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.