We're travelling down a carnival road, are met at intersections by
varying faces: poets as eyes in collapsed black holes, even the
universe as extension of the stellar poet. Then, they are transformed,
become worm-pickers, masons, longshoremen who subsidize their
poetry with the real task at hand: making waste, laying trestles
instead of women to prove a point.

This is necessary. I'm defending it, find it both believable and
interesting. Meanwhile, troubadours and wandering minstrels eke
out a living on storybook memories, join Marco Polo if he ever
lived. Seek out the Great Khan in a box of cookies or within a
magnum of champagne depending on circumstances.

The Grand Lunar is watching. Her pallor commands true poets to
roll over, gaze at silver buttocks make a commitment to the art
beyond spray painting, ghost watching, navel gazing.

The sky is the final home of the soul, the Sage himself a wanderer
announced.

It was a warm spring evening. Lilac bounded from antler brown
twigs only recently inert. Everything dissolved at once into crying.
The world itself became a tear.

BEDROOM GLASS

Counted three white pigeons
on a roof, near a gable
silhouetting a barn;
as an afterthought
killed as many nervy bluebottles
on the bedroom glass as
warnings to myself, perhaps,
or the elements pelting the window
with ice beads, tiny crystalline
versions of those distant elephantine birds.

AHOY

Image throttled in the subconscious,
romantic throwback--
the mind on a voyage round land's end
to eclipse pyramidal fires
set as beacons along rock strewn shores--
her skeletal inhabitants on ice flows
wrapped in bearskins
with dirks between their teeth
slapping one another to keep warm.

Then, alpine ranges carrying
the plight of the Andes in their mouth;
a dull, white sail propped against ship's bow
with a noise like an anvil
coming loose in the brain.

More frightening, sailors mutiny on a diet
of bread as sallow maggots
march in a quarter horse sized trot
across the floorboards.
Such men in the bellows of one's mind
break out rubber dinghies
in quickening escape thru the
maw of an Arctic sea.

Expiry. Dry rot. Sunken astrolobe
and an armada of feelings drifting alone.

THE POETRY POND

Everyone is a poet, or so the philosopher said. The world teems
with poetry in much the sense