This is a selection of poems from the author’s journal, Jabberloon.
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A Ghost I Could Populate
How to pull the ship up by the hair
and set it on its course?
How many layers to possess
before one holds one’s warmth?
(We wear a massive house upon
our backs, the severe and delicate
business of spending these human coins
as the night-whales call and call outside
our bedroom windows.) How open are
our eyes, how haunting our cries?
Fire-Alarm Trees
Our former selves would die as animals in the woods
you wouldn’t believe the beauty I’ve worked
on these walls sometimes the wounded
does not want to be strapped
to its next finger
in an effort
to heal
let it heal wrong
on its own.
A drink to neither rise nor fall.
The Road
When I was ten my father sold
our old family car to the poor family
at the bottom of the hill for a promise
of fifty dollars never kept. And he
never walked down that hill, in the dark,
after work, to demand his money.
I remember this. It affects me.
Jabberloon
The creaking of a door
—that peaceful pound of air
pushed by sallow cat—
is not a woman’s moan
of discontent but
the great and final
anthem of some
sad country.
Judgement Day
He opened another,
flipped through its pages
before settling on an ornate
portrait of people he did not
know, a mother and son—
flipped back to the title,
thought it rather presumptuous—
and read on, smiling at the
seven days quote in particular—
slipped a participation ribbon
between its pages, placed it
on the ever-growing stack
and opened another.
Tiger
A poem should be
the tiger in the room,
not the gentleman guest
leaving no stains or crumbs
when he finally stands to leave.
Old Moon to Young Poets
Stop bothering me.
I know nothing.
I’m just a rock in the sky.
The Wind
Back outside, the wind is starting
to pick up. I have that feeling
of acceleration, that quickening
that comes, and I might say is
required, when you have lifted
the lid off the cookie jar of life
by the simple action of doing
just one thing to extreme
and you find yourself pulsating
to the strange but intimate rhythms
of innocence. That streetlamp!
That puddle! Those train tracks!
I walk a few yards down them past
the old feed mill. First balancing
on the rails then walking on the ties,
I remember my desire to be placed
in the train yard of some small town
with no money, no belongings, just to see
what I could make of that pure potential.
I realize that is exactly where I am. Now.
I try to deny it, to say that I have my
room, some clothes and a very small
but undeniable amount of money.
How quickly we excuse ourselves
from the presence of freedom!
How we use even the smallest of
objects and obligations to drag us down!
Room becomes millstone, money
becomes anesthesia. Day denies night
as here denies there. But I am here,
staring down the tracks that I am now
sitting on, just inside the separation point
between the unknown and the known.
How marvelous I thought it to explore
the intricacies of the daily world while
just outside of it, just a short distance
down the tracks, lies something that even
my once-proud courage balks at: the night.
I slowly stand and begin moving down
the tracks, away from the city lights,
the named. That familiar feeling of
expansion, of oneness with the world,
fills my body. No separation exists
between my legs and the ground.
Now unable to see the tracks, my feet
become more sensitive, my boots tools
of precision. I am moving faster, deeper,
neither through the night nor the night
through me, but rather a melting and
mixing of one’s vibrations with the other’s.
The faster I move the less it becomes
a matter of speed and distance but more
a moving toward the nucleus of the night,
which, containing all possible motion,
recognizes no reality other than its own
stillness. When a man finds himself in
the land of the infinite, he must either
retreat immediately or attempt to
expand quickly enough to survive
without exploding. Pure expansion
is not possible within a human mind
and I feel my very self disappearing,
losing all awareness of my body as it is
no longer needed to create the illusion
of moving through the night, for I am it.
Free of bodily restrictions, I can focus
my energies anywhere. I become hearing
and am immersed in a world of vibration
with the sounds quickly passing beyond
the ordinary into a garbled cacophony
which reaches a peak, not through loudness,
mind you, but in completeness, and passes
into one continuous opera of pure voice.
I look and become sight. All images arise
and disappear faster and closer until I am
observing the past, the present and the future
in the true reality of the now. As with sound,
my vision becomes pure and I am floating
in a whitened world of electrical gauze.
Out of the plasma an image begins
to suggest itself. I focus my attention
on it and in so doing quicken its formation.
A face, it will be a face. I am not surprised
and neither am I afraid. I believe that I
recognize that face, that I had actually
expected it, was waiting for it to appear.
Its expressionless observance of me
causes no discomfort, for it too must be
of the infinite. But can it really be?
It is a human face, and must therefore
be of poison, weight and memory.
The more I observe it the more
solid it becomes. A change occurs.
A look of understanding settles on
its features and remains for some time
in our static world until it closes its eyes
as if feeling some inner pressure and its
look of understanding is swept away
by a silent wind only to be replaced by
an increasingly sinister smile swirling
the coldness of death all around as
the laughter begins gurgling up and out
of that quivering grin and I collapse
as a scream is ripped from my lungs
to go flying off into the mouth of my
apparition to feed the eternal,
murderous hunger of night.
