A Table Lamp In Connecticut - a poem

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I'll meet you there."
-Rumi


"The light is only a circle" -

more a bend that frames a sequence,
a gradual definition of things
that leaps to a shadowed blending
as you back away.

On the nightstand,
there is a half-empty bottle of
Coca-Cola, an open bottle
of Tylenol PM. I must be tired.

Outside I know the hills of Ashford are
washed with nocturnal noise,
frogs and flies, the crescendoing
and breathing that keeps this cold night
from freezing.
There is a moon, some stars,
and a whisper of light. Just not in here.

Inside is just a testament,
white angles outside the lamplight jutting
in an ancient geometry,
a wooden cabinet that kills the
blaring silence, bare walls and old magazines
to grow bored by.

Miles away speeding cars collide
to say nothing,
and all I can hear is what I can't say.

- "The light is only a circle."

Hayride - a poem

Engine spatters through vegetation,
planking a field that might
be wheat, perhaps flax,
maybe something unnecessary
or dead.

Conversations between us are now
tucked in like tender young,
and we're taken to stargazing.
The idea of galaxies more than
mere imprints in imagination
out this far, I look too,
thinking of mirrors that cast
no real reflections, only
vague indication in the glass,
there and definite but not defined.
I know these white dots are probably
clustered echoes long since faded,
old eco-systems smeared to obscurity,
but sometimes it's best to pretend
the pulsars are paper dolls.

Sudden, someone cuts the darkness
with voice, pointing at the high dark
behind me. A falling star tails across
the atmosphere and lands in some
field out and unknown.
Their collective oooh is heard for
miles, through the scattered branches
dancing in the new cold wind,
clear back to the fire we left for dead.

Recollection - a poem

I think her dog was brown.

I only saw it once, though, in a black and white

photograph – small and round,

with Batman ears, streaming away from focus

like background radiation,

an afterthought.

She was the foreground, focused finally,

framed by the light

of the Sarasotan sun, a singer at fifteen,

still afraid of thunderstorms that always seem

to come around midnight, her sour stomach,

and father’s drunken screaming.

We made plans to meet in Daytona, once,

but never did. Such was the nature

of our promises.

And now, these days, she blows her kisses

from softer images,

exhaling like fresh air beyond all the pedestals

and structures supporting her. She looks off,

to the left in space somewhere, toward something,

beyond and outward,

over the powder blue horizons, to an infinity

of other dogs greater than anything

I can conjure.

Ben Folds in November - a poem

This moisture coalesces on the windshield
to form something that resembles
a fingerprint in the sledge-slide movement.

This could be four, now, about a car
staggering down a highway like a drunk poet
in 15th Century Persia.

Inside, everything is cleaned and polished,
no lunch sack mountains, crevasses,
or canyons to connect us, just a long,
lone place to jump from.

I chuckle and recall the last time I was here,
my sore tooth and harsh opinion toward Anime,
the old woman miles away, and dying.
It's my feet tonight, though, a pair of bad shoes,
and impatience to be at the end of this distance.

It seems I still keep the same crooked frame,
a series of disembodied voices unvoiding
this present darkness like the stunted dials
barely defining her face,
an existence that falls back to being
from the brink of fading.

She's worried and asks me to slow down.
I do, this rain as fierce as ever.

We'll all be there, soon, after blistering the wrecks
down our lost streets, to watch Ben Folds
make bad words seem like watercolors.
Men will sell pizza out of their trunks afterward,
leaving us hungry enough,
but not sold.

Japanese Animation - a poem

The sign above the concession stand reads

“delicious hot dogs,” and like the onset of

sudden changes, he’ll see them –

plump ones, basting in their juices, their skins set to

shine with the light of all their commercials –

Perhaps these are the hot dogs of Hot Dog Alley.

Why always this theatre, he’ll ask himself.

Darkened, except for the screen’s random strobe,

pelting his face like soft hail, this is the hall he always

seems to find his way to, arriving every time

with these same people to sit, to watch, and to see

the insides of these unlikely venues of small worlds

and skewed relevancies.

It’s been said at one time this was a building used to sell

Plymouths. And even now, after the ends of all the

days since, the cars still remain, kept in the rank

summer heat of the garage out back.

They breathe the fumes of their fresh new paint jobs,

lying in their new, unaccustomed traditions,

these spectacles for pushing coffee on the young.

Inside however, the cool rubber air bounces off the

processed chicken salad they make here,

and a group gathers away in a corner, the epic rolls

of their laughter setting this place to echo.

They remember seventh grade humor – days of “doing

your mom,” nights of jumping off bridges,

full flexing the charge of such young power.

At a piano, one plunks some chords in an Ionian mode,

like a rapture of old yesterdays, and swears

he doesn’t know the little things that make it work,

just what’s good to the ear.

It’s in this pierce of elder sun, his music becomes the

soundtrack to the unfolding scene, as the rest of them

cling to the toys and trucks that dirtied their childhoods,

these reaffirmations of other realities, the building

contracts of cartoon revolutions, in a cartoon nature,

where the cartoon wizard’s cold holds the kingdom’s

sway, and the only resolution resolves in such spaces

as between parted lips.

A small white coupe pushes up a grain bitten highway,

and with it, the young man rides his smooth gradient

of age, watching, as the dark hills of Arkansas slowly

absorb the orange sky, the sweet trappings of an old song

spinning the night before dissolving like cotton candy,

his month long toothache almost enough to ruin it all.

Somewhere else, a walking castle rolls a twisted chaos

through green mountains of another world,

and it echoes the percussion of his companion’s silent

concern. She turns on the headlights.

Perhaps later he will recall their weight, comparing it

to the gravity of all the things he’s seen today,

an old woman’s pain from falling, distances,

like threads of religion that seem to spark the spine,

and he’ll pace the floor before it’s all over. But for now,

all he can do is continue this motion past Shakespeare Drive,

and think about nothing else but dancing lemons.