I dreamed I was dead
and woke and was not.
Whose time is this time?
How much have I got?
Tag Archives: poetry
How it goes
When a rockslide traps the fish –
little fish in a little pool –
the fish swim ’round and ’round
and ’round and ’round and ’round
What would happen when I close my eyes and do
Sometimes while walking I close my eyes
and fall into the sun-
shine that would catch me
(it’s so warm) were I to fall
and I do
and it does
Medicine for the burglar
I was surprised to hear a doctor in Holland
say
he keeps a knife and club by his bed.
What he will if necessary do,
I’ll not want to know.
But that the world is big
and the night long
is,
as the burglar will see,
indisputable.
Two arrests in twelve hours
One outside, one inside
the station. One at night,
one in the morning.
One shouting, one not.
One man watching,
sick with his belly in a hole.
This morning the morning more rural
This morning the morning more rural
passed by – cows, grace, grass
and wire –
sun and all that nothing
to do, so I did it (in lieu)
Blue-eyed Wayne
I guess the idea there
was that if I met a student,
a seminarian,
of the Princeton Theological Seminary,
I’d see you could be that
and whatever came after
(a minister, a priest?)
and still have sex
or get married or both
and maybe she was suggesting
one of those for us,
though I doubt it now.
Wayne was friendly enough.
I’d like to know what I asked him,
since I didn’t know why
I was meeting him.
Mostly I was just in love with a girl –
and tennis and gin,
and a quarter-cut lime mixed with
theological ideas.
There are forgotten reasons why
There are forgotten reasons why
you didn’t do what you didn’t do,
but now you’ve only what still
never existed – Technicolor scenes
and whiskey ads, gunboats in Esquire,
the Senator before his subcommittee,
the microphone, people clinging
to his every word.
From where you watch he’s far away,
mute lips on a screen as sunlight
climbs the outer wall. Soon there’ll be
nothing left to catch it. It will unravel
in cold dark corners of space.
Man on the bus
Back when I worked at Charlie’s
on Broadway,
in Seattle not in New York,
I got it for once from both sides –
the dreamy looks and jokes,
the ever-in-my-section, thumb-rubbing-
fingers like the promise of money –
and the thing itself – big tips and a
206- just for being me.
The money part’s the part that made me not
mind it overly much – though I’d hustle in and out
when it was a group of guys,
with their hush-before-arrival and
giggle-when-I-was-gone.
They could hope for their
“maybe later at the–”
where I’d never ever be. And so
it was nothing, nothing at all
until one day on the bus I
looked at a girl and she looked at me
till she looked away uncomfortably
and got off the bus.
Only then did I recall
the man who’d scared me off
with that same hunger on that same bus,
and thus became clear
what was ever clear to a girl:
Men will ever be menacing,
and I will ever be of them.
A meditation on time and suffering
We could throw away all the clocks
and move freely through time,
get ahead of our sufferings
and swerve round them,
circle back and laugh.
Impotent suffering.
Fool.
But wouldn’t we then, even then
carry inside what we’d lost
and know it
and die?
Utrecht Journal 