Simple
Let’s keep it simple.
Clouds. Water. Rain.
No solid geometry.
No history of the Trojan Wars.
Light the candle
but leave flame
to melt wax on its own.
Open a window
but don’t encourage the breeze
one way or another.
Nothing holy.
Philosophy be damned.
The clouds are so full of water,
they cannot help but rain.
Pitter-patter on the roof,
down the window,
splashes, puddles, on the ground.
Sometimes, as with love,
it’s the very nature.
Parade of Guilt
I dug my name into the jowls
of the statue of a Confederate soldier.
I stood when I was supposed to kneel.
When the hippie chick wasn’t looking,
I spat on her incense candle.
I once told a naturalist,
“I hate bats. They don’t deserve to live.”
I find beat poetry boring.
True perception has never been easy for me.
Obsession, on the other hand…
I’ve clung to beliefs long after they were proven untrue.
I have illusions.
I frighten easily.
I’ve written propaganda
and I’ve spread bullshit on fertile ground.
I’ve been greedy and awkward
and I’ve made remarks on other people’s hairstyles,
which is the height of irony coming from me.
I didn’t know what a sphincter was
until I was 15,
nor could I find Cambodia on a map at that age,
or understood anything that supposedly
came out of the mouth of Lord Buddha.
I had no idea why anyone would shave their head.
I still don’t.
I use a fork when a spoon makes more sense.
There’ve been women in my life
that I can only remember naked.
I prefer a hot shower to conversation.
I eat meat even though I know it’s really flesh
and it belongs on an animal.
I write poetry even though I know
I’m encroaching, it’s private,
and it’s not always my story to tell.
At the Uffizi
Can’t analyze art.
Applied math but it refused to quantify.
Put physics to the test,
but art refused to bend to
its all-inclusive, unbendable rules.
Behind me, a voice asks,
“What about biology?”
Art is bulging with something,
but it’s not carbon-based.
It doesn’t respond to chemistry.
The numbers can’t explain
Botticelli’s “Venus.”
Even the poet struggles,
so what hope has the scientist?
Reaction is as variegated as faith,
as a diamond.
It’s like the roadmap
of some unfamiliar territory.
It suggests 1,000 routes,
none of which take you to
where you want to be.
Here I am in Florence
at the Uffizi gallery,
a tourist, half of an equation—
myself on one side,
a masterpiece on the other,
and the whole thing is tilting
but not towards me.
My glasses fog.
Formulas are worthless.
Neither can cope with genius.
Why not just say,
“The hell with it.
The woman is a goddess.
She’s a glorious high-stakes creature
looking down from a wall
at a low-stakes kind of guy.”
Best just be love-drunk.
The more alcoholic the feeling,
the less it tells me lies.
Why I Cannot Love You
I am this body. The weather doesn’t care,
nor do the needs of others.
It complains of the distance it has come.
It can imagine the dead as living and the living as dead.
It’s been to the rim of its own death and back.
This morning, it’s a bone bag awaiting fresh sun.
It has an appointment somewhere in the busy city.
Its breath smells of snails.
It wakes, shaking, anxious to be outside.
Its arms pretend there is something to hold,
grasp thin air.
Just a reflex action, I assure you.
It’s not signs of a particular yearning.
This is how my body operates.
It adheres to the proper balance. Love cannot.
It operates on the edge of others.
It knows that even breathing is a risk.
There was a time when the air in its lungs turned to sighs,
and hands turned touching into affection,
but it has duties to perform.
Feelings only get in the way.
It cannot surrender itself
and still perform all its functions.
It will someday contract something fatal,
so why encourage fatality now?
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image: Elliott Brown (Cropped from original)