The Terror

I was in absolute terror
When I suddenly realized
That iambic pentameter
Was a real thing and that
There was no way in Britain
To stop it.
"Will!  Put that quill down
You Elizabethan fruitcake!"

McClenney To Beeville

I step outside for the night’s last cigarette.
So quiet I hear paper,
tobacco sizzle the permanent scar
between my first and second fingers.

I think about my old friend Leonard Larson.
Leonard had a broad, angry brow
like his hero Beethoven.
Compared his mastery of harmonica
to Beethoven’s command of piano.
Several years of failing to convince
anyone of this, along with a dual diagnosis,
got him sent away to the horrors of McClenney
for six months of ECT and a lifetime of Thorazine.

I drove a Kenworth for forty years,
then a bottle of Wild Turkey deep into the night.
Ended up in a trailer east of Beeville, Texas.
So quiet I hear paper
burn, flesh sizzle.
Not sure what got me thinking of
Leonard again, but he
would have liked it here.
Maybe it’s the peace and quiet.

To the north, an orange moon
cracks like an egg on the mountain.
It was never quiet in McClenney,
Leonard confessed.

I finish my cigarette,
watch the yolk run down
the other side of the mountain.

Compartmentalization                                                            

 
Of course the door was closed to the room
in which he was snorting crank through

a tightly-rolled twenty-dollar bill, whose eye,
though much wider than a needle’s

would admit only a thin stream, so necessitating
the semi-privacy with like-minded semi-strangers

far and separate from the old-friend crowd
inured to the usual intoxicants distant

from the snowy amphetamine rising to the olfactory
nerve, with which none of said crowd

had experience—or desire to gain
—the new high, another door and hinge beyond the first—

yet stronger than that slab of seasoned oak,
miles thicker too

 

Animals
 
The bear is bare.
Disgusting.
The hare is hairy.
Foul.
The pig is a pig.
Revolting.
The fly flies.
He is truly beauty caught
Between two panes of
Glass as beautiful as
Any star in any sky.

Sneak Arrow

A vow of endless love so grand
Etched on a screen by trembling hand
Glows in WeChat’s fluorescent light
Bared to the world in open sight

From shadows near yet far away
A sneak arrow speeds its way

No Cupid’s dart to spark romance
But a cruel barb from scheming trance

A venomous consort’s cold art
Born of her vicious ruthless heart

This heart just scarred now bears a hole
Pierced by this wound that takes its toll

Yet from that hole through aching pain
A song rises a bold refrain
Its melody so clear so strong
Resounds with courage all along

Cryoconite hole

Once, I learnt the literary world comes in innumerable shapes: a square, a circle, a Plath-shaped. That winter, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I didn't understand my admiration for Guns N Roses. I was told there is no such word as “unorthodoxy.” Running further away from sonnet-like behavior, I plunged deep into psychedelic rock, then the ocean turned bluer, the waves foamed more as a mug of overbrimming beer, less as the mouth of a poisoned body. I stopped learning songs that espoused moral jargon and I began opening the window to let the mist-inebriated wind overdose the open pages of my journal, where claw-fingered and shark-teeth despair melted into prose worth reading again. Some days, I feel those cold days were suspended in time, giving me the frozen hours to pull myself out of the cryoconite hole. 

Important

 
I went to bed forgetting
Something important—
What it was
Is already forgotten.

I woke up in the morning,
Still unable to remember
What was forgotten—
So perhaps it was unimportant.

But what is important, then?
Well, it all depends:
Whether you’re young or old,
Wealthy or poor.

Love, marriage, wedding,
A job interview, a promotion,
Children or none,
Savings for retirement.

Look closely, and you’ll see:
Everything is important—
But only while you’re looking.
Once forgotten, it no longer is.

 

          ON IMPULSE

If she likes my poetry
I will lick her nose

If she wants my autograph
I’ll jiggle her hands thankfully
All ten fingers, her ten flags

If she feeds me
I’ll throw food and pound the table
I need a high chair

If she manages a music camp
I’ll empty out my pockets
Bring her plums

If she speaks a language I don’t understand
I’ll go limp with relief

If she is at all familiar to me
I’ll have second thoughts and turn away

Columbus' Cat

It’s not just the sea, not just the sails and the stars,
and the glint of the ocean’s endless curves—  
but a cat lying as the waves rolled beneath,  
a creature of both home and journey,  
with eyes that saw nothing but endless blue,  
its paws tracing the brilliance of ancient myths.

It’s not just the man with the compass,
who first felt the weight of fate,  
it was the cat, the quiet hunter of moonbeams,  
who dreamed of shores unseen.  

For the cat, no continent to claim,  
no flag to raise,  
only the fleeting whispers of humans’
only the promise of endless blue,  
as it nestled in the white grains of the stars.


The Fluttering of the Brown Antechinus  

When dusk gathers in the underbrush,  
a slight tremor scatters the shadows.  
It’s not the rustle of leaves, but a whispered secret,  
coming from unseen corners of the wild.  
A small brown figure flits between branches,  
its tiny paws tapping a broken drumbeat,  
a dance of wild, violent energy.  

It's wrestling with the invisible wind
to untie the kinked winds, the sinews of the angel's thigh.
It is reaching for fleeting fortune,  
to prove itself the chosen of supreme power.  

A moment stretches into cosmic light-years,  
a streak of brightness crossing countless constellations.  
Its life is but a brown photon,  
quietly resting on a leaf before dawn’s arrival,  
still swaying with the frost upon the leaf;  
content with fate, indifferent to good or evil,  
even as the traces of its existence will slowly fade away.