A Visitation

I sat on my bed
and watched white flashes pop men dead,
when a boy of three came up to me,
eyes full blue in curiosity.
"What's that?" he said,
pointing. "What's that?"
That's a bad guy, I said,
he was sent sprawling--flash,
behind came another in a dash.
"What's that?" he said,
pointing. The wall, I said.
"What's a wall?"
It stands straight and tall.
"What's it for?"
To keep the outside out,
the inside in--please, don't ask more.
"But why?" Flash, an open door closes,
so ended that.
"Whoa!" was an unbridled shout,
the boy latched to my shirt,
for he wasn't tall enough to reach my arm.
"What's that?" A wall.
Don't you remember?
"What's that?" To keep out out,
and in in. "Why?"
Because it's cold outside,
the fierce winds call--
one that liked cold surely lied,
or else the guy was dead talking.
In the snows that fall
we are blind.
There was a silence.
"Why?"
I paused the game to look at him.
His cheeks were rosy in bloom.
He could look down the street on a whim,
unaware of hooded figures,
the strangers dark, looming.
"Why?" For a moment I saw him.
Without a word I resumed.
"River," drifted a voice over the guns,
through the emptiness of the rooms,
"come on, it's time to go!"
On his feet the boy soon runs
over the clothes pile that grows, an
amorphous monster at the foot
of my bed.
But framed in the doorway to the hall,
the boy, River, seemed to stall...

and back to the bed, to me, flung
himself like a horseshoe to the rung,
knocking the breath out of me.
He said, "I love you."
Then he was gone, from where he'd come,
and I was left with my thoughts
and my weapons, alone. What is that?
                 "Why?"

Being Real

The pencil lead breaks when I try to sharpen it.
The lead that's dull is least likely to cut.

When friends and family
laugh and talk about me,
and I have nothing to say,
I pick up my pen and my lead
and let the pages with me
transcend the sleeping mind,
so I still have a place to find.

Just as the explorer
loses interest in the path,
I let the shower
drop all of me in the bath.

This is not stupid, this is real.
How many people spend 5 minutes a day
to be real with themselves?

Under god, one nation,
two parties where nobody
has any fun, and people die.
They bleed, they burn, they suffer.
No one sings anymore.
I only began singing this year.

Why sing for this country
when we can sing for the world,
all of it we know.
Europe is not the world.
America is not the world.
The world is the world.

Sometimes it hurts so badly I must cry out loud.

Is this how I cope?
Are these words to an audience?
What are my motivations to write?
What governs my line length,
what says ten syllables or five?
You do, my love, you do,
sweetest part of me,
that quails but seeks to mend
every end that fails to me.

Near and Not Far

The night falls as my eyes open.
Their brown and black orbs shutter
'neath cold snowflakes that flutter
out the darkened sky.
My mind is a child--he licks
the white beneath the street lamps
while the body sprouts hair where it shouldn't
and sees only yellow specks descend.
The streets are silent--the body more,
but the mind screams, fleas, warms, and sings,
scalds red-hot in the furnace,
is plunged headlong into the smelting waters,
kicks and rolls and hardens,
weeps blue steel and confides in no one,
blankly stares into the air,
watches the flakes covering all he knows,
and irresolutely consorts with his end
beneath the blankets, beneath the roof,
inside the sun, hotly disintegrated,
lost to all time and eternity within a hole
in deep space far beyond imagining...
How are we to sleep when every second thought
is of the grave and the stars?
Comfort must lie near, not far.

Miscellaneous Verse

When I say go on
you say well hold on
but then the fast beat's gone
and we're all left tripping.

The sky's getting darker
like some kid with a marker--
on the curb sitting safer
paints the air by whipping.

Say, how many cars pass by
as the drivers die and die,
here to there and at jobs, asking why,
I thought I must be slipping.

I was right and the deal's in,
the world's crumpled up in a trash bin,
nothing for me but to sit and spin,
my bag's been lost in shipping.

But as I'm resting on the lawn
I'm feeling my edge get sharper,
so I lunge forward to let the edge lie,
in favorable dirt and untouched, so let it grin--
I'll be on top and on bottom, this coin's flipping.