We’ve All Been Asleep

We've all been asleep for a dozen years,
So, when we wake, vigorously alive,
As the creeping armies of night arrive,
We will wash them out to sea with our tears.
The cannibals will have themselves to eat.
The king and queen will summon a viper
To drive away the song and the piper,
But hear only their own hearts cease to beat.
What we will make of our new universe
Depends (like the fine point of a spindle)
On how much pain or love we will kindle.
Will we invite a new, more evil curse?
Sleep on, nothing will happen while we do.
The prince's kiss has changed into a moue.

Tanka, 10/15/26

The loudest cricket

In my yard never ceases,

Except when I sleep.

He began so late this year,

My October turned August!

Note: Only male crickets chirp.

War

Nations fight War because they have no choice.
Men silence with bomb, rifle, and the sword —
Trying to bury Death's insistent voice
(Though a command is real War's godlike word).
By killing each other men will kill War,
At least that's what they're told by king and czar,
Dictator, minister, and president.

A doctor, my dad had to shoot a man,
A "Jap" who burst into his patients' tent.
War keened, "First, do harm!" — the man's blood ran.
We are all divided into two camps,
Those who fight a war and those who do not.
War offers the latter up to his champs,
Then rallies them all toward riot and rot.

The Four Elements

Eclipse ashes smudge the air

The four no longer breathe.

The earth is a sucking wound.

The earth is bud and bone.

What once was green is red.

What once was dead, aether. 

“Some still say they are four.

I tell you there are but three,”

Says Lady Cobweb twisting —

Ganglions dangling from a slot.

She checks her own pulse — blood

Beats like tines on a crosscut saw,

Always anything but a waltz,

Erratic, and nobody's fault.

Haiku, 10/6/26

I found this in pencil on the inside back cover of my ageless copy of Salinger's Franny and Zooey, which I've had since I was in my teens. There were several drafts. If you've read the book, you'll know there's a lot of Zen in it, which must have spurred me to write this haiku.

A broken pebble —

Sand and mountain together,

Also permanent.

Know One and Two

One

Some think trees know each other

As an unborn child knows its mother —

Receptivities to stasis and change

Continually rearrange

The molecules of a form of mind

As they perpetually unwind.

“Some think” has become all

That’s left of the old universal.

Two

We can’t tell anyone to know,

Don’t even know what knowing is,

Where it comes from, its genesis.

Things we know just come and go.

We can’t force anything to stay,

Especially anything we say.

Everything we know is “as though,”

A nothing become contingent,

Mindlessly intelligent.

There’s no bird smarter than a crow,

Or so it’s said by learned men,

Who can count from one to ten,

But find it hard to explain how

Crows never fly in a straight line.

As if seeking some strict design,

We fly from not wanting to know.

 

Haiku, 10/27/26

Light from a prism

Moves along my bedroom wall —

My sun’s opened eye.