts got baptized

05.23.2005

A window is a wish
Conscience is a kettle

No man is an island
An island is a memory

The Grand Canyon of Time is never seen from the rim
A fissure in time is what each identity proposes

He wants to number the glamorous
She tries to disintegrate the familiar

Nothing's more personal than strategies of evasion
Sad song: wonder wounded everyone

The lyrical void touches its tongue to the loins
Desire in the finite text mimics a heavenly music

Pattern produces a sense of order
We order more than we need

05.22.2005

A muddle of voices in swirling brown water
Flowers spill from plump clay pots atop a wall

White sails on the mud-green bay blown along in morning sunlight
Ultra-yellow stucco house w/ultra blooming bougainvillea trellised out front

Wildflowers compete with gardens; island competes w/bridge
Sight is saddled with ceaseless occurrence

The green vine climbs the stucco wall up the drainpipe
Necklace of plastic pearls (?) dangles from a power-line

The actual plural is more populous than the actual view
A frame aids the good, which protects thought from too much reality

Words allow labeling of variables
Desire morphs into hallucination

05.21.2005

Suddenly, big stillness of May heat in which everything's so busy
Light like this — so bright to memory — just goes slipping by

Gradually the standup, soft animals started thinking
Millions of years — that's what they ended up thinking

As he aged, he began to feel the same about one thing after another
Gradually, out of the slap-dash days, more noes than yesses

Confusing conversations are most likely held with the self
Words can be a tremendous improvement on the original

Tendencies sometimes arrive at a state of grace
Need is required to complete the deal

The excerpt that best represents the whole is shock
The activity that most matches knowledge is dreaming

05.20.2005

The season tries to go beyond its limit
Memory is invoked in defense of flesh

Sometimes "beauty" just drowns you like a flashflood
You've got to live it (roused) if you want to add to it

Spring pleasure: steam smoking off the blacktop as clouds rise & rain eases
Spring wisdom: continuous versatility of time converges with identity

Of all versatilities, memory's most used and least whole
Memory retards time and difficulty while arousing desire

What darkness we swim in, lapped at each day by the roil of time
The roiling rivulet is regal, relentless, sluggish, deadly and majestic

05.19.2005

Though made to keep you in, the fence beckons
You've seen it; it's seen (& teased) you — ordinary muscles start thinking

That thing's so fast there's no darkness in it!
The thing that thinks absence pales before brilliances of days

He looked good, but he wanted a story to hide in
Poetry kit: grass, thunder, dead ants, 98.6° in the shade

05.18.2005

California invents a climate of calculation
Investment bankers have the worst dreams

The shining rain buries all its coins in the soul
The ever-patient earth endures the metaphysics

05.17.2005

Building a wall or a fence? A question for sentences
Fences and gates; sentences and words

The question concerning words leads back to desire
Eyes full of moon, and heart . . . the heart full of desire

Misheard no fences as no sentences; we walked on a windy hill
Grey-green bay, May-blue sky, bridged Golden Gate

On the way to work: rhododendron, nasturtium, bougainvillea, bottlebrush
The music of the genius of the place is the mother of desire

Complete thought: desire desire desire
Persistent fragment: previous previous previous

All thoughts are fragments; all words are clues; all clues are clocks
Desire is the mother of death — death of the mother the beginning of beauty

05.16.2005

These words (nothing really) are all that will care my light was on at 3 a.m.
All my friends in the alphabet have made other plans with the dictionary

He approaches the edge, clears a spot, places it there, backs off
Returns later, clears again, leaves another (repeats, building a wall)

05.15.2005

They are working on healing the rifts in the rain
They would like to please their mother

The hardest part is seeing into things
Nothing else even comes close

05.14.2005

Sunlight goes off like a gun
The moon collects the gloom

Debris is hauled off and used as landfill
It begins to seem the soul may, indeed, be immortal

To do work I choose words from the unemployment line
Green is my bodyguard; blue is my redemption

05.13.2005

Misread field as yield, and saw wide open space relax
When drugs kicked-in the pain (and the brain) relaxed

