BY ANY OTHER NAME

I was seed that ran
fast to meet

beautiful extinction

seed from
what I know not
I became

burrowed out
of a hole, given
a name

now
to live up to

BLISS

Percy Shelley
is waiting
on an
alien shore

for his robot wife
and robot baby

she returned to Earth
to do research
for her robot novel

when they
are all together once more
as it was always
meant to be

it will
be bliss.

PUSH COME TO SHOVE

I cannot remember
the poem
we shared

when we
were the same poem
and the words (such
as I heard)
were all
words of
expectation

but then
the window opened, or
was that a bomb-bay door?

I cannot retrace those steps
if there is a little
boy standing in
a field with
so many questions
seemingly lost
I cannot
find him

and yet though the
envelope has changed
it is the same envelope

and I can
feel something of the
strength of that
initial burst

for, you see, when
push comes
to shove
it is
indeed still carrying me.

THE GREEK AND THE GERMAN PHILOSOPHER

The Greek and the German philosopher
are traveling to Africa
climbing back
down the tree of
our genetic history
to the place of our
human origins,
continent of beginnings
where
words took
their first shape

under those swirling brilliant stars
to which all breath must
ultimately return.

SWIRL

Swirl
swirl

yea, ask your progeny what
genes they would like
in their coffee

I am flying to another nebula
past a spiral galaxy
and my rainbow
communications officer
is getting frisky

so for
the next few parsecs we
might park in
the back of
the mother ship
everything
on auto pilot
I trust her
to press my buttons, she
trusts me to
navigate the canals
of her home planet
find
the perfect spot.

FOR SOME REASON

Consequently, I
wriggled out of my
sweet cocoon, but

looking back felt it
did look a bit bad
which was the
very

moment the
bullets beset me
whizzing past, this
way and
that

as if my being fellow human
had me targeted for some reason.

I HEAR

I HEAR

I hear
an ocean

waves parting, folding back
spike in
my brain activity as
I surmise where
in my words this
sea has
disappeared to

speaking deliberately now
as I sense myself
fording a steam or
stepping from
pebble to
pebble
and here the rain, as always
rushing to add to
talk of completion

the pebble I stepped on last
so smooth now, yet possibly
could tell me
an irregular history

going back to when the
planet was magma, was
fire and
fusion

and all the compounds, elements that
I am
still puzzling out
an architecture to
account for
an
interior.

MUSE OF NONSENSE

I anxiously await
the Muse of Nonsense
arriving
on a cat large
as Manhattan

timed to coincide with
the Vernal Equinox
and the
birth of a mouse
in Central Park.