He fled when solitude met him,
but he only butt his head
against the bars--anxiety, unmuscularity--
when inside the lion's cage.

Strangely, light shone through the beast's
esophagus. The moon was brighter without
the pack.

As he sits, the clouds roll above the
bowing greenery; they seem
more than just villi,
and the loamy pungency
more fragrant than intestinal musk.

When he questions the world,
it echoes in return,
but an answer would just startle,
and by now he is hardly material.

He will touch the earth again
without knowing. But before then
he would only laugh, and delight
when the world laughs back.

He is in transit. When moving, when still. He biked along the palm-rimmed beachside drive and listened to thoughts lifting off in every direction like planes directed by a lunatic controller and meandering through sky-line thought-paths of "no coconuts fall from these palms, or dates, not with the fit jump-roping blonde beside the picnic table." He biked past and sat. Advil does not halt the throbbing wayward flyers, and if he knew it could he'd give it to the gutter. Stopping thoughts in mid-transit would only drown the passengers in the mid-Atlantic, and stab Marsyas before he could be flayed.

A guise curtsies
and hints at something
somewhere else--

a child bare on dark wet pavement,
a youth trapped in isolation's thicket,
a man alone--

and smiles when it says,
"I'm well too, and yes
it is warm today."

Monosyllables

And I do love her,
thought I as I fell
into her warmth,

but when I break through the imitation
wax paper surface of first sight,
and hit the concrete reminiscence
of other loves,

I see that it will come to nothing--
to monosyllables
or a no-goodbye
disappearance.

But tonight she unexpectedly
enters through the sealed orifices
of my white walled room;

she peaks around the corner
of my eye, winnows
through my bones,

and as if I am a woodwind
through whom her whistling emits ideas,
she sings and I find: she is I, and she is none.

Unfathomable, preposterous, hrmph oomph hachoo hack, wheezed Uncle in the face of my restatement of the age-old novelty. Reason guides us, he cried; logic holds all together. But Uncle, as you speak atoms that once belonged to you float into effluvia, and you disappear into ever-dispersing quanta!

Nonsense!

The monkeys and koi have more sense!

Pfoo; thoughts of I and humanity have built interconnection,

Where?

Here--

What are you doing?

                                      We are together

                                                Let go, get away!

Reason guides movement, momentum.

                                                 

Solace of the woods
stuck in a plot between roads and houses--
solace, solace
are you forever unreal?

Stretches of imagination
that attempt to guess another's thoughts
are less real than wisps of wind
on a calm day.

No rope and grapple
can fly from me to you
so that I may climb into your mind
and have tea with your thoughts,
and genuinely become
acquainted with your heartfelt
intentions.

Instead some spark trips
or some chemical pulse fires
and a green or red ball bounces
in my solitary ball pit,
and I guess,

because our thoughts are as alone
as a dormant black hole--
as a pinch and a pull on a tarp
that imprison all balls in one pit--
that not even a moan is always true.

And yet the madcap still laughs at me
and cries, "You think you know, you think you know!"

Then

Then opens a palm
that holds dirt and glass
and drips rivulets of red,

and tightens a fist,
and with pale finger-walls she hides
like mist, she hides.

But Then's eyes delude
and like Tantalus' food,
she steps back when I grasp,

yet we cannot part. Be
my shadow, Then,
and I always your heart.