The Irresistible Wave

I want you to know that
I’m sorry for making a mess of things.
I had convictions.
I tried my best,
But
Circumstances unforeseeable
Carried me off against my will,
As they generally do to good-hearted people.
That’s my excuse,
Not an interesting one,
But there it is.
I found the world wrong
And wanted it right.
I pushed against it,
But, instead of an equal and opposite reaction,
The force that pressed back at me
Was an irresistible wave,
So powerful that it drove me back to the shore,
And even farther back up the beach
Than where I had started,
Leaving less than nothing.
The trap snapped back on me.


I lay there pebble-bruised,
Sprawled over yesterday’s black seaweed.
What dark karma operates in human affairs!
Pathetic.
I’m sorry.
Who am I to implore you to keep up the fight?
But I feel I must.
Perhaps the waves will weaken,
Who can say?
Good luck.
Just don’t think too badly of me.
After I’m gone,
Lower me gently,
Back into the waters,
And if I wash back up on the beach again,
This time I won’t mind.

Feeling the Umami

Our commonplace emotions,
Never new,
Never old,
Color the world;
Recycled like the rainbow,
Bestowing significance on everything.
The colors of our lives:
Red, yellow, green, violet
Happy, sad, angry, scared,
Suspicious, disgusted, ashamed,
Surprised, hopeful,
And a few more you get from mixing.
Could any amount of DNA editing
Add another emotion to our repertoire,
Or is this it?
Cannot even science add another color to the paint box?


On the furthest planet,
Skimming along the rim of the universe,
Do they feel nothing different?
It is too early to say.
We could travel a long, long way,
To verify that we can only ever be ourselves;
Or, perhaps the wormholes are too distant
In space time
For us worms to reach,
So we might never know.
More sensible to just accept it right now:
There are only so many emotions flavoring our lives—
Sweet, sour, tart, sweet,
Umami!
But there are enough,
Just as there are enough notes on the scale,
Enough lines, shapes, textures,
Waves, breezes,
Seasons.
If the aliens have learned this,
It might explain why they never visit.

Auto-Archaeology

To uncover the layers of yourself,
You must start calmly.
Survey the area,
Don’t prejudge anything.
Pick a spot,
Then bring in the bulldozer.
Tear off the top.
Carry out the rubble.
Now go to work with the spades.
Dig, dig, dig.
Whatever you find here is of no consequence.
Haul it away.
Only when you are certain that there is nothing left,
That you have reached the original ground,
Come in with the trowel;
Delicately.
Scrape, scrape, scrape.
What do you find?
Indiscriminable,
Grimy,
Unpromising,
Blackened,
Stuff.
This is your treasure.
Wash it off carefully,
Polish it up,
Observe it from all angles,
And in all lights,
Not forgetting the infrared.
Behold, something new for once.
So old that it’s new!
Hidden in the midden,
But what does it mean?
Can some hermeneutic of stratigraphy be applied?
Can it be understood?
Or, are we alien to the core,
So deep that we have no affinity with our own wellspring?
Is there any depth to our depth?
Or, are there just infinite layers
Of disposable
Emptiness?

Hunters

The fox is a hunter.
He doesn’t know why.
Hill and valley, grass and stream,
Up and down, and on and through,
Heartbeat, panting,
Aching legs,
Looking for water;
Meat chasing meat
To fuel the rush
Of meat chasing meat.

Man is a hunter of the invisible.
Ideals are his meat,
Ideals that can never be fulfilled.
We catch glimpses,
Pursue in haste,
Into a sunset we never reach,
That sunset unto which we are raised,
Transcendent,
In our dreams.

We hunt the Tudor-red fox,
Of whom we have no need,
Who is not even meat
But only a meaty stand in
For objectives that we have not fleshed out.
But he will do,
Meet for the task.

Man is a hunter.
He doesn’t know why.
On and on,
Hoping to catch a break.
The fox,
The hunt,
The dreams,
All pointless,
And cruel,
But how pleasant
The galloping thuds of the horses' hooves,
The cries of our fellow hunters,
The bracing breeze,
The shimmering waters
Of the sun-splashed streams.

When I Was Young

When I was young,
I wanted to be Leonardo Da Vinci,
But, when I was old,
I became Homer Simpson.
What made the difference?
I took a road less traveled,
The wrong one.

