"Man Is a Hole in the Heart of God"

     As we are each an emptiness in the occult heart of culture, a gap through which it drains its vortices, as this one spinning now through you as you read, you, you, not entirely aware that already this is you, before you read it, because you know, you knew, you were the words, you are the words, the spell passed down through you is you, is us, is me, whispering into being, new old thing of external becoming inside you.

     The watch on the heath is a clue, yes. It's a clue that the processes that produced the highly improbable watch are alien to the processes that produced both the heath and the individual beast crossing it, startled at the glint of the watch in the moss.

Wail's Idiom

     But here I am, anyway, Master Owl, not properly asleep, no, and not properly dead nor dreaming, but certainly, through these phrases others formed so many times before me, with only a slight rearrangement, like the tic of an unsteady scrawl, the twitch of an old shawl, passing both into and out of my mind. No one ever truly invented a language. Heirs, all of us, rich or poor, to the grounds of these estates that lie around us, follies and ponds, sheds and meadows, the neglected, the abandoned, and the well-kept as well, their novelties and antiquities equally alien and familiar, ours for now, as we little things who walk among them, ants in their kitchens, peepers in their wells, tourists in their bedrooms, are theirs. This is occult, Master Owl. Eery human occupation and utterance, every little product of every little subculture is occult.
     And in this chaste sense only, I am. Among the nothings that have made me and make me as I touch them I am. We are such things as dreams alone have never made, as beds have never denned, although we come from them, forgetful of every thing except that we remember, surprising ourselves three times: I am. I am nothing. Here I am.

Sodality

     And is there nothing? Dark rollers breaking out of a moonless, cloud-choked night? Other romantic doggerel like that? Or is there a greenwood, an oasis, a Lubberland, a peach-tree blossom spring? No, you know you don't think so. What's untouchable, what's never been approached, is unlikely to look or to not look like any happy or unhappy story you've composed or entertained awake before.
     Shall we go, anyway? Try, anyway? It wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't that no one can go together. Death has more companionable aspects than the lived loss of memory dealt out in consciousness crushing hammer blows throughout any ordinary night's naughts of sleep.
     Worse, no good story goes alone. There is no story in it, not even for a castaway, not without contrived companions. The islands of the dark are large and uninhibited as to being uninhabited, and no bad or good drama goes on there among them.
    Yes, now you guess.
    All this preamble of "we" and "uncertainty," of "you" and "me," delivered as if we shared the same apprehension of a barely perceivable outline, of Aristotle's ship sinking hull-first into the horizon of a sea-girt world, into another we'd never really know up close, not us: fake. Forged fellow feeling. I forged it.
    Yes, you're correct. I've been there. I haven't only just reasoned or speculated wildly at my scholarly leisure in my study. I've been there. I can tell you. Yes, you're correct. I remember.
     No, no, I apologize. I lie. No awareness goes down unaware below the horizon, however alive, to return, however alive, with anything other than imaginations in hold. We are all visitors, you and I, all alike, and not one of us has ever arrived.

Swed-yo

     There are two worlds, one we have explored, mapped, and come to know well and one the existence of which we have only been able to infer from our explorations of the first. Occasionally, we have argued about those inferences and the plausibility of that other world's existence or have told a few fantastic stories about it. When we do think about it, we try to reason out its strangeness, but only end up shuffling likenesses to the world we know. Mostly, we haven't given this real, second world much thought at all and have preferred making up worlds entirely of our own contesting imaginations--heavens and hells, alien planets, fairy kingdoms, utopias, dystopias, endless silliness. Of course, it's hard to know, given there's reason for uncertainty and nothing much to help it except imagination, whether an unvisited world is real or nonsense like all the rest of our foolishness.
     But there is a world. We visit it every night. We know, don't we? But we never bring back the proof. We never document the news of discovery. We forget. All our waking lives or almost, all we do is forget. We take the flotsam of dreams we find washed up on our waking awareness for the whole of the other world, a weirdness we barely try to explain except as more weirdness within the world we already know so well. At best we turn it over as evidence. What is this? Where did this disjointed monstrosity half washed away and rotting quickly in the morning sun come from?
     Past the dreaming and the nonsense, the theories, the electrodes, the fluorescing images, and the bon mots about our nightly lunacies, who dares to set sail into a total darkness? Who would want to try to go there to where that must be but where there may be nothing?

