Just Three Ways of Seeing Burning Incense

In a vertical vortex,
Like Yeats's gyre,
The incense respires.


The smoke submits
To unseen currents.
It crumbles,
Disintegrates, and testifies
To grander lies.


The incense-smoke pools
Under the blue arm-lamp
'Til surrounding gas soaks such dust
Into the damp.

Postmodern?

We must abandon reality, really.
Honestly, the word is silly,
"In reality he was actually there,
Actually knowing the truth and proclaiming."

"I think therefore I'm real,"
Skinny as an apple peal,
Or "I think therefore I'm real,"
Boasting and laughing and drinking, I steal.

I'm telling you, now you tell me.
In reality, thinking's free.

On the Use of Words

The brick wall built on the habitable hill
Occluded the sky and the enemy still.
The monument of mortal birth beside,
A place for no one's nomads to reside
And settle. This be but a history lesson.
The challenge is to write from just discretion.

summerruvvohseven

Liquor Bangin to toronto techno
on a So-Cali beach
by moonlight

Seems to be Hollow

A man has two feet to stand on
And two arms to punch,
Two eyes to see with
And two fists to crunch,
One heart to follow
And one mind to think,
One throat to swallow
And one hole to stink.

Letter Home

It's cold in the East.
The weed is very expensive.
The girls are pretty, they dress well
And act politely, lots of smiles
And Thank Yous.
Everybody looks the same.

It's been cold and rainy lately,
The storm clouds keep rolling in
To drop rain instead of snow.

Yesterday I saw the caboose of a train
As I crossed the railroad tracks
To my apartment.
It was heading West perhaps.

Love,

Growing Pains

We will lie to each other,
And then will we know pain.
We will score one another,
And matured, will we do it again.

Fiddlephany

Fear of Failure Fucks with Foundations
and Feeds a Frenzy of Finality whereby
Foolishness gets Fucked alongside Fun.

Ethics

Will my difficulty
In fabricating silence be worth
Your reminiscing my silent outline
Somedaze
When we are too old
To do anything about
It?

Desire

If I have what I want,
What more could I want
To have of you?

Desire designs itself
To please its own self.
This Faustus knew.

We eye one another
Spontaneously
Fashioning lust.

If we have eachother--
A basic engine
Desires we must

--We lose that perfection.
Who wants an emerald
Returned to dust?

No Lightbulb on the Porch

There is much to learn in a cigarette lighter,
African rhythm, Belgian chocolate and bramble-brier.
This rhyming makes no sense to me
But I'll smoke another if it's free.

This branching, and my friends all gone away
And two cigarettes remain but not to stay.
This rhyming certes puzzles me
But I'll smoke one more as sure as certainly.

These leaves are falling from the tree,
Falling, flailing sure as certainly,
They're gathering by the undead flowers
If only for one cert--uncertain hours.

This rhyming lacks integrity,
I know I'm sure, as sure as sure can be
This cigarette's done, done with burning brighter,
It leaves behind a shock--shocken lighter.

Virginia isn't Wyoming

These wooden planks smell
Like my grandmother's cabin did
In the valley where a
Glacier carved the Teton Valley
Eons ago.

The smell is like sap
Still runs down the
Cheap unvarnished boards
On a slow sloping way
To quiet snow.

Virginia isn't Wyoming though.
Grandmother isn't up
Long before I am, halfway
Done with her crossword
And preparing pancakes
And eggs and frozen sausage
And whatever other fancies
I replied when she cooed,

"What else would you like?"

She didn't call me honey,
She was the sweet one.
Nothing puzzling about her but
The crosswords she unraveled every
Fresh morning.

Grandma is gone now.
Her cabin is not her cabin anymore,
My nippy stuffed nose only
Confuses states sometimes.
It doesn't take long to remember
Virginia isn't Wyoming,
Virginia isn't when Wyoming was.

I was afraid if I set out

I was afraid if I set out
I should ne'er return,
That my fluid heart so shook about
For quicksand trophies would ever yearn.

Who would love me in the lonely fen?
The bluebird, the fox, the wild horse?
These woodlings have it all to them
To scavenge, where Nature left no course.

Byron etched his mark in ancient stone,
Matisse left a chapel by the sea,
Could these modern entageweorc
Outlast a mortal misery?

I shall seek moderation in the shade,
Beside sunlight, that falls between the glade.

I Follow Science

This is an hypothesis I found,
Pinched it off the ground,
(maybe 'twas one's discard)
And I've been testing it.

Don't think less of me
That this philosophy
Runs contrary
To your creature comforts,
It irked me too
Like my first Roquefort,
But it's growing on me.

