WORK IN PROGRESS
Torturing The Earth To Stay The Same
I'm a work in progress,
you could never deal with that.
You always wanted a finished book,
you wouldn't hold anything less than a masterpiece
in your hands.
"These pages are blank.
this chapter needs editing."
I'm a work in progress.
From the shadows of bohemia
where youth is squandered by ideals
that suck it dry like vampires,
and crown it with laurel leaves,
to the white snows of age
where the hand of wisdom shakes,
and kisses hobble with canes
along the trails that love wasted,
I never wrote a thing that couldn't use
improving,
though I never gave birth to a word
I did not find moving.
I built a thousand temples
without a roof.
Gods don't mind the rain.
But you do, and I am reminded
every day by your eyes
looking past me.
You set me down to race with writers
whose pens are covered with roses,
duelists who fell off of cliffs with poems on their lips
and were buried by nations of schoolchildren
watering their words forever.
Without applause, my pages' feet were too big,
their shoulders stooped, their knees knocked,
you judged me by the sound of hands clapping
since to believe in me by yourself
seemed too audacious.
And I never rose above your fear to be alone.
To be first, one must risk solitude:
better to wait, than to encourage.
Work in progress.
But it's not to blame you,
merely to tell you
that that's how it will always be.
I will never be satisfied,
though I love my pen's willingness to
stand like Horatio at the bridge,
even if there is no Rome behind it.
I will always feel like a pigeon
trying to stretch pitiful appendages of feathers
to be the size of eagles' wings;
while my throat,
my pigeon-cooing, pursues the notes
the nightingale sings.
Work in progress.
I'll never reach Eden
because I can't stop running forward,
I already passed Eden by a thousand times,
which is the place where you stoop down
to untie all the knots
made by your inspiration.
Too many blank pages lie ahead,
beating me to death with possibilities.
I can't wait
merely to make my past perfect.
Besides, I can only do this
if I'm standing in the middle of the highway
of my principles;
you try writing novels while you're
dodging cars.
Work in progress.
But I've lost my way.
This wasn't meant to be a lament or an
assault, only an apology.
Because I never finished
the statue. In the middle of our lives,
there's still only a stone from the quarry,
with part of a face.
I could never decide if it
should be happy or sad,
if it should be black or white;
I am still trying to explain,
to the mountain,
why I have a piece of it.
I know.
I know.
My dancing hasn't put bread
on your table;
crowds step on us,
and wonder why you're
with a bum.
I'm a work in progress,
what more can I say?
Tell them that,
see if it can keep their
cruelty away,
which you take upon yourself.
I'm a work in progress.
Though I'll never finish,
maybe one day I'll get one line right,
one line that could change
someone's life, one line that
could send me, untroubled,
into the void,
one line like a bottle of champagne
broken over
the hull of the ship that's launched
into the night.
One line, passed to another warm hand,
perhaps my own, to continue writing
beyond my death,
adding drops of my mind
to this great collective book
whose open pages have the wingspan of time,
this work in progress,
precious and imperfect,
that is Humankind.
Thoughts battling in God's head
I am one
You are another
It is not murder
it's thoughts battling in God's head
The world wants to get up
The world wants to sit down
The world wants to sleep
The world wants to wake
Thoughts battling in God's head
I am one
You are another
It's not war
It's ideas that have taken flesh
We are pitted against each other
in God's brain
trying to move the hands of history,
to pick up gold
or reach for a star
Thoughts battling in God's head,
it's all we are
Do I stay in today
or go out?
Do I dip my brush into paint
that's blue or red?
We're ideas
trying to move the body of the universe,
trying to paint the perfect world
Ideas writing themselves into stone tablets
Ideas writing themselves into gravestones
Ideas coming with bouquets of roses
Ideas dropping bombs
Thoughts battling in God's head
He has dark impulses
that must be swept aside
with a broom of light
Just like us
whose glory the night nibbles on
with masks
and Judas kisses
We must clear his mind to act
Sit in the quiet space of meditation
that will make goodness rise above
the shortcuts
that weigh more
We must quiet the demons
that have assumed bodies
Sparks of soldiers flashing in
God's brain
Dreams of green pastures
Nightmares of machine guns
Thoughts battling in God's head
Beautiful thoughts can't
let the sickness win
Resist the neurosis!
