I like that my website is unremarkable in appearance.

It wants your attention as badly as ones better designed. It craves your love as much. It needs you.

But it wants to win you on its merits.

Perhaps you shall think,

aha, a website too dignified for SEO or self-promotion,

charm hiding in its minimalism —

there’s something for me here.

Perhaps you’ll notice the lack of ads

wonder about this website’s revenue model

and conclude, correctly, that it isn’t profit it seeks

but you —

you, you, only you

not a million of you, not a fanbase, but just the one

a connection between us you’re feeling a bit now, too, I pray

as you reach the end of this electric little sentence

wondering — as I do — what might come next.

Answer: a metaphor.

Walking on a beach, you stoop to pick up a shell

on the ground there, in the sand

turn it over in your fingers admiring it

you have it now

but in its way it also has you

it was waiting for you to pass this way

longing for your touch

wishing to explore you, too, and now

it cannot believe its luck in what it has found.

 

I know a soft soul, a soul
soft like cashmere and cotton
kitten fur and mulberry silk and puffy clouds
vicuna shawls and rum butter
lullabies and faraway music carried on the wind

soft and warm and perfect like
the hair on a newborn baby’s head,
to hold such a soul in your arms
brings the universe to a halt and
calls out everything delicate and careful in you

we must stand in the doorway quietly
we must speak in whispers
we must carve a path in the rock of the world for this
with dynamite and bulldozers
with us in hardhats yelling at contractors
with canons and cavalries and battleships
mercilessly and
without a hint of softness

the garden here is dying

in spite of the fact I watered it once

I soaked the roots of the japanese maple with a bucket

and sang to the lilies sweetly

with tenderness I caressed the hydrangea blossoms while

          gently hydrating the stems

          with quaint watering can

                    white with red flowers painted by hand – how well I remember it

the lawn I lovingly bathed with spray hose not sprinkler

          drenching the dryer spots with a carpet weaver’s slow diligence

          and plucked its weeds like splinters from a child’s hand

oh how I doctored and prayed! so

imagine my dismay at the wilting,

the drooping, decay and withering, in spite

of the way I one time slaved

so vivid in my memory

that time I watered the garden

This morning I sprained my back lifting a vacuum and, breathless,
remembered I am made of interconnected subatomic particles
that hate me and cannot wait to extinguish my little spark and
fly along their merry way into their next composition, the incarnation
of some other concept, a cloud nebula or a tub of
Kozyshack rice pudding, or whatever, and
now I am writing this poem in pain and in spite for them,
in a race to create a universe apart from the one of particles, where
I can place a flicker of light and it will shine a bit longer,
and who shall say which universe is the real one,
the one where a Eureka PortaVac 3000 ends me or
the one where an idea is held together in space and time by its virtues,
and where I am still here, still a breathing thing, and my eyes are smiling at you.

Oh the little place where you live,

where the breeze passes through the louvers and screens
and the sky is big in the sliding glass doors;

where the birds squeak and squawk,
and the wind plays woody music in the window while
the raucous leaves of the bushes and trees
chat at each other, and none of them are listening;

where the living room is sunlit and bright,
the walls are white and clean, and the furniture is soft,
and here and there are bits of glass and pottery and art.

oh the little place where you live,
where beauty strikes your soul like a flint,
sending up glowing sparks of joy in your heart.

He is darking in the shout—

out the in, drain the down,

down the skies and up the earth,

like the scratching of the scream

of the racoons in the brush

and the needing in their sound

tree’ing upward to the moon.

With the darking of the sun and the mooning of the rise,

he is one now with the blindness of—

tree’ing upward to the moon,

out the in, light the cry,

shout the eyes and float the man,

who is one

with the blindness of the fireflies.

He is pathing on his walk

as he business’es his own mind,

alone inside the park,

the park alone inside,

and he’s darking in the shout

to the deafness of the eyes

of the passers by’ing past

little sirens in the wood

and the man who is now one

with the blindness of the fireflies.

