IN THE MANNER OF THE WORD

At the party

I watched the words, 

who came in costume,

act out their pantomimes:

    make love to potato chips, 

    one chip at a time,

    weep mournfully over the texture 

    of their own imaginary skin,

    diabolically folding napkins as if 

    each crease were a new province of evil,  

    arm wrestle with the spice and spunk

    of impassioned foreplay,

    give massages like spastics 

    in the middle of a melt-down,

    pull up their argyle socks as 

    Einsteins' solving theoretical proofs,

and thought to myself,

if only we could express 

ourselves this freely

we might put an end 

to our own charade, 

and give up playing 

dress-up for one brief moment,

and stand fully exposed, 

as if we were the word naked

standing naked before itself.

BAUDELAIRE AND THE BAGUETTE

“The French have a different word for everything,”
Steve Martin said that, and it’s true.
 
The other night, in a lazy sort of way,
in a kind of mental saunter, 
I came across a French word 
I had never encountered before,
before sleep, in a book on wayfaring.
 
The word was flâneur. 
It is nearly onomatopoeic.
It feels a bit drowsy in the mouth,
like the tongue is going numb 
in the very act of saying it.
And yet it also feels posey,
like it finishes with a slight swagger.
 
It was a thing in 19th century France, 
to be a flâneur, a loafer and a lounger. 
To be a Baudelaire strolling
down the boulevard, 
a connoisseur of the street.
To wander with no purpose.
To be a passionate spectator.
It was an art form to be a man of leisure.
 
Oh, what I would give to idle my days away
with no sense of urgency 
and nothing to do but savor
the ebb and flow of time
like a flavor, like a Parisian cheese 
on a baguette I symbolistically bite into.

MATH BACKWARDS

I start with the sum

and work my magic 

backwards—choose

and use anything

I can lay my 

mathematician hands on:

my imagination  

a protractor

decimal points

powers and roots

proofs and theorems

differential equations

Fibonacci numbers, pi

probability theory

permutations formulas

inverse trigonometry, calculus

all in an effort to create 

the equation (the problem) 

that my mind has already 

solved, so I can, 

like a modern day Pythagoras, 

play slip and slide 

up and down the slope 

of my hypothetical hypotenuse.

THE JUGGLER’S EYES

I didn’t listen to Rabbit,

who taught me how to juggle.

Stay away from the trees, she said, 

the branches will pluck

what you’re juggling

right out of the air.

I didn’t listen.

I just went right on juggling.

And for reasons

I didn’t quite understand

I became bewildered 

and befuddled by my

little circus act. And then,

sure enough, like Rabbit 

had predicted, a tree took 

what I had been tossing

up and down, from 

hand to hand, 

and left me empty-handed

with nothing to juggle.

I sat down beneath those branches

like the Buddha at the base

of the bodhi tree,

and waited—waited 

for the season to change,

for the tree to lose its leaves,

for the tree to give me back

what was mine. And sure enough, 

when autumn came,

the leaves fell from their limbs

and with them dropped 

what I had tossed 

too high. I picked the little orbs up

off the ground and put them 

where they belonged, back 

in their sockets.

It was then that 

I finally saw how 

blind I had been

to my own blindness,

and just had to laugh.

I howled like Coyote,

and was grateful,

so grateful, for a taste 

of my own medicine

and the genius in its trickery. 

PASSING GAS

Maybe the Big Bang

was just one epic fart,

a cosmic flatulence, of sorts.

I have gas, but mine is not  

of mythic proportions, 

thank god. At least 

that’s what I tell myself.

But maybe it is.

Maybe those trapped 

bubbles inside my belly

are nothing more than 

a deep desire for expansion,

like hydrogen and helium

had at the beginning of Time,

that gave rise to 

the stars and the planets,

the suns and the moons,

the constellations and the galaxies, 

all inside  

an expanding space,

a boundless belly.

Maybe all my bloating

is an intelligence

all its own,

roiling for the chance to join

with a source and force

greater than the body

and bubble my narrow being 

can offer. I am ready 

for that day to come,

for my own Big Bang moment,

a release of such a magnitude

that everything I carry inside me

that might be fuming or swirling 

finds its way free

and in that singularity

becomes lighter and brighter

than it’s ever been, 

and oh what a glorious 

heartburn that’ll be.

CURATING CUBISM

Every day I wake

and look 

at the figure

in front of me.

And every day

it shape-shifts 

into some new

form

that has me 

think 

some new thought

about it. 

And with this 

altered thinking 

my soul grows heavy

or light 

depending upon 

how I am seeing

the thing I see 

that day.  It’s not 

easy going through life

with a kaleidoscope

in my mind.

Oh, how I wish 

I could take all this 

thinking 

that gets 

stretched

across hours,

days, weeks,

and months,

and put it down,

into a canvas, 

collapse it

into a cubist 

painting, 

strip it 

of time 

and space,

render it 

into 

one muted 

flattened moment,

that I would hang

like a mirror

on a gallery

wall. All that 

thinking, 

all in one place,

within one frame,

within one room,

what a relief 

that would be,

how free I’d be.

I could visit it,

the painting, 

the thinking,

whenever I wanted to

instead of

it visiting me

randomly, compulsively

all at a moment’s notice.

It would be

outside of me

as something 

I could witness

instead of being 

a thing inside me

like a cancer

I couldn’t cut or cure,

like a child I couldn’t

comfort or cradle.

With it outside me

I wouldn't 

feel so 

powerless over it.

I'd be the curator 

and in control 

once and 

for all.

HOUSES CLOSE BY

Apart like

stars or atoms, 

notes 

in a fugue.

Like voices 

held      in silence,

in the 

expanse

splayed      between

the in-between.

These houses

 might as well 

be minds

trying 

not to try 

to think, speak.

What do they     hear

         in their      separate 

 confidences          

among the       walls 

 and          windows

ceilings and doors,

tables and chairs,

inside         all the insides 

                in their       distances,

            surrounded by

 

all that’s 

outside and gathering

                in the space 

 around them?

  Is it hope, trust, 

      peace.       A prayer?

   Or simply       a breath 

                breathing 

                 its way 

back home?