Truth In All Directions



To write is to judge.
But beyond judgment
is the goal of my faith.

The earth is nurture.
But it is home to and nurtured by
corpses enough, were they atoms,

to form a body.  Meditate
on death as a yellow 
dandelion blossom,

the pretty weed, 
solitary,
a sun pushing up greens

like a feast, then
the dandelion ages, puffs
truth in all directions

and the object
disappears.  Identify your self.
The finger points


away from the body.




Economics/Lesson



Starvation’s swords
slice through silos

and grain spills like a gut disembowled
and bakes itself

in a sun gone supernova.  Bread
and missles, guns and greasy butter.

Sin is in our garbage,
any loaf not cut

and eaten to a crumb.

Watch death, America, throw out
your food, drive your Dakotas.

I’ll buy just enough fresh
to eat this week, drive

my battered clunker to work, listen
to our cravings and judgments

and pray they don’t
infect me.


Meteor


Mary with your offbeat sense of humor
which is to say you laughed at my jokes
and intelligence that cut
from taste to savor

and the perfect big breasts and sex
that in my decades
I have not learned writing well enough
to do justice:

O Mary, there are so many satellites
and pieces of space in our way
and we'll never get back.  Why
did you have to be my aborted mission?

You gave me a taste of the eternal
then left, the perfect contradiction.
And when you re-enter eternity
I won't even know

your streak across the sky
separate, but lumbering 
toward the same death
your stake driven not quite all the way

through my heart.

After years away from the best
relationship of my life, brevity
is a lesson for my memory
and my prayer

as I contemplate that past
and this present, and in the future
I read of the Milky Way colliding 
with another galaxy millions of years

from now
and you probably knew it was all the same
mattered not the more or less
Mary with your offbeat sense of humor


Lost Over Germany


here in the smoke and surge
of bar conversation i am

in mid-sentence
losing altitude and attention

lost over Germany


the flyer low on fuel
and drifting distressed

the ones you want
never want you

shellshocked and shrapnelled i push on
astray with time-killing talk

and friends who are the enemy
through the smoke through the sky

i see who i am:


solitary snowy flower
grown nourished unnoticed on clouds


banking over the horizon
leaving myself behind

back to earth
with my epitaph:


what you want
never finds you


the crowd gathers
around the crash
as they always have


the solitary cloudflower
snows its warm pure petals
white over twisted metal

as it always has

back here in the bar
talk is the kiss
always was

endless foreplay without completion
we parachute this far to hard earth

and spring up flying
the lonely night run again 



back to reality this wayward boy
is lost over Germany still