The River Maps of Hercules

To break with common thinking you
Can’t be afraid to be a little wrong
To realize the real as true
You must fight Hercules and be more strong

Misunderstanding is an act
That hammers at the common paradigms
Until the fractures make a chart
Designed to guide us to more complex times

My thoughts are messy it is true
My brain is filled by many flowing streams
That network to a complex brew
And truth emerges from my growing dreams

Hermosa

The wave runs fore
And frictionless until
It meets the shore
It rises to a spill
In changing amplitude and space
An ever-moving hill
Before which quick sandpipers chase
The waves that stir their food upon the shore
Beneath the foamy fractal lace
That in their power will
Create destroy this fractal place
A cormorant deft-dives for fish before
A rainbow breaks upon the face
Of a new wave to fill
The human mind with nature’s grace
And every seabird’s bill
I’ll watch some more
This natural churning mill
Creative war

Crime and Sin

The woman is the archer who
Just misses, misses, misses
Then offers to make her aim true
With kisses, kisses, kisses

The man is but a criminal
Loves murders, thefts and rapings
Rampaging like an inflamed bull
Destroying with its shapings

The criminal is out at night
The sinner, she is sleeping
Destruction is his true delight
Her pregnancy, she’s reaping

From crime and sin a boy is born
From whines he winds to wining
In drunken ecstasy he’s torn
From us as we were dining

From sin and crime a girl is brought
To birth, an earth seducing
To become creatures who have sought
The truth as but reducing

In crime the boy and girl give birth
To a true, wise magician
Exposing to the world its worth
This trinity’s one mission

The flesh and blood of this young man
Are rent because a savior
Is always killed – we cannot ban
Our criminal behavior

The great ones who will make us free
We’ll squander, squander, squander
And that is why man aimlessly
Will wander, wander, wander

Fractal Thoughts

My thought-grains pile and avalanche
In patterns like a wind-warmed branch
They jump like sand fleas on the beach
A single thought seems out of reach

A pomegranate beckons breeds
A lust for flesh its wanton seeds
An apple no a blueberry
I’m climbing in a cherry tree

With nothing left too much to do
My toddler son brings me his shoe
I’m ignorant and know too much
I’m racing fast and hold a crutch

So many little things obsess
My middle middles more or less
And but a few things looming large
I don’t know what I’d even charge

Myself to do with what I know
I watch my little children grow
My ocean laps up on the sand
My mind won’t work upon demand

The Son of Suns

I am the son of suns, each atom born
From supernovae, all the atoms shorn
Away to leave behind a neutron corpse
Whose spinning density near-spacetime warps
Until the time beside it slows and bends.
They made the atoms on which life depends,
The iron, nickel making up earth’s core,
The oxygen that laps up on the shore
When it’s combined with hydrogen, the sky
Of oxygen and nitrogen. I lie
Here with my stardust eyes and see the stars
That die by iron in the passing cars.

Chirping

Enfluffed wired bird.
Green air frosts your every word,
Feathered thoughts, absurd

In the Land of Butterflies

We search the desert sands 

for butterflies---the one 

which reflects the colors swirling 

within us, making us 

who we are. I think 

mine is small and blue--- 

it wants to be bigger, a beautiful blue 

and black bird-wing, wings 

almost a foot wide, impossible 

not to see, impossible 

 to ignore. 

How many caterpillars 

are out there, masquerading 

 as butterflies? Can't we see them 

for their false wings?

So I search these desert sands 

for other butterflies---butterflies 

with wings of gold, reflecting 

the sun so you cannot see them, 

mistake them 

for something other than butterflies--- 

until they take off, drifting 

light on the desert winds. Her shine 

makes her difficult to see, 

 difficult to obtain, 

though I must obtain her 

if my own butterfly is to expand 

into the blue and black bird-wing. 

 So I search, knowing I may instead--- 

certainly will in the end--- 

find a black-winged butterfly 

that will take me finally away 

to the end.