Leonardo:
Built parachutes,
Painted madonnas,
Set the caged birds free.

Homer:
Watched buttons,
Ate donuts,
Juggled job and family.

Leonardo grew old
Seeking patrons in dark castles,
Spinning the fragile plates of art and science,
Thinking himself a failure.

Homer never aged,
Never failed,
Hadn’t the awareness.

So, I shall pass at last
From the futility of Homer to the self-reproach of Leonardo,
Having skipped the wonder years,
Only to catch the disappointing finale.
But, unlike Leonardo,
I’ll at least have donuts.

Words

Human beings,
Like hogs,
Quickly go feral.
It only takes a small threat,
Even an imaginary one.
We must be well-housed,
Fed,
Entertained.
Still, there are no guarantees,
Because, unlike hogs,
We can turn feral spontaneously.
Education is the hitch:
How do you keep the mind open,
Yet also discerning,
When the old are so eager to mislead the young?
Remember the dove and the serpent.

Did someone say serpent?
We become afraid.
We panic.
Decency? Self respect? Joy?
Out the window they go,
For nothing.
Chaos is as close as the next Olympics:
People strung up like hogs,
To resounding applause,
Because of words.

The Emperor

I like to go incognito among the people,
Traipse their streets, marketplaces, vineyards.
Their dogs bark at me,
Slaves eye me with suspicion,
But I am among my people,
The people who would otherwise quake in my presence.
They don't notice me passing in front of the temple,
Walking the perimeter of my stadium.
Mine is an empire
Of rock and flesh,
Concrete and wine,
Oil and water;
Bricks of beige and ochre,
Blonde and brown,
My people!

I find myself in the Costco parking lot,
Grabbing a cart in the rain.
I enter wet.
I scrutinize the goods in every aisle.
At the exit, they ask for ID and I hope for a nonchalant cashier who won’t
Uncover my true identity.
I wander out.
On the quayside, men are loading amphorae onto the boats.
I watch a departing galley,
Her oars breaking the water.
Serenity.
Fuck the Federal Reserve! I’m going to devalue the denarius.

In the Little Park

I go to run
In the little park,
Round and round the stony walk.
Sometimes rain,
Sometimes snow,
More often the hot, hot sun.
Long sleeves and pants
To keep off chiggers;
Counting my breaths,
Forgetting the number of laps,
Wondering how long I can keep this up;
But without it I grow fat,
My ballooning belly
Inversely proportional
To my self esteem.
So, I shall run until I drop,
Or until,
Either within or without,
Something breaks.

Perhaps someday the sky will split,
The bottom will fall out of the world,
And the last trump will sound -- great heavenly fart,
Portent of Eternity,
With Its infinite unbreakable laps,
And no hope for release,
Because the bottom
Can only fall out once.

No, keep running,
But confine hope
To trivial things:
Cups of coffee,
Glasses of wine,
Well-timed rays of sunlight,
The right song playing at the right moment,
Hot baths,
And, above all,
An occasional sincere interaction
With a fellow human being:
I and Thou,
Me and you,
When time is obliterated,
Zapped,
In a moment of identification—
No earth, no sky,
No death,
No apocalypse,
And no Eternity,
Not now.

Civilization

The peaceful family,
Community,
Nation,
Are soon washed away,
Depending, as they do,
Not on human nature
But on culture,
History.

Eons of experiment, discovery and reflection—
Gone in a thousand days!
It can happen here,
It is happening here.
The sands collapse beneath our feet,
The very sands that Abraham walked,
Because we have not communicated our values,
Have not embodied them.

Civilization is risible,
The father of all jokes,
Until you lose it.
It is injustice piled upon injustice,
Until a greater injustice comes along.
Jeremiah,
Confucius,
Aristotle,
Francis.
We mock them all.
We are hopeless without them,
Children unparented.

Oh Zeus,
Don’t take it all away just yet!
Give us one more chance
To teach kindness and humility,
Respect for facts,
Wisdom.
Compelled to start again,
We might not get this far.
Perhaps this was the only chance.

Oh, to return to the old days
When we felt safe enough
To put a torch to it all!
But we were only cartoon characters then,
Sawing the branch that we sat on.
We must grow up now.

