The age at which suddenly becomes suddenly

the light changes and they, the siblings, 

the parents turn to ash and ghost, 

their mementos carry pieces 

forward to balance helix

 on fingertip

scenes 

and clips

meant 

to exist 

only

for 

a 

while 

in

last

little 

drips.

The Creator

When the matter of free

will is abolished,

when all are dead,

evolving into stone

and then, iron,

Will we then understand

even the most finite

change in the wind

was perceived?

Will we then know our own superiority

as living things in a world of stimuli

daylight, moonlight, oven light?

We will understand at last,

the minutiae

of making bread, the notion of the yeast

reproduced and extinguished.

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 The Lease

The pentinents seemed to rush toward the aisle.  Father Pepe was at the head of the church waiting to delicately lay the wafers on their tongues, tongues too mean to be forgiven.  The insurance agent must have been in the line and when I met him downstairs in the rectory, he anxiously told me his lease with us was still in force for three more years.  He left the rectory without bothering to greet any of the other parishioners as he likely knew little about them, the insured who probably paid premium after premium. Hopeful to never have to claim on anything. Insurance is a nasty business and agents either go fishing alot or wear dull dark suits and pop up at church rectories univited.  His rather demure looking wife who looked to be over 70 must have sat quietly in the car waiting for him to run in and lie about the lease to the woman who sublet the space from him.  She came to me a few minutes later saying that I told him that she had to pay him now...a full year after having purchased the building. 

I wondered how many minutes from the church to the lie?  I hope to meet him again. Very much so now. Just hope it isn't his funeral because I'll have nothing to say.

 The Silent Night

Was there once upon a time

when angels were created

before man, before djinn

and then tested? Was there

once upon a time

when they thought

they had it licked

all their batting averages

1.000 to the 10th power?

Allah created Gibreel

before the rest of us,

all the angels, all the djinn

to serve as witness:

time and time again

sworn to secrecy

honest to a fault

willing to take a newborn's

soul from his love lorn mother

if told to do so.

Gibreel did it,

never gave an inch

nor flinched nor balked.

It was necessary

because later on

when Gibreel had to talk

to a virgin and convince her,

Gibreel had to come with some

sort of proof that he wasn't 

just some Adonis or other

bon vivant. To prove

that the very long line

of heredity was about to change

and change for good.

Gibreel has been through the all of it

the thick of it, the ups and downs 

of it. Gibreel wept at long absences

between round trips

saying to the prophets

each and every one of them:

"I missed you so much friend."

But, once upon a time

there was nothing but angels

and stars and night and angels

would not know a lie

because lies did not exist.

26.3.06

Bound to Happen

I thought I was just pretending
all along, saying well, that's
bound to happen and it does and I say
well, that's bound to happen.
We all know that when we leave
the room, the room disappears.
We've known it since we were born
and sometimes we talk about it
with strangers knowing full well
that once they leave
all secrets follow
into the ether or the dark,
same thing and who can tell
time as it passes
when you are asleep,
the clocks looking you over?
It is a strange statistic
and one I am fond of until
it comes to the war zones. concentration camps.

 The Ris(i)k of Grief

Forgive me for seven minutes

of your time, repentance for the hours

leading up to the manifestation

composed as it were of signs

each one in a sequence as if

a spiral began where it ended

instead of toward the center

from which it formed, or 

did it begin before 

it was named and it was numbered.

The Higgs Boson 

This is no ordinary fatique,

looking through the posts 

about Fenton glass, microwave cookware

and sheets through a storm

of boxes and happy birthdays.

 At the same time they were 

carrying your father

from the house to the cemetery

 you scalded yourself with a cup of boiling coffee.

 I'd been warning you of such a mess

for a long time but you insist

on refusing condolences,

 treasuring your sweet secret another day.

As you open the cash drawer/

over and over tomorrow and the next

day and the next, please

think of the pain on your knee.

 Think of the time laspe world

in which we live, in which

fathers and sons try their best

to run the experiment backwards.

 I think a new widow reminds me

of a bride, I think your father

scolded you at a distance 

last night as you screamed out.