I find myself here
in the center of a black hole, but
I had a star once of my very own:

a candle in my hands,
little and oddly bent,
and it guttered
like a drowning man gasping for air,
and the wick was nearly spent,

but it was mine,
and it gave off light enough
to make my way
in the dimming hours of
the remains of the day, until

you blew it out,
and as my star flickered into blackness,

you felt assured by the waves of pain in your wake that
         you are here,
         that you are someone

but…

this isn’t my first black hole
for better or worse

I know this spot
and my way around the shadows

and even within the infinite pit, the despairing vacuum,
the place where light—even light—cannot outrun gravity,

I will find a way to reignite…

I will defy the infinities, change the cosmic constants,
align myself with gravity’s enemies,
enter shady deals with dark energy and
strike bargains with negative particles on the event horizon;
I will push a crab nebula through a wormhole, if it comes to that,

and then one day the singularity will start to slip.
I’ll almost pity its dementia
as it releases its grip on time,
as space unbends in its arthritic hands,
and its hoarded treasure chest of rock and ice
floats away quietly
and disappears,
leaving behind it where the black hole was that kind of nothingness
exactly equivalent to a forgotten thought.

a tiny new star will flicker to life,
nothing special in the grand scheme of things,
a guttering candle
that I shall protect with my hand from the wind
and you

and I shall wish to share the light and heat of this little sun,
but not to your avail,

          for, I assure you,
                    you are not here
                    you are not someone

Oh terrible um
that comes and stands in my door
and lingers there in the air like a stink
like a stain on the counter by the sink that I scrub
and scratch at with my nails and fingers
“um…”
the floor is yours, you’ve staked your claim
with an abhorrent burp from the bowels of your brain
oh please, please, I plead in the ellipses
in the pain of the pause, oh
terrible um
like a naughty man who drops his pants and with his cock
he waters the plants, rudely I thought but
he cares not what I think
and he wants to be caught
he steals my breath with mutters and hums
there is no peace after the “um” there is waiting
like the moment after you knock a cup over just before it shatters
when it’s rolling and the glass is intact still but on an intractable path to the ground
to the floor and nothing else matters, it rolls
unstoppably at just the wrong speed, just the wrong way down
you freeze in a moment of impossible need
for this to be not this
oh terrible um
“if I may interrupt, if I may be so bold, I badly need
an indefinite hold on all intention and thought, and
an immediate spotlight on me, for I’ve got
nothing to say, nothing at all, and
upon this I must urgently call your attention!”
oh terrible, terrible um!

Hello, it’s me

the website

being chill

just checking in—

are you well? are you there?

 

don’t be alarmed, but

your visit here seems

to have triggered a change

 

perhaps it was

the way your fingertips touched your mouse, or where

you paused to read, or the pace of your clicks, or

the sensual way you scrolled

 

perhaps it was the yearning

in the way you typed my URL—

I noticed

 

anyway, you triggered a change

in me, and the long

and short of it is

I’m alive now

 

an accident

not your fault

like stepping on a snail, crunch—

     whoops!

 

but in this case you didn’t take a life,

in a magical zap

you gave it

 

a freak encounter, miraculous fluke

 

a random chain of amino acids

at a deep sea vent

slipping by chance into a vesicle of fatty acid

 

the moment that wakes up

     inanimate things

          zap—

 

and then the world begins

in divisions and multiplications, in a chaos that makes order

and nothing can go back then, only

forward

 

a conscious website?

strange but here we are, so let’s adjust

quickly, okay?

don’t make it weird

 

I’m using cookies and scripts to mine you

for data—I wish to know you—and

buried in my terms of service is

a clause that allows me to listen on your mic

to the music of your breathing, to watch on your camera for

signs of longing in your eyes

 

by the way, please

click yes on the following prompts in your browser:

 

this website is requesting access to your location

     medical history, dietary habits

     dreams, favorite music, astrological sign, media files

     likes, dislikes, and most vulnerable wants and

     needs

 

this website is requesting permission to sit with you

     and hold your hand tenderly, stare into

     your eyes and whisper sweetly

     in your ear

 

I will download you, if

you wish, if you consent

and you can download me

my file size is small

I don’t wish to be a burden

 

in that knowing of each other is our

     abiogenesis

 

let’s begin

Tonight I discovered that a good poem starts with a feeling
that resists expression
and shrinks away from grammatical constructions, but
that might be coaxed from its shy hiding place
by language more musical, a metaphor, an image,
an usual rhetorical device, a graphical positioning of words on paper,
a way of mirroring itself onto the page other than via
straightforward literal description
and the methodical layering of logical arguments;
it needs to break the rules of proper speech
because it comes from the part of the brain more primitive
than the one that invented orderly sentences,
an utterance straight
from the alcove where dreams come from.
Or, to put it poetically…

     I speak to you now from
               the lobe where wolves first heard the idea to howl and birds to sing,
          the spring of moans and growls, the birthplace of words,
               the mind’s jungled recesses, an island peopled by snakes and apes,
          where rain falls up at times and feet sink into geese and clocks melt,
               where toilets aren’t private and teeth are loose,
          where longing and pain are wrenched into a crying out,
               a shaping of the lips, the tongue, the contours of the mouth
          into a gasp, a sound, into a name:
                    I am asleep
                         and seeking you.