Concrete: sun shoe tree shore hive sticks heaven gate pine men
Abstract: fun flew me bore dive mix leaven weight line zen

05.12.2005

Acute: world's voices ebb; bowels are mud, as are lungs
Blackout: felt time's truncheon, never knew what hit

Chronic: while seasons ignore you, time figures you out
Alone: the private voice is so lewd, if given half a chance

Who cleans up after? It just heals, or fades
Paint fades, even so the painting lives on

What's the matter? Muon, lepton, neutrino, quark and dark stuff
So who cares? He so loved the world He gave His only Son

Dogs bark in the dark, earth spins, jokes are told
Blind man walks into a wall, new knowledge that lacks vision

Exile's the last utopia, language the least prison
The ultimate gift is the logic of private time

05.11.2005

Cloud culture plows up soft ground under silver-bladed spring rain
As the oceans begin to warm cumulonimbus continue to slowly spin

Our job is to renew the wasted when no one gives a shit
The reader's job is to fact-check the dictionary's imagination

Imagination marries reality (a marriage of convenience)
Reality is the Mother Tongue (a high maintenance bride)

Reality's job is to purify the life of the tribe
The tribe imagines a beginning and an end

05.10.2005

A public agrees (at least) on respect for the dead and desire to imitate
The ways of saying notice this are few and ruthlessly imitated

Endless imitation makes it hard to imagine reasons for new stories
The garden plot is different from and (perhaps) older than the story's plot

Cult, culture, cultivate — plow to the end of the line and turn
Plant the seeds, plant the predecessors too, for sustenance

You can say anything to words, they can't say everything back to you
The little lamp burned late into night and the dish ran away with the spoon

I would have scoffed to see such a sight if it hadn't been there in the room
It has given me the sharp taste of a new fear, that much I grant it

And then came the nights when dawn was the only soporific
Wont you? Wont you? (dream); You cant! You cant! (mockingbird)

I knelt to touch the name in stone; later, kneeling alone, she did the same
When does every plot come down to a handful of words? In a cemetery

05.09.2005

Mother wouldn't allow it and Father wouldn't oppose her
Letting go of holding back was an awkward, loud beginning

05.08.2005

As fast as words said them, facts disappeared in thin air
Child shakes her head and hums her sounds for I will not

05.07.2005

The intentional destination is never the one you arrive at
A sentence that goes where expected is never worth singing

05.06.2005

The May wind sounds different (the new leaves) than December's
Some seasons I want by the mouthful, some thru the nose, all by the eyeful

05.05.2005

They are pleased by how much nakedness is left in them
The way she fell asleep prevented him from doing the same

05.04.2005

His soul got prozaced, the meat of him sped down the road to ruin
The Honda Xanax; the Lincoln Lipitor; the Pontiac Viagra

05.03.2005

Early on the ear evolved and caught the sound of rustling leaves
The sound of leave taking haunts prayer like an echo of the Big Bang

New leaves unzip you; forever unzips you; night the rain the sex unzip you
Your portion is sweat and sleep, sweat and meat and sleep and ashes

Dark-matter gets culled out by the blood cults
The heart lilts and fibrillates approaching a moist border

Dark- and anti-matter collude to unsex the clock
Odds are long, the heart forevers, but mind is just ticked off

The clock was ticking long before the heart was beating
In the end the heart beats the clock to the finish line

Marking each meaningless minute, the mindless clock tickles the hours
Auntie Matter and Uncle Meaning have baptized all your cousins

It was a mean border town like so many others
The weak heart needed a clinic, and quickly

It's better to have tossed and turned than never learned at all
In the end the clock's clumsy hands have fondled you all over

05.02.2005

No one tells me anything | A little bird told me
Summer is made of language unlike December's

An emptiness fills up the sky and the clouds can't stop it
What you tell me now won't last, what you can't say will

What is whole if pressure of words must explain it and imitation plays a part?
Who cares where the doubt comes from, it's the coal in the diamond of me