Don't wash your hands every time
you touch a door knob,
you can't live that way
Don't fix a bayonet
to your narrow view,
don't let righteousness
lead you astray
Beautiful thoughts
are the nightmares of those
who settled down and made homes
where they were lost
Beautiful thoughts keep walking
in the woods
I am the flesh and blood
of a beautiful thought
I am God
dreaming of an angel
in the concentration camp
of what you have
done to the earth
Thoughts battling in God's head
Thoughts with guns
and thoughts with books
thoughts that have accumulated armies
like sludge
that clogs a drain
Thoughts of sickness and thoughts of freedom
using men to make decisions
in God's brain
The Universe is losing its stars,
growing bald
from all the testosterone
Thoughts need many men to
move God's hand,
no man can do it all alone
I need you,
together we can make a river of thoughts
we can change God's mind
No man can do it all alone
which is why I write,
dig up tons of words like coal
to fuel the fight
Thoughts battling in Gods' head
to hold the skies up
or bury hope with slime,
like water rising from a backed-up toilet bowl
bubbling into the dawn
Thoughts that are men giving up their lives,
leaping in front of other thoughts
that have taken the form of bullets
Thoughts that leap into the river
to save drowning cats
Thoughts that are men
crucifying themselves
on crosses of words that kill them
coming out,
like the sting of the bee
that destroys
the hero of the honeycomb
No one can survive the ecstasy
of such love!
Thoughts battling in God's head
Thoughts that are like impulses to shoplift,
to rape, to smash a window,
thoughts well-dressed,
thoughts well-armed,
thoughts that draw plows through God's brain,
making furrows called borders
in his gray matter,
thoughts that put flags on mountains
that belong only to their own height
Thoughts battling in God's head
I see a $10 bill fall out of
someone's pocket, do I keep it
or give it back?
Thoughts battling in God's head
Thoughts embodied by men,
thoughts embodied by nations
Some men and some nations keep the $10
Where will we take Gods' brain?
What command shall we give His hands?
Should we put the sun up in the day
or let the night last forever?
Thoughts battling in God's head
That's all we are
And that's enough
Thoughts battling in God's head
Beautiful thoughts,
come together,
we must move God's hands
which move the world
Torturing The Earth To Stay The Same
The sinner in Hell.
For a whole century
he screamed,
standing in the flames.
He would have wept,
he would have repented,
but the fire was so hot
it wouldn't let
regret enter his heart,
it wouldn't let his voice
form the words, "I'm sorry."
Remorse is a creature of the intermediate zone
between gluttonous delight
and sheer agony,
the flames hurled him past learning;
like a rocket he flew
beyond the world of flowers healing from the winter,
past the blue dome of mothers
into the darkness
of pure torture.
Nothing good can hold onto a scream,
nothing good can cling to its slippery sides,
nothing good can resist
its furious gyrations without falling off.
Nothing was discovered except that
after a century,
somehow, the fire began to hurt less.
The part of him that could feel pain
was burned away,
he stood there, numb, with a strange chill
in his body, that's all,
feeling next to nothing;
and then, as consciousness slowly
returned to him,
he thought again of his sin
and it seemed to him less than God's.
The ant scurries around in his little world
inhabited by giants.
With his antennae to the pavement,
following the trail of other ants,
tracking down grains of sugar in a desert of stone,
he barely comprehends
the enormous feet that, every so often, fall out of the sky
like meteors.
He lives constantly
in their line of fire
playing the odds,
in their shadow
his every step, his every rush towards some
miniscule source of joy,
is a gamble,
a game of roulette
with a gun pointed to his head.
Utterly oblivious to him
because their eyes are fixed on the horizon,
giants hunt him with a lethal lack of intent.
From dawn to dusk
salvoes of their blind feet
come crashing down on his ant paths.
It is a miracle
not to be obliterated.
It is a miracle
not to be destroyed without a flower or a tear.
By the hundreds,
every day, they die, the ants:
squashed remains
shared by shoes and sidewalk.
Under the heel of tasks flying towards completion,
smaller tasks succumb.
Every once in a while,
a giant looks down
and changes his stride
so that an ant can live.
Flake world.
Everyone's afraid,
uses other people
like fireworks
to light up the night
inside their scar;
uses other people
like bread you feed to the ducks,
throws crumbs of reality
to every lonely hour of the clock
till the dawn comes,
the dawn of being a machine;
the relief of belonging
to someone else.
Imaginary friends never cough,
never get hurt
by a careless needle.
You don't have to remodel yourself, porcupine,
to feel the thrill,
don't have to control your quills.
Robinson Crusoe doesn't have to remember
how to speak,
his vocal cords, ruined by silence,
are singing in his own mind;
and there's no one not to hear.
How embarrassing it is for the unvisited bookshelf
to be kissed by a feather duster,
it's almost better that no one ever reads a book!
But imaginary friends are so thin,
like balloons not blown up to size.