Our Heaven

Here in America,
We’re all going to Heaven
Not because we deserve it,
But because we are entitled to it;
Such is our creed.
Heaven must be within reach of the majority,
Appeal to the median voter,
The average citizen,
Carrying an average burden,
Making the average number of complaints,
Being cruel only rarely,
And kind only superficially.
Heaven sanctifies moderation.
If saints do exist,
In our Heaven they will live a marginalized existence,
As despised eccentrics;
The exception and not the rule.

You might think our Heaven a humdrum sort of place,
But it isn’t,
Because the amenities
And the service
Are extraordinary:
The pillows are that soft,
The music is adorable,
And you can fly,
Without even a jetpack,
Simply by willing it--
Whoosh!
It’s like living in the best possible hotel,
In the best possible amusement park,
Surrounded by people who, inexplicably, think you're awesome.
Heaven is Vegas on steroids,
And who wouldn’t want that?
Heaven is like being stupendously rich,
But without being miserable,
Like so many of the wealthy on earth are.
Otherwise, why have a God at all?
You can see Vegas from Calvary.
And we are all going.
Gee whiz, what fun!

New Roses

In bars,
Factories,
Forgotten villages;
Through rain,
Wind,
Snow;
Standing at stoplights;
Or going from car to car,
Trying not to get hit,
I have hustled many roses
Down the avenues of the dead.

I sold my roses to young men,
Who gave them to their sweethearts;
I sold my roses to married men,
Who handed them to prostitutes;
I sold my roses to little girls,
Who presented them to their mothers.

Sometimes the dead were gracious and thanked me for my roses;
More often they were hostile,
Or the roses themselves perished,
And joined them.
The blood of the dead
Reddened my roses;
Their thorns
Pierced the living.
I kept up the hustle.

I used to sell my roses for God.
I have new roses now,
But no God to sell them for;
I park them in a cheap corner of the market,
And wait.


“I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.”
Charles Bukowski, Consummation of Grief

For the Aliens

This one’s for the aliens,
So far away,
Who have so few poems written about them,
Though I’d like to think that they’d be cultured enough
To appreciate it
If we bothered.
So far away
That we can probably never reach them,
Nor they us;
But we can think of each other,
Like sailors on different oceans whose routes never cross.
Perhaps the aliens have more of a handle on it all,
Or at least some of them do,
Since there must be billions of races of them,
Unless none at all,
In which case,
They will not be wondering about our poems.
We can still wonder about theirs though,
Because they’re that far away
That the ones they haven’t written
Are just as interesting as the ones they have.

God Who Cannot Be

A God dwells within me—
The God who cannot be.
He offers no eternal life
But only a palpable sense
Of solidarity with all people,
All conscious beings.
He watches over my shoulder,
The God who cannot be;
He knows my inmost dreams.
He is imagination,
Like steel and rock,
But He cheers me on,
And gives me wisdom,
Assurance,
Grace,
Sometimes correction too.
Here he is,
The God who cannot be,
Ignoring all evidence to the contrary—
Not even offended by it.
He is unmoved,
Unaffected even by His own nonexistence;
He has no inclination help my unbelief,
Or otherwise cross my palm with silver.
We wait it out:
Me here,
Him here—
God who cannot be,
Till death us do part,
In preposterous equilibrium.

Corridors

Corridors are tunnels
That we build above the ground,
Between the present and the future,
The known and the unknown.
Corridors are rooms to which Time has been added:
They must be passed through, endured.
In dreams, we find ourselves inside them,
Panicked;
Running against the clock;
Trapped between the observable and the hidden;
Bewildered by constantly shifting connections,
While striving desperately to reach some crucial goal.
Time is always of the essence—
Time that lurks in corridors,
Clutching its silver baseball bat.

Awakened,
We have clocks to remind us
That we are late for something,
But not what we are late for.
The second hands move too fast for us;
The hours too slow.
The satanic, black minute hand is the worst,
With its tantalizing, almost perceptible movements,
Which seem to say that Time is barely out of our grasp,
Like water in a nightmare of thirst.
The brutal Time that persecutes us in our dreams
Is the deranged henchman
Of this dull time that regulates
The monotonous tick-tock of our days.

Yes, all clocks say only one thing:
“You are late!”
But there’s ultimately nothing to be late for,
Except the clock itself,
With its circular reasoning.
The Earth turns and makes its way around the Sun:
There is no late in Astronomy.
Clocks lie to us.
What tyrannizes us is not Nature’s time but civilization’s.

