Category: Existential Poetry

You sit in so many different places, in a park, in an office, in a subway, in a car. The scenes around you change, like maelstroms, like rapids, and yet the center remains. The eye is fixed, and it watches, and somehow in that watching, what solidifies the eye and differentiates it from the transience, also begins to change. Mountains once the pinnacle of awe become speedbumps on a road, and what used to stain the heart with disdain earns paternal empathy. The eye that watches becomes the eye of change, and seer and scene move adjacent to one another. It’s a dance, a dance of becoming, where the theme that drives the rounding and bending and turning and leaping does not end, instead ebbs and softens then hardens, quiets then explodes—and there is only beginning. You are a continuum, and when you reach a hand to touch the handrail, you are the cool metal turned heat and the pumping of blood within every artery of animal life. The pigeon that flies overhead is the freedom between your temples that millions around the world cry out for as they are crushed by the immense weight of your boot. How like a stampede you are, through rain slicked neon streets, through dry dead grass patched earth, through glades in the hearts of forests that circulate with red ants carrying the nutrients of a day left hot and shivering after the sex of life and death. The lamb is born, and with it the sin, and on the mountain meditates a Hindu monk that knows the letters that make up your name. It is his name as well, and that of she who lives at the base, the base of your desires and dreams and despair, and in the mirror shares your face. And somehow, with all this change around and within you, you sit, here, there, and everywhere, reading this.

I will always be here, a stone of the world,
but you will move on
as the wind moves on
as the seasons move on
as the stars and the night move on
and disperse into various
clouds and ideas and desires

and you will move on
as everyone does
as every child
moves from womb into world into death
and death into matter into fetus
and passion into boredom into despair
and into new embraces of arms between legs around waists

and you will sit for a while
and you will move
on but I
will always be here, a stone of the world.  

The library staff changed
and my heart grew a little colder.

Not bitterly cold—just room temperature water
pooled when crying in the tub for too long.

The library staff changed,
just when I wanted to share a crazy idea:
that maybe my poetry had a place
there among the authors.

I knew a guy, a bigshot library guy—
thought I’d make him my messiah, but
the library staff changed,
and I witnessed an interview.

I could tell from the prospect’s face
that she knew about the change,
and that it was coming again soon,
and that home

was a crazy idea.

I’m sitting on the front steps of a lovely church. To the right of me are jade leaves entranced by the rolling of a warm breeze. Birds on branches are chirping a medley that creates a symphonic membrane around the intersection, a visually imperceptible emotive field that cars pierce through with their hurry. Engines rumble as they meld with the horizon. Their echoes fade, then more take their place. The day continues, but it’s nice right here where I am. On these steps, I rest—on these steps, my place next to the leaves.