Category: Book 1

Love is easiest with no object.
It can wisely lope across fields
Of seething intensities,
Missing all the atoms,
Dodging galaxies:
Unrequited,
Purified,
Earnest
Love.

Wide awake at four
Off across the Pacific
I've misplaced the sun

There are some daisies.
I see hummingbirds humming.
Oregon summer.

Routines broken, it's easy to lose track,
drift among the flowers of consciousness,
wanting to taste all the lost memories,
but the tongue is numb, there's no flavor left.

It's hard to write poems
when life wobbles upside-down,
and green trees won't yield.

One night I sleep well,
another night I will drift,
that's the jetlag thing.

Without memory
the sun rises normally
the sea still surges.

ㅁ
So we took a walk up the sloping road,
Arthur and I, but we didn't talk much.
The road was scattered with brown husks of spring.
The sky was painted with curved, cobalt clouds.
The air smelled of childhood and vague regrets.

– a pentastich of indeterminate pentameter (if it’s iambic, it’s not very good).

An Oregon dawn
trundles in half-sleeplessly
with a rooster's crow.

a bit of eggshell
a fragmented hemisphere
like the Pacific.

The ghost drifted to the cold graves to dance,
to perchance watch fates unfold:
the world's old.

My small apartment:
the birds speak through my window
while I smell coffee.

We only face our mortality
just one person by one person.
Mortality can't be met
as an abstract concept –
rather, it is some
impossible
unlikely
lurking
thing.

The calendar moves
and draws a new season out:
warm air gets muggy.

Lavender sunrise draws out the cold morning's harmonies now.
Distantly I can witness the arboreal grasping of hills.

The moon was orange,
hovering there in the east,
chewing on buildings.

[daily log: walking, 8.5km]

Sleep
is strange,
since each night
we surrender
to the brain's stoppage,
as if it's protesting
the fruitless hours of doubting,
and has decided to walk out,
leaving us alone with our body.

Not even dawn, thoughts obsessed and creeping…
It's true, sleeping would be best…
Just get dressed.

Walking home after
a dinner with coworkers
I felt summer's weight.

Well, the devil is in the details.
You could read this poem and wonder.
But the darkness lurks beyond.
There, above or outside.
And couched in symbols.
Unseeable.
In plain sight.
Count it.
Hah.

[daily log: walking, 1.5km]

Can I find words that are hard, strong, useful,
meaningfully shattered shards,
but backwards?

Meaning emerges –
words' materiality –
like a windblown leaf.

A cerulean sky
A bit of wind tugging here
A mortal moment

Coming out as from a dream
Tilt and turn, the moon's agleam
Bending then to check my hand…
Ghosts afoot, nowhere to stand.

I dreamed all my world infested with worms.
Do its weird forms mean I'm stressed?
Not the best.

the ragged edges
and vast inchoate boundaries
of time aggregate… 

sometimes I wake up
terrified – as if I'm still
in the hospital.

Sometimes the dust that inhabits my room
spirals around as if searching for what
random thing might have been lost or forgot.

[daily log: walking, 7.5km]

Blank.
No poem.
Not a word.
Thoughts just a blur.
Deracinated.
A failure of symbols.
Adrift in meaninglessness.
An embodiment of silence.
Compositionally handicapped.