poetry notebook

The harvest moon no longer equinoctial floods deep water sky

while an announcer on PA not far but the other side of town

talks bulls and riders.

Earlier today I climbed into a locomotive and caboose with a woman

and her four year old son telling them

About steam across the street from the rodeo. The boy loved the

metalic wonderland, the woman wanted history

To teach him later, and we corrected one error.

From this to step deep into Jeffers

Feels like Raskolnikov intersected with Shelley

Shot through with Nietzsche. But the thing is

You’re there, right there, in the middle of it, with your own rebellions

and conformities and lusts and fears

And shattered mind grasping at concepts for answers. Terror, Knowing them all

inadequate while grasping most at one – that you are different, that you lead them.

From that one construct you must speculate in order to preserve a theory of

yourself that you can

Defend to yourself, the monstrosities of action you must fulfill

To consolidate your sense of meself from the notself

Of what you perceive in everyonething else.

But this drunken kung fu turned against its own Christian

heritage splits Milton’s Satan into fragments

Recomposed into Blakean bombast that cascades

In thunder and lightening through rocks, mountains, and rivers into an ocean.

Predatory birds, horses, sex and perversion, adultery and frigidity,

murder and suicide played in full view

Of a lighthouse and forests of redwood and oak under a sky wild with black

clouds streaking over the mountains

Which hardly take notice much less censor and judge.

The queen desires you to use some gentle
Entertainment to Laertes before you fall to play.

The basic tune is a long low pitch
Then a quick high stressed
Note and pedal of equal sound and
Silence pitched between
Intervals bracketed by triplets
While the drone goes in quarters
Tune and tone at slightly
Different tempos.

So much to hear.
Ever changing music
With sudden closing door
Or V8 two-ton starting
And its own pedal or
A mountain bike glides by
In the light a clouded moon
Casts past the edge of a streetlight,
And so forth, a voice, a laugh
Teenagers walking to a party —
Bountiful entertainment.

Yet the end looms ever closer.
My body slowly crumbles.
My mind moves more
Haltingly from point to point.
The memory of one or another
Place or interaction
Spreads in dream
Fragments of a nap.

Such an ending is expected
If one lives long enough.
But what of value have you done?
Nothing comes to mind.
Anyway, what might value be,
In my world of self
Judgment?

I Imagine
Heights occupied by others.
Would I feel my life
Successful had I written
Illiad or Cantos?
Likely not. The flaws
Would gall more than triumphs
Soothe.

And yet, most days
I move and speak as though
The past were all fulfilled,
The future never coming.