Another dream.
Now we are in a mineshaft—
A different kind of corridor.
We trudge into pitch black,
Toward gold, or disaster.
We see a light:
Is it daylight,
Or something massive hurtling toward us?
What we really want it to be is a lantern,
Swung by a friend.
Miners withstand corridors far worse than ours.
Why is it that they do not all go mad?
Camaraderie.
Brotherhood.
Fellowship.
Those who walk gentler corridors—
The air-conditioned, well-lit, antiseptic
Corridors of power—
Lose their minds quite often,
For want of the same.

Corridors are rooms
In Halloween dress up.
Are we going to let them frighten us,
Or are we going to party?

Walking on the Sun

If you and I were to hike around the perimeter of the Sun,
Covering thirty miles a day,
It would take us 250 years;
By the time we returned to our starting point,
Everything would have changed.
We can never really know the Sun.

A photographer out on the sea
Records only fragmentary glimpses.
Observing his photos, he might imagine that he knows the ocean,
But that would be foolish:
It is too vast.

With a powerful enough microscope,
You could spend your whole life
Studying a single dust mite
And never be finished.
Even the tiniest things are too big for us.

The brain collects snapshots of the self,
Which it tapes together,
And declares, “This is me!”
It isn’t.

Our mind cannot fully apprehend itself—
It is too small,
And too big!
We are bigger than the Sun,
Bigger than the ocean.
We are infinite.
You can never know yourself
Because you are too big for yourself.
The oracle lied.

It’s well known that we only experience reality indirectly,
As our consciousness recreates it.
Go to the Grand Canyon and what do you see?
Only you.
Look up at the night sky—
That’s you out there.
Under that microscope—
More of you than you could ever explore.
The Sun?
You too, every mile of it.

The smell of fresh bread,
The taste of honey,
The softness of cotton,
The notes of the scale,
The colors of the rainbow,
Are all you—
The legacy of millions of years of evolution.

Just as you can never see anything on TV except the TV’s own light,
You can never experience anything in your mind except the activity of that same mind.

Yet, we intersect with others,
Whose senses derive from the same origins.
On different screens,
We can all watch the same events;
In different minds,
We all see the same stars.
Your Sun is my Sun.
The waters of mighty oceans mingle.

We can never know ourselves,
But we can spark others,
Who are also infinite,
Igniting flames of mutual recognition and celebration.

The Banks of the Nile

The ancient Egyptians investigated contraception.
If only they had mastered it!

We could have lived happily under the sun,
Along the banks of Mother Nile,
Adjusting our crops and our numbers
According to her magnanimity.
We could have stayed there forever,
Contentedly,
Blowing south with the wind,
Sailing north with the current.

Now comes our final chance
To flourish within the boundaries
Set by Mother Earth—
Generous boundaries at that.
We could stay here,
Empowered by the sun and wind,
Not deceiving ourselves into thinking
That there’s somewhere else to go,
Or that there should be more of us,
Infinite as we are:
An easy choice,
But so hard to make
As long as superstition masters us.

To Know What Life Is

To know what life is,
In all its burgeoning splendor,
Look at the evolution of birds.
To thrive in all climates,
They have developed a bewildering variety of forms:
The penguin, the vulture,
The hummingbird, the dodo,
The chatty green parrot, the mute white swan.

They are newcomers to Earth,
Long predated by mammals and reptiles,
But the diversity of birds is staggering.
Study their anatomies, social networks, reproductive strategies, building techniques, travel habits, songs. . .
Profound mysteries await.

Consider our quick-witted neighbor, the crow:
Her rapid adaptation to complex modern environments;
Her precocious tool use;
Her puzzle-solving skills;
Her mimicry of human speech—
All with a brain weighing only half an ounce.
What efficiency!

In the race of life,
The mammals have a head start,
But the birds are faster.

We have the overconfidence of the hare
And the speed of the tortoise.
We’ll probably have to cheat.

The Great MacGuffin

My life is a film noir.
I’m the protagonist,
Investigating the mystery.
I don’t want to kill anyone,
But I didn’t write the script.

I’m out on the street.
Can’t afford a taxi,
So following that car is out of the question,
Even in the rain.
The MacGuffin disappears around the corner.
I have to find out where,
But the police in this town are all corrupt.
They’ve never forgiven me
For the last case I solved.

