the last degree

I don't want to live like this anymore.
I want to live different. Even just four
degrees out of three-sixty-three would be fine! Even

just one. If it came
in time. Mind you,

I do want to live, regardless.
Even if I have to live like this. I just
don't want to live like this, no more.

I'm sick of running up such a gaudy
score.

kismet goodbye

You were made
so was I, and we thought
no coincidence, but
We were wrong,
since we did
coincide
too much
and
not enough.

unopposed

It's sad it's how it had to go
At least you didn't tell me so.

It's not as if you kept from me
conclusions you had come to see.

It's just as if you never knew
I guess we figured out it's true.

It took us long enough to see
how sad it was eventually.

I'm happy for each day's delay
and wish sometimes we could unsay
unlearn, unknow, unfind each out
that forced us to conclude
our doubt.

what habits really feed on

Old bad habits never break.
Only sometimes slink away
when we walk the other way -
Found ourselves a better one!
Working it habitually.
Build it!
Feed it!
Growing strong.
Purely for the good of it -
Bad ol' habit quite forgot
with new good habit,
coming on.

No one's seen bad habit 'round.
No one wants bad habit now.
Why's good habit smiling, though?
Something we don't want to know?

de elevator

Let's take this lift
down where it goes,
all the way two floors
past the "L"

When we get out, we know
there'll be scores of cars
and we'll have all the keys we need
just ours

A man's heart

A man's heart
has got to have BALLS, since
that's where the brain is
hanging down loose by the dick. Are you
a right ball, left-ball thinker

or what? That means
you are more of an artist, or
a math words type. Competent,
brave and you don't give up. You
could be ambicogni-
testicular! That

should be looked at,
though.

Checked out. You're at risk

of losing your mind
in a dirty fight.

detachment

whose genitals, you ask?
a peculiar question. Aren't
they attached? Oh

sorry I asked

sum of sum a

A man like me
He lives in the sea
I see him sometimes
and he sees me

I lie on the sand
and say it's cement
there's nobody fooled
that's not my intent

As people bake selves
like dough in the sun
a scenty smell rose
- we know we are done

Let's pack up our things
and go to the beach.
Today and tomorrow
and yesterday, too

- if we reach

cynicism

I don’t know
what happened around the world.
Maybe partly
our bad influence
via hip attitudes.
But here, Vietnam,
counterculture abolition
of corny virtues and topped off
by Watergate - it was a killer.

People have changed,
but maybe for some good.
I wouldn’t want to live in
1950s pop-optimist mandatory
affirmation of corny values,
either. And I love
corny values.

But maybe we needed to be scathed.

I have tremendous hope for the modern era
of making loud outspoken political noises
against all. I hated the fucking politeness
of “no politics or religion” social-occasion
talk bans. The only reason I suffered
those fools is,

I came up that way. I came up with it. It seemed
another stupid-but-accepted, therefore
useless-to-question norm.

If values are falling, so are norms.
I’ll take that trade. Truth works
best in uncluttered light, and human
reason responds powerfully to it
- by growing appropriate values.

Our species
is going to grow so strong. Have heart,
little one. We got this.

You and me got this.

last-minute decisions

I love this book I didn't want
it to end, and
it hasn't yet, but
I'll slow down if I can
I cannot begin again
I cannot begin again
once it's over, to start over
would be nothing but pretend

as if things could turn out
differently, that's
not how books can work

unless they make a movie of it
but I hope they keep the ending,
since
I haven't reached it yet, but

shit. It's got to be
so good, I hope
it's good enough to keep! How
can you slow it down
while plowing headlong forward with
your hope in throat
so deep?

I can't.
I'm stopping now.
Let's let suspense fill in
the rest, and I

will set aside my hope,
to sleep.

This morning, once it dawns,
I'll wake blear-eyed and bushy
-faced, exhausted from the pace

I've made, pick up
the book, from where it's laid

- and make the choice

No, never mind.
It's made.

This book will never end. I'll pass
it on to one dear friend, and swear
her to a secrecy:

don't spoil it again
for me.

new lute

There isn't a way to say this
but if I try, I might convey
some sense of the negative space
that surrounds the shape
of the meaning and feeling
which bulks and intrudes
like an instrument I have not
practiced upon - I can only
begin to play

the quantum box

the quantum box
holds superposed
a pussycat
with cute pink nose
who is both dead
and not right now
and no one knows
unless, until
we lift the lid
(or hear meow)

(except I know,
because I switched
the poison capsule
for a pill
of extra-strength
placebo grade
- if particle
decays, it will
do nothing much!
But still, let's
pray. Poor pussycat
does not enjoy
such play)

the bloom

the bloom of youth
is off us both.
there's nothing
left to hope for us,
except for what
I always hoped:
the growing old
together, growing
trust.

free wist

Free will, he argued. I know
not why. Why not, I guessed
my fancy free as anyone's
- so his must be. At least
there isn't any bind, or bond,
not even James, to kiss
or kill the freely wandering
of wish, and wist, and whim
- what will?

this point.

We irritate each other such
that even slight remarks touch off
- remind
without quite bringing up
the grievances
grown hard inside
- too small
to bring up at the time,
we find.

a proven technique

I walk outside
somewhere mostly sky and living things,
if large water, cool.
Big and lumpy cool,
but trees alone
and some high, scuppled clouds

will do in a pinch. And I do

the opening-to-sensory overload
thing. I try
to pay attention
just to what's streaming in
through every sense.
A distant song,
a smattering of overlapping bird calls,
the water, the rustle, the wind,
the hot pine smell,
my skin
my airways and lungs,
my throat,
my lips
and the impact of earth
traveling up my legs. The sight

panoramic and minuscule, all at once
- expanding attention to all at once
but doting on each detail the point
of my mind will touch as I go, and let
go. If I see

something cool

I may stop and just look. All over
it at first, then settle on one point
and let persistence of vision build up
like melting periphery and lightning-flash
through cracks of surface texture, holding
my gaze on, and through one point
but geeking out on the intrusion of tiny shift
and shake that ripples all through. Especially

valid for use on the right kind of clouds
- the kind that look like breaking waves
with streaming spray of cirrus.