Campfire

Follow the flame, the flame
flickers, focused fiercely
on your eye. Why? I wonder
what you see in those flames
that drive us near, away, too
hot, too dry, not enough of either.
Water crackles, lips crack, cries
of steam searing out of wet wood.
Eyes burn, heat smoke, shimmering.
Watch the flame escape, become
its own, spreading with indifference, knowing
where it's going. It all burns
down around us, sending
pops penetrating
from every direction. Heat hovers
everywhere, singeing
hair, skin
blisters, pain
freeing us from inhibition, freed
in our consumption,
purified.

The Comfortless Comfort

I hear the radio speaking to me,
speaking of fuzzy kittens lost
under houses ready to burn
at the first spark. Where
are the rains to douse the fires
raging in us, tearing down the trees
we planted to protect our inner houses?
Where is this barricade, this fence
that helps us make our neighbors friends,
hiding cats hunting mice
in secret holes in the boards and trees,
peaking out with their shining eyes,
lifting feet to scratch their heads,
afraid the movement attracts the cats
lurking --- pounce! Death is immanent
as it's tossed in the air. We must agree
that we feel more for the mouse than we relate
to the cat, having been tossed too many times
into the air ourselves,
an air filled with waves, sending sounds
invisible, inaudible to us, inviting our neighbors
in, asking them to make themselves comfortable
in the seat of our being, a place once protected---
no more.
No more, lest we lose ourselves
within ourselves, staring
into the darkness that tempts us in,
into comfort, protection, permanent
comfort and protection, a death before death
we cannot endure to see in others
as we peer from our hold in boards and trees,
afraid it could be us, wondering often
why it isn't,
why our terrors were far less worse
than theirs, wondering
when it will be our turn, having
felt the darkness creeping, drawing
our eyes to it, into the warmth,
the comfortless comfort.

Surgical Strike

In the cloud the leopard prowled
The misted branches bent
Mottled movement, monkey howled
He stopped, he turned, he went

Slanting on the rain-slick limb
The scalpel-teeth unfurled
Reaching out, the monkey’s slim
Hand missed the fig. He hurled

Off his limb to get the fig
The moment that the cat
Sprung and missed – it had to dig
Its claws into the mat

Made of moss, and thus it lost
Its grip and tumbled round
Bounded off a limb that cost
Its life. It hit the ground

Dead before the monkey heard
The sound of clouded death
Whisper past the place that lured
Uphir to his last breath

Without Rules

Im bored
floored, soared
seeming sailing high on winded sky
stupid, stupid, stupid
It all sounds the same every time I write
whatever comes to mind
poetically
continual rhyming – internal, alliterative,
same sounds over and over,
S and I
why?
Poe’s long O for sorrow –
even the sentence above sounds sorrowful –
But why my S and I?
S is slippery, serpentine,
I lifts the soul high –
how can high and slippery serpentine
possibly come together? –
a formalist problem –
the postmodernists know
even if I don’t.

On Being Human

Are you native? Are you foreign?
Are you shadow? Are you light?
Are you logic? Or erotic?
Do you bring the world delight?

Do you think with your emotions,
Or with your cool intellect?
Are you conscious or unconscious?
Or too simple to detect?

Do you love a soulful life?
Do you love technology?
Are you thinking? Are you feeling?
Trunk or branches of the tree?

Are you general or specific?
Particular in what you love?
Or does the universal match
Your soul and fit it like a glove?

We're particles and we are waves
That atom into molecules
That chemistry into live cells
And body up the brain it fuels.

The brain is minding as it acts
And interacting brains give birth
To social orders with their cultures
That make us humans what we're worth.

Neoteny

In Mexican pools low on iodine
The axolotls can’t become adult –
Mature infants swimming as a result,
With pale pink gills all feathery and fine.
Here we, observant infant species, learn
Something about itself while watching child-
Adults that swim and mate. Here we're beguiled,
In this old youth that we young elders yearn.
We look into these pools, these mirrors clear,
Which show a stage we even now go through,
Young apes who immature to people who
Can then love axolotls we find dear.
In these large salamanders we can see
The deepest source of our humanity.

