Things I have learned today

Say you are driving north on the PCH right after dusk when the sky has just gone dark all except a slice of pale desaturated brightness down over the pacific and you are driving and the land between the road and the ocean is completely black except for these tidal pools that are somehow sheltered and completely still so they reflect that pale blue slice of sky like a mirror in the middle of all that black beach or marshland or whatever you can barely see it as you're driving sixty miles an hour but you steal glances when you can it's so amazing and as you bank around a bend in the road there is this giant fat old raccoon furiously scampering across the road as fast as his fat disneyesque haunches can scamper which isn't very fast he's so fat you bet you could probably take him in a foot race if you had to but this isn't a foot race this is a 3,000lb car moving at what one hundred feet per second? you're not exactly sure it's difficult to do such mental arithmetic in a fraction of a second and the context is a bit stressful but anyway you have a fraction of a second to realize the fat haunch of that raccoon is on the wrong side of clearing your front right tire by inches and the road is curved and other cars are around and forget about shoulders and that there is nothing you or that raccoon can do except for him to scamper as he can and for you to hold tightly on that steering wheel and maintain control and stay the course and you realize that even though nothing has happened yet and nothing is going to happen for a little bit at least that you and the raccoon have already made all the decisions you are going to make in this one particular transaction and your further collective agencies if raccoons even have agencies are now irrelevant for the next couple of spare instants which is likely all at least one of you is going to have all of the rest of eternity packed into not even one tick of the clock as the universe's accountants determine the outcome of your choices with actuarial tables of mass, momentum, friction, heat.

and afterwards you will find that your jaw is surprisingly tense, and has been tense, and even after you consciously relax it you will find your teeth aching for hours afterwards which will make you wonder what purpose all that served.

An evening —
Wine bottle long emptied, talking,
Watching you roll the cork on the table,
Watching you absently finger its damp, red stain.
I want.
I want.
I want.
I want.
I want.

Loyalty Oath

I pledge allegiance
to the people of Earth
and to the people of other worlds
and to the animals,
and nothing else
and nothing else
and nothing else.

Moral Sentiment as Currency

Printing apologies
on Weimar Marks.

The structure of culture

is like the rocks, the way
the oldest ones from way down deep
squish up in Hawaii
like hot, inverted soft serve,
new and smoldering. The old ways
keep returning.

Since we realized we live
in monkey bodies, the cool thing
(civilized) is to keep your
monkey body sleek
like a pet Afghan hound,
and the sleekest monkeys live
the way the monkeys lived,
barefoot, eating fruits
and insects, eschewing bread
and supportive insoles.

Now, they say the monkeys
(or was it the Puritans?)
couldn't really sleep through that
whole, long dark - they woke up
in their unlit communal beds
and screwed, and analyzed their
dreams. They visited the neighbors.

It's the old ways, when we get up
from screwing in the vibrating dark
and fry Brussels sprouts in butter
and eat ice cream and smoke weed
by the pool, then revive our sleep.

Cold fingers fumbling old buttons,
scratching musty straw.
I can scare the crows for a spell.

After Marge Piercy's "Sentimental Poem"

You are such a good lay.
I am such a good lay.
If we get together
our bodies will waste, two wires
of competent sinew
around our small bones,
then nothing, empty sheets.

("Sentimental Poem" included as an appendix in the comments.)

Fragment Found in a Prayer Wall

God is my witness that if Augustus, emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honor me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me for ever it would be sweeter and more honorable to me to be, not his empress, but your whore.
—Héloïse d’Argenteuil, first letter

I have committed a filthy sin: I have recognized my brother. We have made love and removed our names from the marriage wall. They say your brother's semen burns your viscera like Drano but in truth it burns you up and you're gone.

Shabbos

The gods will come and ride you if you have prepared.
If steam is rising off your clean hair,
and your boyfriend has gotten on his knees
and massaged lemon oil into the floor
all Friday afternoon and dissolved the resin
choking the vaporizer's screen
away into grain alcohol, so that when you wake up
and shit neatly and close the bathroom door
and lift your white coffee cup away from its saucer
you can draw the vapor smoothly into your lungs
between sips - if you have maintained your
body's cleanness, so that both your heart
and your blood vessels may cry out in response
to God - then they will come down
and ride you and ride you and ride you until
your body metabolizes all the acid in that
miniature postage stamp of blotter paper,
those stamps that will mail you into any painting
you look at, that will animate Van Gogh's Mulberry Tree
with the crawling intricacy of a Mayan codex.