The Greatest of We Is

The thing we seem to have
Too much crushing
Trouble remembering

While we're busy with marrying,
Parenting, burying, hungering,
Categorizing this relationship or that

Is that all human relationships,
Being human, depend
And revolve on nothing

More nor one single thing less,
Not sex, nor blood, nor death, beyond
Pure friendship in the end, the test.

The Underworkings of Life

I'm fifty one. There's still time
For me to die young, if not
Any longer in my prime.

Keep that in mind. You could look
Back on this old man today
As a childhood picture book

Of what an old man looked like,
Once, before you grew older
Than that picture in low light .

Who Are the Wind

Blow hard from lungs shrunk
Down to grains of bluest blood
Knowing no blood to be blue
That wants to do its work.

My father, my father, weak man
In his end times, small man
In his vanities, as I am in mine,
Knew his peasant blood blued.

Is mine? Is mine not yet red?
Are the lines in my mind
Still singing with lust in my head? 
In a bright time, when blue shines.

Aghast

Here is why I don't write open,
Honest poems: I dropped off Sarah
At a grassy concert in the evening,

In a small town, our small daughter
Asleep in her old, stained car seat
Behind me, and I waved and drove

Away through the meandering
Recreators and recreational
Vehicles, all intersecting without

Touching or knowing, and then
A black cat ran out, across traffic
And got somehow caught in the car

Just in front of me, not crushed,
Not still, not miraculously untouched
But flipping, frantically, furiously,

An incredulous black rag doll
Of a suffering cat on the pavement
Just in front of my vehicle, paused,

In horror and cowardice, watching,
Pretending to myself to be
Innocent and deciding,

Before I carefully drove over,
My wide stance and high clearance
Avoiding the misery entirely, or so

I thought until I saw, in my rear view,
The stilled black body, the white car
Stopping to get out and lift the corpse.

The Night of the Sorrowful Grace

Truth to tell is easily

Come by. Lies to embroider
(And when was the last time you
Embroidered anything more
Daring than a small sampler
Exclaiming out cross-stitched thoughts
You thought were clever, if that?

[I'm unkind, I know, unkind
And unknown, given over
To bad parenthetical
Groans of expostulation,
Excused slightly, if at all,
By the fact of having lived
A parenthetical life

{Not marginal, mind you,
I wouldn't claim a status
As fashionable as that,
All retro as a vinyl
Pillbox hat, boxed and shrink-wrapped,
Just a sort of encysted
Existence in the middle

Of things past, forgettable,
Res gestae, as yearbooks say}.].)
Are the rarest creations,
Those daring fictions despised
By gods and cosmologists
Who want their thread counts threadbare
And faithful, thin but untrue.

Tasty

I just got buzzed by a buzzard. Sign
Of my own decay and hasty demise
Or the value of a thermal in the sun?
You know the one, the right answer.
But oh, to be desired, how much fun!

Matter Is a Shut Fortress

"See your account in the woods,"
Boasts one of the purveyors
Of culture carried on invisible waves,
American Telephone and Telegraph.

I don't trust them. I need them,
I make obeisance to them,
I believe them and the gnomes
Of indoor-dwelling bipeds in shirts

Who have lost lifetimes laboring
In their mines to worship them
And make us all more powerful,
Together at least, than the old gods.

But I don't believe in them.
I know they are women and men,
Or at least the hungry ghosts
In the brains of men and women

Ever since no one knows when.
These are the creatures like me,
Not wholly creatures at all,
Any more, certainly not whole.

We live in the shadows of ourselves,
Our selves in the shadows of words,
Our words in the shadows of trees
That live inside the outside of us,

The woods, eternally gloomy,
Terrible, haunted, rich with flesh
That cannot easily be captured
By hands or minds. Winds are rising.

The Wolf of Metals

A magical, cheerful elf

Of a poet, say, Jane,
Who read to us the other
Night in a whitewashed Mormon Hall
In red rock country, midway
Through her circuit of the world,
Of the Silk Road and skeletal
Miracles of molecular entanglement,
Shadow puppets in the dark
Night bazaars of Istanbul, China,
California, burning, and New York,

Almost invariably may
Be predicted to find physics,
The transformative forces, biology,
And the proud flesh charming,
Being charming herself. She smiles,
And makes eye contact at the end
Of every wandering rhyme. I like her.

She reads us her latest piece,
Just out in The New Yorker,
A sort of catalogue or bulletin
From the most recent lab science
Emphasizing how little of our bodies
We are, genetically. Borrowed
Lives make up the most of us,
In which Jane finds a light delight,
Explaining when the poem is done,
"That's something I've been
Wondering about since I was seven."
She twinkles and glances around.
"When does the apple I'm eating
Stop being apple to become Jane?"