Wavelets

As the waves crash on the shore, shells
Are in fair fractals of tense time –
As are we. Wisdom unveils vain
Our beliefs, more we are much more
Than the ebb energy gyres
From the folds formed by the space spread
From the big bang. We’re the form frothed
As the time twisted the waves white
And complex. Patterns emerged, minds
That could see seashells in stars strung
Into groups, growth which would make man.
We’re but dense droplets of wise waves.

What Is Missing

I am a lion, a high-soaring bird,
I'm coiling and hissing a softly hot word.
I am a spirit with amorous wings,
A mouth that can only spill words if it sings.
I am light, not shadow or gravity –
I am a painful and dark black cavity.
Do you know what all I say? I’m smiling
And as I laugh, do you know who I’m styling
My soul against? An abyssal dragon
Has flown into dark clouds and sky – an agon,
War whipping my soul into strong and hard
Long-living spirit that will always stand guard
And bring a gift for all of mankind. Gift?
It’s in a box, a box brought up from a rift,
A box I carry down and carry up –
I cannot touch lunch or drink from a cool cup
Until my body and my blood turn warm
And I unfold again my old human form.
A monstrous animal or living light –
A spirit that in its good growth fashions flight
From fast-growing wings that lift us aloft –
Shall all of us grow hard, or stupid, soft?
I had to go down to climb mountaintops,
This light gift . . . I laugh, so that no laughing stops.

I Do

As sunlight slips between the shades I do
My joy and watch you sleep – with love, I do.

The love I have for you belongs to me,
A secret knowledge, wisdom which I do.

My light, my life, producing you in me
In children and in all the things I do.

I’m unified with you, in you, through you –
With you I’m confident in all I do.

My fingers slide softly across smooth skin,
And love fills every touch of you I do.

You resurrected me to a new life
And Heaven is in all with you I do.

I want to live in every jasmine kiss
From you I steal – I swear to you I do.

Such supple flesh enfolds me as I press
In close, embracing you through all I do.

My love of you in many ways had just
Begun the night I said to you, “I do.”

I celebrate the joy of all my love
For you in every thought, in what I do.

And now I slip into our room to watch
You sleep and breathe, a comfort that I do

Then we’ll wake up together and you’ll know
Your Troy will always love you, for I do.

The Joy You Bring

The sun rose and shone at last when you,
Iris of garden, sky, and eye, my light
That colorized my life with your clear dew
To prism sky and field and fill my sight,
Yanked me from my long polar night. My soul
Filled finally to thaw the frost that filled
Up every crack, now sealed – you make me whole.
Come, my beloved, you’re the Spring that killed –
Knifed – Winter with your sharpened rays. What joy
And love you brought to me, your flowers spread,
Nourishing me forever, to enjoy
Dew dripping from your petals, floral bed
Spread out before me, crocuses that peek
Up through the last crisp snow, the daffodils
Crowd narcissistically, the tulips seek,
Know what they want – you know they want their fill –
More tulips to fill up the bed. My eyes
Yearn but could never take enough of these
Desirous colors in, and so my sighs
Infest the garden. Could I ever please,
Caressing leaves and flowers, you my love?
Keep filling up my life with living sun,
Dearest, and I’ll pick up my garden glove,
Yank weeds that grow up, for you are my one.

Whoopie Pie

Two rounded cake-buns full of cream
That, thick and white, squirts on your tongue
And fills your every sugared dream
To make you feel forever young.

The name is not an accident –
The aftermath between your thighs
When in you I have become spent
Looks, yes, just like those whoopee pies.

Ah, whoopie pie is such a treat –
But with such pleasures, so intense,
The consequences you won’t cheat
For long – you soon will grow more dense.