Would have lived, will have wanted

night falling,
crickets chirping,
hammock swinging its
 slow orbit around the world.

The sad song of neosporin

Cold sore scab
like bird turd
on my winter canvas

Fraternity, Liberty

Spring leaves coiled
Tightly in buds.
Such tender restraint.

Nostalgia

An empty room
filled with echoes
of murmured plans.

Poem In Which Everything That Happens Has Already Happened

— the surreal reverse-Christmas
of a successful nighttime burglary —

A sort of sonnet on the subject of your dinner.

Breaking brown bread, oven fresh,
a last faint puff of warm unfurling steam,
an avocado, careful spoon scooping,
scraping along the bumps felt through the skin,
then olive oil in a fine slow drizzle,
sea salt in fine fat flakes

that will crunch under teeth,
pushing inside the yielding yellow flesh
fragrant oil running to the tongue, salt's bite,
crackling crust, the warming fragrant bread,

a hand rests on a hip, insistent, firm,
satisfied, demanding satisfaction.

and what we carry will come to carry us.

The box had spent hundreds of years migrating up and down the silk road, bartered over on mongolian steppes and back alleys of close in cities, carried over narrow mountain paths in late spring snows and pelting rains, strapped to dromedary humps in crushing sun, taken blood crusted by moonlight, wrested from fingers still and stiff, traded, stolen, singed and soaked, back and forth over hundreds of years, thousands of miles, uncounted lives, rubbed with sweat, blood, musk and hair of camels, donkeys, horses, men, carries of burdens all these long years. This box has held gold, sapphires, silk, pepper, pupae, a man's shaving kit, a man's ear, the toil of a lifetime lost with a broken strap on a high mountain pass, cryptic unknowable notes found ages later after a spring thaw, papers rotten and crumbling, inked in foreign hand, turned over by thick trail dirty fingers and dumped into the mud and reeds, the box now nestling in the folded robes of the next carrier, his treasure tightly held therein.

Psalm to Jupiter

Jupiter the wrecking ball
swinging above the vineyards of Ukiah,
over the mist in the hops fields and the marijuana gardens -
wheeling between the carrion birds and cold Orion
and over the wrecking balls we are all driving
and over our skulls and the skulls of infants -
the great pendulum god with the face of Kali
unwinding its gravitational chain
far over the uncrushed skull of a leaping rabbit.

Dragons without, dragons within.

We saw him after a half hour walk across the late autumn desert, sky threatening rain and twilight in the offing. No bag, no visible water, camo parka, camo pants, long black hair. How long had he been following? From where? Our car sat lonely and alone on the road's shoulder, somewhere behind. He hailed us with a raised hand, and fished from his jacket a ziplock of dried dull green leaves, a bright bic lighter. Poor english, poor spanish, howling wind and uncertain distance. A couple of attempts, then he turned to walk on through the prickly scrub, the bare pads of his feet trailing behind him.

Not long later - the sun fell behind the mountains, the full moon's glow muted by heavy cloud, chilled november rains. The landscape a monochrome in ever darker shades of navy. Hiking back in file, flashlights swinging, what appeared to be trail markers ahead always turned out to be stunted joshua trees, their motives cryptic, inscrutable.

On the Economics of our Present Hermitage Shortage

Being a hermit ain't what it once was,
What with the short supply of lonely peaks,
The bumper crop of sages, and that new
Fad for climbing everyone does these days.

After surmounting mountains, seekers must
Clamber over high piles of wise men. Day
Break's racket of self-actualizing,
Endless conferences, panel discussions
on listening theory -- unbearable.

Then come unto us the mountain lions,
Carried a tongue and ear to stony home,
We listen now to cat's teeth worry bone.

hi koo

my shadow splayed on yellow grass.
the buzz of hummingbird wings.