Torrent

Born in springtime under the shade of morning's fire
She is: 
A random deluge but every droplet, essential.  Or
The sensual call of the cicada's song and the impenetrable power
Of mountain after mountain after mountain.
She assists the rivers which spirals along the terrain's curved spine running
into the horizon to greet the dusk where she becomes the silk of night.
She is the cumulonimbus breath, the flood and surge
Sent from the voluminous heavens to set the world in order.
She is unleashed from deep within cyclonic winds and hydrated breezes which
settle and then lull the forest and jungle to sleep.
She nourishes the lunatic waves and is the ebb and tide, the undulating secret
Rocking the boat, the dock, the shore, the heart.
She is the ice, the snow, the brine and the mist
Transforming endless dreams of barren space into a wild fete
Enrapturing the eyes, nose, ears and skin.
She is the music and cadence, the harmony through which visions create
themselves.
She is the melody divine.
Singing, touching, dancing, crying, scintillating...
She is the rain.
Redolent , the smell of fire upon the earth,  the air.  Humidity meets

electricity.  The synergy

makes her come.

Senescence

The science of the self
The relentless chemical reactions,
cell death and rebirth,
digestion, peristalsis and
respiration.
The chemistry of turning food to energy.

And what of the non-physical self
what changes there?
So subtle, immeasurable even,
But over the course of a lifetime
those changes, minute though they are,
Add up and
Can be shown by the crooks and furrows
Shadows, chiaroscuro,
Atrophy and tone of our
facial muscles teeth hair hands skin ears
Lose elasticity, change color
Develop a cauliflower immovability, a stoop, a staunchness.
Alas a weariness.
We seem to wear the earth
Becoming the earth's twin or a
Reflection of the earth's timelessness.

Gaia

Gaia
A living, breathing, loving
Finite mass of intergalactic matter
Fused into utter perfection.
She has given birth to us.
What have we done for her lately?

War's Smallest Cries

Children do not walk in straight lines
To avoid landmines or missile heads.
They have no concept of dying.  Wait.
That's here but not there
Where body fragments lay rotting in the
Rubble of bombed out dwellings.  Everything, everyone is
Covered in dust, soot and sand.
And there, the people scream because they
cannot hear.
The bombs have blown away their eardrums.  And
All that remains is the buzz, a sound very similar
To the little lamps on the nightstands next to their little beds.

Ode to Autumn

My senses are always grappling with the true nature of time.
But I anticipate
the loveliest transition,
that of summer into fall.

I become aware of
Arctic tinged breezes which chill through to the marrow
causing my joints to ache and my nose to run.
All around cinnamon colored leaves are ceremoniously offered
in a ritual of fiery sacrifice,
The incense of which burns my eyes and singes my nose.

Numbral angles become repositioned as on a sundial;
Allowing for the equidistance between night and day.
And as the night grows longer, the closer we are
to aphelion.

The once downy feathered peartree
has born the last of its fruit.
Wind becomes void of bird songs and cicadas
Yet pregnant with the Norther's blustery seed.

Golden wheat and corn stand at attention ready for the reaper, as
pumpkins become ghouls, twinkling their fiendish grins
All along twilit landscapes.
All Souls Day is nigh.

So, come away, come away
'tis Autumn's first day
Helio's chariot must rest 'til May.

Chasing Cosmic Dust

“Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.”  Albert Einstein

Infinity is sought through telescopes, ultraviolet and infrared gathering spectrographs or miles under ground, smashing atoms round and round-
The super-collider purports to recreate the beginning of time.
Dark energy mystery, a physicist’s riddle:
the philosopher’s dream of a “grand unified theory,”
Emerging from dark matter or the glue holding
Reality intact, or so they think, with the promise of multiple dimensions
Held together by superstrings.  Elastic nebulae, supernovas,
Space-Time formulas and  “m” theories dizzying to the nonscientific mind.
Particles, antiparticles or weakly interactive massive particles
 muons, quarks and bosons collide and repell, appear and disappear
Collapse upon themselves within shadow universes.  Black hole vacuums
Ingest and implode quanta, the event horizon reached
Relativity is suspended.  Simplicity states
The microcosm reflects the macrocosm reflects infinity mirrors.

“Baby Go Boom” (1986)

Keith Haring, you, as one of Warhol’s final disciples,
Blew translucent amorphous bubbles with a tiny plastic wand, spreading warm fuzzy pop art,   
And muscle car caricatures fluffed into marshmallows.
D.j. scratching, beat box NYC 
Your pulse, your kingdom, your harem.
Latin boys lined up wanting to model for you-
are not that kind of artist.  Graffiti, urban art form of the dispossessed, denied,
disenfranchised.  Bareback alleyways, gritty sideways glances and groping,       always the groping
Never enough, never too much, just like your art.  Broadly drawn monochromatic shapes, with fists pumping, “Power to the People!”  Or, faceless pastel colored, bodies like cooked rigatoni whose appendages and torsos flow one into the other
Probing and prodding every exposed surface or orifice or contour. 
You didn’t just devour!
Tempera and acrylic cartoons conveyed your vision of
Comedy, tragedy and all was love, Madonna and
Silence did equal death.

Wish Box

Believe me
I will not lie to you, even as the tickers, titles and tits dazzle
Your eyes are fused open to reflect and absorb the ever-changing, pixelated kaleidoscope.
Do not blink and please don’t change that channel, you will miss something,
Even if it’s nothing.  It could mean something
To you. I am a friend and confidant warm and fuzzy with the glow of invitation.
RGB hue baptize your familiar face, alien and you become a couch chameleon.
Admit it, you are awestruck!  Worshiping me, vilifying me in the same breath-do you know why?  I am the all pervasive juggernaut of your imagination. 
Some call me an idiot box.  Ah, but you know me by my real name
wish box.
Listen, I can’t get you drunk, do your laundry or walk the dog but
I can if you believe in me.

Humanity

Reaching outward, the slightest caress
The faintest whisper, the slyest glance,
I sense, I intuit
From you, all this and more.

The infinitesimal, quantum world is ours.
Subatomic embers, nano-particle sparks
send mana, chi, Kundalini energy down my spine, Love.
Neutrino fire storms, glow worms all around, through you, me.
All of us fireflies dancing, mortal,
and surely, everyone can see 
Just how spectacular this cosmos.

Love, Not God. God, Not Love.

Is it wrong to want to write you a poem?
And is it wrong to want the secrets of the universe revealed,
To understand the true nature of humanity's existence.

I think about all this and more when I think of you.
I think about secrets that lead to subterranean kingdoms,
chthonian labyrinth snaking itself into the human psyche like
mythos.

My pathos is circular, radiant and enigmatic.
My imagination blisters a beam of timeless sunshine
And all this because of the invocation
of your name.