Dwight

it's tempting to be
sentimental in the spring
when evening drags on

there's a mournful song
i love to hear, those simple
slow ecstatic tears

a leaf of dried sage
still smoking in the ashtray
spark wind haze and ash

While I slept

I dreamt about grocery shopping
with a gal I used to know.
We never used a buggy or a basket
but in the dream she had
this army green rucksack
that she dragged across the dusty
industrial tile.

I always hated soy milk
and I swear to God she filled
half that bag with boxes of it,
then several jars of peanut butter
a single head of iceberg lettuce
and a King Size pack of Twizzlers.

I was walking
about ten paces in front of her
and drinking from a jug of wine,
not even bothering to screw the cap on
in between sips. I remember
squinting into the flourescent
lights.

Nietzsche:

To the realists. -- You sober people who feel armed against passion and phantastical conceptions and would like to make your emptiness a matter of pride and an ornament--you call yourself realists and insinuate that the world really is the way it appears to you: before you alone reality stands unveiled, and you yourselves are perhaps the best part of it--oh, you beloved images of Sais! But aren't you too in your unveiled condition still most passionate and dark creatures, compared to fish, and still all too similar to an artist in love? And what is 'reality' to an artist in love! You still carry around the valuations of things that originate in the passions and loves of former centuries! Your sobriety still contains a secret and inextricable drunkenness! Your love of 'reality', for example--oh, that is an old, ancient 'love'! In every experience, in every sense impression there is a piece of this old love; and some fantasy, some prejudice, some irrationality, some ignorance, some fear, and whatever else, has worked on and contributed to it. That mountain over there! What is 'real' about that? Subtract just once the phantasm and the whole human contribution from it, you sober ones! Yes, if you could do that! If you could forget your background, your past, your nursery school--all of your humanity and animality! There is no 'reality' for us--and not for you either, you sober ones--we are not nearly as strange to one another as you think, and perhaps our good will to transcend drunkenness is just as respectable as your belief that you are altogether incapable of drunkenness.

According to Albert Pike:

"In the visible aspect and action of society, often repulsive and annoying, we are apt to lose the due sense of its invisible blessings. As in Nature it is not the coarse and palpable, not soils and rains, nor even fields and flowers, that are so beautiful, as the invisible spirit of wisdom and beauty that pervades it; so in society, it is the invisible, and therefore unobserved, that is most beautiful."

On the tip of my tongue


When Sunday morning starts at 4
and coming Spring has roused the tourists,
beatniks, and leftover church folks--
livening their steps--
I'm floating down the sidewalk
above them all, a lovely rock star
on my arm, and wearing last night's
clothes feels perfect.

As we cross the street
a tangled lock of hair dances
in the breeze, brushing the soft skin
of her neck. Resisting
the quiet urge to stop right there--
amidst the traffic--and kiss her
up and down
makes my vision shimmer.

poem before bed...

Church on Monday Morning

A 30-foot extension ladder,
hood pulled tight around my neck,
the clouds exhaling quiet rain,
I press myself against the house—
a perfect time to talk to Jesus,
working in the cold
and feeling every breath
just come and go.

Normal Guy

writing about rhetoric is

...a story about the reality of a story about the reality of a story about the reality...

A Portrait of Early March

A Portrait of Early March

The snow from yesterday
has melted into slush—
caressed by the sun.
A muddy paw print on the futon,
long-johns draped across
the creaky rocking chair,
outside the window swirling
clouds of woodsmoke:
the kettle on the stove
begins to sigh.

Life is Life