Poems for Poesia

The following two poems were selected as submissions to the journal Poesia, October 2006 Issue. Information about the journal can be found at: www.IndianBayPress.com.

I heard the Buddha crying just the other night

And in this solar century
what lies beyond these hazy fields?
For all we learn to see is nothing but phenomenal reality,
but still this beauty I can’t stand, it nearly breaks my heart.

So I fill my nights with madmen poets and philosophers,
caricatures of abandoned dream, a dusty-brittle unrevivable star chart.
It’s all intersubjectivity, and in the glow of love and loss who’d want it any other way?
And oh my mystery don’t leave, please don’t tumble down this well of memory.

And now these unpleasant desires, this cheap unpleasant plan:
I’m an 8 year old boy, an it, a mis-creation, a funny kind of dam.
I try out my life on a 50 minute hour, but never get there.
There are stories no one hears, but yes, still I know we are all refugees.
We are all of us falling, flailing, heartfelt refugees.

Interstices

Interstices.
I live in the cracks.
In the spaces between words, between poems.
In lack and inarticulation.
Where the day discreetly enters and soon overwhelms.

I am circumscribed by the moon, the sun.
Watching the dragonflies send their
new souls into the sizzling concrete of a September noon.

And there is only brightness upon brightness.
Where the light is no more cathartic than wax on flesh

and I seize this instant for its nothingness.