Poetry

Darkness and Resonance

No accurate description

for the ideal love

you found in the darkness.

Darkness, you see,

is the trick

the laughable cunning.

No accurate sound

for the smooth answer

to a serrated question.

Resonance, I hear

is the trick

the visual deception.

Metaphysical Confusion

This wasn’t the room I began in

the colours have been altered

out of spite or cunning

so difficult for me to

ascertain with certainty.

The room changes again

a strategy I cannot comprehend

but I take notes to refer to later

when I’m in another room

newly decorated in concrete and regret.

The room starts to quiver

like a mirage suddenly seen

then to expand in metaphysical

confusion so that only a deity

of rooms and regrets

will be able to explain.

Forgotten Sleep

In a crevice of the night

the pompous battle the pious

a nonsensical game

a replica of sanity

but what can you do

when you quarrel with

larger-than-life gods

more cunning and cruel

than earthly opponents

you trapped in wakefulness.

Perhaps if you curse

into the darkness

the darker the better

painting both reality

and scheming illusion

with similar colours

you’ll catch the eyes

of forgiving adversaries

you’ll reshape your dreary

self into someone remarkable.

Now sit at your desk

in the dark fashioned

from long-past nights

and begin to list

reasons for sleeping

at inopportune times

for preferring a clever word

for composed darkness

to the inescapable loss

of wakefulness.

A Topic of Conversation

The night entered

halfway through the day

like a criminal

upstaged by the crime

no tempest in the forecast

nothing untoward

or even mildly mystical

when the mystical

just might refine the day

reshape the blandness and boredom

into a topic of conversation

that exceeds eclipses

even inexplicable happenings

that are an affront to the ordinary

to the day-to-day

even as you sink

into the ordinary

and the day-to-day.

The Darkness and Its Unsympathetic Ambiguity

Staring into words

surrounded by uncertainty

it is quiet

except for the disgruntled dog

barking from time to time

into the darkness—

what does it want from me

and from the heavens?

My late-night desires are without cunning

wanting words for wordlessness

voice for voicelessness

for mistakes remembered

enumerated and tidily ordered.

Fighting forgetfulness

I open the window

and shout into the darkness

at every disruption to the soul’s reflection

wondering if the dog

will remember my curses

or will I have to devise new ones

for the darkness

and its unsympathetic ambiguity.

This Guiltful Thought

I wait two full days

and two full nights

to make this confession.

Yesterday I had another word in mind

but tonight it is confession

revelation sounds too strong

belonging to someone else.

When I was ten years old

after I had my summer’s haircut

I was walking home

finding a little dog dying

close to the railroad tracks

wrong side or right side of the tracks

how many railroad tracks

in childhood memories

or in adult films

I found a little dog

as I started to say

and I did not say a prayer for it.

Now I find this guiltful thought

half as ludicrous

as last night

and the night before.

If We Didn’t Have a Word for Beauty

Beauty is irrational.

No, beauty is as beauty does.

Unbeautiful

the opposite of beauty.

Is longing for beauty

the absence of beauty?

A life without beauty

a surfeit of beauty

a hundred words for beauty

beauty is wordless

beauty to the blind

imagining beauty

defining beauty

comprehending beauty

beauty as archetype

language, perception

if we didn’t have

a word for beauty

or weren’t forever caught

by the words of beauty.

Break the mirrors

erase the words

begin the portrait

over again.

Ugliness is irrational...

Regardless of Location or Sense

WE CONFUSE DREAMING WITH WAKING

WE BECOME WHAT WE SEEK AND FEAR

this was the graffiti

on the apartment building

in a language a tired old translator

spent the night translating

and told anyone who chanced by

it didn’t make a whole lot of sense

nonsense scribbles

but it was his job

to translate wall writings

regardless of location or sense

the sadness, he said,

was when the walls were blank

and he had to make his own work

a lifetime of translating

warnings

divine messages

schedules

first utterances

final thoughts

manifestoes

doctrines

philosophies

ancient texts

anticipated revelations

he had seen and translated

even Bedlam’s wall-writing

made sorrowful and disheartened

in the translating—

all languages are foreign to me

even my own, he thinks,

laughing at his out-of-placeness

so little to laugh at these days

and he begins to translate the next message

feeling both furtive and gentle

FURTIVE TRUTHS ARE TRUTHS NONETHELESS

GENTLE LIES ARE LIES ALL THE SAME