Seems magical and wondrous,
Doesn't it, the transformation
Of bodies and bodies and things?
But the Saturnine mage poets
Of the demonstrably false
Hullabaloo of spells and alchemy
Sour the milk of good fellowship
With their athenors and metaphors
Of dark forces breeding gold
By fire from over-cooked dirts. Grim,
Old men, mostly, for whom the Host
Wasn't miracle enough to trust,
Back in the days of literal trust,
Who wanted to transcend
The ordinary magic of dying,
To compel enchantment to power
And force their silent readership
To shut their books and weep.

Why are want-wise poets so stupid,

Anyway? When did we part ways

From the genius of a plein air race?
Perhaps when in our own stupidity

We saw the stupidity of any genius.
Or perhaps we, who didn't matter,

Caged as base matter, wanted away.

Dandelion Moon on Fire

You don't owe life anything.
(I'll get to what you owe other people
In a moment.) You'll be punished,
Of course, and rewarded as well,
But you won't be the reason, ever,
Gone before you can ponder it,
This Way. Within the dreaming
Of these dreams, without
Dreaming them, he rose,
Woke up and walked free.
Ordinary dark. . . . And then it goes.
It's real usual, usually, for people
To leave. The way they want things,
Things that can't be done:
Obelisks, burial in the grove
Of the favorite trees, cute quotes.

"Why not your glasses, too?"

Oh well. Do the best you can. Know
You can't. Quote someone else.
Scatter the ashes somewhere legal,
Somewhen. Send him a cenotaph.

Oh god, I forgot to get back to that.

One

Words carry stories phrases frame.
Periodically, sentences suspend
Cirques of flaming zodiacs,
Compound histories contained
As unrelated depths of light.
Thus the word-constructed mind
That contemplates mirrored night.
No manuscript of Hazar Afsana
Survives. Strange how we save
What we lose, the wound of the loss
More permanent than its recovery.
Something to fill with narrative,
Which abhors a vacuum. I say
That the original set of stories
Was complete, or almost, except
That the horrific frame of the tyrant
Who killed a wife a night, undone
By the wise sisters who knew
Stories could detain death a while,
Did not end well. All was lost,
Other than the alarmingly weird
Rewrite, asserting the sisters stayed
With the murderously jealous maniac
And his brother, bearing them sons,
Happily ever after, never telling
Another cliff-hanging night story
Again. Right. That and some lyrical
Fables and fooleries, saved,
All the really novel, philosophical
Manichean bits deleted. A woman
Wouldn't relate such things to a man
Who couldn't relate to them. Left,
The animal bits, morals attached,
Echoing Aesop and Vishnu Sharma,
But cut, the winging shadows,
The occult allegories of trees
That thought themselves midwives
Of minds. Cut out the witchery.
The rest became acceptable,
Popular among the new literati,
Entertainments for the gentlemen
Of The Lord. The earliest fragments
Are already an Arabic translation
Caught in the scraps of a lawyer
Practicing his handwriting. How fast
The easy, familiar versions circled,
How men labored later to fill in
The gaps of eight hundred or so
Missing stories, and to emphasize
Some justification for the king,
Necessary piety for the telling
Woman who only wanted a man
To let her stay alive and fecund.
I say what was lost was greater
Than the whole sum added later;
The oasis is larger than you thought,
Larger than the mirage you saw
Approaching murmuring penumbras
Of concentrated foliage too dense
To be a single palm. At the end
Of your expectations of refuge,
The refuge itself appears, dark
And knowing, a green thought
In masculine sunlight, an ink
Dream in feminine starlight. Home.
Outside, open desert, inside, Ereshkigal,
Owls, and ice rivers, winter deeps
No virtuous desert mind should hold,
As if Persia knew no cold mountains,
No ancient oaks, no Shanidar.
There's where the rest of their tales
Remain hiding and waiting, less
Pious, more minatory, whispering,
The lost hundreds and hundreds
Of nights and all their anxious,
Suspenseful days spent waiting
To see how the never ends. I can
Give you signs, but remember
We are not out of the woods yet,
And I am not the wise woman
Surviving, I am just a man,
Or the genie of a man hiding
In the cast-off jars of old words,
Atrahasis, agnosis, Aratta,
All the errata of forgotten facts.
The oldest story is prettiest, darkest,
Drawn from the time when woods
Were spreading, not retreating,
Many young and aggressive as men.
The stories begun the first nights
Did not pretend to moral or meaning,
Did not resolve conflicts, find lovers,
Circle back on themselves, account
For anything being as they became,
Explain. Those were stories of one
Word told to her sister in the dark,
Pretending not to hear the listening
Ear of the paranoid king, thinking.
The suspense was terrible, beguiling,
It hung like fruit in an orchard
Fortified by fences and soldiers,
Attended to only by bees, the true
Retainers of the birth of fruit itself,
The witless keepers of knowledge.
Imagine that orchard, immense
Enough to feed an empire, folded
Itself into the trunk below combs
Of honey the bees bartered for love,
The trunk as one sapling
A thousand arms around, small
By the ambitions of the advancing
Front of the flowering forest.
Climbing ivies, songbirds, mushrooms,
Yet unnamed moss-faced monsters
Later to be slain by men followed,
And within the rising sap and crowns
Of the world of trees, obscuring
The stones that slept blanketed
Under the hungry-rooted floor,
The orchard in each trunk brooded
On the fruit of one name. That
Was the whole plot, the whole
Mystery, the whole swelling anguish
And labor, the cauled birth, omen
And new thing, really new thing
In the world the princesses shushed
Each other speaking of, the Name
The murderer leaned forward to hear,
Expecting something unknown,
Uncommon, aristocratic, grand,
Hermetic, complicated, language
Not of men, of angels, gods, djinn.
But the princesses knew the simples
Of the already much reduced forest
Floor went by common, lowly,
Snail and slug terms, among them
The end and beginning of the first
Plot, the sealed word that rhymed
With seasons, nights, days, oases,
Fears, hopes, dreams of being
That bind, the word all metaphor.
And this was the story they started:
Once or twice, before this world,
The daylight stood in pillars, still,
And everything was as it was
Inside of always, always now,
No matter what happened, nothing
Happened outside of the here
Without here ever admitting
Everything that ever was was
What was gone or could be gone
By being right now what was here.
And although everything was
Becoming among the green leaves
And the cedars, nothing outside
Was outside or ever had been.
There were no names, no gods
Or spirits of distinction between
The one thing in here and the other,
Not already in here. It was is. Light
Shone as it could, darkness pooled
As it should, and all was alive, still,
Including dying, including hunger,
And thirst, and waste, and play.
Then came the thief, the thief named
With the first, great Name, to say,
From now on the outside will say
What the inside forest can say.
Humbaba is dead, and the name
Of the world that makes inner worlds
Is a name you will always and never
Be able to fight, bright, blinding,
However you try it, binding tightly,
Over and over on your tongue,

