Home >  Monthly Archives: June 2014

200 / 12
 
The woman with tuber hands puts
	tubers to lips, puts tubers to heart.
Could she catch a coin if I even threw it?

The man-spider crosses next to the curb,
	locomotes on rusted rods_
Outstretched eyes search the faces above.

The bone girl comes last, begging basket
	laced in plastic petals.
She carries a baby caked in soot.

The driver tells us not to do it, 
	but how can we resist?
Coins and bills trickle from the vents.

Their anguish is palpable; their anguish is gone.
Their joy is palpable; their joy is gone.

They are palpable; they are gone.
	The bus moved on. 

//DELHI TOLL STATION//
[107]

140 / 15
 
At last
the kid always chuses
his plain old self_
chewses what always wuz_
Why not heed the tug of ambition?
Pick up tuba? 
Learn Old Dutch?
[134]

1024 / 8

Window_2

“There was something impenetrable about that year, something somnambulant—a winter’s afternoon watched out an upstairs window.”
– Janet Carson Clark, 1975

[21]

140 / 16
 
Nobody reads anymore.
Not even readers_
Only the girls you see at Starbucks,
Wishing so 
So hard over their moleskin journals.
[122]

200 / 13

I wake up in the morning with my phone stuck to my hand—this small black rectangle made of equal parts vanity and distraction.

At first I was cool about it. Just used it for calls, directions, an occasional text or e-mail, but then one Christmas I couldn’t stop playing Temple Run, and I realized I might have a problem. I deleted the game and thought I was on the mend.

Now I’ve gone and joined Twitter, Instagram, started a Facebook site, and everything has gone to hell. The phone devours my attention, pulls at me like a sculpted wedge of neutron star on the kitchen counter.

Yes, I know it’s all the same school ground stuff—popularity, friendship, validation—they come pipping out of the device like a morphine drip. All I have to do is push the button. A drug I’ve tested and know I must someday quit for good.

But then I see the small black rectangle on the bed stand, and in sleeplessness my hand fumbles for it. A thumb-mash of the call button and I get the next splash of morphine—a brief visual patch for this yawning, chemical quiver.

[199]

140 / 17
 
Look_
The doors close, year by year,
  Doors close behind you.
And the doors in front of you, well,
  Best to seem they suit you.
[125]

1024 / 9

Bulls_3

Eleven generations honed the bull to glyph. Picasso could have gone farther. The astrological sign Taurus is an arc surmounting a circle. But the end is not abstraction_it is the precise center point of simplicity and clarity. The picture word. Toro.

[42]

140 / 18
 
On the Via Dolorosa
The crescent mounts
The minaret that mounts
The Blood-wept
Statio septima_
The place where a 
Man-God stumbled.
[125]