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SANE, YET LONELY
All I wanted was this. A French song bouncing around Paris—on my gramophone. I got a taste of this in my life in love. And now well I’m just alone, sane, yet lonely. I found the sweetness I had with...
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CHANGE YOUR THOUGHT
To find you are wrong is the best thing; wrong instills wonder and change; wrong gives that surge to love when everything is strange, and sails in to forgive and writes the bright song. Triumph to...
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IF WISDOM
If wisdom is always saying what someone else has said no wonder love is like it is; no wonder all that’s new is trivial and dead. O! Bright wings fanning platitude! No wonder all my friends are gone...
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NOTHING HAPPENED
Nothing happened. And this was good. Trees stood freely next to trees. When a lot happened, (confusing youth! made more confused by learning!) not much happened which I understood— and much of it...
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KNITTING
Useless as knitting, thinks the girl, glaring into her phone. Pathetic. Like that thing grandma made hanging in the back of the closet, bulky and alone. As useless as the granddaughter Ashbery made,...
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THE POETS MUST ADMIT
The poets must admit non-speaking behaviors are the most significant. Poets are helpless witnesses to things like sex and murder. Uneasy dreams, stranger than life, voiced inside the head fixate poets...
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TOWERS
Wimps need their towers. The feeble need their cement. A working class paradise isn’t really what we meant. There is no respect for the naturalist on North and Main. The papers I lost give me...
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THE PIANIST
The critic judges in the glorious silence a composer floats on. You cannot judge—you play. The composer passed away—on the same day you made his music speak to oblivious audiences. “I practiced on and...
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TRADITION
Tradition, like a well-made, famous poem, is everything. You pontificate, you experiment, in vain. Whatever is normal will have to do. Desiring dead tradition is insane. Tradition has nothing to do...
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EVERY POET IS TORTURED
for T.S. Eliot Every poet is tortured by everything the same: the leading idea in political studies: the Sacred and Profane. The rebel spilling blood inside the palace, white. The dirty pun inside the...
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AS HER LIES MADE ME HAPPY THEY THEN BECAME TRUE
As her lies made me happy they then became true and were amazed who saw me knowing what they knew. How could I be happy when I wasn’t the one sighing by her moon and singing in her sun? How did the...
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TEMPUS ET MORS
So much death. And you don’t feel a thing. You have no idea which species no longer sing. She no longer brings her family to the river. The skunks. Who no longer sniff the neighborhood or run into...
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I WILL DO IT BECAUSE I CAN
If I talk self-consciously as a poet in my poems, earning disdain from the ‘neutral observer’ school, I reply: this strategy makes me no less a man. I’m a poet, after all. I will do it because I can....
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THE ADVERTISING AGENT IS RIGHT
The advertising agent is right. A thousand people will read my poem in the middle of the night if I let him do his work. How many readers otherwise? Maybe two? Advertising is the greatest poem. No,...
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THERE WILL ALWAYS BE THE MOON
When the scraps which identify me are burned, when my muscles and tissues have forgotten all they’ve learned, there will always be the moon. You, the living, can always see exactly what I saw when I...
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I LET THEM OUT TO WANDER
I let them out to wander but not far, not far. The enclosed yard is theirs looking at one star. They are the dogs I love, one small, one large and blue. They bark at strangers. Love? I know they don’t...
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THE ENORMOUS EFFORT TO MAKE YOU HAPPY
The enormous effort to make you happy is me talking to myself. You know it ruined you when she rejected you—and you breaking apart has given you pieces to form beautiful poetry. Her rejection of you...
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OR CHILDREN
Let us have children. Come, it’s not too late. Beauty is best coming directly out of the gate. The ugliness of aging has sat upon us for too long. Wealth is finally boring. We need song. Look at...
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TELL ME YOUR NAME
Tell me your name and I will remember your name as a way of honoring her. Introductions and smiles are all I have since Miss Emily Dickinson went to her grave. Tempestuous eyes lost to the world. Our...
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ONLY WHEN BEATRICE DIES
Only when Beatrice dies, will the poet love. There needs to be nothing left before we have everything: for this is to truly love. Imagine her gone. Then ponder what it means to love. We all held back....
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