for Andrew
On the last day in my animal body
I find a hawk feather
Branches rattle like a war dance
Light streams down in sheets
Decolourizing the leaves
When I pick up the feather
It bursts into a blue flame
In a world of parallel stars
Uncategorized
Returning to the Field of Play
“The instant of decision is madness.”
Kierkegaard
I know this from saving penalty kicks,
From diving left or right,
From rushing attacking strikers,
Plucking crosses off hostile heads.
Other times, instinct at the instant
Of decision saves a certain goal;
Truth deflected, the blindness
Of Planck time, our truest guide.
Sometimes all a keeper needs
Are intimations of immortality,
Offside shadows, rebounding voices,
To know position before location.
Age of Dictators
War and without war
Blood and without blood
Fear and without fear
Victory and without victory
Program pogrom
CrISIS critical
Terror tautological
Fake factuality
Anonymous aborning
Innocent impedimenta
Desert dysphoria
Media miasma
War and without war
Blood and without blood
Fear and without fear
Victory and without victory
Oil ochlocracy
Saudi serendipity
Christian camarilla
Jesuit jihadists
Atrocities attenuated
Realities remontant
Twitter tergiversating
Hyperbole hokum
War and without war
Blood and without blood
Fear and without fear
Victory and without victory
Freemason fraternizers
Russian revanchism
Rothschild revisionism
Chabad chutzpa
Oligarch oppugnancies
Totalitarian turbidity
Illuminati ingravescence
Bilderberg biddables
War and without war
Blood and without blood
Fear and without fear
Victory and without victory
Words for a Friend
RIP Andrew Bellon
One who encourages poetry in others– encourages more life.
One who shares the poetic in everything—shares more life.
And one who lives poetry– outlives death by its own abundance.
The Unspeakable Girl
The divine girl is missing
From Poland, from Czechoslovakia,
From Hungary and the Ukraine…
We mustn’t speak about the divine girl.
She has gone into the streets
And brothels of Europe,
Tel Aviv and the Emirates…
She has gone into the underworld,
Vanished into namelessness,
Passed through corridors,
Swallowed the darkness.
She is unspeakable, expendable.
Shh, don’t speak
About the unspeakable girl.
Adult Children and the World
Does anyone else notice an inordinate number of adult children? Both men and women. Is it the natural progression of the video-game man child? Anyway, there seems to be more. You could generally count on older generations who experienced war and hardship not to be fools. That was their strength. Now there’s no one to say “you don’t know what being a fanatic means,” or “you have no idea what the cost of hatred is.” We have these people, but we call them refugees and confuse them with the oppression they are fleeing.
The trend toward authoritarianism becomes even more frightening when we see infant dictators applauding their own nuclear ambitions or discontented potentates dragging the world down for their own selfish gains.
Crow Feather Totem V
A white feather in the grass
Like a spirit return
Under star spider legs
Riding grass snake wind
In the region of the disembodied
Shadows flying over the field
For the longest moment
I had forgotten the road
A white feather
And the speed of light
School of Music
Not the doors we never open
But the invitation of a violin.
A student sings from La bohème.
Better than ovations, his passionate devotion.
In another room, two trumpets
Sound out the physics of justice.
A young woman with bass clarinet
Or strange fish caught in a drift net.
A bassoonist down the corridor,
All thumbs at the woodwind door.
Every work a work in progress,
Perfecting imperfection in chorus.
Not the doors we never open
But the invitation of a violin.
Swans in a Snowstorm
By the hundreds tundra swans descend
like parachutes deploying
in blizzard snow and wind.
They tumble through the air
then canopy their wings
and toggle best they can
in whiteout conditions.
Seeing them is like hallucinating,
except they come every year
to the same fields behind a police academy
in Aylmer, Ontario,
and sometimes in bitter springs
they come out of the northern sky
like a late blizzard,
like driving snow
and meet the earth running.
Clinical Condition
Masses of medical clinics are appearing.
We must be expecting the worst.
Human shadows saturate the market
Like stuffed sacks of sickness.
The office of doctor beehives into bulk.
Medical realtors create a crisis bubble.
The cost of wellness offsets occupancy.
Clinics flourish on curable defects.
Life is the casting of contiguous lots.
Now every property is distressed.
A density test is a good biomarker
To the health of illness and equity.
Salvatore Ala 