This life is not mine, and that is not yours.
We hold only slender shoots, single notes,
Singular bells, green then dark then silent.
Rough, we drink our joys and sorrows
From a well that runs ever deep, ever
Drowning deep, but still and ultimately dry.
Are we each or are we all? Illusory ghosts,
Spirits fleshed and undressed, by turns
Boisterous and quiet, hot and chill, atoms
And ions entangled, untangled, blazing
And broken, too much too fast to stay
A course, always picking ourselves up
From the rocks, undone, released for life.



Cold and sleeping trees
Verdant recall and promise
Knowing hope is love


Digging Leviathan

The dream is still there, even if it’s etched in glass
And a sandstorm is bearing down, the hit or miss
Uncertain as a long and sleepless, starless night.
I hate to hope, unreason reasoning that longing
Begets distance, a monster birthed by troubled sleep.
There has to be a low door in the wall, however small.
The dream is an orchard summering on the far side,
Light and ripe and sweetly fragrant yellow fruit
Like murmurous, laughing constellations of sun,
Like love and warm hands, like green memories.
There has to be a way, because hope is all there is.


American Carnage

America is eating itself.
A cabal of carnal cannibals,
A carnival of carrion,
Dead men overdrawn
With every kind of hunger.
Feasting on the poor,
The weak, women and children,
Even the dead, these men
Will never stop, never
Surrender until the world
Has been devoured.
And the despairing, desperate
And driven hordes of nobody
And nothing will throw
Themselves onto the bonfire
Until nothing is left.
The doors are all closed,
Windows locked, there is no way out.
Ululating at an empty sky,
Books in ashes, we are driving
For open water in a diving bell
That is an anchor, a sound,
A final resting place in the deep
Dark of a last murder spree
And suicide.


Just Today

Like a door slammed across my fingertips
I miss you with a pain so hard and reverberant
That I can scarcely think or move; a hundred
Miles is a thousand years and I’m nowhere
At all anymore, untethered and undone
But knotted through every artery and vein,
Breaking my heart over a moment’s missed joy
And burying the remains under limitless stone.
This is an endless flight, ever aloft and falling.


Left Behind

An ash desert, winds bearing nothing
But dead dreams, and memories of green.
Hollow world, the creation of hollower men
Gone mad with machines, digging leviathans,
Giants of the deep lusting, burning, blind.
Sweet fruit of the earth goodbye, beauty
Of lost animals forgotten, a steady drum
Of the end beating like a black heart.
We are falling, failing fast, sailing
Toward solitudes quieter and darker
Than any we have known.
I am scared my love,
My loves, sleep
Is coming


Lemon Ode

The sweetest sun sleeps at dawn
And the bitterest twist cuts like a winter night
This heart is full and frozen



Fonder and weaker, the longing heart
Grows like a gianting star, huge and
Enveloping as magnetic forces ground
To clouds of dust, pinpricks of awareness
And awe, shrill alarms like scattered prey.
But love is still and quiet and strong as blood,
Forgetting nothing, dammed and pooled for
Its release, one river into another and then
Into the waters of the Earth where I will
Always find you come hell or storm or none.


The Sooth of Sisyphus

A hundred thousand years of struggle,
Good against banal evil, every great
Achievement a monument immediately
Undermined by base and venal fools.

Now we, good and evil, edge ourselves
Closer to the abyss, entranced, chained
Cheek by jowl in pairs like animals
Entering an ark destined to drown.

This is the time to rage against the dying
Of the light, the extinction of us all,
Being dragged by the unfit, idiotic, hateful,
Hate-filled lovers of pelf into the dark.

An eclipse is coming, the end of the Age
Of Man, fools angrily shouting down
Sun and moon both, burning this world
Inside and out until it must be nothing

But a wasteland of ash and an ocean
Of bitter tears shed after the die was cast.
Turning and turning, the vortex will not
Waits to drag us down mile after mile.


With the One I Love

They say the light that burns twice as bright lasts half as long.
The light that cannot burn wants to find a way to flare like the sun
Or become a wisp of smoke somewhere out of any sight.
God protects none of our stolen fires, and his eternal enmity
Confronts me in my sleep like an electric whip striking out.
I want every drop to the last breath, but thirst and fear
Can only mean that today hinges on tomorrow, life runs backward,
And love is a memory of something lost before it was found.
Let me find a way between the hunter and the hunted,
A way to be in this world with its sweetness, and leave late