Saying it means nothing.
The name is . . . so ended the true
Princesses' first night.

Preparation

     If we had ever suspected, if we had ever believed it could really, would really happen, we never would have made so many silly gobs of stories about how it, about how it all, ludicrously, so ludicrously, so variously, so stupidly happened. Then it happened.

     And I said to myself, No. No, I am not going to prepare. Not again, not this time. I am going to wait for tomorrow and find out, wait with all the confidence with which a complete fool dismisses yesterday. Yes, today. Today, I wait, I said to myself, but I watched the wind rock the wooden-rockered chair on the porch beside me, the wind I knew to be rising. And I did not secure the chair.

Thirty One

It's an odd year. Even the best
Numerological charlatans strain
To adduce any astral significance.
It's not the age anyone attributes
A great change to--no climacteric,
No legal shift in rights, restrictions,
Or random cultural signifiers. It is
An age I lived through once myself,
And when I review my little, internal,
Infernal calendar, even I can't find
Much ado that was done. I started
In Maine at a rainy campsite, ended
In Alabama on a city campus, so,
So enough about that nothing much
That was me. I wish you more
And better, much more. Be well,
Be wise, be charmed by the well-
Worn landscapes of melting time,
Be good and happy with yourself,
With your child as her mother,
With your mother as her child,
Be brave and adventuresome even
Sitting at home cutting bolts of cloth
Out the blue skies that fold blankets
Into sudden monsoons, be calm
When the waters rise, be pleased
If your thirty-second year disproves
The pattern I began by adumbrating

Here, be amazed by the subtle ways
The world discovers all in nothing's
Quiet crystal ball, be free, be with me.

You Can't Imagine

The world you want
To be, to be
In, any more
Than tomorrow

Morning, which you
Imagine now
Predictable
When it isn't,

Compound monster,
Time's metaphor
Built from the space
That is the myth

When time itself,
The becoming
And be-going
Constant, is fact.