Enough of each will make you round
Around the belly, though one will
Night eating pies won’t make you bound
For life as will some lovely child.

So do be careful when you fill
Your belly full of cream so white –
You may yet have to pay the bill
For whoopie pie, that sweet delight.

Antichaos (Alcaics)

Flow river, chaos breaks on the banks, and you,
Time, living order, changing in change itself,
Break chaos up to order merging
Flows of the water with earthly order.

Bright sunshine killing, loving tenderness
Light brings to lands that flow on the liquid flow –
Hot magma moving lands now crashing –
Earthquakes are turning the land to chaos.

Dry winds are parching lands into deserts where
Cacti won’t live. Moisture comes on the winds and there
Rains change the land from death to living
Breath and the lightning will light the dark sky.

White hurricane of sea and air are in
Time flows of swirling chaos and ordering
Matrices breaking land with winds which
Bring to the land and to us the ocean.

Life burst from rivers – earth and the sea are now
One river swirling time. The smooth chaos will
Bring order, life emergent, water
Solid with crystals that make them crawl forth.

Antichaos (Sapphic Verse)

The beautiful chaos of river flowing
As time you step out of, into, the living
Unchanging emergence of antichaos
Breaking on mud banks --

Is this the world, bright in the light of sunshine
That brings a remarkable living chaos
And deadly order to the continental
Flow as an earthquake?

The winds are drying and are bringing moisture
To lands the sun parched, and the atmosphere is
Unchanged and changed, bringing a breeze, a gentle
Breath, and then lightning.

The white hurricane on the seas are ordered,
An ocean, atmosphere together, swirling
In chaotic flows on the seas and landing
Hard on the dry land.

And living things, rivers of earth and sea crawl
Across the land, swim in the seas a chaos
That swirls into timeful emergent rivers
Crawling on mud banks

A Eusocial Mammal

The whiskered workers wind their ways along
The tunnels, tense with too much tough demand
Upon them. Quick and quaint, the Queen requests
They do their duty, dig and dredge their nests
And find the food for all to feast – a brand
Of justice promised, paid by plea and prong.

They’re promised beauty, but they’re blind, bereft
Of choice, they choose their chattel life. They cheer
The Queen who rules the rest with righteous reason,
The smooth pink skin is split by her in season
As punishment for making movements mere
Moments too late. The lonely low are left.

The people pleased by power pray that we
Will finally find our fate and follow them
Into the tunnels so the taught can turn
The rest around – a rat’s nest rulers spurn
And jeer, while jawing, “Justice is a gem,”
To them they flail and flog. “We’ll force you free.”

The naked mole rats nest in narrow naves,
Obeying blindly, bound by DNA,
They live a life the liars love to preach,
For man a terror twisted tempters teach.
Such subtle slavery simply spurns the clay
That man is made of – most aren’t merry slaves.

False Memories

Why have gaslight in an electric age?
Why feel the need to be transported
Back to a time none of us remembers,
So far removed it has turned cliché,
A time rustic and quaint, time
Flattening difference into utopia?
A Parisian café longed for
By a man who never left the States.
Narrow streets, full cafes, buildings
Centuries old. Or,
So he’s heard. A romantic place
Of Hemingways and Fitzgeralds, everything
An off-focus impression.
At night, lamplight, neon
Goes unseen. A myth
To be sure – uncommon, but
Not unseen. Waiters seat
Single customers with others –
Discussions, wine, and bread until
Gas-lit flame replaces day,
Flickering faces orange, the deep
Shadows drawing wisdom out
Of every café face.
A woman, in short shirt –
A navel, orange in the lamplight –
Draws the eye to new shadows unseen
In a clean electric-light place.

A Theme I Would Love to Have to Never Write On Again

It's hard to avoid writing
About the slick slime mold
Of creeping socialism
When it is organizing
Into its slug form,
Now visual, hideous.