I elbow my way through China Town,
Sweet-talk amiable young baristas,
Flatter jaded bar tenders,
Hunt down the usual suspects,
Keep one step ahead of the protection boys.

A woman with a shadowy past and a black future
Steps out of the fog.
Am I looking for some place?
She will lead me to the man
Who holds the MacGuffin’s secret.
For her there’s no hope,
She'll never know that the genre itself is
The reason why she can’t form healthy relationships.
She smokes. Little wonder.

Another whiskey,
But from my own bottle.
Cheap, local blend.
Hollywood got some things right:
The drinking,
Piano music,
Darkness,
Smoke,
And a few bright specks of light peeking through.
I’m wrapped up in a white, tipsy haze,
MacGuffin my Holy Grail.

Maybe the blind man selling newspapers has the answer,
Or maybe they took the MacGuffin down to Mexico,
Where I’ll never go,
There being a limited budget and no chance of a sequel.

Eventually, I realize that it’s only a B film.
Nobody expects it to amount to anything,
Except me,
Because the lead actor in a B film
Must take it seriously,
Even when nobody else does,
Like the teacher on a school trip.

Frankl says we must have a MacGuffin in order to flourish;
Hence, temples and churches,
Ideologies, football teams.
They won’t even let you into a twelve-step program if you aren't looking for one,
Because its better to remain an addict than go MacGuffinless.
Blessed be the Great MacGuffin!

The conclusion is trite;
My enemies are vanquished.
I watch the credits scroll by,
And realize that it was all about the chase.
The MacGuffin was superfluous,
Like that incongruent dance number in between the murders.
Take it away
And all you have left is actors and scenery.
Oh, and infinite possibilities for actual enjoyment.

The Twelve Step programs lied!
What people need is not meaning
But one another.
People need people,
Love,
And love has one great advantage over meaning:
Love is real,
Unquestionably so.
Just look into a few recent suicides,
There’s your proof.
But I’m never in that kind of movie.

We are not looking for some thing,
Or some place,
But some one;
Better still, a community, a home.
Well, ain’t that sweet?

Break out from the screen,
Like Mia in the Purple Rose of Cairo,
Or Buster in Sherlock Jr.,
And, if you capture the Holy Grail,
Drop it.
Smash that sucker! For there is no MacGuffin,
No thing,
No idea—
Only you
And me.
That’s what I think.
And that’s why they don’t give me better parts.

Some of the Best People

Some of the best people are psychopaths.
Nothing to worry about there!
They are great achievers,
Big spenders,
Economy stimulators.
Psychopaths make the world go around.
What would we do without them?
They come in all colors,
Shapes and sizes,
Worship all religions equally badly,
Attend PTA meetings,
Most of all, give to charity – hooray!
Our friends the psychopaths:
Clean-shaven, suits and ties,
Impeccably tasteful eveningwear,
Manicured lawns and sheepskin slippers,
American flags flying everywhere,
Picking up the groceries,
Running the kids to school:
Nothing to see here, citizen!
Leaders, mentors, role models,
Solid pillars of superficialdom,
Sunk deep in the shifting sands of respectability.
They touch the bedrock
And they are the bedrock,
Or so they tell us,
And we believe them,
Because
Some of the best people are psychopaths.

The Good Deaths

When the dying one is encircled by loved ones,
The sting of death is blunted.
He is entangled with life
Even as it vanishes,
Engulfed by itself,
Like candlelight swallowed up by the Sun;
He slips into silence,
Surrounded by good will,
Merging love with love.
He is gone, but his heart has already been distributed,
Long before the scattering of ashes.

Death shouldn't feel like death:
It should be tranquil—
No struggle,
No fear,
No promise,
No god,
No need.

But more noble still
Is to die alone
On some obscure mountain,
Or in a hopeless, sterile room,
Yet to still die well,
Borne up by the absent arms
Of those whom one has never known,
And never will;
To die alone but not lonely,
Smiling gently,
Not from faith,
Or resolve,
But actual contentment;
To die with clearheaded insight,
Yet with imagination —
That’s the way to go!
See us all,
Gathered around you.

Nobody dies completely
When there is someone there to say goodbye,
Even if only in his mind’s eye.
The candle is out,
But every color,
Every shape,
Every movement,
Remains,
Ready to flicker
For another flame.