Their Bounds Divide

On either side, the sands absorb the treads.
In the sand it becomes clear that no secrets
Are being told as the wheels keep spinning.
Sinking in is a secret of its own,
The invisible library of dread.
My soul magnifies my mistake. Dig in.
What would it be like to spin forever?
Hasn't anyone ever kept roaring
The engine without easing up a bit,
Without stopping and then trying again?

Granted the gift of inertia, why wait
To discover the possibilities
Of escape? Keep pressing hard, motionless,
And recognize motionlessness unreal
As the ability to keep moving
By preference, in preferred directions
Over endlessly beguiling desert.
Be beguiled. Be oblivious as night
To the furious turning of all wheels.
If stuck, then never the more stuck turning,

Never the less. A hot wind through windows
Gets the vapors from lifting the wet hair
Wicking the bent back, the cricked neck, the arms
Of the animal crouched in the machine
Believing the machine is of its making,
An heirloom like the Air Loom, a madness
Out the grail of a brain. Nope. The jail
A skull contains barely incarcerates
Even temporarily the dreaming
Of machines that claw our designs in sand.

Fuliginous

Start with the last wisp of smoke
Curling out of the soused fire
Of thoughts you burned for the world.
It's a pretty twist, that smudge
Vanishing in the flash flood
Mud and wreckage that retreats
Back down the banks of the wash.

You'd never quite hoped for more.
Wild fantasies aren't quite hopes,
And neither were your panics
You might burn the forest down.
It's pretty, prettiest now
It's no more than the smell

Of dry ash in your damp palm.

Only Surprise Survives

All magic is prediction.
All prediction is magic.
Whatever fails falls away,
Tenuous soil eroding
Bit by flood into the stream.
Whatever succeeds endures,
Gold glow exposed, enriching

Those who know where to seek it,
Before it, too, falls away
With its black magic attached.
Astrologers' eclipses,
Predicted, made gods of men,
Before making fools of them.
Found science of conjecture

Now's hammered in great gold sheets,
Gleaming, vast, whole domes of math,
Awing the innumerate peasants
Who come to barter their lives
For tools and toys that amaze.
The stars, old news, still renew
The alchemy of surprise.

Tetramemeton

The story has been evaded
Often enough to seem at last

To have been told. I have lectured
My classes in storytelling

Both as if I thought no story
Ever worth the telling, never,
And as if the telling made sense
Only becoming forever.

The mind is outside of the mind.
Stop. Stop objecting to the mind
As epiphenomenal mush,
The vapors evaporating,

The too-long deferral of rhyme.
The mush is the stuff behind eyes,
The goop that can be thin-sliced grey.
The mind is out there, dark as day,

A field of heraldry, a tale,
A heart-breakingly perfect sign
Produced in break-neck profusion
As a series of equations:

Story equals chapter and verse,
Verse equals character, the worst
Of passionate immensity,
Immensity delta, dealt mind.

The Whole Universe

Shemhamphorasch. Non rebus,

Sed verbis. There are no things.
Even our thoughts are not things.

Words and their kin clutter air,
Bob along cross-cutting waves,
Carry us back to ourselves.

We belong to them. They don't.
All kinds of trouble in mind

Are orchestrated out there,

Outside of the bone crystals
In which our futures are read,
In which our words make their lairs.

This being of being them,
The business of being us,
Is flesh as flesh is water,

That is, mostly and not much.
This whispering came of flesh,
Can't disturb worlds without it,

But no conjuring from nerves
And breath alone informs it.
Mind's angels drink from skull wells,

And are no more and no less
Real than beastly elements.
But wings aren't water, nor air.

Euhemerism

The brain makes models of the world.
The team makes models of the brain.
Nobody tells the team their brains
Are not the brain, are not the world.

The brain makes models of the gods.
They look like us. They look like them.
They tell us once upon a time
There was one person with one brain.

The brain makes models to deceive
Itself its models are aware.
The self makes models of the brain.
The models lie outside the self.

The models lie upon the shelf.
The shelf was made by someone else,
By all the someones, all the selves
The gods say model us or else.

The gods, the gods. Does the team know
The model of the brain their brains
Have shared came from sharing the same
Strange nowhere that the gods all share?

Me and You

Never went outside. Never were
Me or you. I say this, me, to let you
Know I won't be excluding me
From the not-really-being of you.

