Lost Satellite of Max Richter

{06.14.10}
she spins
spitting messages unconsciously
to audiences she's
unaware of
unimagined

beeping, chattering into the void
sweeping the vacuum
for the shattered remnants
of love or existence
that last touch, fading into
a cosmic echo

scan the frequencies
to see if she's still out there
floating less as a heavenly body
and more as a message or a hope

as she spins further into
the vastness, the full-to-overflowing emptiness
swallows her signal
a sip from some universal broth
she begins to attain
some sort of enlightened loneliness

flashing as some unexplainable nova...

working against the cold

{06.07.10}
working against the cold
most people suggest
making a fire
the creation of heat

but I strike hammers to wires
allow for their vibration
and resonance to
vaporize the arctic air
and
run a hank of horsehair
across strings
until they burst forth
in a volcanic sinew of a cry
or lament

with just that
I could stand naked
in the face of all
the world's glaciers

a new poem

frayed thread
{10.07.09}

I strain and dream
of talking to people I know
in environments, or situations,
unnatural, untenable fits
to who they are.
shifting and pondering fantasy
through different threaded layers
of reality
I deposit secrets in innumerable
hidden Pandora's Boxes
through universes increasingly
confused in the potential
for existence
I laminate the remnants
of my ideas of love
and slip them under the doors of
neighbors I've never had
hoping that some day
I may awake to find
them returned to me
as an alarming signal
that the dream, the idyll
can actually be tempered
by the tactility of realization

Poem for Mahalia

Move On Up A Little Higher
03.25.09


I shit you not
I sat down
put on the headphones
and slapped the needle
down. and
had a spiritual experience:

hearing Mahalia
feeling Mahalia…
but not just in some
simple, auditory audience
way, not just receiving
no…

no.

I channeled a spirit.
Moved up on higher

swept up to the clouds
of the gods
upon the warm updrafts
of her vibrato

suddenly,
knowing all the words
as if I’d been in church
all this time {and I had}

the very sunshine
crept out of her throat
unleashed the power
of faith
to carry on

the foundation of strength
in her breast
that heaved upon
the weary cries
of so many ghosts
that spoke so clearly
in her call
a call to peace
and light
as if Zora or Ralph or Ishmael
had taken
another path in life

the path of swing
gradually, yet surely
firing towards
the sky

the truest of Cupid’s arrows

thursday's poem

{the tonic is personal:the personal is political}
03.12.09

the melody of my being
resolves at the tonic
when
the road behind me
is dark and bereft of machines
left to flirt with
the moon, as a giant chalkboard
to scribble invisible
poems of love to the universe

the chain is undeniable
yet ignored by so many:
from me
to the road
to the moon and
the universe
and back again
where me is interchangeable
with you, except you find
your own tonic note

I wonder, often
what would happen
if we all were humming our
personal tonics
simultaneously…

Castro's Delight (a poem, you assholes)

Castro’s Delight
{03.10.09}

top of the 8th
2 out and a man on 1st
Yosbany Peraza, a 30 year old catcher
steps to the plate

after a swinging strike
on old Uncle Charlie, making
the count 2-1
Peraza launches the next pitch
well into the left field bleachers

a swell of Cuban cheers light up
the Mexico City night
and urge all 262 pounds
of Peraza the Cuban Beetle
around the bases

a fluttering neon bulb
of a memory of Cecil Fielder
skitters across my mind

and I utter, “what a beautiful moment.”
as Peraza is greeted in the dugout
to Castro’s delight