Ours

Think about the shadow of work
All our lives we were there
Just as in love
We were under someone’s shadow
Long dark scroll of hair
On the nape of a neck
When we visited the ocean we stared at it
From long rows of metal chairs
We were an army of the paralyzed
It was okay to be obliterated by wincing blue light
Is the hawk passive as it flies
Looking for blood to become hunger
Our dreams wonder to themselves
While we are asleep and paralyzed
In between asking themselves
If we are the real ones
If we are the real thieves

 

From a Parking Lot

The stone is independent of the mirror it says
It says
The grit under the stone is aware of music
Pass
The cloud surveying this scene is bitter
Rain
The human running for its little car
Sings
The cherry tree relocated from a war
stands in a parking lot next to a Staples
flirts
shamelessly
with
a poem

Winterreise

shopping cart cross
asphalt, blown to wind
on empty parking lot
blow across void
face the STAPLES:
(illuminated word)

blow wind, cross
the void of face
illuminated asphalt
empty shopping
on, across, cross
blown by STAPLES

void illuminated
face the

Twenty-Five Minutes

It seems everything important
happens in twenty-five minutes.
Why have I spent my years
like the candles in paintings
centuries old, sooted,
focusing on days?

Here, please chuck
this busy beaver for me

back into that lake.

Sitting

Zen is not your irony.
Board. Raindrop on eye glass,
singular pigeon. I roll
my pencil toward you,
the pencil runs back
across a desk top.
There’s a constant
earthquake bridge
making this motion,
human communication.
Score another one
for ancient supercomputer
Buddha. Ingrained
ways of being quiet,
useful. The flower
is held by a stem
but appears to hover.
It’s this effect
we see, and
not the thing
itself.
It lifts us
by trick
of yellow bloom,
thought
as.