Blood

Like fearful, anxious children
We have grown afraid of the dark--
We fear the sight of blood--
And look away, avoid its mark,
Avoid allowing such a sight to make
Us into better, stronger, more beautiful
People. Look closely at the wound
Opened in the soldier's bare chest, full
Of outpouring blood of brightest
Red, throbbing with a dark and terrible
Sucking sound with each slowing heart
Beat. Look into his unbearable
Eyes, their fading glimmer, fading
Hope, bringing to us in that glance
A new hope of our own to bear, stronger
Spines, straighter postures, and a chance
To recognize our own short lives
In his. Do we dare follow him, dance
Into the underworld, our knives
We protect ourselves with in fright
Left behind? It is a dark cave
And we're not carrying our comforting light,
But this dark descent is how we save
Ourselves from this terrifying night.
Our brave soldier guides us to the stream
Stretching a barrier between
The world above and the world of dream,
From all we know to all we mean.
He stands, stares, wants to know
If we are ready to go
Down to his new old world to bring
Up new and tragic songs to sing.

The Shame of Love Poetry

A thousand sonnets written by deaf men
To sullen women who refused to speak
The beauty of those lonely poets when
Those men could only think or sing or seek
In all those loves the beauty that still drives
The men to recreate all of those loves
In songs or sonnets, concubines or wives.
The poets see them as flowers or doves,
When all these muted women ever see
In these, their poets grotesque swine or goats--
Never their beauty, just the fatal flaw
Of sensitive souls, when no real man dotes
On women that strange way, for if he does
Something must be wrong with him--nothing grows
From such a weak and ugly, damaged seed.
Nothing but a winsome poem can grow
In the polluted soil of women
Who must be right, as this poem does show:
These men have poor choices for seed or pen.

For Anna’s Birthday

You’re beautiful and gorgeous and very cute—

I can’t wait to see you in your birthday suit!

In Brackish Waters

 Passions pull and repel--powerful prides
In this pair bring them blue love and cool pain.
Whenever high rivers collide with high tides,
Their brackish waters bring them little gain.
Sheltered waters are where they have a place
Discretely checking out the intruders,
The sociable climbers who want to replace
One or the other's quick-changing waters.
In the shifting salting world of tears
Where neither earthy flesh nor oceans rule,
Their passions doom them to their tidal fears
And stop them from seeing with eyes too cool.
But those with enough strength and energy
To maintain their display get victory.

Pleiades

Away from the palms,
the mountainous shores
with cliffs to the sea, crumbling
houses into waiting water,
everything's obscured.
Where are the stars? The Pleiades
are one, fuzzy. The stars
are clear in desert skies,
cold and clear. They almost forget
to twinkle. No clouds
haunt the skies. The cold
is frightened away during the day.
The heat hides by night. All is dry.
But the Pleiades!
All seven sisters are clear on such nights,
inviting eyes to watch them,
pick them out,
notice them one by one
instead of as one.

Apprehension

Something strange is lingering
Storms appear they may appear
Clouds in gray or white do not obscure
Sunlight from the noonday sky
Spring, the air full, flower scents,
Pollen make the air more dense
Than the winter's colder air.
Something seems to hide
Something seems to need to be uncovered.
Gray rocks, rotten logs we overturn--
Snakes and worms and rolly-pollies--
Musky, earthy smells as sweet, attractive

Bug Collection

A glass jar sits in the window--
paring knife air holes punched in the lid,
holes of thin triangles.
Gray-brown twigs, too young for white lichen,
brown buds hiding green new leaves
protrude past drying grass, yellowing,
coiled across the bottom,
sprouting throughout the jar
for the creatures captured in the yard.
Some are missing,
eaten.
The praying mantis now lies dead
among the husks of fireflies,
white pepper-winged moths
and their black and brown banded woolly bear larvae.
A walking stick, perched along a twig,
lies as still as the tiny branch it evolved to imitate.
One wonders which is which
without looking closer.
The only life left is a millipede, waves of legs
along its two-inch body, black and shiny,
not noticing the cyanide it secretes into the air.

