Cabin Lights

In the few moments I could recollect before falling asleep, I saw the boardwalk at night with all the cabins lit up. It was the summer of 2001 and I was fifteen years old. I envisioned sitting on porches while listening into the night the voices from other porches that could be heard over the chirping crickets and loon calls amidst the silence of nature. Nights were dark in the woods and so made the cabin lights all the brighter, all the more meaningful, as if to say, ‘indeed, life is in here.’ Those reverential days I would sometimes walk the boardwalk at night, eavesdropping on the very same porch conversations that soothed a quiet night. I would hear talks of who should marry whom and who wore what ghastly clothes to dinner that evening. As I would walk past, those on the porches would wave fondly to me, gossip halting for a temporary indulgence in community. I would smile and wave back, maybe say, “Goodnight.” The stars hung like moaning diamonds, trapped in sticky molasses. The loons called sporadically, lonely, earnestly. Crickets chirping. Frogs wailed. Murmurs. The sudden, unnatural outburst of laughter and then all’s quiet once more. The strange peace of it, I found enthralling. There was something in it - some expansive memory that reaches into the farness of time and now transcends my experience and becomes happiness, though I did not know it was happiness then. The simplicity of nuanced habitation in the greatness of nature. Freedom with a measure of comfort. That is happiness. Cabin lights piercing through the darkness. Voices lasting into the stars. And so shall we remain forever. That is happiness.

American Sidestep (The Things We Did Not Become)

I feel close to something different.
The ribbons have left my eyes
And fatigue is a new blanket left open to inspiration.
Am I not spiraling?
No, thank heavens no.
Where the watermelon blasts come like rain
And the candles manufacture the daylight
Is now A land I will call habitable .

There are no new crops, the harvest fails,
My children will have nuclear small pox
And yet I can rest; sleep soundly at night.
I no longer cook in the boiling turmoil
Of speculative intellectualist farces.
All things are free, Israelites and the slaves,
From Egypt to America, all things are free
And I can rest, I can rest,
And know what I do is good, towards an end -
Not the sad snake moan of a broken Bible
Or broken families, dreams, trees, or earth

For so long I have been bankrupt,
Stranded in the viscid muck of a vapid ocean,
Trash among the seas,
But now I feel contentiously good,
Like a solemn prayer flying higher
Than it thought it could
And still rising.

The joy bells ring from cumulus clouds someday,
The sun shines luminous to grandstanding greedy dreams,
And sleep is its own reward, pure sleep, rest,
In the wake of a day too fast gone bye, sleep,
The ellipsis of living, sleep comes justly.

Remorse and trumpets arouse all spectrum of feeling
While I am you, American side step,
Going introverted and knowing the road.
Call off my landlord and make me a rich man,
Or send me to Haiti to atone my life through labor,
My life could be better but so it goes.

All the rudolph stories could be fated speeches
Prone to the all powerful propaganda machine religion,
Thrown to the underbelly of the Cosmic Atom
In search of truth where none exists.
To the black holes I have not become, I raise my glass.
Everyone is undertakers but that doesn't mean I must be too.
And so the cash drips out of my bank
Like a leakng faucet in a day dream
And the piles of mud and fog prophesy
That I shall be down and out again soon,
But for now there is soda, for now there is cake,
Some vast indifference is on the wane,
A family reunion is around the bend,
With cannon fire and love to amount to,
And so shall it be forever with these beat days (which are all days)
And so shall it be that I must not be undertakers.

Christendom is coming, but not too fast,
So we can ignore it all righteously
And hope to get caught in the fountain of youth
But never be found in the whirlpool of youth
Which has drowned so many unsuspecting souls.
Ah, for we do everything to try to participate
And make participants in history
And we look for the right side to land on.
Never fear my future babies,
You'll have your place too.
We'll all muddle through the sciences and seasons
Till bells jingle for you, as they jingle now for me,
From the all the clouds and space
And the things we did not become.

