Poems From My Ages

Work Zone

By your nature,

where is your mind in the stream of time?

Does it leap in rapids like a mountain stream,

fast and agile around & over rocks,

pausing only in restless swirls of pools?

Or does it rest in placid pools

collecting itself for a rush

over yet another rapid?

Is it like a mature river,

seemingly slow, but deep,

full of incipient quiet power?

The quick thinker,

the pause and parry thinker,

the old soul reflective actor.

With lives not quite as steady as a river,

possessed of our erratic humanity,

perhaps these are Whitman’s multitudes that we contain.

We can know ourselves as the river does,

but with the expansive eye of the hawk.

Consciousness.

2025

MASS

Every private pain magnified

whine and complaint

rife infant flesh

organic heap

neither more nor less than swamp slime

without memory

Fecund body like hound or sow

it stinks, it oozes, it must be flesh

Jar it’s torpor

wrench its narcosis

shiver its fat (saved for nothing)

chill its grunting sleep

haunt its dreams with panic and horror

until it wakes electrified

to know

the rhythm of its breath

and the rich rush of vital blood within its

gaping skull

1969

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The Sigh At The End of The Day

A sigh comes out of the earth at a moment of sunset.
A sailor’s breeze, if there’s water;
that’s how I came to know it.
Afternoon’s giddy gusts on the lake would calm themselves, then sleep.
The comfort of calm, with gentle sunset skies,
would carry an undercurrent of abandonment upon the waters.
Then the sigh would rise and softly fill the sails just enough for a peaceful ride home.
A small steady wake for the end of the day.

Watching the sun set in Big Sur

I am speechless with the anxiety of the day.
I struggle for words,
fretfully searching.

Then,
in a long moment
when the glassy river
and the sparkling sea
mirror the sky’s change
from gold,
to orange,
to scarlet,
stars reveal themselves,
the day’s chalk moon turns to polished silver,
peace arrives
with the ancient words
of the ineffable:

"those who know don’t say".

My seed sprouts in my ashes;

dawn will glow green.

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Meditation,

Unknown in modern life.

A craving need creeps

under the noise.

A conscience,
a tormenting ghost.

A memory,
a yearning for the unknown once known.

The surprise of solid ground that rises up
to stop a stumble.

A forgotten peace.

VerbEros

The verbal parts of your mind
are a mush,
a primordial soup
from which slither words
seeking to copulate.
The squalling of their child
is word jazz.
A poem is first a messy diapered thing.
We parent it into tuxedoed gentry.

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Our Wars Are Us

If you want to fight the war
to end all wars,
don’t march ahead into the field
brave and meek
and shoot into the masses of faces
across the distance of otherness.
If you want to fight the war to end all wars,
turn around and look behind you,
into your own face,
and kill your colonel.

As I write this America is all about heaven & hell:

Let’s hurry up,

kill and die and get it over with.

November 2005 celebrates the multi-year reign of a gaggle of petty pedestrian gods

who give men release

from the effort of change

in the splatter of guts.

Death is lazy,

death is easy.

Let it happen, captain.

Slow suicide is boring.

Put the petal to the mettle.

I, Narcisso, demand this, because I

feel that something is not right,

and something must be done.

Make something happen,

shoot something,

make something change,

Then maybe I,

Will feel better.

Or Feel.

Or something.

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Brazos Goodbye
The boy James cleans the fish
examines the entrails
sees the future:
the dam,
the nuclear plant.
The vital green current that rushed
against the white rocks where the fish live
being shifting to the sandy side,
stagnating.
From brown slime moss
bubbles of rot rising.
Bare feet wading
in the moonlight
squishing on a dead hog.
A life’s joy diminished

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When you look at the photographs,

You can’t know how much you were loved.

You little thing a day old, a light handful

You’ll know it true in your bones at first,

in the concrete foundations of the house of your heart.

Years click by like the seconds of a clock.

That concrete protects you sometimes,

sometimes those heavy bones seem to keep you from flying.

You were the sprouting seed of love,

as decades pass that stem of love rises up through you,

green tendril stems of the true, the vital.

it rises from your bones

to your heart.

Slings and arrows fly.

Dreams bloom and die.

Loves are challenged by perfidy and death.

Pride crushed soars again.

Years rush by like the seconds of a clock

In that distant time we elders wish you,

you little handful,

a love that rises

flowers from your heart

seeds from your soul,

to keep a thousand green springs of love

growing

when these photographs are dust,

earth for seeds of

ongoing love

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I am Dirt.

The peach tree gets the credit for the sweet chin

dripping juice;

the mango gets the bawdy lyrics;

the bread and wine get the reverence.

What would they be without dirt?

The old mission stands

on trembling earth

swash waves of history surge around it;

seasons of green and amber come & go.

From its adobe walls rise the scent of earth and incense;

out of its walls come ghostly voices of Castilian

and Latin.

Out of walls of

Dirt.

The burning bush?

Roots in dirt.

Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare?

Words floating in the world

above them in the dirt.

From a perilous tin capsule

beyond air

we look back and see,

singular and solitary,

a precious sphere,

minuscule in the deepest black,

a gem of blue, yes,

and fertile green,

because of Dirt.

We are dirt.