Imaginary Evil

The problem of evil
Is the rejection of truth.
But we cannot agree on the truth
And so disagree about evil.

The problem is ancient,

From the days of the cradle
Where stars did form and thrive:
For all that we argue
And all that we cry,
We don't even know we're alive.

Little Rhyme

If I could only find the time
To set down a little rhyme,
A poem with a thought or two,

I would leave the world far better

If you and I should come together
And share the truth I saved for you.

Individuals

“Buy me,” said the sign.

Buy now!

Don’t ask why.

Don’t ask how.

Just buy.

Hurry up, buy now!

The limit of your credit,

The limit of your merit,

Is the sky!

Operators stand by!

Only you can be so beautiful.

Only you can be so you.

Only you can be that dutiful

In a suit of rayon blue.  

Only jewels will make her happy.

A broach of gold is just the thing.

But to really make her happy,

You must add that diamond ring.  

Money clings

To the face in the mirror.

So make that skin look clearer!

Moisturize,

Actualize,

Individualize,

And super-size: 

Buy stocks

Buy rocks

Buy cars

Buy wars

Buy fountains

Buy mountains

Buy pills

Buy thrills

Buy vacation

Buy affection

Buy rope

Buy hope. 

This is the sign of the times.

A glass of fine wine

And you reach the divine

Pinnacle,

Where dances the real you

In smart shoes

Of leather.  

So never mind the weather.

And never mind the clime.

You will end up all the better

If you spend another dime.

 

Warning

What conversation is to be had

With someone like you

Who thinks I’m mad? 

I tell you the festival will end.

So set time aside to spend

Getting to know the silence. 

It will sound, the silence,

Like that time

When your voice falters,

Like that time

When your slow legs alter

The schedule of your day. 

You won’t recall this conversation.

There will be no slow conversion

With the looks of pure aversion

That the young will send your way. 

So take time now to listen:

See how ice on branches glistens

On a crisp, cold winter’s day,

How branches full of flowers sway

In the breeze one fine spring day. 

Hear the cicada cry out its doom

In the heat of a summer afternoon

And the silence when its cry does stall

On a quiet evening in the fall. 

Take time to greet that old man who sits in the park,

Whose eyes will not let him stay out after dark,

Or that old woman tossing crumbs on the ground,

Feeding pigeons, seeing ghosts all around –

For one day time will come, without sound,

To show their faces in the mirror.

What warning could be clearer?

Time to choose which you hold dearer -

The noise and lights and thrills of the carnival

Or that hand on your hand when you’ve been left by all.

 

Hunger

When we were young upon the earth,
We did not understand the stars –
So many eyes of the gods upon us.

We did not understand the thunder and rain –

So many gods howling their disdain.

But we understood hunger.

And pain.

We were bound together

To seek our sustenance.
So over hills and plains we ranged.

In the time since,

Not much has changed.
Spears gave way to guns.
Stones gave way to mortgages.
Shopping replaced the hunt,
With prey replaced by wages.

Locked together in a barrel bobbing out to sea,

We don’t know if there is food for you or me.
We stare at the foul and fruit upon the table
And ask, “From what ranch, garden, or stable?”

Fish as alien as the stars,

Beef mysterious as the rain,
Sweets that startle as the clap of thunder –
Our ignorance remains.

Blindness

January brings a fire,
Cold and without ash,
That burns the eyes
And sears the sight.

Blindly

Yet without heed or groping
The people make their way
On concrete streets sloping
Away –

Away, away from alleys,

Those moribund urban valleys,
Where hidden creatures lay.

The ghosts of unknown abuse,

These spirits hide in refuse.
Invisible to the eye,
They stand, swaying, in corners,
While the blind people glide by.

Their shadowy shapes vary –

Women and children who once owned homes.
Now they haunt dark, empty doorways,
In the cold and all alone.

Down comes the snow and turns the world white.

The tracks of these spirits are fast hid from sight.
If a ghost should appear on your way home one night
And ask for a gift to fight hunger and blight,
And your heart can still see though your eyes may be blind,
Remember one day you may too be a ghost –
The blind at the mercy of thieves lose the most.

Mask

That African mask,
Smiling in the gallery -
Stories it can't tell.

Proper Place

All things have their proper place.
Places are claimed by the things in time.

