The Lotus Position

was never comfortable, was it?
And when I was a kid
we would, both accurately and not,
call it “Sitting Indian Style.”
So that wouldn't do.
And to pray without ceasing
was hard enough on Mt. Athos.
Hell, it doesn't even work in novels,
so that was out too. Then I started to get a bit down.
I mean The Oversoul was all well and good,
and I still dig the fact that Svetaketu and I
are both made of honey; I sometimes picture us together
riding in the back of an old convertible,
his dad driving with one hand,
all of us resplendent in gooey gold
getting the seats sticky without a care in the world,
but when someone cuts us off and we ride up to his window,
I still struggle to see the honey in his eyes.
And that the Enlightenment
is already the name of an Epoch
passed is enough to make me rise from my room
to mount my bright red bicycle
and ride, fast and deep into the soft glow of an empty night
until the wind on my face becomes itself
the only prayer that I know.

19to20.04.10

When the morning comes clear as crystal, brilliant blue,
it is hard to believe
in the fragility of my being;
and perhaps that's the point,
sharp as the early air is
with sun and chill and spring.
And I watch
the windows across the way,
the steady stream of traffic below my own,
the clumps of cocoa that cake my coffee mug's
white porcelain walls, clinging like dark cliffs of Dover
above the surf, wanting nothing more
than to escape erosion one more day.
But when my window is thrown open
to give a little of Mulgrew's delicate piano
while taking in turn the syncopation of the street
the equilibrium feels fine,
and I feel myself also
flowing into perfect pace
with the piano and the people
below, at my staggering seventy-two
beautiful beats per minute.

Kastanienallee 103

An einem Samstag im April. . . .

With patience full of joy
I watch the linear boundary between shadow and sun
creep across my table outside this Prenzlauer cafe.

But as clouds blur the border
stark to soft
my coffee cools.
like a bathtub draining water.
until I feel far
from everything
in a way neither good nor not.

For a moment that gray abates
to resurrect the line
and I reach across the table
as for the hand of my beloved
and it's gone.


I gaze over a shoulder to read headlines
through whose syntax I stumble
like a child.


The clouds deepen.


Across the half busy street,
whose pace itself seems to slow,
the fruit seller and his apples, bananas, oranges'
colors cool in the cloud-cover.


And now, now with the border a pencil behind my ear
the Sun makes his Odyssean Return
and somewhere half within me
a familiar flame flowers
that will stay aloft all night.

In A Place With Love Locks

Here in this planned park
East of the Atlantic
small Eurasian Tree Sparrows hop and dart,
the same precision as their brothers
in the States they will never see

as cotton clouds uncover
the sun, flaming the grass green,
cumulus veil of difference drawn away
like dining room blinds before coffee.

And with a skyward squint
I glimpse the breadth of our sumptuous span
of life, and the wide and seamless human horizon
stretching out in all directions, illimitable
and in you.

Torch-Bearing

In this new city of red-brick houses
your memory might be a ghost
who shrieks at odd hours of the night,
or a cage I rattle when I'm alone,
if it weren't already the sword I use
to parry the blows of real life.

I'm setting up camp
in the red boxcar of jealousy
where I rot with the wood for weeks
before wrapping myself in velvet night
to gaze at milk-drop stars
who wink behind a million-mile blanket,
dripping their glow onto the weed-ridden, rust-covered rails.

And now I want to reach out
and touch everything that's true,
bringing it into myself
sudden and electric
purgative and dizzying
like shooting penny vodka with the boys,
all of us fresh, the restorative power of communion
coursing through us like lighter fluid
for the torches we are sure we'll become.

In the Space Between the Snowflakes

The seeming loss of everything
still has me swaying as at sea

but the time when I was falling
into and out of myself
far too fast to focus
has receded,

and you know,

I heard somewhere that the Self might be God
of a warm and familiar planet
where we all are the savior of something.

The Flood was Never Coming

Bated by breath that bathes the Earth
I stand at attention
my senses poised to filter in
the bloom of morning.
And I swear beside these quiet stones
that my grief will be interred
before my flowers wither.
The fear that, could we backtrack
the landscape of our lives
we would not find a footprint,
is it you that binds our tongues and bodies?
I see some brothers and sisters moving mute,
ever scanning the horizon for higher ground.

Cafe in Mid-February

“To be surrounded by beautiful curious breathing laughing flesh is enough”

~Walt Whitman,
I Sing the Body Electric

There are other moments I encounter in this

one when everything moves slow

and I realize there is no difference

between drinks at the Groveland Tap and Guitar Hero
between God and drunken bike races in the snow

and I believe for half a breath

that if I bear myself in perfect honesty
if I tell my father and mother that I've done drugs and fucked
up my relationships with rash selfishness

then everything will be clear as the glass of iceless water

and maybe they won't turn in shame
maybe a hand would fall to my shoulder

and this weight of proof could be lifted
to fly from me like a flock of sparrows fleeing a bush
who just for a second
seem like they'll never stop

releasing something that continues
like the lines that are not segments
going on forever beyond where they end

Fairview Ave

Over ethereal haze of traffic and urban homes
the evergreens tower, but fade
to something less than backdrop,
vague notions of nature beneath the daily Real.
As we coast with complacent frustration through custom
their majestic singular green
blurs behind like highway passing lanes in the night;
but two minutes beneath the swaying scented pines
pull me back to my senses like a ghost into a body,
and all the invaluable infrastructure cracks like dried mud,
falls away before our living breathing bodies

On Being a Drop of Water in a Rainstorm

No one thinks you're special,
no one cares for the drama of your fall,
how you clung to the clouds fierce as fire
and fell with Luciferian grace when they pushed you out,
wings pressed to your back in the infamous dive
that could only happen once, that happens everyday,
and you wonder who is watching
and you wonder where you'll land, and you wonder
what music best fits your fall
as you plummet symphonic power
an inverted crescendo to the ground.