Must one smash their ears before they learn to listen with their eyes?

The other day I went jogging along the canal
A cold morning
All the water was frozen
Every breath I inhaled stung my lungs
and steamed up my glasses

As I ran down 31st Street
Rounding the corner
Down to the water
Where the civil war re-enactor’s perform for the tourists in the summer

Two deer came running up the canal
They were frightened but graceful,
Dashing in big leaps up out ahead of me
I hurried my pace and they jump down from the trail, into the canal
Running on frozen mud and garbage
I could hear each thump of their feet
Landing on the ice



We ran alongside one another for a minute,
Almost forgetting the other were there
Pretty soon they broke out in full stride
Jumping up onto the trail right in front of me
They took a hard left at an opening

I slowed my jog down, lowered the volume of my music
and took a left with them

The road was dead-ended
A metal chain link fence about 6 ft high
Had caged them in
They turned to escape but I was standing there - blocking them
So they rammed their heads into that chain-link fence,
Like they couldn’t see it
Was really a metal barrier

They’d ram their heads, look back at me
and then frantically run a half circle between me and the fence
and ram their head again.
This went on for about a minute

I wanted them to just walk right past me and go back onto the trail
But they kept busting their heads on that fence

There I stood,
that wind still stinging my lungs and heart
now racing
glasses fogged up with steam.

How close can you get to an animal ramming its head against a wall?



They’re about 10 feet away
Or maybe it was 20
It felt closer

They never grunted or made a noise
They just bounced from the ground,
Back into that fence with a blind determination

Other animals might have grunted
And from hearing this grunt
I would have moved out of their way
But without the deer making a noise
it all seemed more natural
Just the clanking fence and their wiry hair

If they'd a made a noise I’d felt it in my gut
I’d felt it physically
This lack of noise created a sort of distance
A distance I couldn't quite discern


Must one smash their ears before they learn to listen with their eyes?

Just then the mother runs right past me,
Dashing in one burst she breaks out
Her grace amazes me

I stand there waiting for the baby to follow suit
But she just continues to ram her head into that fence
Over
and over

I’m not responsible for this
She might be injured but it’s just
Something that nature has let happen
I’m just a spectator
The animal(s) can leave any time they want to

And besides, the series of events that have brought us here
Seem out of our control
I have been brought to this place
She has been brought in front of me and that fence
The wind had picked up and blew hard
I looked around to see what else nature had in store
What other coded messages lay waiting to be unraveled

But I refused to stand there any longer
I could feel the animal's heart just bursting with fear



I let the fawn alone and moved along down the trail
My music back on I begin to
Head back, glancing on the spot, and she has left
I run up past the canal and back onto 31st St.
Ending this jog

Entering my house I call for my wife and she's
There in bed, her eyes dart across the room to meet mine
I smile slightly as I take off my headphones and turn off the music

InDivisible Lies

A lie is a state of movement. It has a before and an after, cut into the now.

Wait, what is it?

“I know it when I’m not asked”

But our fathers never told us what it means to lie. They never asked.
Could we say that our fathers lied?

But what are these lies really
And this haunts Augustan

The lie as rooted in time
There is no dependency on movement in time, when Jericho stops; there is no movement.

The lie in motion is made different by its movement
Like a set of wipers onto the world.

That was a lie

I used to beg the Buddha

To change my windshields

Float, Swirl

I’m stationed over piles of leaves

The bottom of the pile wet and cool

Like a fish hook.

And she’d look back at him

As if he were a newspaper left to the streets for a day, unread.

His colors were stained supple

Like a chalk line prison

That can only be pointed to as a cause

Until his day up close to the sun.

Hypocrisy

Justice conceived at the steps of the court

She’d find him under the pile of leaves

On the return

The park was bare in the fall

Fig trees stood calm

Like an old picture show

Swaying in rhythms of a past, jettison -

To this glorious day,

New England’s birth.

“And not since Antigone have we seen such decisive action”

The plebian chorus proclaimed.

And saints would fill the fantasy of their neighbors

For in the fog and dust up the way

The storm would pass them

Like hope floating down a street towards the water

And Hart Crane would wonder for days on end about the night when fog had descended

Up out of the imaginative peaks

Picking up the leaves with little effort

Like thoughts in turn

Where at once bricks, my history, and the leaves swirl back into the water.

Two New Poems

Tired Cyborg

This morning I woke up
with a crink
in my neck
I figured it was due
to my exhaustion

That I simply slept
so deeply
that my body
Was too tired to re-position itself
in the night.

I once woke up during the night
When I was a boy
With both arms totally asleep;
no blood was flowing from them.
This made me laugh.

