things i've given up

A number of things i've given up
having reached a time
of knowing 
not everything beneath the sky.
The birds know more.
And the sea mammals, even though
they are disappearing one by one.
From behind her counter, the secretary
must know something
the bosses don't.
And so the events of the world

turn and come around in patterns
appearing random.  Who can say?
All the physicists are trapped
in a world, the lawyers argue,
policy makers disagree.
Meanwhile, the news goes
on and on and the stray
dogs in third worlds die unburied.
That is not counting children.
And the men and women who leapt
at turnpikes without looking.
How does one take

their tea in the morning?
Someone delivers the paper
another sends a note.
I write her a letter, imaginary.
Some things i've given up,
some things not.

watching light on a pool of water

Morning finds me reminded of Rwanda
and senseless deaths
the news never runs out of
like fuel for the grand machinery 
of the world (what machinery?)
In a made-up place, quiet and serene
birds call and try find
ways on impersonal pavements
where bamboo is cultured to grow
and kindness a paid service.
Blue bowls of sky and water
meet in a dome.  
This make-believe peace.
Somewhere else a plane 
crashes and closed rooms are alive.
I wait for August, not admitting
anxiety for something brewing.

Last night was a waning moon
and two bottles of strong beer.
I sleep with restless listlessness.
To refuse to do.

east of the sun, west of the moon

Where will you go, love
when the late winds start to blow
dry leaves catch on your hair

Will you be facing the moon?

It is blue black 
the night of your thoughts
and buried deep in your chest

A flickering glow

The lovers have long disappeared
a trail of winding pebbles
where will you go, my love

Will you be facing the moon?

beating the sky

and what does it merit to try to fix the world?
the world remains unfixed.
whether it has become for the better or for worse
remains according only to the lens.
i have broken my rose lenses a long time ago
and these days i try only 
very very hard
to keep from being cynical
although truth be told
it is here, running in my bone morrows

and some days it is more potent
stronger than my senses
and i hate a good number of people
a good number of men
and maybe i am disappointed too
of the larger cosmos or of any grand design
if there be any
life's not fair, and that is that
who are we to complain
when always there is one
in a better or worse place

and maybe life's like that 
and maybe it's better to leave it like that
although for all the world i know
maybe it is better for those
who simply don't care







clc

The Kamasutra of Kindness (Position No. 3)

The Kamasutra of Kindness
Position No. 3



It’s easy to love
through a cold spring
when the poles
of the willows
turn green
pollen falls like
a yellow curtain
and the scent of
Paper Whites
clots
the air
but to love for a lifetime
takes talent
you have to mix yourself
with the strange
beauty of someone
else

wake each morning
for 72,000
mornings in
a row so
breathed and
bound and
tangled
that you can hardly
sort out
your arms
and
legs

you have to
find forgiveness
in everything
even ink stains
and broken
cups

you have to be willing to move through
life
together
the way the long
grasses move
in a field
when you careen
blindly toward
the other
side

there’s never going to be anything
straight or predictable
about your path
except the
flattening
and the springing
back

you just go on walking for years
hand in hand
waist deep in the weeds
bent slightly forward
like two question
marks
and all the while it

burns
my dear
it burns beautifully above
you
and goes on
burning
like a relentless
sun




by Mary Mackey

Explaining Summer

On the first day of existence,
the sun chose us. And that was that.

He’s got a street address now
and a delinquent tax record.

Let me explain. I am lying to you
because it is cold where you are.

Cold and far and snow and darkness
and chilly hands. Or maybe not.

But such dichotomies are easier.
And who are you to stop living

multiple lives and occupations
in the snowstorms of my mind?

Teacher and farmer and secret poet.
I need to tell you I don’t love you.

I just need to stop falling in love
with you each time a cool breeze

rushes past the tips of my fingers.
Or revising another novel I will shred

in the hidden office behind my rib cage.
As if my entire body were a mob front.

But isn’t everything a front for something?
How, in my world, cold weather is nothing.

Only a history of you. Remember that talk?
The gulls? The Baskin Robbins in winter?

I said: Anger is almost always shame
in an existential crisis, writing poetry

in a café, shielding its notebook
from each passing stranger.

Oh, I might as well be talking to myself.
Besides, I theorize that you

will only read this in one of a thousand
possible universes. If not here, there.

Or in the warmth of my skull. Imagine that:
One goddamn poem for each world

in which our lives intersected.
Like hairs tangled in sunlight.

What’s not to like? What person
would say no to zipping from body

to body on some madman experiment,
taking notes on the many cuisines

of love, giving each of them names
like they were your children.

“Instead of love, why not sky?
A species of bird? Or the changing

climate of the heart?” I give up.
I am thinking of names now

as a breeze passes and I do not love you.
I am merely enjoying the cold

in the national park of myself.
As if the origin story of something

entirely unimportant were about to begin.
A new sub-breed of sparrows.

An alternative to happiness.
Curtains raising to a new color of sky.

by Gian Lao