AGGRESSIVELY MINOR
Flowers’ve been around approximately
one billion five hundred sixty million months—
most of these before the month was invented—
and unlike me, they know just when they’re to die.
He who expires with the brightest detritus
glints now and again from a stone or a screen,
and of course the same thing’s true for the ladies.
If on some days I have the worst taste in light
(and if on those days life still seems possible)
on others living lacks a definition,
and what are you going to do about it,
italics mine because they make it sound right,
poetry being an oral art and all.
There’s always the sad fiction of not wanting
whatever it is one needs, but let’s just say
that that’s what’s called “the present”—is that okay?
Joy’s not an oil poured on all of us at once,
but most of us get some sooner than never.
Spring’s of course been a postscript to the winter—
the bad news bad, the good of no consequence,
my body almost forgotten in itself.
Dumb questions can’t be better than their answers,
but they’re reason enough for staying alive:
Why don’t I title this poem something else,
and what would one day without peril be like?
+++
EXCESSIVELY
Tonight I decided I’d quit poetry.
Tonight I heard a mother talk bitterly
to her son, but something in her voice confirmed—
for me if not for you—that the kid was loved.
I slept in the moon in a curtainless room.
I heard a fly buzz. I don’t know when I died.
Still in airplane mode, devoid of curb appeal,
I have my sanity and its theatrics—
shadows of, shadows from, shadows the whole way
down and/or around the proverbial way
which by itself is just a walked plank of talk
(most of it level if you can believe that)—
to re-convince myself that all is not speed,
although I might chew on something with a face,
play tennis without anything forever.
+++
PROVE IT ALL NIGHT
Noisy idea I neither get nor lose,
I don’t choose between an ashtray and a bowl.
Astride the point, logic’s lovely and empty.
If time’s a chrysanthemum, space is a hole.
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