Clothed in Forests of Words

All poems are on death--this dark art
Invites us into the forests--islands
Of trees that spread shadows on the trails
We tread on our short trips across
And through--beginning and end threaded--
Woven in brown and green--warp
And woof--I wonder where these woods will end--

We dress ourselves in dreary clothes
And wonder why the darkness wafts over
Our lives--dark clothes losing us
In the dark forests--fear surrounds us--
Why must we live in such morbid fear--
We are unable to see that in the absence of greatness--
Pettiness prevails--what poor lives
We have learned for too long to live--and to die--

All poems are on love--and live longer
Lives than the lovers--living their deaths
And showing that love creates the same showers
Of death-blood as wars and droughts--
The trees these poems are fashioned from trickle
With the blood of those hung from their high limbs--
Dressed--I hang highest in these trees--

To Find God

I had to cleanse myself of all religion
Before God could, would finally come to me--
He shined in through my eyes as beauty, love
And peace--the holy opened, set me free.

For God is one, yet not just one, He lives
By being many, too--as a true healthy
Body is made of many kinds of cells--
No one investment ever makes you wealthy.

To live in healthy holiness we must
Go out to fight all of the cancer cells
That threaten this hold world as it grows,
Sending branches up roots deeper than wells.

A single path is not a choice, one branch
Is not a tree. Cancer kills the body--
If we want a healthy and holy world
We need plurality in unity.

The strongest loves grow between different,
Unlike things. God is not narcissistic--
He does not want us all to be the same--
For in Him, and us, cancer makes one sick.

And so, I cleansed myself of all religion
So God could finally make his way to me,
And shine in through my eyes as beauty, love,
And peace, wholly open to be set free.

Back on the Road

 I must get out of here, away from all
The boredom, mediocrity it represents,
The boredom, mediocrity it is.

Shall I follow Kerouac on the road,
Sixty years too late?
In time for all my conflicts,
The nihilistic fight

Blows taken 'til we learn
If what they say is right is wrong
Then what they say is wrong is wrong as well

Let's go back on the road,
Go back to learn about ourselves,
Before we learned that wrong was right,
Before we gave up on the right
Before we found that we were dead
Soon after birth--and never learned to live

What will you choose to be your sure escape
From the realities of hate
Where creativity is scorned,
Intelligence despised

We must be trampled so they may feel good
Made mindless mediocrities
So they may feel secure,
Done with our sanction from our guilt
For being good

Let's go back on the road
To find ourselves
To save ourselves
From all the moral cowards they have med
With our permission
Because it was ourselves

Low Screams Unheard

 Low screams unheard
They never listen to our voice
Low screams unheard
They never let us have a choice
They'll hear us when we stone their ears.
Low screams unheard
When will they see our tears?
A voice they won't allow to hear
What do they have from us to fear?
Low screams unheard
The best we cannot surface
It cannot be allowed in any case.
It cannot be allowed to change this place
It cannot be allowed to join the race.
Low screams unheard
How do we terrify you so?
Our ideas, our thoughts, the things we know?
Do you fear the truth that we show?
Low screams unheard
What life will people know?
Your fear is all we see
Low screams unheard
Despite you all we will succeed
And you will be the one to beg and plead
And then we will be heard.

Autumn Dream

 An Autumn, warm and beautiful.
The colors, right and bright
Warm and wonderful. A cool breeze
From the north renders the day a joy.
I lay down in the yellowing grass, enjoyed
Autumn's company. The leaves rustled.
The birds sang. The clouds migrated
To warmer climes. A flock of geese,
Their honks filling the air, chased them there.
Her sweet caressing warmth filled me--
I closed my eyes to listen. I looked
Up at the sky. Familiar shapes were born
And disappear. Bright, beautiful, colorful
Wonderful, warm. I stood. Colors
Exploded in the field. Flowers
Bloomed, birds continued singing, waves
Rippled across the field. I felt pulled
Back into the grass. I lay among the grasses,
Took a deep breath. My eyes slowly shut.
I slept in Autumn's comforting embrace.