 Life is this super collider

and as they lifted his coffin

a bit too quickly, the atoms

and molecules rearranged your DNA.

Sayuri's Joke 

 In fact there are ten 

thunderwords in the honey 

stomach of the bee, fifty million 

partisan donors a day regurgitate 

each to each a brilliant-bronze 

breast milk to cure the cud. 

The baby tells me they make it from scratch.

Sayuri's Joke In fact there are ten thunderwords in the honey stomach of the bee, fifty million partisan donors a day regurgitate each to each a brilliant bronze breast milk to cure the cud. The baby tells me they make it from scratch.

I must accept the permanence of confusion,
the intractable weapons of chaos
or rather, it is the case that death
is the goal, the long lasting aloneness
that I crave, the only respite from years
of service to the systems,
the good mornings, the how do you dos
all of that professional courtesy
and whitewash burying the past
in vacant memories.

I want to tell you dear that I am in a permanent state of confusion now.  It is accompanied by frequent episodes of nausea.  The criticisms are so perpetual that they have become not only a way of life but an expectation of same.  I have nothing to be ungrateful for and this compounds a kind of sadness in which the futility of happiness is coupled with the never ending thoughts of losing each and every thing.  One at a time.  Like teeth. 

The numbness.  Oh the numbness is there.  Somatic or otherwise, it is similar to being a two legged dog or even more crippled than that. 

You never really admitted to anything.  In fact you have formulated a brilliant scheme to force me into the trap of agreement and complicity.  I know how you do it.  That's the worst part maybe, I know exactly how you do it.  Inescapable if you ask me and lord knows, I have tried.  Tried to kick sand in your eyes and then felt the sorrow of cruelty.  Perhaps you know what that is by now but when we played the game with a child, I knew for certain you had no desire that compels the rest of us to lighten up.  He sat there blinking.  Just blinking and wanting to run away.  I know that feeling. How I know that feeling.

I love you still for whatever it is worth.  If I wasn't aware of certain facts, I'd not bother to stick around to make sure that you understood that but as it stands I do.  We have a name for this in my line of work and it's called 'seriousness of threat.

So is this the slow way?  I hope not and it is that small glimmer of hope that I must hang on to.  We all do.   All of us that struggle to wake up each day and march a little further.  I just feel I am marching in a thick and bottomless pit full of decades worth of mudslides. 

*adapted from a conversation with Darla Whitehead..years ago.  She was coupled with an ornery example for sure.  I only met him once and that was perfectly enough.

Psalm 2023

I imagine there is

no laughing left

in Turkiye, maybe

a little smile on

the outskirsts of

Byzantium, remember

the Bosphorus got the blues

as it split Asia from Europe

yet I imagine there is

no laughing left

in Turkiye, maybe

in Beirut tonight

the assassin holds

his cell and calls

his handler once more

and dupes a grin

yet I imagine there is

no laughing left

in Turkiye, maybe

the elephants in Ceylon

believe the end is near

and stare blankly

towards Java and Haiti,

Chile, Hawaii, Alaska

The. Great. Rift. Valley.

yet I imagine there is

no laughing left

in Turkiye, maybe

the souls of New Madrid

are restless and recall

months on end when

the earth smiled

ear to ear

again and again and again.

Yet I imagine there is

no laughing left

in Turkiye, thy rod

and thy staff and thou

shall not want.

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5Bisbee Bodega, Raghida Khouri and 3 others

The Mourning

Up there they talk about you

late into the night, ghost

talk but it is good

to be known

by one's brothers' names

even if death has wrapped

its arms around again

the all-of-it and small-of-it

the petrified rock-of-it

the once was a tree-of-it

the hemorrhage of birth

now in a box, the weight

of a small child held.

I'm so sorry, so sorry

to the ash-bones

as if they can hear

a finely working heart

when it says remember

all that stuff

that we thought mattered?

It doesn't.

Periscope

The day cannot see

what the night reveals:

if only, if only, if only

said the dreamer

to the dream.