It might pan,
Or I might leave it on new ground.

Professor

He got to he age when he wanted to lecture,
A silver-scalped half-moon monk among the prefecture
Of Eliot, Frost, Stevens, and Bishop.
And he stood at the lectern
And sought to elicit
Their metaphor, their pedagogy,
Maggie and May,
Milly and Molly.

Professor, I'll listen,
I promise to vigil
If you'll so reward me
At year's end epistle,

(But I know that there's something,
Wisdom or other, to tie me to them,
These legends, your brothers.)

It's Becoming October

It becomes October
To unravel breath in
Smoke bursts, like cannons blast.

A corporeal harvest moon
Commands Autumn, creeping reiver curst,
"Awake at last!"

Life is fleeting,
My heart is beating,
Your heart is beating faster,
Let's be each other's masters.

Quintet

These ladies don't pretend to know
The reason they're invited for.
The hosts attend their waiting guests
And slobber for a taste of sex.

The beer-pong table stands immortal,
More than wooden plank, a portal.
The girls step up to meet their partners,
Boys who scheme of team's departure.

Leaving bars and heading home,
Hounding for a doggie-bone,
I bark a bark and howl a whistle.
All's that's left is skin and gristle.

Slid off chastity, and then,
Inked above her thighs in pen:
"Will Not Do It, I'm No Slut,
You'll Have To Settle For The Butt."

The moon is down and rainfall lingers,
The sky submits to rosy fingers,
About the streets the sunlight shows
The shames of stranger bedfellows.

Blonde Reminds Me

What break effect have I had on you
That your hair shines a fret of gloss?
I kissed you then on a soused bed,
And since I have caved my loss.

Sport of Kings

These wounded soldiers on the table,
Couldn't finish, weren't able,
Swayed by a first year's--
Well, her blush, or not perhaps,
Perhaps her butt

The jacks and queens across the floor,
Spades and hearts, they are no more
Inserted in a beer can's top
'Til anticipated Jenga pop.

The jacks and queens across the floor,
Some to sleep before the dawn
-Those who couldn't crush no more-
Those who could, they got it on.

New Love

A kiss meant nothing when you kissed me,
Now it means but all,
Since my dearest, my sequined love
Did fall

Beguiled in the winds of ruby whims.
Your kiss was nascent,
Hers the very touch
Of butter bar rubbed on cherry flush.

She is no more. You are what is left,
When a late frost reclaims
A cherry blossom. The theft
Lets my heart to ripple by the threshed
Bud in the pond below.

I lay my lips upon your lips
In a broken bungalow,
And out the window scorns eclipse
Of sun by vaguest snow.

Will I love you like I loved her once?
New love, I do not know

How Now?

First a man,
Then a writer,
A poet, a singer,
A heart exciter.

Upon completing
This procession
(it may be eternal)
I hope to learn
A valid lesson.

Where do I stand
At the end of the day?
(though the day has no end)
In a forest
The sidewalk is leagues away.

The gaze is ahead,
Not up nor down,
For the future will be,
The past once was,
But the present's now.

That is how,
The here and now.

In Response to a Benign Petition

(I don't need you
Adn my time is ym money,
Refrain from stupidity
In the presence of my fecundity.
This is my business, my town,
And damned if you or anyone
Is gonig to bring me down.
Phft!)

I answered your questions in a previous e-mail.

-WigHead

Weeping Tree Song

Weeping Tree, Weeping Tree why do you cry?
Your tumbling branches fall out of the sky,
Down to the Earth where it's trodden and brown,
Where your trunk stately stands on the dewy wet ground.

Weeping Tree, Weeping Tree why do you frown?
The sunlight is shining and friends are around,
The Oak and The Elm and The Red Hickory.
Weeping Tree, Weeping Tree look up you'll see!

Dirt Begat Mud or How to Love

I reckon there are seldom shores
Where desert meets the sea,
Perhaps because wherever 'tis
A sandy kiss it be.

Perhaps because a roaring wave
Would rather slam a cliff,
Than roll atop a level plain,
Mulling and adrift.

I say this while ten miles from here
One finds the oceanfront
Abutted by a beach of rocks
Reduced to silt and dust.

O fie but why would water blue
Incur the yellow sand?
Maybe for the saltless ocean
Thinks itself too bland.

There is no lesson to this poem
Other than to say:
Mud is the child of Dirt and Water
And Mud is here to stay.

Rose Return

I love you like
The rose is the most beautiful flower,
Fragrancèd blossom illuminating.

My nose keeps you on my couch after you leave,
So I doze among a splendid perfume,
And no flower I've tasted diffused as such
A scent that could engender love so much.