Enfolding Time

You will be reading this poem on time.
You are now reading this poem on time.
You have been reading this poem on time.
My reversal has placed things in order
Where we now question where lies the border
Where inside and outside are disorder.
Time occurs in endless repetition.
Time will never give us repetition.
Time circles linear repetition.
When will time rise into eternity?
When time rises into eternity,
Then time rises up to eternity.
More complex things are made through time's passage.
More complex folds are made in time's passage.
More complex folds make time's complex passage.
Changing time changes as changing space-time.
Folding folds folding in changing space-time.
Folding change changes in folding space-time.
Eternal return of the similar--
To know where you are, know once where you were--
Time's tasting of wine and smelling of myrrh.
Time is a rover that's flowing along,
A snake shedding skin and a lyre song,
A line and a spiral getting along.
Inside and outside are in disorder
Where we question the length of the border
As my reversal space things in order:
You have been reading this poem on time--
You are now reading this poem on time--
You will be reading this poem on time--

Omen

Lonely, lovely Japanese girl
Gliding slowly, gently across the kabuki stage--
She stops and stares at the audience, tense,
Her golden necklace seeming to float
Around a neck as green as the backdrop, gold
As gold as the golden lines around her face--
A startled action. And yet, she tries
To remain calm, alone upon the stage.
She hides her face under a pure white mask--
Her red and green and golden hair is stringy,
Flailing from the sides--her makeup makes a part
In her flattened hair on top--her severe
Part and flattened head of hair
A mask for us as well.
Red lips, green eyebrows, red edges
Surrounding lovely dark green eyes--

But can a Japanese girl have green eyes?--
The look upon her face is one of dull surprise--
And on her face the makeup dries,
The mask hides from all of her her truth and lies--
How will she fall, how will she rise?--
Yet, no matter however hard she tries
All we can hear from those scarlet lips are sighs--

Where is the lover she laments for on the stage?
Will he come before she gives up and dies?

Woven

A pair of masks are separated, red
And oddly rootless ti plants grow between
The eggshell blue and red masked faces, lined
In blue and in maroon--this chiasma
Of peering Asian and worried Aztec,
Deep bags under its straight, stern eyes--a mask,
A face? What is each mask trying to say?
When Asia comes to America--Self
And Other of any kind make a mask
They present, hiding who we are--who are
We to anyone? Our loves or our friends?
Is this why one face is stern and angry
And the other pouting in the corner?
How orange are your feelings, red and blue masks?
Grasp the rootless ti plant sprouting between.

Weird Balance

Yellow two-faced bird blowing smoke rings
From blue chopstick lips
Taking the red-eye to cross the red mountains
Blue hills rise behind
Yellow birds, yellow sun, shining cheekily
In black space comets
Streak through the sky past haloes that puff,
Puff, Puff in tic-tac-toe,
An "O" picked up in tweezers that question
In white and brown--
Don't be cross, don't make a sound

In the Flower Garden

The cock's combs, red and wrinkled, rise
Above the leaves to lift the blooms
They hide up to the butterflies.
Crab spiders transform feasts to tombs.

The buzz and sip of bees upon the breeze
That brings the honeysuckle--yellow, sweet--
To both our senses--theirs more sensitive
Than mind--they smell the clovers at my feet.

Keep It Unreal

 I'm always being told I ought to keep it real
But that is not the way I think, the way I feel.
My life can turn into what I would make it seem--
Success will only come to those who dream

And live within that dream. And then, I can aspire
And take myself to task, make me make me aspire
To streets of gold and castles in the wispy clouds
To airy utopias hidden in the shrouds.

The real will drag my dreams back down to mountaintops,
A high place on the earth where we can see the shops
And crops and tabletops of human life at play--
But we cannot aim for them or we will delay

The possibility of growth, increase, and wealth--
To aim for mere survival will deny good health.

Vital

Read and know and think and learn and learn to love
For if you have lost everything, it's all destroyed
Or taken from you, when the things you own do not
Exist, then all that's left lies in the mind.
Love and knowledge build and satisfy the soul
They are the riches in your life.
Hate and ignorance destroy and famish the soul
They are the founders of death.

The Conception of Art

Conception is how all art's made

Creation's how it's growing

We weave and wrinkle and we braid

To more than we are knowing

Like all my children, art's conceived

Through Eros, love, and passion

We give from all that we've received

And never start in fashion

All art are concepts concretized

We must conceive the concept

All art's from what is memorized

From inspiration's incept

Yet creativity's true source

Is in our social living

And art can only find its course

With every artist's giving