Sleep

You think you can shut this down
Grand Central at midnight
Trains inbound and out
Generator in overdrive—
How do you sleep?

You entreat with a pill
Count sheep on the wall
Here in the caffeinated city
Your graffiti on every car of
Every train, every sign

Pointing to a night at the theater:
Rumbles in the station, panhandlers
Rap music, lost chances
Lost potential romances colliding within
And tell me how will you fall

Asleep?

Onward

Hard to believe you hover here
In this numbing cold
You in the smoke, you in the trees,
The snow-filled fields,
The birds that bear this blinding freeze

I like you so much better
In the summer where you
Blue the sky, you warm the lake,
You let the girls wear summer skirts
You let me have what I can take

What will you be in springtime?
Will you take Afghanistan away?
Ann-Marie whom you know well
Knows nothing of this metal world
This crushing hole, this freezing hell

All those butterflies, I close my eyes
I see them painted in her room
You in their wings, you in their eggs
You gave them flight,
You give us legs

Alight

When the night descended
Madman beggar, loveless soul
I was hanging out my laundry
To dry in the sun
Never one for timeliness
I tore the clocks down
From the sky
Where am I
Come morning

Blood Red Moon

The moon turned blood red last night—
Once in thirty years—
That’s our blood up there
Reflected in these tears
The galaxy is starlit
But not our troubled home
We are falling like a dynasty
May we rebuild like Rome
Every angel in the system
Looks askance or looks away
This is the war we wage within
This is the world we know today
Venus holds a flower
Mars would surely strike it down
There’s a fever in the romance
There’s a fire in this town
God in all his glory
Holds the cities in his sway
The moon is bleeding red
The blood is seeping into day

Reflections from Land's End

I looked into the water
Saw myself a younger man
Holding clouds and rain and thunder
In the hollows of his hands

And off on the horizon
As the sky began to dim
Was a shadow slowly growing
Until it came to live within

The power that I shouldered
Thinking I could ride the sky
Was a falling star at daybreak
Was a comet bound to die

And now the water rises
And it rises to my head
But I understand the darkness
And the sacrifice instead

Questions

With the little ones, we
Do our best not to discuss
Where the old, old, old, old, old people go
When we get to see them again
Where the hamburger and tuna come from
What fishing feels like for the fish
Where all the garbage gets to go
Why the men in the news dress in green with guns
That we do not allow them to carry
But these questions I do carry
They used to gnaw at me
Forty years in the desert
Now burning

Still Life Falling

He walks his child across ice to school
Snow starts falling, silent wall
Sheltering, dividing, protecting her
Blanket made of flakes
Dazzling light in all that white
The children will stay inside today
So warm against the sea,
Staring out at the white, white sea
He remembers how it used to be….
Before the blanket was torn asunder
And he became one with cold….
Faces splayed out in the sea, stories,
Distant lands, shapes of
Eskimos and dinosaurs
Flags of many nations
Hello in Japanese
The hounds of winter call him out
Bits of snow falling still on balding pate
White conspiring angels, all