So much summer nothing.
How I forget you
in the room to room rush of fall.
How I can't imagine
you ever were.

Catechism of the Vulcan Catholic Church

What is the purpose of consciousness?

The purpose of consciousness
is to raise the intelligence of creation.

Why should consciousness
seek to raise the intelligence of creation?

So that creation may know itself.

Why should creation know itself?

So that it may cease to be lonely
and in ceasing to be lonely
become happy.

Why should creation be happy?

The value of a happy creation
is self-evident
when laid alongside
the current unconsciousness
in which we find creation now.

Nothing

You can make a religion out of Nothing
or a cause or a war.

Sarah 1

Wanted to be a dancer
but her father of the hardware store said No.
So she became a teacher and her daughter Sarah 2
(the family was not so blunt
as to actually name her that)
danced when she should have been
in the chem lab, and married a nobleman
who should have been welding steel.
There daughter Sarah 3.1
danced until something tore
and married an underworld figure.
It was Sarah 3.2 who made it to New York,
whoch was a good thing
because Sarah 2 and her nobleman
werre getting too old
for more tries.

He really looks good --
a nineteenth-century italian composer
with the hair just the right amount of wild.
Staring eyes, gotta love 'em.
And that beak and those cheekbones!
Damn!  Too bad he doesn't write music.

I write what I'm given
said Borges
staring out of the stage
under the lights
he couldn't see
but maybe felt
through his pale skin.
You just don't find
dignity like that anywhere
said the marketing major
forced to see Borges
for his English class
and thinking what kind
of product a guy like that
could front for.

tapping me on the knee
a dead leaf
and it's not even august

Somewhere Else

The bells sound different of an evening,
as if under the water of possibility
and though you feel you should drown,
you walk in this light just fine.

How many people want to be where you are?
Whole nations.  Whole centuries.
Here were poets are smarter and
briefcases lie open to the air.

New Notebook

Nothing
and therefore everything
on the cream-colored
pages.

He left it that way for ten years.

I am
my shadow.

return of the Rick.
welcome back!

tiko

This one woke me up
wearing jagged black rags,
talking in a voice like
roots of a torn-up tree.
There was wind all around
but it didn't come in.
This one's words
went to join the wind.

Poetry doesn't want anything
but everything.
It doesn't ask, doesn't take.
It opens and opens.

I swear that bird
went into a cloud.

I want
to eat
the sky.