metonymy4u

The sound of thunder

on the hills made me
think everything was being doubled.
Does it sound that way to you,

is everything doubled? He

got a call from his girlfriend
that sent him over the edge. Why’s
not important.

Everybody talked about him later

and laughed like we do at misery.
Like

when we’re nervous or feel superior.
You can turn away,
and leave them to it because they won’t laugh

when some day death hears them breathing in the dark.

Read Full Post »

I moved to obviate the center.
I did it with my whole body. The center did not care.
I decided bias is not the length of a voice.
Harmony does not hold its breath. A psalm
is a garden that hardly knows its fate. I wanted more than stale bread. I wanted to cook with cardamom and nutmeg.

Does the eye make the thing it sees? Does sound uncover being?

Pesach is a lazy time of year when people scream.
We do the work of god

and pretend she has no ear. Try to sit
for any time not meditating. Try to understand the vastness
already upon her mind.

Read Full Post »

all that ancient
history turned indispensible
lies,
i saw what
centuries did
to the ones i loved:
faces,
tired of living from
the inside
turned themselves out
for some wine and cheese
and,
the party concluded,
with their daughters they
sailed down the horizon
into
their pasts.

Read Full Post »

does god hear the voice he makes
does the ear make the sound it hears
do today and today and today care
that salted snow is on the banks of rage
melting far below

Read Full Post »

To those who believe they’ve solved the Sisyphean itch,
there will be war on the horizon before you wake.

To the voice inside my head I said so,
what are you in for?

I will go out and do the same, how many more
times after this?

Shall choose between a string in a field,
and the death of a rock.

Only emptiness holds something else.

Which is why I offer no myth in place of discovery.
No final words you can ride to the grave—

I loved her only when I saw her.
Now she’s gone I never stop.

On a planet where molecules evolved I think
it is tempting to personify the world. To hope

we rise above brute need.
But church is only a place to review the doubts your parents believed.

Like the one about how all are one and one is all and
if there is anything then everything must move together.

If the faster we go the slower we advance does
that mean we can ever stop?

Where are you going, I have been so burn
your word dump. If language hurts as much as it does,

go some other way. Disbelief
leads only to a question of you. And a fish upstream

probably likes to turn around one last time.

Read Full Post »

Against my very will I find myself for home again
trending beyond the river’s expired month and hoping, panicked,
to someday see again the ocean of my youth. Behind me
my years a dried up whisper, and you my bones in the yard.

Newly dead and with no history I lie face up
to an unwashed desert while a flight of tarnished wings,
meaning nothing to my story, line themselves across the sky
to empty the day at the end of the day. That being said, your

voice in my innocent ear was such that I slid easily
down a waterfall of lies and saw time as it walked away
from its partner of many years.

Tired work days often end like this:
my sun words dance prayer-like along a beam of light and
blinded I can barely see the mercy that sends me home
released from this life, a moment of pain
flanked on either side by silence.

Read Full Post »

switch my brain for another and I might not know the difference.
                                                and i’m still quite upset

that you thought it necessary to remind me
last night (between the closet and the door) that
the old time rockers understood passion as a bridge
between two clouds: work itself one could be proud of,

and not apologize for. i wish everything
was more sustainable than that.

but by this time tomorrow i’ll be waking alone in my bed
wondering if you were a dream.

i who can draw almost a lifetime, from one unheard
                                                               compliment.

have you ever seen a sky as beautiful as the one overhead right now?
no? then please don’t leave me tonight.

i can’t endure another thought as sad as the last.
and i’m worried about the imperfections of my body.

Read Full Post »

smuggle me once more unto your heart darling dear,
i’m a rapid anodyne diplomat of hope.
there’s no water in the trough over here.
and we are drying the rope
so recently washed of its blood.

sensory experience deprivation of the very first kind—
it was a monster head embalmed in port
after warrants dispersed by a people forsworn
and devout.

and i’m but a bald day long
languisher for your lies, a witless suitor
for your amour.

                        god, sometime in the middle of the 20th
                        century, all doubt about your
                        power and continued existence
                        left the earth forever.

Read Full Post »

she was having one of those dreams one wants to force
yourself awake to be rid of. when you wake up and your
arm won’t move and you shake it almost off trying to remember
what day it is and what you’re supposed to be doing.
i think i’m in chicago still trying to get back to california
or that i’m failing out of school because i skipped
too many classes and didn’t turn in the papers,
hoping i could cover it up later and not lose
my security clearance.

it’s an occupation that quickly saps all desire.

like the week i flew all night to shake one man’s
hand, got back on the plane and flew twice that time to see
my own bed again. they dimmed the cabin lights but peace
missed the flight. or was shredded by the engines
who knows. stale air is no reward for hard work.

my brother used to tell me stories about swimming under
the summer moon with fireflies overhead while his
sticky skin slid thoughtlessly into a dark water. he said
fish nibbled his toes. i think he was just chicken shit.
scared as one could be under our naked sky

homeless for its gods once again.

Read Full Post »

                                    Abraham wanders the desert alone at last


Game the master devil and destroy their wholesale letters,
he wrote from beyond the barrios of España
orientál. Dispense with hope and discretion.

Covenant with me again, said the rock. Wordless
dreams are the lord’s anger for lives of
no repent.

Also, he worried

if somewhere it had been written that to dare
the lost camel paths of smugglers of salt and poetry
you must steer only by the hue of the setting sun. Cheap
wine and sandy dates will be your lone support.

There were no emails to open so forget
comfort like tea forgets its leaves each night

under the earthen moon.
Tell the sky

cancel my accounts;
and say unto my widow and orphan
the face of the child I betrayed is too hard a thing

to ever forget.

Read Full Post »