I used to live

there in the woods

with them,

there on the lake,

on the beach,

I used to own

at least a part of it.

Now I know

which part

it was,

the part

that was not.

The Crazymaker 

 Afterall the fatique despues 

the visions blended from 

a myriad of testaments 

and still after that 

but in the before 

where a silent witness 

that is me and not me 

because you said so, 

I look entirely different 

frowning and sluggish 

more barren than Zahkariah's woman 

perched near a stove 

and her dirty floors, 

no one knows this pain 

quite like I do. Not a soul 

but the before me knows 

anything at all has happened 

between the many days 

that measure the building 

of the pyramid 

where entombed is my heart 

still beating 

down there in the dark 

but just barely.

People ask for prayers all the time and I am not sure what it is they are asking for, prayers or prayers. Kneeling or standing, to ward off evil or speed it up and pass it by. One is in surgery the other is a child with an agressive form of November on Otis road out by the cranes. Cranes never die or if they do their bodies are strung so far and wide we don't see them. As it is in life when we don't look too close to notice or hear the leaves rustling one by one but instead, in a group yet they all go in one direction. Prayers up! they say and I wonder where is the up they mention, the proximal or distal? Do they still want to stop it and why don't they know what it is that they want? Otis stayed alone for four days without water or food looking toward the door, waiting for Claire to come back in. We all wait for that and fear the exception while existing in an exception, the one leaf that occasionally breaks free, walks out that door and does not return. Pray for the door to open or close? The light is on at the neighbor's house where she is getting ready to go but much slower than anticipated. He is up there hiding his daughter and wife because he bludgeoned too many of us on the way up his lonely hill. He never asks for prayers, some never do. It is too late to pray they think, easier to install a grab bar and night light. The Parable of the Tardigrade All the moments fit together like a jigsaw puzzle and there is no use wondering if the detective understands this or not as long as he knows where the edges are, the straight ones. The ones that line up and constrain the rest of it when in reality the big picture is fractal and this the prophets knew as well as Borges. The kind detective practices feng shui and asks for dates and times, when was the last time you saw the victim, talked to the victim...as if people keep notes up on their fridge that say, you saved my leg thank you very much like I do. All these puzzles are set upon table after table extending as far as the eye can see but the detective is on his own surface as well as am I. Once the wind blows it tears down the tin roofs out in the valley, rips then to shreds and scatters them upon the desert floor and we all start over to reassemble, to gather our things into some kind of order. But nay! I swear by the sunset redness,and this too: And when the heaven is rent asunder, and then becomes red like red hide, I dropped the ball. It was too hot to hold much longer than a did. A bolt of lightning can only be held for so long. Nothing more than a stray laser in the cosmos on a journey with the rest of them, walking like ants in self similar lines into self similar tunnels. The ants and Otis know the killers and accept the killing but for some reason, we humans don't get it. Yet. We will one day but for now we toil over the puzzles, ask questions and form conclusions. The KP index was high that day and there will be a time in the future when we'll know when to warn again. As did the aboriginals. For now though, we are just getting this machine up and running with low level contraptions that used to bring water to the surface for cows. Not much progress but when you realize the thing is already running, it isn't about starting or stopping it, not at all. It lingers in the mean, the mode and the meridian at midnight.