The Style

My parents don't appreciate The Style:
Be whatever, rip a bong, then smile.
I smoke a cig in my backyard,
I don't know what they do,
Or who to talk to.

My mother used to be the remedy
For her burdened child.
She's like a cop now,
I can't be honest without
a) fearing for my continued residence
b) fearing she's right
When she says I might not make it through the night.

I don't like that we fight.
I don't know how to stop it,
Unless I do as they say,
Drop It.

That's not it though,
(I don't want to sue
Again in psychiatric session)
But dammit here's a lesson
At least one of us has got to learn:

(When I figure it out,
This poem, my conscience waiting,
I'll return.)

Tipping Point

Perhaps the most modest and fair
Way to characterize man
Is to spot him center on the span.

Greater than the elemental atom,
Yet pressured evenly in the stratum.

He lives below the heel of Heaven's host,
But feats of strength and wit the child boasts.

The fulcrum of the lever as it tips,
As supernovas burst and cease to exist,
As bullfrogs hoot amphibian bliss,
As lovers idolize a kiss.

The only issue with this plan
Is its founder. Does he understand
Why God above has made him such,
Or why he wields the blunderbuss,
Or why his open wounds will puss?

He doesn't, so in the snow he shivers
And longs for widening idle rivers.

Bank of America erred in my favor

Bank of America erred in my favor,
Two hundred new ducats in my account!
What act of charity, what behavior
Rewarded me this auspicious amount?

20 buys beer and cigarettes.
40 pays for a parking ticket.
One hundred and forty for a halfie of sess,
Sell three eighths. The rest, roll that shit.

The beer is gone, the volume rising,
The squares and weed are working well.
Where is the smoke-sack, is it hiding?
Vanished to nowhere as far as can tell.

The Lord that gives from the thinnest air
Hath stopped the wind from blowing there.
Two Benji Franks, a sack to slang,
And none to smoke. It isn't fair.

The Anti-Climax

Up and over seven rocky hills,
Down into the valley to cross a stream,
I carried nothing on my back but chills,
Who chided, "Chase her, chase your dream."

I followed commands my heart issued out,
Racing, demanding, it yelled to me the route:
"Cross these vasty plains ye cowardly virgin!
Run to the place, I promise you her face."

The mountain I crawled up to call her phone,
(How long did I listen to a flat dial tone?)
Ringing, I did it, now it's up to her...
A voicemail message. The smoke and I alone.

My heart is a liar,
And I must wander home.

Beside Tonight

Alone in my parlor beside tonight,
A thought curdles inside my chest
Of she,
Who wears the wind upon her breast
And doesn't talk to me.
Doesn't think of me for all I know,
Probably
She rests her legs on a sofa
And rests her eyes
Where some other guy
Tore a piece of her heart and chuckled.

My heart will bear more sorrow ere
I'm rapt in golden-goddess hair,
But she, unknowing, wouldn't lose a wink
For my, still growing, tenderness that's pink
And reddens as I lay my eyes on fair
Features that melt Adonis into Hecate's stink.
I muse, I funk, I meditate on she,
Who thinks, considers nothing fond of me.

Lightly child of the Ocean

Lightly child of the ocean
Come to quell the witch's tide,
Instill in me the ancient's notion
To meditate, reflect, and bide.

A tragedy in twenty acts
Was set against the summer sun.
My burning wish was to attract,
But she, the mermaid, didn't come.

Zelda in her blooming years
Cut a figure much the same.
Gatsby, did he shed a tear
When Tom his rival spoiled the game?

I take myself to moonlit beaches,
Absorbing waves from far and deep,
And think of Gatsby as he reaches
To hold what he could never keep.

And I lay on the dark sand
As I try to weep.

Assuming a Grip

Man and she were put on Earth, as 'twere,
To celebrate bonds twixt him and her?
Such is the gift the Lord has wrought,
Confining love to a single spot,
The public arena for private affairs,
A boxing match for splitting hairs,
A hug-a-thon for subduing tears,
A mirror to reflect a tome of years.

The good Lord peopled his lands with differing types:
One to fish and one to wipe,
One to love and both to gripe.
I suggest it was under the Tree of Eden,
The titular sense of good and evil,
That lovers first quarreled and determined one to be regal,
The other, heathen.

Can a smothered sense of commonness,
An ignorance of universal duress,
Or total lack thereof,
Be the fount of universal love?
No son of damnèd Adam
Has found a Madam
Worthy to betroth
On the merits of her tenderness alone
I suppose.

