metonymy4u

                        Odysseus home

Athena,
once again approaching home I am busy
composing a lyric poem in the classic style,
journeymen shout me to me and then forget to count fathoms as
we watch your shores approaching.

Twelve journeys I make it since we left the honeycomb coast
you call home and i can’t see any more for all the days spent
gazing along sun bleached horizons looking for you,
driving forward before me promises like a mission.
Twelve attempts, twelve hasty returns

to the receiving room to whisper my own version in an ear so experienced
that I can’t even begin to tell the story for you,
and I think this much you must learn for yourself:
all that passes here is tantamount

to love.

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old man in the train-car
singing backward to his youth
he got caught

they had no use
for one such as him

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there is no snow
on the mountain this year
to take away my sadness

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sanction roared my
morning sky open
so: siren turned
to sun

burn

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In dawn of all morning lights, just
before awareness crept in
you; just, just there

before, right
before all possibilities you had ever dreamed could
illuminate hope and despair—
laid in the immediately momentary blink of the day’s

sedentary

glimpses, what,
what what what

what,

did you experience?

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wed me to life, voice of my end
bring me a candle to die in the wind
i cannot see the train on the track

cannot build this house on my back.
it triumphed, it liquefied
the

sapped crown blood in tree light
frozen town.

and if with every when i try again
to season invisible hate, violence seeps

some
way into every space what
then?

i am telling you self
same people sangha, road tried
animal sangha of my brain:

            i love the wandering of words on the page
            i love age of life
            i love discovery

o dance of death
which is the dance

of possibility:

            when you call i don’t want you
            when i can’t marry a way forward

            i do

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cognitivist bias

left me mis-
understanding this:
there is no space
here and there
between the wind
and the winding
sines that wave
the model is not the phenomenon
drawing
is not the same as
the line left behind

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shadow falls
my day across
destiny calls—
dance close
dance close
your heart to my heart
your chest to my chest
working eyes
i can’t forget

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mary child of my eyes,
breath of my body,
i think i knew you
before you arrived.
fruit of someone
else’s labor and
wicked determination
led you to me. did you
realize on your way here
how much i wanted
a child like you:
wide eyed and blearily
bespoken with irreverence

and a

barely contained nativity
of young minds?

how could i not love you
how could i not keep you

here in my heart for another?

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I am
what
my daughter calls
peripatetic

atoms,
planetary rhymes,
loosed by a sun
turned
tantrum scholar,

maniacal
and slightly dissatisfied
by the silence
of her peers this all
arrived

to discover
oh, I don’t know,
maybe just a
steady hum of fear
which drained
its way tiptoe
across ten carpeted
galaxies,

tripped

over some
whispering sands
you left behind,
took

a turn and
there encountered,
world-keyed
and faint,
nothing
but

sun-faded laughter.

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