There you pressed a little harder. There an image was shaped. There you wrote rain. There you folded the paper. There is the envelope in a red postbox. There she is reading of rain. There it really is raining. There is the notebook with the torn sheet. There the word rain seeped through. There you face another empty page. There memory teethed.

Beyond a gauzy curtain and a window streaked with dust and cobwebs
A cloudy sky hovers over an earth draped in summer green, and towards
This sky my thoughts leap, impudent and ineffective, like circus clowns,
Who really would have preferred to be leaping aerialists or motorcyclists
Who whiz round and round along the circumference of the Well of Death,
Transmuting the ache for sublimity into concrete moments of gravity defied.

Instead what I have are slapstick jokes performed by these fat men wearing
Masks of mimes, slapping each other around with loud unnatural noises,
Falling on their ass as they slide off bicycles with wobbly wheels, or better,
Stuffing themselves into a cannon like a sausage and reaching out from
Inside to set a match to the fuse. And following the explosion, these jokers
Instead of being airborne like comets, appear out of a cloud of smoke dressed
In colorful tatters to the loud thigh slapping laughter of the mob arrayed inside.




My Poems

Wind from the great lake funnels Through the alleys of this strange And brutal city, that was just released from an icy straitjacket.

You, a convict from a prison ship, Are stranded here like a sea anemone, Which will eventually become rock,

Which is chained to this heart, a dynamite cap Waiting for its fuse to be lit, to explode Your body’s caverns veined with emotion.

Footsteps follow behind you. A few paces away a body sluices through The hole you left behind in the night.

At those high windows, invisible to you Since you have been denied ascension, she stands, An insomniac, awaiting morning light, the arrival of birds, and of beloveds.