It felt like one of those anti-gravity machines
that make your whole body numb.

Lately, when my body falls asleep,
it's harder to bring it back,
to re-circulate the blood.

See
I’ve been burning the candle
at both ends, lately

Why do we use the candle metaphor
for describing
a state we aren’t able to identify
as being on the brink
of “burned out?"

Maybe by burning the candle at both ends
we’re just strengthening
our capacity
for never becoming burned out?
Or maybe
we’re just building
an immunity
to never becoming burned out?

St. Augustine comments,

“the mind commands the body and it obeys.
The mind orders itself and meets resistance.”

The body is the instrument of the mind,

yet the mind is elsewhere.

The mind is precarious
in its control
over the body,
like a computer
in relation to the data
it outputs.

My body can only be measured by its outputs,
not its intentions or efforts.
This is how the computer
has enveloped
our idea of performance.

And by performance,
I'm referring to the performance of a system
And not just any system,
for what is a system
if its parts are isolated
from its whole?

Without the function of a system
in its whole,
would my body
still be free enough
to be separate from the pressure
of having to simply perform
its output(s)

for the machine?
----------------------



The Ambivalence of Sight

The “scopic drive” is tied both to delusion and to truth
In nature, each object is presupposed
to possess two natural properties,
that are either good or evil.

Such is the thought that has absorbed our imagination,
but our philosophy has surpassed this common understanding.
But why would it matter
if our collective imagination still perceives objects in this way?
What good is knowledge
if it is not addressing these realities?

So if the natural properties are inhabited by certain auspicious and non-auspicious qualities,
then what of the objects themselves?

What are the objects made up of?

Take the gun.
The gun is just like any other object.

And like all objects,
it has a certain indifference
to its user and its observer.
So it isn't nature that gives the object its dualism.
It is the participant
and the observer.

In object relations theory,
the difference between the perspective of the participant
and the observer
is the basis
of your subjectivity

And in the incorporation of the gun
into my field
of sight
I understand
that the gun
is really the object,
not of veneration
but of pure evil.
But I understand this
through my understanding of the indifference
of the object,
the object is made up
of a non-existence.

After all,
our desire
to associate
the two properties
are rooted in a concept of the self
that we incorporate into each object.

The gun has changed the way
our object relations are constituted.

A problem the metaphysics
for which
has yet
to be developed.

Staring at the River After Church

Strait laced pilgrims
Anchor the curtains
Light westerly’s upset the blanket
The court of arbiters structures us out in squares
The sky above no longer guides the sand
The spirit has shifted strategies

This is that, the rabbit heart
Setting off ships cross in day of noon when the mirror sees the water up to the mountain
And the mountain sees the water down to the depths of
The world without, ends.

She’d bring the wine
He’d kneel before the body
The dirt and the disgust of the mind
Had uncontested children

We have discovered the carrot
No longer did the solace bring them home
The hitchhiker had brought up the effort
And was chastity in part responsible
For the dreams realized along the bank?

The terminal button set to neutral
The ancestor Osiris is not capitalized
From the symbols of his gown came the question internal to elevators
We’d step from the bed of roses onto the horizon
Without an error of this world to guide
The mistrust found
Paper’s re-shuffled

The misty eyed
Waiting for the day that the water would return the favor
Cleansed from the sight
He would de-board the dingy hopping from the island
Across the river.

Didactic moves
Frowning Japanese women
Howl for Providence
As they manned the iron tract plow
In allegiance to the rabbit
We’d anchor the curtains without having found the stage

The button would be switched in an instant, the effort would be restored and the home movie would settle her treaties.

The horizon remarks dust to dust
In faint periods of time
In between the barge of peace
Before the era of electric clouds.

4 Poems

Mascara

I’m pulling off trains track by track
There are purple emissions above my head
Each of her lashes are brown dewed with black

The Martyrs song is sung by the lamps
And the mosquitoes fear to go
The air stained wet by the look of mascara drips
Her cheeks pale white rusty amber
Encased in my pocket is the thing
Tarnished from generations

The streets tiled brick
The alleyway home to great calamity
A century brought change and sanity
On the eve of a revolution the low candles burned
On street posts without glass pyramids

The wind had taken those candles to gas emissions
Aside from the dewey after-effect
The wind would not reach them.

Henry

Inside the rail stood patient Henry

Holding out can for duct tape donations
She brought back two dimes
The southbound beeped, beeped and laid him down flat.
Before the caboose had arrived
She held him in the shadow
His head had gently fallen over the tracks
His will restored: nothing.

