Anxious as my thoughts paint out a canvas,
Tenuous strokes with each choke,
As I look at my hands, they soak,
Covered in blisters of oak,
As I wept through the saunter,
With no words their daughter says,
No peak at the herds,
Hoarsed around in their glammy gala,
Oh this fiesta, I could've taken a siesta,
Envied with this gluttonous rake over my bulging eyes,
Oh I'm shaken by this phrase,
Starved moons left to rot for this,
I cower with no fight to arise,
I begin to tremble with no cries,
Shots fired but it's only light,
I am in frame for only tonight.
Existential uncertainty
arrives like a question older
than the body carrying it~
a quiet inquiry rising
from the marrow’s dim archive,
asking “what does it mean
to move through a world
that never stops shifting?”
Light tries to reason with shadow,
but shadow answers
with yet another riddle,
reminding me that clarity
is just a temporary visitor
and doubt is the more
faithful companion.
Some days the self feels fixed,
a point on a map
I can almost name;
other days it dissolves
into a constellation of maybes,
each star a possibility
I cannot fully claim.
And still~
something in me listens
for the logic beneath the chaos,
the tenuous geometry of purpose
obscured in the noise.
I step anyway,
realizing the path is shaped
as much by my questions
as by my steps,
understanding the unknown
is not my enemy
but a horizon.
Uncertainty remains,
it becomes my teacher~
one that asks me
to live without definitive answers,
to let meaning be something
I participate in
rather than discover.
A cacophony of sound surrounds me,
As dissonant music blares into my mind.
I sit in front of my computer
to type away my latest poem.
"Are these your dirty shoes, dear?
We have a rack for them, you know."
"Why is our towel soiled, dear?
Were you fiddling with your car?"
Whining and carping, objecting and wailing.
Oh, for a precious moment of silence,
That I might be alone
That I may be allowed to concentrate
On my tenuous inspiration
Before it dissipates
Into its normal useless insubstantiality!
Gone is my poem, like a frightened bird.
I live in an oasis
One formed by the power of electricity
To pump day and night
From The River.
Day and night everyone along its shores
Waters their crops and yards, gardens and fields.
In the few years I’ve lived here
I’ve planted almost 500 trees and shrubs
To transform an old alfalfa field
Into a thicket of greens
Haven for mice and snakes, birds and bees.
Every day I faithfully reroute the irrigation
So that in a week it all gets watered.
If I don’t within just a few weeks
Everything would stop growing
And within just a few months
Everything would be dead.
It’s sobering to realize how tenuous our hold
On a place is.
Without electricity this whole farming valley
Would dry up and wither away.
With electricity, coming in fact from the water itself,
It is an oasis of life, calm and green
Filled with the joy of birds and bees
Humans and their trees.
My own place in it is temporary of course
But someone will come after
To keep the pumps going
Keep the sprinklers flowing
Until they don’t
And this moment in time is forgotten
As all things must be.
(5/5/26)
A mirage
Reflecting another path
Showcasing another life
Man to man
A timeless wonder
Ravaging the mind
Distorting thoughts and persons
Transcending sages
Traversing phases
Life, a treacherous haven
Selling tenuous dreams
Whispering delirious melodies
Slithering into nooks and crannies
Branching far and wide
Dispensing the message
Selling the vision
I heard about your violent death...
And had not known about your poems.
I went searching for them, but it seems as if
Someone must have put them away.
Perhaps they would be just too lovely for our ears to hear...
Perhaps the words would be more worthy
Than our repentant hearts might be permitted to feel?
And I am left looking out of my upstairs window
At the mass of white blossoms beautifying the pale cherry trees;
Not even a wisp of wind ...the whole World is left
Silently grasping for breath;
And the fraught blossoms dares not even tremble
Should they lose their tenuous grip upon the crowded
Black twigs.
Sorrow has a tenuous power
to make faces beautiful,
especially women,
men are a little better or worse
at shapeshifting,
of course it is their eyes, and lids,
the subtle exhaustion of lips.
As we rush through the hours
perhaps we may speak to
a Traders Joes helper,
or half-listening
to the spiel of a salesman,
we may glimpse a veiled sorrow
that surfaces through an un-tinted light,
perhaps we may silently hope
that such a loss,
will not enter our eyes
anytime soon,
or maybe it has already.
It’s 2022, we’re in the final battle for the soul of the world.
There is no Indo-European root for soul,
the Greek and Germanic roots mean quick-moving, fleeting, mercurial.
I’d add evanescent, impermanent, ephemeral
disappearing, diminishing, dwindling
tenuous, brief, short-lived.
Whatever forever—that’s where we’ll be after WWIII.
World, home, think, breathe: man,
woman the vital force in man, the Anthropocene, men together
violence, virtue, virility. Also, werewolf.
War: to confuse, mix up, make worse.
The old are paying close attention but my sons ignore the thunder,
plate tectonics, gamma ray bursters and mortars on the Eurasian front.
Peace out—the end, limit, boundary, never to have been. So long,
sayonara, shalom, salaam. Take into eternity my hail and farewell.
