in order to love anything
but an animal you cannot allow
yourself to believe in those things
that are if we don’t stop them
going to destroy us
Aubergine
I lie in bed
staring at the ceiling
last night before
I fell asleep
I put the book
on the floor
looking down
I see its spine
with the golden
simple name
of the old
poet who might
already be dead
somehow he used
ancient magic
everyone says
we don’t need anymore
to place inside
me that perfect
sadness
at last
after all the formal
words of love
I could really imagine
how terrible
some day
not for fifty
years or so
but still
for one of us
to say goodbye
it will be
again fear
that is almost
seasickness and also
surely irrational
hope by that time
I will in some
way feel “ready”
through me
moves and then
asleep again
I am wearing
a dead rich
man’s black
luxurious overcoat
gold buttons
it is snowing
in a vast
wooden hallway
I am not cold
someone laughing
says just watch
them learn the same
lessons he means
my children I don’t
have yet
I touch the head
of a very important
black goat
and wake up again
the clock radio
says a small
tremor shook
some part
of the desert
no one lives in
tiny drones
we are flown
by what we do
not know into
blue election
season
inevitable spells
are cast
by warlocks
they move
their hands
and factories
rise or stadiums
into dust
collapse
8:10 a.m. December
San Francisco
rainy season
you pull on
your boots
I call them purple
the label says
Aubergine
you leave
for work
and by a jolt
of atavistic
sadness electrified
I move
once again
to the impassive
black desk
to clock
in for my eternal
internship
at the venerable
multinational
not for profit
Lucid & Dreaming
What Can Poetry Do
In Africa people are angry.
They are climbing embassy walls
and burning whatever is there.
Each time I click on some words
and read what we call news
I feel certain some people
while I was reading have died.
I know I am here merely reading.
I just sit in my room and worry.
As always I can do nothing.
So I close all the portals and go
deep in my mind to discover
something about Tunisia.
Tunisia of desert silence
broken by occasional battles
where a man set himself on fire
then revolution then elections.
Tunisia whose cosmopolitan
capital city Carthage
the Romans completely destroyed.
Tunisia where they filmed
the familiar home planet scenes
of the space movie we all stood in line
a million years ago to see.
I don’t know anything else.
Now I remember something
I once read about the forests
people are carefully growing
far from the capital city.
The trees are eating the poison
probably much too slowly.
But still they take the particles
and even if we don’t deserve it
our air is a little clearer.
It’s like the painting I saw
of a witch in the forest
her hair in a black column rising
like