Time lays its sleepy charms on all people.

People secure the things by their claims.

Claims on things are dreams by nature.

Nature secures a place for all things.

All things have their proper place.

The Inn

Walking I reach the shore and I stare at the evening sea,
with the waves moving to and fro, and I sense, once again,
that I've nowhere to go.

But still I must go.

There is no room at the inn.
So I will try another, and another, and another still.
Perhaps one night I will find a welcome sign
and a warm glow through a window.

Here I stand at the end of the year
with a story that nobody wants to hear.
It is that all things move:
the stars in the sky, the waves in the sea,
and the love for you that spins within me.

Nobody wants to hear how the going
makes life so dear:
from the womb to the grave,
through cheerful days,
and fretful days
and loss.

The road is long for me, for you, for us all.
We remember, we forget, we remember again,
but not all.
If you should think of me,
remember that I go on,
from doorstep to doorstep.
Until I should reach another sea
the going is all there is for me.

Traveler

I love you more
than you will ever know,
than I could ever show -
far deeper than the ocean
in the moon glow.

 

But every word I utter 

brings you just grief.
So our time in the world
was fleeting and brief.

 

Alone I have left you
with peace in your mind.
Alone I shall wander,
searching to find

a face in the world
to match you.

 

There is a love that for you
the years hold in store.
But my path, traveled far,
ends in a cold, distant shore.
Here I stare at the stars
and shout til I'm hoarse - 

but the heavens show no remorse.

Horror

Strange that our Election Day
Is scarcely but a week away
From Halloween.

Strange, too, it seems

That we elect our nation’s head
Ever so close
To the Day of the Dead.

But stranger still we do not see

The leaders we select, the knaves,
Are monsters from our mental graves.

We vote for ghosts of yesterday.

We vote for zombies of today.
We vote for vampires of tomorrow,
Without thought to future sorrow. 

Indeed the choice has often been

The lesser of two evils.
But few can stare into the eyes
Of a horror more primeval.

The beast that shambles

To the voting booth,
With greedy eye and hungry tooth,
That tears at flesh
And rends the truth,
That creature with an empty mind
And shrunken heart
Who casts his ballot in the dark -

More terrible and stark

Than a rapacious leader
Is that voter who,
Without knowledge,
Without courage,
In that final hour
Bestows the leader’s power.

Golden Worm

The Iniquities of the Age,
And the Barbarity of Yore
All sprout the same black gore.

The avarice that piled coins high
At the point of bloodied blade
Today sees sums in bank accounts
Rise in high surreal amounts.

How to explain the riches of today
If not as a parade of terror,
Oppression, destruction,
And pain
That makes our evil plain?

Across the world and in plain sight,
A testament to greed's blind might,
Spreads the wreckage of the poor,
The hapless living near the lure
Of the beast of gold in sundry forms,
A monster feeding worms.

Burning towns, piles of corpses,
And bullet-ridden cattle,
The cries of women raped,
And wailing children
End another wicked battle.

Petroleum, uranium,
Gold, silver, iron ore,
Futures and stocks, too -
All produced by the same gore.

The malice that in ancient times
Raised marauding armies,
And the contempt that in our time
Loosed financial ruin -
The mythic despot and the banker
Share that timeless heartbeat,
The drum that beats the dirge
Of the planet's strongest scourge.

August 6, 1945

Sixty-seven years is a long time to forget

The faraway victims that we never met,

And the color of their final sunset.

The children born today can never remember;

For years and years, throughout the world,

In towns and fields, no uttered word

Of that war or surrender.

Who alive today can truly say

What horror took place on that day

When the bomb found Hiroshima in its path,

Its heat burning life away

Like a vengeful sun god’s wrath?

And so we turn to dusty books

Where the pictures live in print.

But of the toll that Little Boy took,

The stories there only hint.

Sixty-seven years is a long time to grow,

As the trees, the flowers, and the grass show,

While the Ota River through the town flows

And new festivals shine in the lantern glow.

Throughout the years we failed to hear

The distant Hiroshima echo -

In the victims’ cries under smoke-filled skies

And the beastly bombs’ loud bellow:

Warsaw, Helsinki,

London, Coventry and Belfast;

Hamburg, Cologne,

Essen, Bremen, and Dresden;

Leningrad, Stalingrad,

Bucharest, Budapest, Belgrade;

North Korea, Vietnam,
Beirut, Baghdad, Basra.