Something has been imagining
Me imagining you reading me,
Gentle reader. You are gentle,
Are you not? Binding term, you see.

That kindness and literacy
Should be the property
Of minor nobility, antique
Values, kingdoms of constraint

And expectation, the light
Outside the blinds before dawn,
Striped by the ancient blinds,
My dreams, and passing headlights,

The light by which I compose
My breaths to pass the time,
Closer than usual to being past,
Closer than usual to being free--

Please allow me the opportunity
To put this another way: we
Have both been prisoners
In separate prisons, simultaneously.

Sunflowers, Moonflowers, Wash

A tiny fly that does not sting
And can't be shooed, caught, or slapped
Harasses me with what feel like
Extra sets of brushy feet, feet
That can't be ignored. Even the fruit
On my plate, salty foods, meat,
Even the condensation on my glass
Won't tempt it away from me.
It climbs in my hair and along my skin,
And I feel it so nearly constantly
I can't enjoy my food or my transitory view
Of an extraordinarily fine afternoon
With sunflowers and moon flowers down
In the broken wash, air-brushed clouds
Arising and scurrying through blue in a hurry.

Daily hiraeth, daily saudade, daily poem.

Place is only periodicity
In the experience of the wash,
A similarity arising, time to time,
With the power to fool us into making
Something from nothing, "radical space
Adjacent to history." No such thing,
Except that we can't live without it,
No such thing, except all our metaphors
Belong to it, perform it, keep us
Forever somehow apart from experiencing,
Our trudging, sleuthing, true thing.
Shoo fly, don't bother me.

I'm Fine

The half-scorched aspen's applause
For the evening breezes, like the taffeta
Rustling of angels shuffling in
A scry-stone's stone pin seems startling
And wrong to a human used to distrusting
His own anthropomorphic whims
But not above guessing his senses
Know the surest way into the world.

And what if his first, foolish instincts
Were the closer to correct? The tree,
Lonely clone with no siblings left it,
Really was trying to be reassuring.
I'm fine, it shushed through its leaves,
I'm good at being
Fine, in fact
It's what I'm best at.

Thought to Itself

You are going home, away,
The next time you have to move.
It's not enough, anymore
That you don't stay here. You must
Go home, now, and only home.
The wind around the corner
Eagerly awaits your bones,

And what precious bones they are,
Veal to the wind, softest flesh
To the winter that gnashes
Icicles like incisors
In keen anticipation,
Not real bones at all, not bare,
Not spare, but surplus. Go home.

Esparto Papers

Much has been
Rustling in
The dry grass,

Much hissing
Fear inferred.
It's laughter,

Friends, not snakes
Whispering.
Who's afraid?

Shiver Wonder

You can't remember you,
And yes I do mean you,
Without some confusion,
Can you? Oh, who was it
Who first went by your name--
What child can you recall?

Feel, when your ghosts dare you,
What sharpest memory
Waits inside the dark back
Of your mind, innocent,
Envenomed, elegant.
That was you, was divine.

5 September 1977

Veeger. The heliopause.
The gap between the former
Joke in a Star Trek movie,

The first, in fact, and the fresh
Announcement that the latter
Was surpassed a year ago

(A year, hah, geocentric
Measurement of anthropoids!),
Consisting very nearly

Of all of my life, at least
As I know it now, fading
In my fifties (there's that year,

That calendar year again),
With scant confidence at all

Of surviving ancient scams

For enhanced longevity
(Mercury, Emperor Qin?).
Astrology, where was I?

Where art thou? It is the east,
And the dark heart of spiral
A galaxy in your hair.

Miguel of the Left Handicap

"After all the years I have spent asleep in the silence of obscurity, I emerge now, carrying my years on my back, with a tale as dry as esparto grass."

Forgive me. You were right.
I was sinister. I joke because
I love, and I am afraid.

There is a prison everyone
Knows and few
Acknowledge, a prison

With a view of knowledge.
To wit, too true, it's true,
And yet too simple.

A man who has led a life
Of suffering by the nose
Around the grinding

Mill of daily rounds knows
There are no grounds
For growing round

And round. A squire
And a square are there.
Oh whatever. Who could

Believe you were you?
An awful person making
An awful mistake. Doubt.

You should celebrate. Without
Celebration and good humor,
Life has only meaning. A play,

A synonym, a pun, a gotcha,
Get it? I knew you would. Good.
Another tremendous wrench

In the symphony of the spheres,
Another unanticipated precession,
Or just another work-around.