SOLO

  Lifting horn to freshly cleared mind
  Cold metal pressed to battered lips
  Ears making involuntary adjustments
  Air sending sounds to every corner of the room
  Sweat streaming down, blinding eyes
  Vibrant colors emerge from behind closed lids

  Breathing, anticipating
  Raising horn in jubilation
  Arms moving fast

  Thinking, not thinking
  In a key, out of a key
  Tongue, teeth, lungs, all coordinating to reach new
  parameters of communication
  Connecting with strangers sitting in darkness

  Yelps of encouragement
  Applause
  Exhaustion
  Refuge 

  Sept. 3, 2000

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    POETS OF THE NOW

  Hoarding shards of perceptionless vibrations,
  Smiling down tirelessly suffocating fears,
  Crossing rivers on the backs of formless jealousies,
  Climbing over the last dead, rotting insecurity.

  There and then, the Now appears   

  Opening arms so as not to take them up,
  Lifting the front end of strollers up subway stairs,
  Listening to the silence of the void, before the first note touches the air,
  Gazing on the endless power and possibilities of the present.

  Witness this harvest of the Now from which such sweet fruit is bared

  Glint of night retreating from newly sown seeds of breath,
  From behind glass walls, fragile self-esteem steps aside
  As soul reaches out, knocking it all away --
  Free to connect to the world again,
  Sending isolation to its lonely grave

 Yet staying vigilant, listening for the next crowding in of thoughts,                Unwittingly ready to erect new enclosures.  
  What's it like to live in the past or future of your mind, I've mostly forgot,   Confusing the Now with the fantasy of some other place and time,  
  Some other experience, never resembling mine.

  Maybe seeing where I am right now is not where I'd hoped to be,
  But being able to BE that NOW in THIS time and space and KNOW
  The transitoriness of a situation and NOT let it determine who I am,
  But to know the wholeness of it all
  And not be swept away, lost, somehow, in the cluttered musings of some   illusion.  

  This is the lucidity of the immediate,
  The arrival of living.

  No more prisons of the mind, body or spirit,
  No more how-it-is-your-supposed-to-be police,
  Rambling, ramble
  Slowing, slow
  Center, centering
  Now, now

  The five skandas, both simultaneously present and destroyed,

  This is the challenge.

  The rich, the poor,
  The shuckster, the hustler,
  The businessman, the homeless,
  Those most proud of being gas guzzlers.

  All in need of this Now,
  Not simply a bunch of words,
  But something once found,
  The beauty of which paves a lush path to the infinite,
  Transforming the victims of the swamp into the Poets of the Now.

  July, 2002

 

  Black Goat Tour Poems        November 2003

 1.

 Get to the essence,
  Resident essence
  Flowering on the
         celestial byway
         of here, there
        whatever, wherever
  Whenever the Northeast
        Corridor recognizes
  Its time to reboot
  The roofing of the other

 

 2.

  Reasons and doubts
  Never hurt everybody.
  Next rest stop:
  Never. Write the
  Yesterdays everyday
  Academy of higher
         sobbing washes out
  In the clearing of
  The workshop of
          the fire of
  Tomorrow

 

  3.

  Caution, voyager
  Bridge the Bristol
           River
  Blue
  With Bebop,
        and Jersey City
        and too much
                 time on your
                 hands to
                 know this is not
                 right and that
                 might be worse
                 but never knowing
                 the lesser of
                 two evils equals
  The hot, Biblical Hell
  of alternating spaces of
  someone else's making
  Forgetting the business
  of here.

   4.

  More people are
  Buying Fords.
  Glittering longhorns
      and ferocious
  Bucks traversing
  The tired ground
    of your unrecognizable orb,
  Determined to fulfill
      their destiny,
  Rest assured.

 

  5.

  Tower,
  Sprockets of unreal
  Isotopes short-circuited
  By the change
  In the electro-molecular
  Constraints imposed
  By the government of
  The people magnetically,
  By the fed politicians
  Who never seem to
  Have enough of
  What they don’t know
  Enough
  About.

  Enough.

 

  Tower,

  I live in your shadow
  Starving for what others
         feel entitled to
         gorging themselves on,
         without knowing,
         innocently assuming
         the “others” have
         the same rights and
         all is just within
         their reach if they
  Work hard, pull themselves up by
         their bootstraps
  If only. Liberals, new agers too.

 

  Tower,

  Your shadow envelops
          me,
  Saying you are right there
          with me,
  Until the emergency road
          says exit quickly.
  And with good reason, too