Dumbstricken By A Line From Malebranche*

Playing our latest “smart” 
Game with my six-year-old 
Granddaughter to sharpen 
Our powers of observation, 
We watch patiently 

The dense overhanging jasmine vine 
Above and in front of us 
As it jettisons 
Its white, five-petaled 
Flowers one-by-one, 

Anxious to see who’s going 
To be the first to shout 
There it goes! as each star falls 
Dumbly to the oh so equally
Dumb and patient ground. 


*Attention is the natural prayer of the soul.

Red Herrings Made In America

On top of so much 
Devastating news 

Concerning the Earth 
(about which too few 

Of us are concerned 
And even fewer willing 

To digest), lately 
From the hinterland 

Comes disturbing talk 
Of giant invasive hammer- 

Headed earthworms over- 
Taking the homeland 

By the millions, 
Swallowing 

Our much smaller 
Native fry 

For breakfast, lunch, 
Dinner AND midnight 

Munchies—I don’t know 
About you but for those 

Concerned, I think 
It’s time to come to 

Our senses and hope 
It isn’t just 

Idle table talk.

Read Your Fortune, Sir?

Murky—like the poem you were so 
Intent on finishing you missed

Seeing that fly buzz by only to end 
Up a black dot flailing 

The dregs of your coffee cup.

Tangerine

“The commune of Poetry becomes so real that [the poet] sounds each
particle in relation to parts of a great story he knows will never be completed.” 
--Robert Duncan, Bending the Bow 

The dynasty 

Of Song, tangible as 
The word sounds— 

In this instance 
Joyous, a small 

Round, reddish-orange 
Object plucked 

From a mandarin’s 
Bough. 

Existentialist Angst Is No Laughing Matter

With the world
Exploding

In bloody stitches, you keep 
Laughing at yourself because 

You think laughing is good 
For you, you must be 

Joking. 

Late Deep Sleeper

lux in tenebris lucet

 
What’s with you, trouper? 
On stage

You made many a move 
To draw the curtains,

But the sun’s still 
Waiting in the wings. 

Trickle-down Economics Broken Down By One Of The Haves

It’s this way you see 
His ledger rife with minuses, 
Two plus two never making four, 
This good-for-nothing no-account 
Too poor to know the score he 
Put a double-barrel up his sinuses, 
Nothing made sense anymore. 

Reverie

           “The Jasmine” 

Whether it gets dark 
or light 
the jasmine stays 
always white.
  —George Seferis 


remember

wherever 


jasmine

flowers 


absent

mind


makes

sense


all day,

all night.

"In The Beginning Was The Word"

—for my A and Ω, Eleni—who knows me better than I do myself 

Why is it when I at last 
Give in and grudgingly promise 
To translate a few of my more 
"Knotty” avant-garde poems 
For you, my not-so-comfy with English 
Better half, half-way into them I get 
That nagging sense you think 
They were all Greek to me too, 
From their promising beginnings 
To nowhere in particular 
In the end. 

"There's A Sucker Born Every Minute"

—attributed to P. T. Barnum, American showman 


Believe it or not, 

I read somewhere that 
Some land snails can 

Lift ten times their weight 
Up a vertical surface; 

So if you were as strong as that 
And sucked just as well 

And weighed in 
At one hundred-fifty pounds, 

Hauling one thousand five hundred 
Pounds of suckers would more than likely 

Drive you straight up a wall. 

Bereft

Oh, wanting 
Apostrophe, the comma’s 

Always somewhere 

Here to make you, 
Pause to think about it.

Invasion Of The Slug People

No need to fret beforehand— 
You earthlings will know when 

We’ve taken over everything 
When you no longer have enough 

Time to shovel the slime 
You’ve left behind. 

Huuklyeand Cinquor On Purveyors Of Genetically Modified Crapolla

You sod busting deviant turds you 

Keep on grinding out this bull 
Husking horseshit and before you 
Know it y’all be corn 

Holed by an ear-to-ear 
Grinning sodomite 
Grim Reaper, got it? 

Good. 


Moderator’s comments: Huuk demonstrating his fiery didacticism once more; too bad he had to stoop so low this time—linguistically speaking—to get his rapier-wielding point across. 

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

Been there 
Before been through all that 
With the required modicum 
Of grace they told me 
I’d find everything as it was, 
Save the whereabouts 
Of my face. 

Variations On A Theme By Williams

"There are lots of things we have to go and find out. 
We have to go and find out, what red, what wheel 
and barrow are, at some level." -- Paul Muldoon 

perhaps this is why 

so much depends 
upon 

the glazed-over rimed 
blue 

eyes of the stricken 
farmer in the muck 

beside the dazed 
white chickens, 

the frozen up- 
ended 

wheel of the red 
barrow, the fouled 

furrows of the mind gone 
plowing somewhere off 

in the lowermost reaches 
of ground zero.