This is a proven technique
to drive words and connected series
from thought. Some people can do it
indoors! I tend

to wake up
at a road someplace
unfamiliar, remembering
every step of the way

but none of the time passing.

footpads.

Instead, we pad around on beans
as nimble as some master's paws,
so sleek and still invisible.
He knows we'll never come to call.
But catspaws always at the beck
of universes, come correct.
We are not shall not masters be.
We're too consumed in mastery.

two of the creatures

I am one of the
creatures, moving around
I would fix my persistent
stare upon you
'til I figure you out.
It's true you could
pounce! I would skitter
like lightning-quick
striking away, and you'd
miss me and

flounce.

match from nowhere

You are the match
that tumbled out of the world,
to strike
such a spark from my flinty strip.
I sat
at the end of the dock,
casting lines,
in hopes of a catch

it came so quick.

hierarchy of we

It's nice to be wanted
it's nice to be missed,
it's nice to be needed.
It's better to kiss

the gift we had gotten to know

No good things end well.
Only bad things
end well, because you
are well out of them. So
if you are in a thing
that is good, has been good
- a thing that ever you once would
have wished could go on forever?

Please know it will end not well.

Don't want it to
Do not wish for that, but
perhaps never end?

That's swell.
You can bank on it.
But if balance has dwindled
to breaking point, and you wish
you were well out of what
you've become - but you can't
just end. It would hurt
someone.

who you love like yourself
a thing that you know in this world
at its best, can never repeat

Do not wish
after such good fortune
and so much bliss
for the end to be sweet.

Do not diminish the good
that it is, or even was - it is
in reach! It still
can be saved! Or can it
not? Of such bitter pills
we sit down to feast, but our cups
never empty so long we live
though he meat with which
we fill our mouths may rot, They spill
still with all the good
that flowed.

The bad fades, the good
is forgot, but - has entered
into us, metabolized. It is blood
and bone and muscle
and tears and snot. You will live

with it always,
now

the treasure you had,
that you have:

the one gift.

of getting to know.

and giving to it
as good as you got.

front-row critic

Sometimes, you just want to step
back from your life, make some popcorn -
sit down and watch, spellbound! But

all of the actors would get confused
and the show would grind, and grind
in fits and starts - like it always does

when you try to take a break, from being
you. Their eyes turn

in awkward and piteous appeal
- they can't put it in words,
it's not in the script - can't break
character, that would reflect
on them - they really do

give a shit, sometimes

and you say "OKAY! I was just

hungry for a big bag of butter
and salt, and puffed fluffy
kernel-y CORN. Hold your horses,"

you'll be right there. The relief
onstage is a cross to be borne.

unother

another exact
same thought process! - See?
That's exactly why I speak
my mind! It's fun
what a match comes tumbling
out,
especially with
some one so fine.

stochasticism

Done for no reason, or not at all.
Things should be, I mean.
That's my motto,
and every call
that I make along lines
tends to curve and arc
either towards or away
from shine,
or dark,
or stimulus, so-called
(perceived). Chances are
I'm indifferent to all such cues
- at least, so I
have been forced
to observe
I believe.

I was thinking of some
-thing else, just then. When
I did the thing. Something else besides
reason or principle, or any such
so-called second-order
reasoning. You see
In any given
moment - the decisive one,
stretching out for subjective
weeks, maybe

until just when you'd otherwise think
(or you'd think so) (you'd think
you would) - in that moment,

the utter white noise
of one's mind kicks in for good,
wipes blank in a massive,
flashing laser array of focus,
and drives away all concerns
both extraneous and otherwise
that you'd find. And it's off!

Chasing a white hot crazy dance
and scamper and slide! After
a disembodied dot
a disemprojected point of light
from a nonexistent laser pen,
being chased in turn by
an absolute cat
- which may or might
exist, but can't
at this moment
be reached. Which is good
because more to the points of its
imagined claws
- can't reach you. And within which,

(the cat?!)

there is only one point
in the world
to be missed: of awareness,

perhaps

it is always off-joint,
in-focus, mid-kilter
and gone for a ride

in accordance with prophecy
got up impromptu, a vulgar
and rude self-anointing
decided upon to mislead
the cat. No dice. We tried. It
skews ever so
slightly up,
in a twinkling, a trice
we arrive now radically home, as I try
to look on the lopside
of things. That's just as
things lie, so to be precise
I always try to look there,
when I see what's-what.

I succeed, pretty much
inevitably.

If you ever ask me
for the reasons involved?

"It is what it seems,"
I will hint,

"There are three,"
but don't push me for details
that I won't solve. Instead, join me
now - let's find it all out
as we live and breathe,
and our minds revolve
in our heart's desire, perchance
to dissolve.

I was kidding.
There aren't "three" that's just
kind of an in-joke, you know. Any time
you stump me with a poser I'll start off,
Well,
"There are three main reasons"
and I just make them up!
Good ones, usually. But

they were not even present,
were never referred to
at the decision-level. The end
only came to being
because of the sentence. "Explanations"
maybe

would be a better word.
And I assure you

there are three.
There are always three
it's a little absurd