Take all you know, and say goodbye, 
your innocence, inexperience
mean nothing now.  

There’s a poem dying on the sidewalk,
we will bury it with the rest. 

She has never learned
not to look
a wild beast in the eye,
that she can’t fly:
much-bitten, hypernaturally
attracted to light.

The voice of a single unidentifiable bird cracking dark
an electric kettle flicked on as first step toward coffee
red plum from the fridge a small cold body in the mouth
in still-on torchlight paving stones gleam sepia
a car gone the old man his swaddled news on the grass
drenched hem of the long cotton robe heavy from wet
the paper lain on the porch a cat standing on the walk
3 a.m's endless itemizing hear and red numbers banging change
a dream city's mute de Chirico porticoes
naked prowling against a cold window's breath
where was the old cat its death would not surprise

If we are, as some believe, created in God’s image, perhaps our greatest likeness is in the impulse to create worlds. Or maybe we are compelled to prove to the universe that we were here, that our little spark of soul added to the eternal bonfire of life. We are here, stacking stones in a cairn along the trail, or carving our initials in the white parchment skin of an aspen. Maybe our greatest choice is in how we leave that mark, whether to create beauty and uncover truth, or to create a karmic legacy through destruction and the infliction of pain. And what kind of mark will we leave? I’ve left both kinds in my wake.

Let’s invent useless things,
the ultimate freedom.

I’ll make marble eggs,
headless dolls,
and stringless violins.

I found myself on this magnificent, velvety-soft, yellow object with delicate, rounded edges, after a powerful storm on a dark night that seemed as if it was the night the universe was being built from the beginning. The two mountains vibrated to their very core from the thunder. All night long the sky washed the dirty surface of the earth clean, while the flashes of lightning severed the dark horizon into terrifyingly beautiful pieces… The grandeur of Nature one might say. The moment of my own birth, I might say.

We’ve all heard half of the fairy tale:
A mermaid rescued a drowning prince,
swam him to shore, then pined away
because she missed the weight of him

and the heat of his breath against her neck;
nothing at all like the trickle of cool
saltwater flushed from delicate gills
when she kissed the mermen back in school.

Open one eye only — 
the horizon is in the closed eye.

Open the seashell —
no solitude will escape.

The stones on the riverbed drink up time,
the dead fish swim towards the sun.

these characters 
with mirror-magic
eyeballs
collided like two giant comets
pitched a tent in the middle of a loft
to live inside of it 
out of the way
of the masses without sky-high spirits

I want to feed you
Lots of metaphors
bunches of images
I want to dress you
A dress with moon buttons
I will widen the horizon for you

The artist—call him Janus—means to comment, 
with his implant, on “the inaccessibility 
of time,” which Einstein said is part of space, 

or linked with space, or flows by relative 
to space as, tears flowing, relatives flow 
past a coffin, thinking, “He ran out of time”—

There are times you are authentically
the person you slid into being,
one who, for example, rips a corner
raggedly off a bag of bird seed and tries
to shake it evenly across the porch,
although you never quite get it right.

The creative process is important because it allows us to connect to our higher self/intuition; connect to others, express and communicate our internal worlds, as well as help us understand and maneuver through life. The creative process is an amazing teacher full of wisdom and has the ability to reveal things about ourselves.

The truth is I left it on the bus
on purpose. Because I saw someone

else’s religion there and didn’t
want it to be lonely. The truth

is you should never begin
anything with the truth is

Less and less do I think
of my blood as it ebbs.
Where I used to track the days,
now I hold the bark
of cork-oak and grevillea trunks.
I watch the chafer, 
armored in metal-green –
six spiny legs cross the stone.
I see the faded kitchen towels
over the drying line

More and more, I swim towards a rock
that moves away from me, and what I say

seems less real to me than the sparrow pecking 
and scraping at my kitchen screen today.

But after we talked, you and I—or rather, 
I let rip and you replied with a spare

Behind their blinds, the neighbors are whispering. I know they’ll call the New York poetry dicks and, together, they’ll peek in my windows and be shocked by what they see. A horde of saved words lazing about everywhere—in the daybeds, in the fireplace, atop a chest of furbelows and they’ll be aghast to learn that in the freezer, the washer/dryer, even in the shower, are still more words. Foreign words. Miss Spelled words.

Having seen enough of the incompetence of politics and the rapacity of corporations, not to mention the numbing discourse that clogs the Internet and most of the media, I return to the arts, particularly music and poetry, to find the place in which our humanity in all its dimensions can be fully seen. As Miłosz reminded us, “One clear stanza can take more weight / Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose.” I am still trying to write that one clear stanza.

Although the general imaginative capacity
might seem to have been plundered by a man
having set foot on the moon, poets decided,
without deciding, to just keep dropping it
into their poems as if nothing much had
happened. They let it shine down on lovers
as an ancient power and, in the bedtime stories
of children, you still had to say goodnight
to it. My part Cherokee mother was alive

Sometimes (often)
we draw, together with my daughter
and she'll chose which color she wants me to draw with
thrust it into my hands
point out a spot on the paper
and say “tan”
(“tan” means “there”)
designating thus
which part of the blank slate she wants filled
where she wants to see the pale void
become mystified with expression
– lively –