Until the day that mankind brings

And end to the making of bombs,

Our children will in remembrance sing
Hiroshima’s deathly songs.

Birthday Cake

Melancholy is an ailment,
As common as the cough.
Though we take our medicine,
It remains, tough,
Rooted in our deepest days.

I always wanted a simple cake,
With blue lettering and white frosting.
But for years
My parents bought a fruitcake
For my birthday.

I always wanted the white cake;
All the other children got white cake.
How I cursed my lot,
Fated as it was for fruitcake.

But I failed to see the fruitcake
For what it was -
For the color of my parents' minds,
For the memories, hard to find,
After the cakes, and everyone else,
Are gone.

Now in the days of no cake
I see what is at stake.
To water the tree of my days
Is the best medicine to take,
And to hope, from beneath its shady leaves,
To take, from the burden of years, a brief reprieve.

Independence: A Meditation

We gained our independence from the faraway king,
Only to grow dependent on this new land of dark forests
And mysterious savages.

We gained independence from the wild frontier,
And the fetters of an early death,
Only to grow dependent on television, automobiles, airplanes,
Computers, and other machines of convenience.

We gained independence from God,
Only to grow dependent upon The Next Big Truth.

The myths we celebrate are not our fate;
Independence is merely a date on a calendar,
A folk tale wandered far
From the stare of our impassive future.

America, like Janus, has two faces:
Independence looks to the past;
Dependence looks to the future.

Empires have come and empires have gone.
And after the deeds of history are done
Only the ruins remain and the myths are remembered.

We have too many emails to write,
Too many cupcakes to bite,
Too many flavors to try,
Too many handbags to buy,
Too many bills left to pay,
Or rushed appointments to stay,
Too many miles left to travel,
Or business deals will unravel.

Too many machines of convenience
To remember the birthdays.

Happy Birthday, America!
And as we celebrate your myths,
Perhaps new gods will be born, and walk the land,
Out of the mists, from sea to shining sea,
A new version of the Trinity,
Of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost,
Of Independence, Dependence,
And Interdependence.

And, America, the boon I wish for you the most:
The vision to see as clear as the moon;
Into the mirror of the Next Big Truth -
That you have become the faraway king,
That we are all gone much too soon,
And that kindness is the thing,
Through which empires must pass
For their greatness to last.

Social Security

I pulled my car up
To the toll booth;
The attendant smiled
As she took my dollar.
 
She was 70 years old,
White hair pulled back.
The lines on her face tracked,
Days when she had sold
Her childhood gold
To eat.
 
Future bleak
While skies are blue -
There is nothing I can do.
So I drive away
And hear her say,
“Thank you.”
 
Thank you, America
For your long, lonely roads
Lined with many a toll booth
That mask the sad truth:
What seems a consolation -
The endless work -
Is truly there to soothe
The careless youth
Whose only true sensation
Is of cars that speed til dark.

Easter Sunday

When in the morning I awoke,
the silent dread within me spoke.

The rock had rolled, the tomb ajar,
the corpse already wandered far.

Where has he gone, my inner guide,
that little voice fixed by my side?

When I was young, I did believe,
that God’s own son for me did grieve.

He died for me, I had been told,
so that my days I may live bold.

He died in pain, then rose above,
that pain turned into magic love.

And magical my days did seem,
but now those days appear as dreams.

For here I stand, an older man,
seeing shadows cross the land.

They took my faith, those shadows did,
and now my conscience, too, has hid.

What was to me the son of God,
was just a corpse, an earthen clod.

To my surprise this corpse had fled
and did a thing beyond the dead.

My inner voice the corpse did wrest
and placed within the shadow’s nest.

To find my voice then I must follow
the dead into the midst of shadow.

The truth that finds us on this earth,
the truth so hid from us at birth:

Our mortal nature is divine,
tested in darkness and in time.

Winter’s End

The last week of winter -
Weak winds wafting from the north
Bring the morning chill and the flowers forth.

Whence this strength
To slip from the grasp
Of the season of death?

The flowers scarcely wait
Their appointed hour.
A week early, beneath the moon,
After a night shower spring the blooms.