Romanticism isn't in ditches,
Just occluded by some new school,
Which is...

Out back one May noon

Out back one May noon,
How the sun shone down!
I fashioned a cocoon,
Hotbox! then knocked the sack around.

Stoner Sonnet

To stone begets the urge to stone,
No poem need tell you that.
When home alone my eyelids groan
And land upon a sack.

I hit the bong of summer's song
In morning revery.
I hide it in a cluster-throng
In the attic, cleverly.

And what to do when all is through
As far as smoking goes?
I grab a pen and mark the page
With lines, as I suppose.

Yet what were need of hitting bongs?
O! What I would do!
My love if you but let me touch your soul
And give mine you.

Transitivity

The only thing that matters me
Is poetry

Outro

The greatest burden left undone:
To seal two things into one,
To split up one thing into two,
To realize what's I and you

Exit, Lighting a Cigarette

Cigarettes are bad
Cuz they make me cough
Days after I smoke them.
They make my clothes smell
And take up all my money.
They make my sugar honey
Not wanna be near me for the smell.

Devil be damned
Fie ever quit my cigarettes.
Cigarettes is all I got
When my health keeps me indoors,
When I lose my shirt,
When I got no money,
When my sugar honey
Leaves me for a man who lights a
Cigarette After,
While she curls up on his arm.

Cigarettes ain't no god-damn harm

Intro

Hint of whiskey
Shot of gin,
Taste of vodka
From the rim,
Pounding Natty,
Everclear,
Wine from boxes
Cheapest beer.
Head in a bucket of jungle juice,
Hand on the fabric of her caboose,
Shifting figures
Shifting lights,
Not understanding the purpose of night
We hoist the stein and press the day
Beyond what dad would deem ok,
Fraternité, fraternité!
We hoist the stein, forget the day,
Raise our voices for a song,
Chill and hit the blessèd bong.
Shot of whiskey
Pull of gin,
Shotgun 2 beers,
Let's begin.

You First

If I wrote a poem down
On this brown page I bought
From the university bookstore,
Could it live as more
Than the voice in my head that
Sounds like Frost and Frank O'Hara?

As a lover I am less
Than I think I think,
Having loved so much so much
And given so little back to myself.
Even
As I write these concatenated verses
I can't help but feel I've
Left something out.

Did I mention I'm right-handed?
I like baseball though I can't
throw worth a goddam or hit
or run too well really.
I like pondering too,
And yoga at night by myself.

Is that enough for us to start a love?
Oh that's right,
I suppose it proper to hear about
You first.

Glimmers

In the dirt or the dark sky
Twinge slightest dazzles before
An unattentive eye. Do you see?
Glimmers? Glimmers are illusions too,
The coalescence of this angle,
This lighting, happenstance to be just there
To catch a glimmer of something
That doesn't shine a lot. Stars, which
Will beam a million years before
We see their light, twinkle the glint
Of something beyond themselves. A splint
That sets the course of astronauts
And sets their looks above.
Where does the glimmer begin?
Why not love?

Shakespeare Died c. 1610

The ideas we toss around
Aren't worth retelling.
The woman who's speaking now
Wants only a good grade
So her tongue keeps a-flappin'.
I don't know why I come to class at all.
I usually can't even write poetry
Because--that, monotone. Rails on,
Spitting from a goatee or lipstick lips.
I pay no attention to the emptiness behind the curtain,
As a white page runs black with ink running
From ignoramacy. Why can't we admit
We're not here to learn, we're here to spit
Game, get drunk, high, get blown?
That one night can offer such youth
To waste, I am no spendthrift.
I'll be at bars tonight
With a beer and a posse of girls,
Then in some darkroom with a flaming bongo,
Extinguishing bonfires in my gut.
That's raging. Curing a hangover with a shot'n'a six pack.
Waking up and reminding your friends they were drunk idiots 10 hours
before.
And then you realize some faggot paper's due.

What's Obvious?

As soon as that what's "obvious" is stated,
My thirst for hearing more from him is sated.

:Poet Afterall

The sorrow one feels
When others miscomprehend
His eagerest attempts
To loving defend
Does bruise the heart
And makes one wonder
If fortune farge better
By rape and plunder;
Or perhaps it is
That writing well,
And knowing so,
Is the chute from hell.

In the Lecture Hall

American philosophers
Don't understand
The beneficiality
Of getting out of hand
Like their Greek ancestors did.

The line, the continuum,
These are the tools in so far
As a lover of thought
Can muse on a star.

How can a grown man speak with such gumption
On ethics caked over layers of assumption?