One needs to start somewhere. It has to have a beginning. Like Adam and then Eve, a clear concise beginning. Things however, have many beginnings, they do not comply to the standards of a prototype as old as mankind itself. I think, "Otis was alone for four days in an efficiency apartment." That's a good place and I say to the couple across from me in Ray's living room, "I buried him up there on High Lonesome." They said their old dog was on the shelf in their living room, most likely in their manufactured home on some property and in the middle of nowhere. It begins there too. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I caught a snippet from them of their blind son, like getting a whole cold from a little breath from a stranger on a train. On the way home, driving past High Lonesome, I have a feeling that...no...not a feeling. It's more than a feeling because those are subjective. It's a fact and now I know it, it is considered knowledge. The fact is (and when people say that, it is considered knowledge and aspires to become common knowledge)..the fact is, people want you to know what is going on. They start to allude to a bit of this and a bit of that. They hope you will catch on and offer them a bit of your energy to something they have obviously worked quite hard on. Hard work to understand it, to accept it, to share it, whatever. It is an offering, it is an act of special charity going both ways. They don't always flag it like you would in a study guide but the way they interject it almost too casually in even smaller talk, they absolutely want you to know: our son is blind. There's a reason for that. It all boils down to ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It's on their mind. Constantly. As Otis is, on my mind. That's his real name but the other names now, will all be false. They don't matter in the simulation. They just don't. He's the pin on the board, he is the road out west near High Lonesome. He's the bones in my garage that I found outside that one's final place of rest. All very good coordinates on the map. I counted the miles from the shallow grave on the odometer, six. I still remember, it was six miles not counting the short distance to the highway. I'm sure all murderers (for lack of a better word here) do the same thing when concealing their crimes. They mark and measure, they often return and they take mementos. Let's restart it there. Mementos. I saw mementos in Paris. We'd been held up there overnight because of a delayed flight between Paris and DC. I was still drinking then or rather, I restarted to drink after a week of being dry. I'd cut my wrists in Paris and they glowed in the dark at the Smithsonian under the black lights there and several days after the stone-cold adventure at the Muséum National d'histoire naturelle where we took a picture of a skeleton belonging to Siamese Twins who were joined at the heart, where we all are joined but are seldom as acutely aware of it as I was then. We take mementos, we mark our stories and sometimes we say, "This is it, everything goes on from there." But it doesn't really except in rare cases like Adam and Eve and that is because a story, an important story must start somewhere. We as a species, a whole group of related things that share proteins comprised of code made out of 21 amino acids are so specific as to type as to have our own "species", our species has such a regard for death that even our murderers need to retain a memento of the death and it occurred to me while in a state of shock over Otis' solitude for those four days, that perhaps the death sequence creates a heightened state of awareness in the continuously breathing souls that remain behind, that the killers get a high off of the event. It's unfortunate that they don't know the real path to the sensation of grief, the one you wait for, knowing one day it will be yours and they'd be better off waiting their turn. Grief is miraculous. Truly miraculous. And it isn't always because there is a death. It could be the anticipated loss of a leg the day before the surgeon starts his saw. The remaining leg even. No legs left to walk on. A Cat Stevens song goes that way, thanks for making me blind so better to ignore you with my dear, says the Big Bad Wolf that consumes the little girls, talk about dark. Let me start somewhere else if it makes it easier. The detectives ask certain questions. You should be ready for that. These are like people who drop casual information about blind sons but before the son went blind. They are like soothsayers and know the son will go blind. But they want to know how. I asked her, the relatives of Otis, "How did he lose his sight?". The professional in me doesn't say, "How did he go blind?" Because he didn't go blind, he didn't go anywhere. He lost something but maybe gained something else. The detective will always ask, "When was the last time you saw such and such or so and so?" It is unnerving. Such a simple thing but it is truly unnerving. You wrack your mind to come up with a reasonable answer because you saw her handwriting the day before yesterday. You saw it right there where you pinned up the card. Or you talked to her last April or May and avoided talking to her because it would have been too long of a conversation. In this case, you knew if she was dead, there'd be no point in calling but if she wasn't, it would be a long ordeal and late in the night, you had to choose otherwise. I did and I said so. Honesty is always important but never more so in a death investigation which is where we are now on the map. Next to High Lonesome where his bones were retreived many years ago and above the fridge door where the last bit of Clair's DNA might lurk, I'm not good at names but Clair is a nice one and her real name was nice. An old name, one that I like alot because I've known some with that name. Not that their name made them nice but their name gave off a nice aroma like certain flowers do, a powerful one that cannot be mistaken for anything but that kind of flower. This is a Clair, this is a Henry. That one over there is a Mister Ham. Mister Hams are great because they live next door to everyone. Clair lived next door and underneath two other apartments, beside a tennis court and next to a place where my own child lived for a short bit of time. She lived close to where she was found. I studied her pretty well. I study them all pretty well. You have to. They want you to. It makes it easier than having to drop all those hints and answer long questions when they are feeling poor. I learned how to skip over and return to things like a detective. That's how I know how they think. Detection is human nature but most of us ignore it because when we detect, we must do more work to investigate and that is time consuming. Below most of our payscales.

