poetry notebook

Speaking misleads. Silence falsifies.
Lies accrue directly from this enterprise
of wanting and not wanting.

To believe what is thought
furnishes fantasy with properties
and fixtures, appliances and tables,

flannel sheets in cold nights
felt only through windows,
to buffer this moment —

inhabited room, familiar ailment,
teeming emotions that clamor for action.
All acts are sweepstakes.

The odds are against you.
There’s nothing to win
or to lose. The ruse of what

you credit with possibility
is zeros and ones on the Fed
computer, a tally of your failures

and triumphs, hills and valleys, spills
on your bicycle ride from a pub.
You could enter a precious moment,

watch rain drops gather at the tip
of an oak leaf and tremble
at their certain fall. But this

is no more real than the bare
bulb a silk moth flings itself against
and pings off of again and again.

There is nowhere to go.
There is no-one to see.
There is nothing to become,

nothing to change, nothing.
As a glass tilts up and water
pours into your mouth, night

descends, clouds part, lovers
embrace, victims die,
uncountable beings come into

and go out of existence
never having been aware
that you are here or even

that you could be here outside of
their spheres of anguish and joy.
To follow feelings spins out unendingly

details of a dream unaware of its dreaming
that inhabits future and past
with present turmoil, roiling and jagged,

viewed from an expanding thunderhead
rolling down quickly upon you
as stillness in the center of a cyclone.