Little Piles

There's no such thing as sandrocks.
Sandrocks were just a childhood fantasy
Called to existence by curiosity,
But you must admit the sand collects
In little piles under the right circumstances underground.
I've never found a sandrock to last long
In a fist's forge
Or the open sea.
A surface bump of little piles
And then debris.

Apartif

I was in Paris,
Wandering from place to place
For the jewel of the Seine
Is too Metropolitain
For two short days.
Staring at a transit map
I didn't see he was
Coming but heard his heels
Knocking closer and closer
On the pavement sidewalk.
No notice from him.
He was fixed on what
I cannot say, but
Positively the cigarette
Whose butt he was suckling.
All too nasty to tell
How soon I saw the
Collected dirt on the
Stone and concrete around me,
Grey and black on grey.
There was room for two on the path,
And as he passed
He flicked the remainder straight out sideways
Onto an abandoned street.
I contend on the uncommonality
Of meeting a man alone
On a Paris avenue at midday.
Behind him flung a black coat in the wind,
Flapping to his rapid pace,
A certain deliberation in
Coming and going and flipping
Used butts along the way.
I couldn't say why I stayed
A little longer than convention allows,
But there was something about
The stale stillness of the city air and
The way he'd ditched that cigarette
That made me doubt my own direction.
"Here, by here, then here, this is
Where I'm going." I set out
For my own appointments,
However undecided they were.
The sky was enough and
The city enough to get me started,
While my mind replayed, replayed
The memories of departed.

I was a little bit high around four

I was a little bit high around four,
So, having some ganjé at my ready,
Pinched four fingerfuls from my store
Then sat there and held the bong steady.

Four months had it been, or how many more
Since this binge began? How many before
Had I taken upon since first I tried
The herb to which all I'd left beside?

By the work of thumb I had but four flicks
To ignite the blossoms, leaves, shake, and sticks
And leave the world too much with us behind,
But a nobler vision crossed my baked mind:

The life I lead could achieve more than thus,
Waiting to smoke a stranger bowl of grass.
I lit the piece and breathed in vapor dust,
Introspecting as the stony feeling passed.

The gift of work, the labor of a dream
Have all glory in knowing how to seem.
All glory, praise of men and printed wealth,
To seem is something I can do myself.

Skepticism

The lazy drops announced themselves in tocks
That stroked the midnight silence like the knocks
Of dearest returned home. Falling water
Broke light on steel gutters and polished rocks.

The smoke my cigarette was offering to
The rinsed-out air sought new residence through
Twisting itself between cracks where the rain
Had missed a spot. I watched it go in vain.

It cost some inward struggle to content
Myself to being a smeller of scents
That washed, and left fresh all they had befell.
The wish I kept to cleanse I cannot tell.

God on the cross, Buddha's enlightenment,
An ancestral sacrifice of yore went
Short of enticing a skeptic to dock
In the waters that keep the divine clock.

Sonnet

Outside the evening cloudy sky
is rolling toward the mountain glens.
The winter sun has said goodnight,
and lambent talk inside the Den.

Inside the Den where chewy lines
are cut and sniffed, and cali weed
Is bought and sold and rolled into a spliff
beneath a skirt of urban vines.

I miss the summer days when lightrays
devoted themselves to Earth and Men.
None was too dark to partake
in festivities at 4:20 and 10.

Roll under storm unto thyself.
Bring the ocean current to forest shelf.

Curls

The smoke broke in curls upon me
Like waves assailing shore,
Waves demanding some return
For burdens they had bore,
But I could only heave a sigh
For I was still as poor,
And wanting too some recompense
For sorrows of before.
So we two sat together there
And scratched our bleeding sores.

The Midnight Stone

It's the Midnight Stone,
The kind you get when you live alone.
Fancying darkness beyond a lamp,
You question your castle's foundation in camp
And breathe the oily midnight damp!

Three Thirty, Sunday

When I let it go off and out my mouth
In the weary sort of way the coal burns,
The smoke erects in space long monoliths
Bent with intent at angles, then turns,
Like a sodden mind that spurns.

Restlessness

I drink a drink of ale
And then of liquor:
To smoke does less
To move the timeless ticker.

I was going to write a poem beside the sea

I was going to write a poem beside the sea.
I was on my way, I was there.
My thoughts were collected, prepared to put on paper
Something slipping, some sly remark.

The Ocean lapped my tears into the broad pale expanse,
Upset my stance, and demolished me so far beyond the shore
It was all I could do to be consumed.

Cambodia

Smoking Out the Back Door at Night

I recalled what made poetry true,
(A genius may have alighted my head)
It wasn't design askew
But a deliberate confusion that led.