E=MC^2 (or: Einstein Was There)

Sail on pale oceans to the starry deeps
And I remember the start of creation,
From darkest light in windswept space -
A trillion miles just a trifle -
To the foggy divine, interspersed God
Within the gelled tome of the cell
And all composited in one measurement,
The unit that is a universe,
As arbitrary as the inch,
As important as the mind,
It has existed forever unchanging,
An island of being in naught.

No change ever graces the unit
Nothing enters or ever leaves,
And so too have we ever always been,
Our mass existing before light
Our energy existing before mass,
And so too will we ever exist,
Our mass extending into light
Our energy extending into mass
Past all death, time, and self
Into star children, becoming becomers
The stuff of God, the fabric upheld.

In lubricious flesh we will waste our days
Trapped still inside our eyes
Disfigured by time, unhinged by laws,
While always we have always been
The Universe and more than;
We are forever for we are mass:
Einstein is crucified upon the Hubble,
Drifting deeper into ancient light
And we are beautiful forever.

Somerville Ave.

Like the damned streets off of Somerville Ave,
Transcendence seems to forget that it fades.
It burns out like a light bulb, disappears like electricity,
Forges new paths in the sands of the sieve.
Go off in the waves. Go off in the waves -
Drown the cruel titan that smells of all night,
Born from the trenches, released by the knife.
with all the sounds stolen from the windmill of time,
The absence of her words keep me locked in the rain
With only a candle, a vigil of remains.
And I run down the alleys of no-where
And hide in the crevices of the immortal
And kill the cruel joker who laughs at God
And knight the sad God who jokes
And heal the sick
And cure the poor
And write the next letter of the holy page
And knock down all doors
And crash down all gates
And cry to the broken space of knowledge
And believe again
So as not to forget that transcendence fades
And salvation is a street off of Somerville Ave.

Friendship

You and I, we use the same soap
To wash the same sins
That we don't believe are sins,
To keep our flesh clean and make our minds secure.
In the twenty some years that link our times
We removed our experiences for statistical logs;
Our lives grow remote, isolated, perpetual;
We become less as more becomes now.

To Us All

To run the frolicking skyclock down,
To stroke the cow's struggling grace,
To mow the last grasses of star spangled earth,
To deny all the fruits of her sad song,
Could be to strike at no fraction
Or percentage too mighty
The sweetest melody spoken so plain
In the highest valley of ever being
All along the libertine skyline
Of every pillow man's dreams.

O ye seaserpents of yellow scaled horror,
Take back thy movie theater, scum for us all.
Grant me to imply its all in the garbage
We eat that births the foul islands atop
Past trash compressed
That betrays us to the vortex boredom and regalia
Of tepid remorse.

To us all. To us all.

Blinding rat soups can will us to vote
But we're not the type for democracy's key.
O poison, fair poison, knot my stomach thrice.
Dice the nothing into small nothings,
Kid not the laughing at such great heights.
Rome shall fall,
Not one brick unturned.
All is but skylab and a joystick.
Know thy God and his face.
He's already revealed in the militias of the future.

It Is Good To Think Upon the Multiverse

How quick things change -
In the dusk, the picture is graying
And I still find my stock in you.
How the old waves of tempered feeling return
Like an angelic meteor crashing,
How the emerald labyrinth still has my heart!
The parade across the orient has been halted
While the elephants give birth and die
Amdist the winged dreams of tsunami salvation
And I am alone, thinking of you.
The air is so hot on this journey
To think straight is sin.

I never thought much about you
Until the islands moved, rearranging everything,
When the eclipse became permanent and all things in purple light.
How is it now without the temple?
Has your center maintained a forward march?
Has grace smiled upon the holy body
That breaks to reform the wine of your soul?

I've missed you these days; the quiet resounds
As the pulse of the universe I so desperately want
Conflicts with the one that I own.
But its good to think upon the multiverse
Where somewhere, in some age we thrive,
Aloft in the barn, asleep in the fields,
Stars as blankets and skies so warm,
Free to be millionaires and hidden in our bodies,
Soaking in the vast freedom of lovers' multitudes,
Alive on the cusp of the fountainhead fate
With visions and dreams ubiquitous with God
And the very instance we're in as the only treasure of it all.

