When a month runs out

"I tried," he says with a sigh, not to himself, but not to anyone else either. By "tried" he means failed, at least as far as he can tell. Telling's a thing's he's been good at, if good's adequate or able, since he was old enough to tell. What he tried, or failed at, was a change. He did change, how couldn't he? Changing is about all any of us really does. Not for well or ill, but just for being. He being like any of us, he did too, in lots of ways, but not in the ways anyone would notice, certainly not the anyone he isn't talking to, and not him, when he says "I tried," not again, but still for the first time, as time hasn't moved, as he hasn't changed, as far as he can tell.

Something from nothing

nothing can be
slippery. out of a thin
blue sky (it’s always
something), the biggest black
-est beetle can fall
flat on its back,
four spindly legs
wiggling for a hand
(or a stick which I have
at hand) up. righted, it stands
unsure till I turn away
and then it slips confidently
back to the nothing (or
something) from which it came.

Barefoot is the sand

Loafer

One brown shoe, still young,
keeps on at the stoop. “No one
will walk it, my mile.”

This moment, and that next

This moment
right here (and this one
right after it) is (or it was,
and they are, or were)
big-belly, ready-to-drop-
everything, and
run-the-red-lights
pregnant.

No, not with any oh-
so very vaguely named
possibility (you know,
or don’t know, the one),
but with a very real
if possibly uncatchable
beauty – all the impossibly
cerulean lizards, lavender
jays and cobalt butterflies
we never chase.

It’s (they’re) giving
birth (or gave it) again,
not to anything
we’ll possibly notice,
but to all of this (impossible
to name) loveliness –
one plucked chartreuse leaf
fluttering down to the chocolate
ground where it will stay,
whether or not (looking
forward or back) we bother
to see it.

The poem I write, when the poetry's run out

My inklings would spring
from pens,
both black and blue,
wriggling and giggling
back at me,
still stuck, in between
my mechanical keys,
where the sounds sound cold
and clackety,
and no fantasy
creatures bound free.

Recipes for inaction

Skip to the who: My self,
unfulfilling prophecies I’ve kept on the shelf
with those spices I never use (Cardamom,
white pepper, cinnamon,
saffron and thyme).

I’ve a tasteless time’s end in mind,
without the means to kill it.
My mean stare can’t hold the quiet
still, to replace it. It can’t quiet the still
repeating tics below these eyes. Filled

with their empty visions, my mouth
can’t pronounce
what ingredients the pages can hold on to:
inkless impressions, a thin, shapeless blue,
the browning edges. Here the years crept in

wet, to undo them.

Flash forward

Clouds unhand the sun
an instant. Tree limbs give me
shadowy pointers.

Wanderings

I am hip to that square
of cool concrete, not quite a column,
where I like to stand when I’ve nothing
particular to do. I am shaded there too, sickly
green by the white of a midday sun, the way
it filters through an overhanging liveliness that is life-
less for one breeze-free moment. Here I overhear
a man talking about a book, an autobiography
he’s read that isn’t very auto.
I don’t care very much
about it, but it sounds like he says it
got “grave reviews,” and he (and it) might have,
but why would he (or it)? Whether it was really “great,”
or “rave,” or indeed “grave”, my thoughts turn
away instead, to the red grapes I have at home
and how I like them to ripen until they fall off
the vine with a special, spicy sweetness.

2am street scene

It’s not an absence
this 2am darkness—
half-dark and half-lit
by its unnatural glows—
grabs hold of,
firmly pulling it—
this thing not
an absence— growling
from the dead
black inside a stray
dog’s too-mouthy head;

not just it, but the voices—
untroubled and present
if not too
many, tucked into
a more deeply darkened night.
It takes them, not to
gobble them
up, but to throw them
off cobble, cement and stone
to open places, voices
won’t normally come.

Looking down

So small, so precious
here. Transiting there, Venus
can’t (no, no) see us.

[A little late...]

Looking out

Princely Norway maple,
do limn me. No more than all
your earthy dreamings.

Looking up

Its hue of blue screams
electricity, pooled there
'tween gray-bellied whites

It's June

It’s June, and the rain-
freshened wood’s
feathered chorus is in
full and sunny swoon, not
singing so much as swinging to
each other’s
noisemaker tunes.

They share the squeaks
a boy of five squeezes
from his bath-side toys,
the towel-dried squeals and howls
he clambers with
up three creaky carpet-
covered steps,

and the penny-whistle-like
tinny tones he blows
with just his lips, to tell
the cricket he’s kept below
a not-quite air-tight lid,
it’s time for more
chirping.