Intestinal Pains

Here I sit with gastroenteritis,
Wondering at the cause as here I lie.
Could it be Lactobacillus,
Bacteroides or E. coli?
Maybe it was something that I ate,
Perhaps some seafood, I don't know.
If that's the case, it could be Aeromonas,
Plesiomonas, or Vibrio.
Of all the choices that I think
It's likely Vibrio; which could it be?
It's likely not vulnificus or cholera
Or I'd be good and dead, you see.
And so for a tiny taste of crab
My stomach's put up quite a fuss,
Not for the meat that I have eaten,
But parahemolyticus.

The Golden Child

The panther steals across the countryside,
Destroying all the sheep who trust in him –
The virtuous will all be made to hide,
The clouds will close and make the sun turn dim.

The panther drags the broken car across
The dark abyss; the drunken driver turns
The panther into ever-greater loss
Until the country smolders, smolders, burns.

The panther salivates, the acorns grow
In number as the squirrels disappear
Across the countryside. His teeth will show
Now that the country lives in constant fear.

The panther tempts the world with golden eyes
That promises all fantasies. Men’s souls
Are slowly lost in all their desperate sighs
And, helpless, end life torn and full of holes.

The panther rages as a tyrant to
The moment when his master sobers up
And takes the reigns again. The panther’s through
Now that the blood wine’s drained from his gold cup.

Envy

"In coveting is evil's root" – Chretien de Troyes, "Erec and Enide"

Envy, dragon of the day,
Where’s the brave knight who will slay
You before you make decay
The glories made by all mankind?

Envy lifts on wicked wings,
Slays the poet as he sings,
Chars the merchant as he brings
To town the best things he could find.

Envy breathes his fires, green –
With each death he will careen
Through the wheat to make us clean
As payment for when we were kind.

Envy rapes each virgin red,
Spoils every marriage bed,
Will not stop until we’ve bled
And lost our children, lost each mind.

Envy, your unbalanced scales
Cover hatred, fear that pales
All our other storms with gales
That lift black dust and make us blind.

Envy, will your hatred grow?
Or is there a knight who’ll show
Us the way so we may know
The joy of leaving you behind?

Envy, fall by virtue’s lance
So mankind can live and dance –
Die so we can have a chance
To live where beauty’s always shined.

Life and Death

One revolutionary gives us cars
Or telephones, or rockets to the stars.
The world is changed, transformed with gusting gales,
New worlds are found beneath white billowed sales.

One entrepreneur discovers ways
To create wealth, to turn the light that plays
On fields and forests into energy,
Unchains each person so they’re truly free.

A second entrepreneur has found
That begging legislators always bound
The citizens to sacrifice their health
To him, though doing so destroys their wealth.

A second revolutionary gives
Us promises of heaven as he shivs
Us in the back who won’t conform –
Society’s destroyed in his cold storm.

The Poet Getting Older

I ate at eight
That’s much too late
And now I have to face my fate

Now I have gas
That I must pass
Both from my stomach and my ass

The acid flows
Up through my nose
Each time I lie down, try to doze

So here I sit
A little bit
And write this piece of rhyming wit.

The Cacophony

Too many voices vying for attention in my head –
So many voices I can’t hear the words that should be said.
I ought to sing a song of envy’s evil, wicked strife
That wants to take what others have and threatens with a knife.
I ought to write on how emotions socially evolved
And through each epoch’s epics see their paradox is solved.
I ought to write about my Faust, a presidential play,
A tragedy that moves the morals plaguing us today.
I ought to write about the different reasons which arise
In every social order – in their unity we’re wise.
I ought to write some poetry about my sacred love
Who makes me feel like I can conquer, raise myself above.
I ought to write abut economists’ deep need to go
Watch plays and thus will learn of human action at the show.
I ought to sing a song of celebration of the joy
Of wife and daughter, son and soon another baby boy.
So many voices vying for attention I can’t hear –
Too many voices which demand their verses now appear.