The ripening of possibility

The eldering of tufts of hope, not the varnish of a
        youthly splurge of buoyant wanton wishfullity,
        but the cyclical bubbling of clumsy cronehood -

Belonging where? to a tomorrow listening with a 
        yesteryear yearn - how now to build on the soft
        heaving and the agile frailty of not knowing? how

Now to wait in wistful ignorance? the eldering of 
         quiet, not the silence set in the crumble of fear 
         but in the hearth of icemelt, warm with winter - 

I am river, you are sea

if you can be the silence, I can will the rain
        if you can know the reach of the stone
        I can sing you each mountain each

rock of each mountain each mouth of each
        rock    if you can be the wise word I can
        will the knife to cut each silence twofold-

---

where is home?

where is home in all of this talk of
            hopelessness? is it the sky
            which should make its tears

burn holes into stonehearts or should
           the river sink those hearts 
           into the abyss which fetches

stories from the deep?    where is hope
           in all this homelessness? will it 
           do to bury the words and be still? 

what good is this goodness?

There is this statistical concept of goodness of fit     today 
in the face of blood soaked statistics dripping in 
non-stop from Gaza, we witness once again what MLK called 
the appalling silence of the good people, 
and as surely as we can say that this goodness does not fit,
with even more incredulity we ask, “what good is this goodness?”

---

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.
– Martin Luther King

does a poem have heart

does a poem have heart or shall it sing of an anguished brilliance
         bystanding a confabulated dance of looking the other way?
         does it have soul or shall it repeat syllables of infinite grace

that pound the little somethings into beatified nuances?  does
        a poem need bother at all as none of it matters when you 
        have a full belly & a head full of universalities symmetrized

into a cognition that is clockwork itself?  and if it does matter, 
        will it matter too soon to care or can the caring wait for the 
        hocuspocussing of a prophecy as full of itself as your belly?

thirsting for the riverbed

the child is thirsting only for the riverbed
      rocking away the blaze of rockets &
      the gaze of an untold story waiting to

unfold     what unfolds will    what feeds
      the wound in time will    nothing is
      where it was wont to have wound up -   

an uninspired block

an uninspired block of carved wood speaks
     to the large cloud - as it forms a bulbous
     shape over the map of trajectories -   the 
    
words are not attentive to the hidden reason
      that shapes the bulb and curates a hard
      shell to work occasional miracles under - 

---

refuge in nuance

tufts of clarity are imploding
             signs of song
             where is my eye in all

of this?   whose ink is being
             spared?  refuge
             in nuance killing sight

if death be a joke

if death be a joke, will it: i - draw feathers
          in the lantern of a lost morning? ii -
          give arid air a grievous look and look
          the other way iii - blow rockdust on

dreams of fire, loud as sword and thick as
         murder?     if all is play, and play is
         lifeblood of air, is it: i - feasible to know
         rockdust as friend when you end your

play? ii - loud enough to rock the morning
         lantern to know sleep from feather? 
         iii - death itself, the play of life being
         antonymed, selfsamed, deliberated?

---

shark of silence

has the last verse departed in
a void that grows only lost
song    has the green of the 
word strained its last bud

beyond what the whispers
willed    has the shark of our
silence been busy wading
waters that shirk all depth?