Still, wrapped in hat and coat I note
How on tender shoots death seems to gloat.
Rain flecked petals in the morning wind
Tell that flowers, too, come to an end.

Though spring comes early and winter fades,
All things, from their beginning,
Show their end of days.

Northern Valentine

The world is frozen
On a northern Valentine’s Day.
The clouds have broken:
Moonlight on lovers gone astray.
They carry tokens,
Yet passion’s warmth has blown away.

The world can lend no aid.
Small creatures dream
In the burrows they have made;
Tree branches gleam
In the wind and give no shade;
And the sun’s pale beams
Offer warmth that quickly fades.

In the cold noontime at the park,
The young man awaits his lover,
Guarding dreams against the dark,
With frozen chocolates and flowers.

He will wait another hour.
Such is its power -
That love will almost never die
Underneath a winter sky.

Love American Style

First we have to negotiate the sexism.
Then we have to negotiate the racism,
Then the homophobia.

We negotiate God
And the places of worship,
Selecting a God for the children.
And then we buy the matching outfits.

We forget about politics.
Maybe we remember
After the drinks, theater, dinner,
airline tickets, and the rest.

We forget about death, too.
But there's no time to remember
After the condoms, abuse, lawsuit,
Abortion, and the rest.

I remember you standing,
Before all the negotiations,
In the bookstore smiling,
And felt those queer sensations
When we said we'd write a new chapter
In the travel book you were holding.

Impression at Dusk

The sun had set without notice.
The winter dusk wrapped the street corner in purple dust.
At the bus stop, four people stood, swayed, waited,
Different shapes and colors, all wrapped in long coats,
In the noise of passing blue sedans and brown taxis
Rushing past the green light.
At the red light, the thrum of tense engines,
Waiting 60 seconds, then rushing,
Transporting drivers away,
To torments and delights,
Real and imagined.
.
.
What can I know?
What ought I to do?
For what may I hope?
.
.
The patter of expensive leather shoes
On the leaf-strewn, dusty pavement
Is scarcely heard
Before the rumble, screech, and gasp of the city bus,
Full of torpid, wool-covered strangers.
The bus blasts off, like an ugly starship
Into the gathering darkness.
Destination: the muzzled, muffled
Thoughts of aliens.

When the dust cloud settles,
A thin plume of exhaust curls around the empty bus stop,
A brief moment of silence - the sweetest sound - unnoticed,
Like the sunset,
And the sinking moral ground,
And the sense that we are bound
To see meaning in sound and color,
And in human horror,
After the bus has gone around
The bend.

Toothbrush

In the dead of winter,
Time to change my toothbrush.
In the garish supermarket light,
The colors of the brushes chatter,

And the clatter of voices, pressed tight,
In the detergent isle burst in bright
Laughter, passing, white.

Pick a brush, any one.
You're not getting any younger.
The clock has nearly gone.
And the line is getting longer.

In the bathroom mirror, my skin too white;
The toothbrush, pale blue in its package,
I stow from sight - a guest might stay one night
And need a toothbrush.

Laughter again, this time mine.
Deep in the mirror lies the wreckage,
A graveyard of brushes scattered like mines.

No one will brave that terrain.
Before I see a new house guest
I'll change my toothbrush again.

Privacy

The American notion of privacy
Is a bizarre, surprising thing -
A kind of lunacy -
In other places in the world,

Like a joke made of sobs.

No thought of privacy where,
On the floor mattress by you,
Your father on top of your mother
Wrapped in blankets,
Trace a cocoon of mystery.

You think that is her head,
Turned back, staring up
At the black wall in the darkness.

And there are soft grunts
Every few minutes, and rustling
Of wool blankets, and your mother
Sucks her breath through her teeth.

Months later you lay the wreath
Of brittle leaves upon her mound,
Without thought, without sound.
She had gone to the wood one day
And not come home

While you walked alone
By the shores of the stream,
Listening to your mind flow,
Like the sound of dream.
There in the moving water
Your shadow face is seen
Wondering if you matter -

A strange notion,
New, pristine.

Lost

We go on, we go on,
From darkness until dawn,
For an hour or two of bliss.
And is there more than this?

At last our eyes we close
And into dreams we doze:
The arms of the lover
That nobody knows.

We go on, we go on,
Until again we wake,
When to the road we take,
Past the refuse and debris,
Of the love we failed to see.

