When you return tonight
Slow tired and warm with caresses
And kisses I’ll sleep alone
Apart from your crowded voices
And mad loves’ abandon
This tempest tosses my mind
Like a lost wing and loses my way
In the flittering dark
And the slow black below like
An ocean of still divers
The asymmetry of science and religion
Is so great the two can scarcely share a line.
The truths of the former stand undisturbed
By the latter, no matter what its claim may be,
While religion falls and lies, enraging, daggerfull
At every pinprick science incidentally delivers.
Every green, running water,
And a thousand voices singing
Stars that cross the night.
Tribes come down like shadows
To make castles in the sand.
Here we were, a minute warmth,
An hour’s embrace, quiet days
And nights of eyes brighter
Than bright — fires, dancing,
Sighs, looping paths in the dark.
A long road to the heart for
A happy few, strong as stone,
Strong as love, and mercy
Full of wonder every morning.
Like the bird fighting a wire,
This flyer cannot run by rail
And falls, fluttering, well down
A tunnel steeper than night.
Lasting peace is always late,
A soft embrace like moonlit
Horses running away, subtle
As a dream at dawn — lost.
Let the light die tonight.
Let this ship go sailing high
On still and moonless water.
Be fearless and breathless,
The shore now close at hand.
Gateway to a dreamless land,
This last loving and leaving
Is the worst and best of all.
Ending the body electric
Is beginning nothing new.
This life is not mine, and that is not yours.
We hold only slender shoots, single notes,
Singular bells, green then dark then silent.
Rough, we drink our joys and sorrows
From a well that runs ever deep, ever
Drowning deep, but still and ultimately dry.
Are we each or are we all? Illusory ghosts,
Spirits fleshed and undressed, by turns
Boisterous and quiet, hot and chill, atoms
And ions entangled, untangled, blazing
And broken, too much too fast to stay
A course, always picking ourselves up
From the rocks, undone, released for life.
Cold and sleeping trees
Verdant recall and promise
Knowing hope is love
The dream is still there, even if it’s etched in glass
And a sandstorm is bearing down, the hit or miss
Uncertain as a long and sleepless, starless night.
I hate to hope, unreason reasoning that longing
Begets distance, a monster birthed by troubled sleep.
There has to be a low door in the wall, however small.
The dream is an orchard summering on the far side,
Light and ripe and sweetly fragrant yellow fruit
Like murmurous, laughing constellations of sun,
Like love and warm hands, like green memories.
There has to be a way, because hope is all there is.
America is eating itself.
A cabal of carnal cannibals,
A carnival of carrion,
Dead men overdrawn
With every kind of hunger.
Feasting on the poor,
The weak, women and children,
Even the dead, these men
Will never stop, never
Surrender until the world
Has been devoured.
And the despairing, desperate
And driven hordes of nobody
And nothing will throw
Themselves onto the bonfire
Until nothing is left.
The doors are all closed,
Windows locked, there is no way out.
Ululating at an empty sky,
Books in ashes, we are driving
For open water in a diving bell
That is an anchor, a sound,
A final resting place in the deep
Dark of a last murder spree
And suicide.
Like a door slammed across my fingertips
I miss you with a pain so hard and reverberant
That I can scarcely think or move; a hundred
Miles is a thousand years and I’m nowhere
At all anymore, untethered and undone
But knotted through every artery and vein,
Breaking my heart over a moment’s missed joy
And burying the remains under limitless stone.
This is an endless flight, ever aloft and falling.
