Function at the Archive [June 26th | 154/365]

I could see the awkward young man prepare bon mots he was too shy to utter, but he resembles a parliamentarian.

The books on the wall are precious in inverse proportion to the stiff, flat portraits of people no one here can identify.

There will never be a fire here, never a thief, never a vandal, never a conqueror who will be blamed by future scholars for scattering the papers.

I was awkward at first, unsure of the etiquette among these foreign scholars, but then I started talking without thought.

Once I searched the shelves for texts in a language I wouldn't be able to identify.

I try to speak to the young man but his murmurs are barely intelligible.

There are always politics to speech.

It'll surprise you to find out who gets blamed for the inevitable, who the future tyrant is, who'll be infamous to the coming bookish young.

Haiku [June 26th | 153/365]

Shadows dappled like
paint on the damp undergrowth.
An empty cop car.

Radicals Never Leave [June 22nd | 152/365]

The old men of the Revolution
Sit silent in the waiting room
Like love too intense and insecure
To confess itself to the People

Declarations pile up on low tables
When the call comes they will rise

Waking Nightmare [June 22nd | 151/365]

The serene Horace is dead
Like a popped soap bubble
Nothing remains but a stain
Let us wreathe him in Persian flowers
The sphere of reality collapsed
And felt myself chosen to retain its structure in my mind
When I tried to write it back into being
The words in my brain became nonsense on the page
Horace cannot weave a universe together
Happy are those who do not know
All words must die

Haiku [June 21st | 150/365]

The drop of water,
held together by tension.
The stone in darkness.

Exhuming Martyrs with Dynamite [June 20th | 149/365]

the machine's profane machinations
are obvious to all
the only question is
whether it's intentionally thus

screams from human throats
pierce the ear like
shouted appeals to god
to end earthly tyranny

am I a fool
to sit and write
thousands of miles away
about others' violent deaths

how can I respond
to images of apocalypse
with nothing but words
but everyone's mind responds

Haiku [June 18th | 148/365]

Having risked too much
the ship, overfull with fish,
was sunk by ripples.

Documentary Theater Poem [June 17th | 147/365]

Alternating flashes of blue and red
People walking around swapping information strings
Yellow and black plastic ribbon strung between lampposts
The motorcycle twisted
The driverside door concave
Hair, much, much too long to be reality
A comet
Spermatium

Tanka [June 15th | 146/365]

The quiet city
doesn't suggest ghosts to me,
metaphorical
or ectoplasmic. No, it's
the din of summer I miss.

The Swamp is Elsewhere [June 13th | 145/365]

monsters and odd bugs
live in the swamp
we should escape there
or at least try

you and I can
believe impossible things together
the reality of elves
and people on TV

the orderers of truth
have nothing on us
but the mere universe
pas de deux quarks

in my current state
I refuse to believe
that you are here
I imagine you elsewhere

On Being Told to Wait Until July [June 11th | 144/365]

July will never happen. July is the End of the World. July is when the Sun steps down from the sky and scorches the Earth. July is the laserbeam that cuts Time in half. July is an illusionist's trick so that we think that June will one day end. July is the tsunami crashing upon the shore. July is the Void, the Abyss. July is the Earthquake God, screaming for blood and rubble. July is the hurricane over the sea. July burns like the flame catching the tree. Don't believe in July or July will believe in you.

Summer Haiku [June 10th | 143/365]

The first drops of rain
were warm. A firefly joined
me in the doorway.

The Fumes of the Underworld [June 10th | 142/365]

You told me:
"Slantways glimpsing
the elephant rampant
augurs a peripatetic hereafter."
Which sent me running for the dictionary.

Then you said:
"A basaltine mycospore
acculturing upon an elmet balustrade
forespeaks a distatic amourance."
And I said: "Hey now,
you're just making up words now."

Your final words to me were:
"Andepanditure maxies
marecal sandomixtants
af saken lackryssics."
"Oh, fuck you." I said and left.

Letters are Pictures of Sound [June 8th | 141/365]

This might as well be language
But let's say it's a picture
Or perhaps a series of images
Either way let's agree on something
So that we can start from a solid
Rather than dance through emptiness
A tomb ditty ditty tomb ditty tea
A tomb ditty ditty tomb ditty tea
Tomb ditty tea
Tomb ditty tea
Tomb ditty tea
Tomb

Scenes I May Have Misunderstood from a Movie I Know Nothing About [June 8th | 140/365]

The forty something movie star surprises her maids by getting on her knees to angrily scrub the floor. A gentleman caller shows up and they have sex in the shower, the movie star and the gentleman caller, not the maids. Here I stopped paying attention because my friend offered to get me a glass of Southern Comfort from the bar because I had never tasted it. The movie star is now a mother and the gentleman caller a distant, uninvolved father. The baby dwells in splendor. My friend arrived with gin and tonic because another friend had already ordered me a drink at the bar and then the band started playing. I was once presented with the opportunity of becoming a father and I said no, not now. Later I glance at the screen that is showing the film and the movie star is cutting flowers at night dressed in an evening gown. A girl, six years old I'm guessing, hands her an axe. The movie star cuts down a tree.

Summer Haiku [June 7th | 139/365]

The summer rain wets
the caterpillar. A snail
lies cracked on the road.

6/4/89 [June 4th | 138/365]

The students sang the Internationale in an effort to remember that there was something to stand for as they watched their childhood heroes demand they lay their heads down on the block to a tank tread a human being is pulp the young woman crying about the desire for death the far too familiar hope that everything goes well and the citizens who try to keep the soldiers from entering the city are also meat to a cleaver and no the hand there is a hand and there are hands guiding those hands and brains sending messages and the teachers die alongside their students and when they had finished singing the Internationale they sang the March of the Volunteers because those are the songs they know the bulldozers will pile up the debris there is nothing to their name their names ruthlessly unrecorded but for every person dead there must be at least one other who remembers who they are and where they died and the students watch the tracer bullets and someone will say that they sounded like firecrackers and there are people alive today who are responsible and in whose name will they be judged those human rags the students are nameless but there are people whose names we know and the students left as faint light spread westward across the sky and the students left quietly when dawn arrived like an army sent to murder night.

The Algorithm for People [June 4th | 137/365]

the boy machine knits
his eyebrows into confusion
and shame at his
heavy incorporeal almost nature

tensing up at happy
noises and joyous words
the algorithms of thought
shutting down without warning

we met out here
away from anyone else
not expecting fellow travelers
inside our own brains

I stumble frequently because
I don't pay attention
to the near once
my thoughts stretch far

Sound by Bird [June 1st | 136/365]

Death would have to be a tricky subject for self-conscious birds, who would have to worry about dying in flight and having their well-regarded physiques mangled and grotesqued by wave or stream or stillness.

Staring into the Past [May 31st | 135/365]

I realize from your body language that you assume I was staring at you but in reality I was merely staring into space lost inside my own mind. I apologize, I should have been standing in a desert staring expectantly into the night sky waiting for the center of our galaxy to rise above the horizon.