To proselytize such things is folly
But to consider them is holy;
Our capacity to wonder and dream
Is the heartbeat of all creation's meaning.

To Invest in Hope

To invest in hope is the end of what you can do,
It summons all to be all while suspended in voids
And uplifts weakness, insubstantiality, despair
In the face of God or Space - the vast all or the nothing's vast
whichever you prefer to worship
And you worship something, no doubt.

Admist jealousy's chaos and earthquake's rebuke,
In the rubble of time and commensurate misery,
The fear of turning off becomes lit like the sun
And the holiness of anything drips away like oil from the earth
We all must fade away into congealed dissonance, drifting
And giving birth to a thousand vindications each day
So that we may never forgive the past and never trust the future.
In such a place and such a time as this forever, to invest in hope seems futile..

But when everything is still on earth and mind,
When the frog sleeps on the lilly pad undisturbed
When the lilly flower has been closed for the night,
And the waters still below, the gar fish adrift, asleep in the reeds,
And the reflected moon cannot be discerned from its satelite brother -
When everything is so, to have invested in hope is not so bad.

Below the Down

This muddy world of wrists and mirrors
Shows the child, by example, how to grow
In eclipses and spasms, in winds and tides,
In growth that’s no growth but a stretch in retraction
Into forgetting, where death rests solemnly on cushions
Comfortably lounging till Spring.

The forces inexorable swing the sword to and fro,
While we hide our heads in potato chip bags,
And speak to and from politics in forums so vast
Nothing is heard but the earthquakes of doom -

To think of it as inevitable
Is to acknowledge one truth.
That the waking thoughts of birth
Are the most pure you will have is another;
Nothing is new after.
Once life is grasped it is lost
Like a coin in the sea
Potential diminishing
Into worthless rust

Have at all tempests, make mortals fly
Reel in the large tuna,
And reverse all time
Some things remain unconquerable
And that is just that
For all time and so on
No more, no less,
All things are thus final.

And maybe but for beauty we would all be done with it
On the first day of life, be done with it right away.
This sphere of rainbows steeped in avalanche cosmos
Allowing us breath and gravity to maintain continuity
Imbues us with such attachments we never want to leave,
And never would leave, for it is the best place for us,
And there is nowhere else except the dark shroud.

We are never to leave until death,
And never to abandon until the babies start suicide -
Then we’ve had it and there’s nothing else to be had
So live on till then or till death departs you
And have at the mirky waters of the sky.

The Poet Who Lived On Grafton Street

The poet who lived on Grafton street
Sold his poems on the street all day
In volumes with titles, the poems all scanned,
And he sold two or three each day.
With one volume sold he could publish one more
And buy some bread on the side

With liquor mouth
Quit smoking at 39
Sold beer for a while
Came from America
Fled to Ireland
Thinking of Heaney
Or Yeats aspirations,
Sitting high atop cliffs
In Howth’s respite
Looking down at waves
From the monster, the titan sea
And thinking water
Reflects the sky’s truth
And the sky reflects the water
While the mail came
All rejection,
The cost of stamps so high,
And the baby cried
And the wife died of cancer
And those children
Who beg every day,
And the poets recycled
Dreamed of hybrid cars
Instead of sheep
In the pastures of dreams
Jumping the fence
For to sleep, for to sleep, for to sleep
And the television too loud
And the lights always on
And the News so bad
And the voices so hard
And the sun always gone
Left his baby
In the house alone
Came from America
Fled to Ireland
Came to stop smoking
Fled to the liquor
Killed a child’s life
For a dream lived out
In poverty, alone
Successfully quit smoking
With liquor

Found a vanity press that would publish his books
Made some copies to earn money on the street
From his poems and sold two or three each day
He came to be known as the poet,
The one who lived on Grafton street,
And who stayed there, selling poems, till death.