Window Seat

The clouds, little and round,
Mostly white with tints of rose,
Like seagulls without sound,
Moving in regular rows,
Go gliding past the window.

Their peace a kind of joy,
Like the grinning dolphin leaping
In the orb of sea and sky,
Is the peace all men are seeking,
Beyond grasp of you and I.

I sense the troubling doubts,
From this side of the pane,
That the serenity of clouds
We men could ever gain.

Far below my window seat,
In lands the clouds do darken,
Drums of war the tribes still beat,
To which most men still harken.

Yet behind my window seat
A child's weak wail I hear,
A clamor for his mother's teat,
A sound she must hold dear.

Clouds their quiet realms will keep
As the suckling babe reminds me.
Men know only peace in sleep;
Their cries the call of destiny.

Nightfall

Walking home alone,
The people all around chatter
Like the birds in the trees at nightfall.
Faces I don't see
Cast shifting neon shadows.
Neon storefronts say the same things
At night as in the day, only louder.
And the mannequins’ outfits still don’t fit me.
I notice my tie, as if for the first time,
Black with white squares, too long,
Though it has hung round my neck all day long.
The moving escalator,
All night long, hums and clacks.
My shoes feel the hum - it is like the hum
Of passersby rushing down the moving steps.
I notice my shoes.
I need new shoes.
And then the escalator screeches,
The loudest noise in the world,
That empties out into the long, wide corridor.
Walking alone at first but soon
The big posters on the walls, they greet me;
They whisper movies, museums, perfumes,
Airlines, and police hot lines.
To respond is pointless, for they only hear
Money and fear.
When the train doors close, the sound comforts -
The humming and clacking of going home.
The faces I notice, as if for the first time,
Some quiet like mannequins,
Some chatter like birds.
Walking home alone,
Something pains my stomach.
But then I stare at the pavement in streetlight;
The cracks in the stone bring me home,
Safe, quiet.

Chardonnay

Western civilization might be a good idea.

The restaurants
Have marvelous menus:
Beef bourguignon,
Chicken cordon bleu,
Spaghetti Bolognese and
Fisherman’s stew.

And to accompany one might
Select the house white,
A brilliant chardonnay,
Or if you prefer, the house red
Will do instead.

Rivers of red flowed from the houses,
The sighs of the dead never heard, never felt,
For the air had filled
With the engine screams of bombs
Falling on all alike:
The terrorist,
The freedom fighter,
The schoolboy,
And the wife,
Falling like a red rain on life.

And how is your chardonnay, sir?
It is fine, you say,
Fine like a light rain in late winter
That waters the ground
With the promise of spring;
Fine enough to wash down
The guilt in every morsel on your plate,
Every morsel savored, chewed, and swallowed
While far away the bodies lay
Scattered on ground unhallowed.

Every morsel you savor, chew, and swallow
Until there is nothing on your plate,
Except the question:
Do I dare, oh, do I dare?
Do I dare to brave the kitchen?
For you expect the corpses there.

But why sully the air?
Raising the glass, you stare
At the clear chardonnay
And your troubles, by the glass,
Travel miles and miles away.

Storm Brewing

The train station lay empty
At that hour
Before the storm's arrival -
Outside a passing shower.

In all the fuss over survival
No one remained to serve me tea.

The people of the world had reached their home,
The train stations of the world great, empty spaces.
Those without destination thread their way alone,
Seeking the solace of tea in solitary faces.

The Beast

A peasant
From the age of superstition,
Days of pestilence and hunger
And nights of endless dark,
Would see a horror far more stark -
And dangers far more strange -
In our present modern age.

From every mouth pours forth a rage,
From which the ancient devils cower,
In mad desire we gorge our flesh,
Slaves to a modern, bestial power.

It thrives upon our constant needs,
And upon our sickly fear it feeds;
Taking cloudy shape from seeds
Within our ever-grasping greed.

We see the monster in the mirror,
Faces that fancy beating death,
Yet still our last day draws nearer -

Even as our voices launch
Forever and far
Into the stars -

We are gone with out last breath.

Shepherd's Task

The words could drop and land
In intricate patterns,
Like the first rain drops
On a hot pavement,
Tracing intricate patterns
With obscure historical allusions,
Novel grammatical intrusions,
Terraced on a page -
All angles of confusion.

