My Way

If I had it my way
The sun would always shine
Glass always full
Love all the time
But it is not my way
It is not your way
It is the way of seeds and flowers
Rain and rainbows
War and peace
Wounds and healing
Fragments of feeling
Sadness and euphoria
Dance out of time
It is God’s way
God’s way all the time

Banks

Your banks are overflowing
Though not the banks you would like
But a river of blood was overdue
Overwhelming, your carnage
Overspent, your accounts
Your karma is following you
Through the streets of Manhattan
The canals of Biscayne
The yachts and the Pipers find you
When you wake where are you
In this rubble and ruin,
The washed away cheekbones of youth

Shine

All murk now…..
Shadows fight shadows
And time loops in miasma

Sad dreams and daylight
Intertwine in the dust
Only memory offers a balm

In these recesses of mine
Scant moments extend
Rare flashes when I am at peace

And I remember when
Ideas scintillated like coins
Collected but not to be spent

Darkness Like This

Evening envelops
once-blue desert sky
a Bedouin’s veil
pierced by star beams

The moon’s drawn and quartered
an infidel hushed
its lonely shaft falling on no one
lazy eye glinting on dunes and oases
while silence rides silence to sleep

In darkness like this
I arose from my stillness
suffusing the void with my light

Zero Plus One

Zero and One were having a heated debate
About nothing
Zero so perfectly obese, obtuse, ready to envelope the earth
One ready to impale the next innocent bystander
With his spear-like intellect
Round and round they volleyed
Sucker and stick
Bowl and spoon
Bat and ball
Head and neck
Cosmic egg and lightning flash
Each convinced of his own importance
Along came a chick
They put their consummate heads together
To become ten

The Movies

The industry
Is dancing above our heads
An alternative reality
So much more pleasing
Than the making of beds
The punching of clocks
The regimens of diets and pills
Tap dancing and drum rolls
Someone kissing someone while someone is bleeding
Guns are drawn though real police seldom shoot
Credits and panning and praising and frothing
Casting the lost horizon
In a sickening smug sunset
The envelope, please
And the winner is
The illusion of mind over matter

Harvest

The air is electric
With spring wheeling in
The wind magnetizes the flowers
In bloom in the garden where I laid my soul
Bare to the earth last November
One of these seeds will become something wild
Something new for the world
To remember