Bona Adnuntiatio By the time you realize it is too early it is too late, the weather is getting cold already, the predictions are neither clear nor correct. The prophet did not mention the procedure to follow for ants yet, with flies it is permissible to scoop and continue to consume. This medium was never mentioned, the recipe for one thing is edited and secrets are lost in the stroke of things called keys so become myths and then, legends. An old poet is found wandering in the parking lot and found the next day buried in snow five years before when passers-by who enforce the laws saw beacons of his light, it is true yet if none of this makes sense it doesn't have to, the 'is it' and 'what is it' question pervails. To exist at once in matrixes is an acceptable plural form, but you can use matrices if you want to show off your knowledge of Latin noun endings it says so right there in revelations. In that moment she stopped a rapist from raping at least for a while but the memory belongs to them, a sad little couple in time is a fact that stuns her to this day, the day a man over there felt ill and died before the shock was delivered inside the maze all the hearts broke, they broke at once like thunder and then lightning, yes like thunder and then, lightning and I know each of them as We awaken, without knowing their names, the day opens with a gasp, a swoon, an Oh-No.

Bona Adnuntiatio By the time you realize it is too early it is too late, the weather is getting cold already, the predictions are neither clear nor corect. The prophet did not mention the procedure to follow for ants yet, with flies it is permissible to scoop and continue to consume. This medium was never mentioned, the recipe for one thing is edited and secrets are lost in the stroke of things called keys so become myths and then, legends. An old poet is found wandering in the parking lot and found the next day buried in snow five years before when passers-by who enforce the laws saw beacons of his light, it is true yet if none of this makes sense it doesn't have to, the 'is it' and 'what is it' question pervails. To exist at once in matrixes is an acceptable plural form, but you can use matrices if you want to show off your knowledge of Latin noun endings it says so right there in revelations. In that moment she stopped a rapist from raping at least for a while but the memory belongs to them, a sad little couple in time is a fact that stuns her to this day, the day a man over there felt ill and died before the shock was delivered inside the maze all the hearts broke, they broke at once like thunder and then lightning, yes like thunder and then, lightning and I know each of them as they awaken, without knowing their names, the day opens with a gasp, a swoon, an Oh No.

You hope to blame it on the barking dog, not the one you saw in the afterboon gnawing a bone or sleeping even though it was in the same location from where the miserable 3 am sound comes. No, not that dog. There are exactly as many Alis as there are dogs and times of the day in this particular village. Not a town which is another class of things with specific characteristics like running water, stop signs and its own school bus. Yes, Jesus did walk here and it ought to come to mind at least once or twice a day but it doesn't, not to anyoneAs lost as everyone is in their current troubles be it an overturned car on the way or lack of an egg, each particular hardship a little worse or a little better, each one marking a path to a greater apathy. This Ali always sits in the last chair near the edge of the balcony and never looks directly at anyone or anything else. His cigarette is always nearly finished,smoked clear down to the tiups of his finger. Not a single one ever needs be stubbed. He leans outward as if made that way in his mother's womb, anxious to travel but not the sort one does for petty enjoyment. His own mother prays for his departure and you hope to blame this sleeplessness on the barking dog whose image doubles and triples through a cone-shaped prism the kind a child struggles to reach and buried in a box of other useless but interesting things yet forgets as soon as they get it, forgetting the struggle almost at once in the mystery of weath

 You'll walk a long long way in the dark

without me, despite me.  You'll take charge

of the gold and diamonds, the dead checks,

pictures and the emergency supplies.

I'm not the easy answer anymore, 

not the num-chuk or the plastic pants.

By this time next year, your tears will dry.

You will walk up to the house 

one last time and see it for just a moment

the way it was and will be forever more.

Take heed, you'll rewrite this poem.