Inflate them with a real person kept at bay,
borrow someone's longing in the dark,
someone's sensual expectation
like a belly dancer's arms coming closer,
gather together a piece of face, a piece of voice,
an e-mail opening like a rose,
combine them all in the perfect mosaic of love,
love without a future;
hurl a possibility like the moon
into the sky
to circle you, forever,
out of range
of your imperfections.
When the dancer discovers she is alone,
she'll go,
but meanwhile, you will have fed.
Like a mosquito,
the blood of others' hopes
sustains you.
You're not a flake,
that's only how it looks from the outside:
you're a starving coward
armed with the latest technology.
Flake world,
Flake kings and queens
thrashing about,
not so helpless as they seem.
There is a method in their madness,
a way of smashing reality to bits with dreams
that are built out of reality's debris.
I don't believe
there's another real soul
in Flake world,
so I'll dream my dream
without you.
Patient, patient,
let the others fall away
Fabius,
Saladin
A thousand years I'll wait
to find the truth
the dancing flea will tire
a thousand years I'll wait for you
I'll wait for the answer
Let the rush hour fade
into a deserted platform
let the shouting circus
become a fossil
in a rock, let it need canyons
to extricate it
For the blazing comet's second
I'll stare a thousand years into the night sky
I'm not in a hurry
The grandeur of something right
is worth centuries
of what is wrong
I'll search for one drop in the sea
Time is not as much of an enemy
as the wrong drop
Paradise is all about getting on your hands and knees
and making a needle in a haystack
the center of your life
It is all about being a cat
by the mouse-hole of a hushed truth
that comes once every hundred years
a truth that's quieter than a whisper,
like the signing of a deaf mute
The hand that holds the knife
remembers touching someone, once, with love
it's that memory
that the world
needs to extract from the senility
of its vigor
like an obscure date,
like someone's name
a secret
of love
a secret of hope
lost in
the Alzheimer's
of utility
it will come
once you sit down
like the sphinx
in the desert you chose
and wait
and wait
to become human
Patience,
let everything fast and immediate
submit
to the eye
that does not blink
to the eye that waits
for what we have waited for
forever
Before we're immortal,
we're mortal.
Before we are forever
we are one minute.
Before we are like the sky
through which bullets pass
without drawing a drop of blood,
we are flesh that weeps from
hands that don't know how to love.
Before we are everything
we are nothing.
Before we have returned
we are a grain of sand.
Before we know
we tremble.
Before we hear the ocean roar
the laughter of waves
and the preaching of the tides
we hear little voices
stabbing us with needles.
Before we fall
we run away.
Before we taste
we spit out happiness.
Before we feel
we mistreat ourselves,
we start the world landslide.
Before we see
we hate.
Before we understand
we cry tears in circles.
I lost you
and stopped trying
till an angel said,
"Get up."
The ticket to Heaven
burns our hands.
The train of freedom
passes so slowly
through hills
of blood.
We're not wrong to weep.
But we're not wrong to get up.
As a tiger rips you to shreds
it is right to look
at the mountain top;
and it is right to bleed.
Before we're immortal,
we're mortal.
Beautiful-shell snail,
step on him and his fragile shell
is shattered
in a second;
but your remorse
lasts for hours.
The hardest shells
are the ones
that are made of your
conscience.
My happiest moments were spent alone
flying in my little plane
without you
but with you
because I was going to tell you
all about it
I didn't speak to anyone
I didn't say a word
In joy and fear
I sat
strapped in to the mighty cockpit
For the engine of my little plane
was as huge as a soul
as huge as the heart
of a man who saves his brother
who pulls him, soaking wet,
out of the sea
on a rainy night
that everyone else is asleep
From my little plane I could see
All alone I flew
like a crazy angel
who drank
one too many clouds
I rose and fell
I dove like a hawk
charging
at prey on the earth
with talons of love
to carry it off into
the sky
I climbed high
above the selfish mouths
that turn the flesh of dreamers
into practical things
I ran away from all of you
into heights private and personal
where something I couldn't see
caressed the body
that you abandoned
I flew
I flew and flew
I spent my life alone
in my little plane
the only place you let me live
away from you
in my little plane
not deserting you
trying to show you
alone
but with you
escaping
fighting
joyful but
afraid I might crash
before I finished
and be nothing but pieces of metal
in a mouth of fire
on a hill
I flew
I flew
laughing and afraid
lonely
and beyond loneliness,
untouched by it,
closer to the moon
than to solitude
with no friend
except the friend
who dwells in high places
who lost her arms
in an accident
of the mind
She makes love now
without a trace
leaving the body desperate
and the soul flying
I flew
flew and flew
alone but content
more content than you can know
without you
but with you
because all the time
I meant to show you
that there can be such a thing
as a man in the sky