But why bother?

Time was when a man
Would seek to understand
A message as it ran
Across a page,
Finding in the words
Nothing strange,
Their straightforward motions
Tracing a man's notions
Of truth and beauty
Of god and time,
In simple rhyme.

A poet should know enough
To come in from the rain.
An unlikely leader of men,
He is called to lead again,
To lift our modern apprehension
And bring mysteries
Of the world and mind
Within man's comprehension.

Compassion

Every day somewhere in the world
Someone dies who understood
Compassion – a song in the wood
Sung by a bird
Few had heard
Or understood.

If one day the birds were all to die,
The wood would scarce be silent.
Creatures beneath the canopy sky,
Their hunger lifting fitful cries,
Not fit for song,
Or baleful rhyme –

Their alien sounds, in passing time,
Nest in the empty clearing
Of our silent hearts.

The Fly

Moral absolutism
Is dashed on the rocks
Of cultural relativism
By winds of ethnocentrism.

In the air-conditioned
Clinical room,
The scientist positioned,
A housefly
Under a lens that envisioned,
Its eyes like diamond blooms.

How like a god
He sets to make incisions,
To go behind the eyes,
Into the mystery beyond the visions
Of the tribal prophets
Beneath their desert starry skies.

But the fly has far more eyes,
And will see in more directions,
Than any man who walks the earth,
Its thousand-eyed reflections
Pierced in tribal songs
Of the world before man’s birth.

Kentucky Derby

Let us be thankful to the gods
For the bacchanalia,
For the fruits and for the wine.
So went the refrain in ancient times.

But the Lord was present in those days,
In the faces of fledgling Christians
Thrown naked into the arenas
Holding starving lions.

From those anguished faces
Wringing shackled hands
The Lord’s message rang out:
Repent! For the end is near!

But who would want to hear?
The thought of ending the party!
Really! Bring on the thrills!

The transmogrification of the Lord continued:
As a bull in a Spanish arena,
Pricked by a starving bullfighter;
As a horse in the Kentucky Derby,
Goaded by a starving jockey;
As a football player in the Super Bowl,
Cheered by a starving public.

In the lands of endless bounty,
From Rome to present day,
The rich starve in every country,
While the poor are toys for play.
All are racing to the finish,
For what prize no one can say.
In the crowd’s roar after victory,
The horse’s groans are swept away.

Location

Silly black man!
Did you think
That you could smoke that blunt,
Bluntly blowing your pain away,
On a corner of that stricken,
Despair-ridden ghetto?

Hell, no!
Calamitous location
Is your situation.

Look here, black man.
Take your smoking on down
To the university town.
Will that professor's frown
Force the smokers
(Young and white) to lay low?

Hell, no!
Your situation
Is a pox on your location.

Listen here, black man.
That smoking is just fine
In places where the sun don't shine.
Deep inside the gated homes
(Old and white) smoke roams
From room to room;
And no police anytime soon.

Our location is Us.
Your location is Them.
Look for those white gates
And watch the rates
Of arrest disappear -
But never the fear
Of them;
No, never the fear
Of them.

Winter Hill

The winter, with its white,
Blinds our sight:
Everything is sleeping, not dead.

What is not sleeping lies quite still,
Or barely moves:
Our heavy coats keep out the chill
But we move more slowly,
As our boots trudge up
The snow covered hill.

There on that silent summit –
If you are brave, if you are patient –
You can see with winter eyes
And you can hear with winter ears.

The red holly berry,
Amid brown bushes and gray earth,
Leaps brightly like a star in dark night.
A clump of snow, softly, quietly,
Slides from a branch to the ground, all white.

A crow, high above, cries out in the stillness,
But it does not speak to you,
The crow, like the deer and the mice,
Has its own business.

And all around the strangely silent hill,
The city stretches, just as strangely still.
It is the power of winter to hear the sound of nothing
That muffles the shopping, the driving,
The fussing and the striving.

The towering trees, with their bare branches,
Reveal a sky that lays hidden in summer.
The trees do not speak to you, but they let you listen,
As their hands, covered in ice that glistens,
Beseech the great sky above.

Stars that hang like a thousand points of ice
Receive that silent winter prayer of love.
The prayer includes you but is not to you.
Having witnessed, you will return home
Where you will join the world in sleeping.