When missiles fly
The Mullahs lie
They bide their time
To turn the tide
Their constant bluster
Now short of luster
For why we ask
No God sent task
To build a bomb
With feigned aplomb
Their word to spread
Among the dead
They have their place
To find God's grace
Not trample lives
Like stinging hives
Fear and temerity
No road to prosperity
But that's what they seek
Control of the meek
A proud nation with tales of old
A proud people who once were bold
A history where feats abound
A long lost empire to astound
Time for Iranians to now earn
That for which they clearly yearn
Freedoms tenuous flickering light
Now in their grasp in line of sight
Hours nibble at a low back strain.
Tenuous strings were tugged
lifting water bottles.
You wonder how fragile you are,
how vulnerable to those red tides
that bend your iron like plasticine,
turn you into a crooked question mark.
Sit a while old man,
sip tasteless water from a warm plastic bottle,
imagine racing upwards
leaping from mountain top to mountain top,
get high on being low.
You've earned every dull ache,
time to ruefully admit
that there never has been
such a thing
as a 'dull' ache.
Somewhere, way out there
I know of souls who grapple
With the Big Questions
The ones I only hear echos of.
Here on Earth, in my little nest,
I play parlor tricks of the mind
Looking for emptiness
And finding it winking back
As everything and everyone.
But I don’t fool myself
Into thinking it is significant
Or somehow adds anything
To what a single human
Can and does do to further the whole.
Meanwhile there are souls I know
Struggling with their embodiment
The tenuous hold
Of dust swirling around spirit
A cyclone with such a center.
And it is to these rare beings
Although they may curse the burden
That the gifts of fecundity
Have been heaped.
Somewhere out there
I know of great souls
Who grapple with the Big Questions
Not because they want to
But because they must.
And in my own humble way
I wish them well
And lend them strength
As the dust settles
To be only, always, this.
(2/27/25)
(“Loyalty Merit Badge”, 2010, original oil)
Loyal to the Last
In a dream I travel
Some journey of unknown length or destination.
It’s all good at the start
And then quickly becomes harder
A stalled engine, dirty windshield without fluid,
A narrowing road, reduced visibility,
A rocky mountain track where I’m forced
To carry the bicycle
My vehicle has become.
But as I go on and deeper into my solo trek
I still have my trusting pack of dogs
Who eagerly follow
Even as the trail becomes a narrowing ledge
Above the steep drop to a river below
Until eventually it’s all I can do to hang on
As I reach on tenuous holds to the final step
My bike and canine companions abandoned
Behind the last bend.
Dreams if nothing else
Give us snap shots of our mind
Overviews and magnifications of where we are
In a life’s journey that has included
Both the dreamer and his ever morphing dream.
But in the end the dream ends
And all that’s left is the dreamer
And the memory of those companions
Loyal to the last.
(11/8/24)
The old poets haunt me
they taunt me from the shadows
following every keystroke I type -
they’re critical of phrases,
they demand narrower themes
and mock the very clichés they invented.
I remind these frightful spirits of how tenuous
life was, how I’m blindly living these experiences,
how prevalent desire is, how human it is to chase
the things we’re told will fulfill us, like goals and love.
I try and explain this Internet thing, how the more copious
my writings, the more people it says are following me.
How I really don’t want to sound paranoid
but as hard as I try - I don’t see anyone.
.
.
Song for this:
Too Much Time On My Hands by Styx
Reelin' In The Years by Steely Dan
Long for the tender tormenting touch of her slips, a vermillion vice of the abyssal depths that lay within the merest brush of her breath, a zephyr's caress that set aflame the parched arid landscapes of my wasteland as sighs hollow echoes whispered promises grew, the inferno of my longing raged, a maelstrom of need that threatened to consume all reason, all restraint in the swirling crimson vortex of those velvets, the boundaries of our recurrent reality grew tenuous, and the tyranny of the flesh held sway as the flexuous uncharted curves of your caress became the acid test of my resolve, dissolving the fragile, varnished veneer of self control, as the confinement of thy desires began to dissolve like gossamer under the scorching waxen sun of ardent, copious passion.
As we entwined, visceral privilege awoke, like hydras flourishing in some foresworn elixir, every casual respite yawned vacant, sucked into the vampiric vortices of intolerably testy discontent.
How provoking, this postponement of unbound reciprocity, tongue just grazing the tips of those plush velvet onyx lips, while catalyzing inveigling suspense
The allure of mirage
magnetic,
thirst unquenched
in hidden hope
unperceived,
insight intuits
crafty illusion
in life of reality,
rational awareness
absorbed.
Onyx cloud clumps
condensed,
shadow masked mind
tenuous,
disguised dreams
delusive,
shaped nebulous
by silver lines,
foresight outlook
splits spectrum
reflective
into colors of trance
in prism
of optimism.
Convoluted canvas
capturers
hideous faces,
makes murals
magnificent,
sparkle the contours
of conceived smile
in vintage vision
of beholder,
the pensive painter.
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