What the mountain told me

There are no words is a lie
There are more words than we can hold
Than we can use

With a broad net there is no meaning
With a fine net we express

First work of Summer '06

Turn the wheel
into infinity
from the grayness we evoke
a sunbeam explosion
the green of trees
Ten thousand yellow blossoms

There is no stillness
in the water
it breathes the life-breath
of all seas and lakes.

Our heart-song is softly growing
with the silence of summer
to eclipse each other
with an eternity of loving kindness

we become less-

In this season,
grow.

Revitalized

What You Should Know To Be A Poet
by Gary Snyder

all you can know about animals as persons.
the names of trees and flowers and weeds.
the names of stars and the movements of planets
and the moon.
your own six senses, with a watchful elegant mind.
at least one kind of traditional magic:
divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot;

dreams.
the illusory demons and the illusory shining gods.
kiss the ass of the devil and eat shit;
fuck his horny barbed cock,
fuck the hag,
and all the celestial angels
and maidens perfum'd and golden --

& then love the human: wives husbands and friends
children's games, comic books, bubble-gum,
the weirdness of television and advertising.

work long, dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted
and lived with and finally loved. exhaustion,
hunger, rest.

the wild freedom of the dance, extasy
silent solitary illumination, entasy

real danger. gambles. and the edge of death.

Rationalization

The reason why I haven't posted any new writing in months is that I've been furiously studying Post-Structuralism and reading Wallace Stevens. So get off my back.

Reckon (an internet original)

I said, "What do you make of this?"
it was a round
it made a sound
it smelled a fruit
at night it hummed
it's middle was vast
it had no gripes
some days it waterskiied.

Vermont Work, pt. I (Opus)

… …

The car glides through
scenery that is only an anagram of
scenery from five, ten, two-hundred miles behind.

I see my reflection in the constant brown rocks on the roadside
in their blue-grey icicles
I see my Grecian urn
the ever-present yearn downwards,
an eternity of failure.

Each road sign that waxes and wanes is a reminder
a mirror image of all other testaments to highway safety
another reminder of the vast rolling sameness of New England.

Like a bullet, our journey has no plot arc,
we are only the straight line, dashed, from point A to point B.

I roll down the window/, -

Paradigm Shift!


The word is colors now,
and on the wind comes molecules of dust and scents rural and right,
the smoke from chimney tops are a hundred rude exclamation marks to my
discovery of America.
I am the new Christopher Columbus, sailed the ocean blue-
me big man now in history books.

Instantaneously I am the world’s foremost expert on apple pie.
narrating this tour with fireworks or gesturing,
peals of laughter over the roar of the wind in through the
window.

I have inborn knowledge now awakened of the secret lives of trees
from inception to destruction
I want to pull over and commute my sentence in favor of
a thick-booted and face burning run through the forest so much nearer now.

Vermont Work, pt. II

The light by which I work, transformed
now by windowpanes into a new character
on the page.
The remnant of all other unfinished works.

each thought a sonogram for a reader.

Here in uncontested delirium the poem is written.
Each letter pressed upon the page, a hideous mark.
Crude symbols of arcane witch-workings and prisons
built each day, coincidently. Byproducts of a law
left too frequently unrevised, paper bags for liquid
contents. Invisible caltrops expelled with plumes of
spittle from the mouth, the pen. To each his own
unbattened hatches and un-coiled lines, languishing in
silent menace across the desk.