Plane Ride
When we embarked over the sea
The trees had taken a dip
The garden was open to the future

Each part of the system had been broken
Her feet dangling above the trees
The long-faced noun had jumped them
Scaring him into submission

Outside they knew a place called “twenty-four bridges”
The rumor had persisted
Our global reflex persisting
The moon no longer resisting
Her smile dim and fading
The other night I performed the scissor
We pasted her face inside the oranges
They brought her a migrant to beggar
Each time we stopped along the river her head would pound like a trigger

Each night I lay awake happier in courage he
Walked with the lions

Each time would bring harboring sick and forgotten
The truth of the matter
Is less than scattered but equally important is what comes out after

The river would hover inside her dark shadows
Unusual odors had ignited his mattress where mares stood glowing
Perplexed and ignited to join in the garlands of beautiful magic
She would not hold onto the any(one’s game).

Animal Packs

The bouquet stacked seven to one
The wolves packed under stone

Rumbling

Empty notions hover above the street
The dry drip and drap bone lick
Of flesh and birds setting off wired silhouettes

Sway

Priests huddled for air shoving
Heat piled on stretching out to space
The sonnet of roses wilting
Protecting the elements
Like a soul warmed under radiated beds.

The Drop Out

The end of motion
across the sky rushes

Indeed its death moves faster
and draws me out like an empty sillhouetted
Picture of trees.

How I long for those lonely suburban days
When the sky encircled above
All movement was eliptical
The distant motor hummings and commotion
Deposited in a beautiful center
Around my cul-de-sac

I would sit upright like a rigid frame
Pretending the overgrown grass
Had blew falling specters

Whose shapes were deified by then
they would droop across the sky, like sad tendrils in the wind

Dream

His white beard had traveled there too,
Under the sunset
Before I tripped on the lawn's sprinkler
And fell onto my back,
I stayed there.

Watching the vision,
The refracting bright swirls of light
Reminded him of the infinite consciousness
That thirst for reinvention had brought them.

He'd turn to stone there
Waking on the lawn to the sprinkler he had realized
How ingrained his artificial madness had been.

And the panoply of
Heroic correspondence,
That literal lust to know

“Had been”

The terrain now so full of sin,
Blew his vision back out across the sky
Until their specters had fallen from the horizon
Forcing the sun to form another lonely ellipsis
Back around the earth.

Every Day and Summer River & Critical Parody in Comparative Literature

Every Day

Every day since you appeared
So vividly on my porch
When I awoke
Feeling cessated from my body
And that surge of clear adolescent energy lifted us
Up to the roof while I followed
Reaching for that point in my heart
You wouldn’t let me touch
For you had informed my body for the first time

Of intangibility

And how we sat
Smiling,
As that dim incandescent glow
Faded into the rain
And dark forests around you.

Every day since you haven’t allowed me to forget
Only momentarily do you show me your many faces
Sometimes etched along the skyline,
Opaque like a faint vision, you tickle my tired eyes

Or near our old parks you enrich color and texture
All of our spots and points my canvas
For these brilliant dreams of you and me
Sometimes sullen
Sometimes green
Each vision you bless with the most treasured gift
No lock/no key
All I have to do is see
The infinite possibilities
You left me.

Every day since you left I trace
All of our connections
Like intricate tributaries,
Ruined from a perennial rain

Each experience a tentacle
Scattered, isolated in alluvial flow
Now charting new ground
Unhinged and pouring
Outward like wicked fingers reaching

Forming spontaneous patterns, new shapes
After mundane dormancy how soon we find
These connections now firm
And beautifully fragmented

One time I thought these channels,
So worn and rutted
Revealed you nakedly, inert
For all to really see.
In that perfect design, my savior:
Nature has chose you to lead the awesome system
And has equipped you with the momentum of a collapsing hillside
To gently cover ourselves in that complex blanket
Until we gel in your omniscient design
Here together in this sad paradise

My eternal image of you,
Weaving the dry earth at the head of the rivers current,
Forging your destination ahead of the changeless followers
Propelled by some translucent storm,
My savior, my phantom

Summer River

There is that far away glow to the river the mild aridity
His heart in motion, gauged by the tired tread
Angels swam sadly outside that day
In an imagined ellipsis he felt them.
Through the material so artificial he would not have realized
It was all borrowed and that they all pretended to operate
Fluttering because they must have in thought
Yelling vicious epithets, borrowed from eternity
He still cast his thread into the tranquility of the past
Slaying the temperate façade,
His little community, a textual heaven
What he could not write was alive and coiled
Unfurled through the swift motions flow
Locked away there in the winds representing
The hearts trajectory gone and etheralized somewhere
Fixed like a pixel on the outer edges of that summer.