• The Silence of New York

    I like to be in tune with the music of New York.
    So many simultaneous symphonies.
    So many psychic notes.
    It fills the air in blinding colors.
    If you are one of the lucky few.
    Who colors do coordinate harmonically.

    The instrumentation is beyond richness.
    Always approaching train wreck cacophony.
    Climax and diminuendo.

    The rests are an integral part of this song.
    But they only come in long wave frequency.
    Once in a strange while the silence sets.
    The audience gasps and holds the breath.
    Awaiting the next note.
    Will it come crashing in again?
    With fire and a terrifying chorus of screams.
    Will the next bar blind us with infrared.
    Anticipation is the element that builds this New York City musical mood.

  • Martian Returns Home to Earth

    Martian touches down again on his new blue planet. His red home is long since gone. He’s been to this bar before. It grows familiarity slowly like crystal formations from the salt caves of his youth. This time it seems different. His complexion is somehow paler. His voice is steady with inflections of the native species. Where once situations used to baffle and confuse, he reconciles the mood with modicum of pleasure. The genetic structure unfolds further. Waves of nostalgia pour generously. He now wants to come home to his new home, in the wild frontier of non-chloride social atmosphere. He still checks as his breath deepens. Test it for noxious carbons. It’s safe now. The acclimation has been successful.

  • Die To Be Cool

    Cool people don’t say “touch base”
    Or “FYI.”
    They’re not afraid to cry
    In public places.
    Not hiding broken faces.

    Cool people never give
    A thought to where the time goes.
    Even if it goes to waste.
    Cool life lives not in haste.

    What does the cool one do?
    Chilling feverishly away.
    Never knowing which part must die
    To feed the cool monster inside.

  • Fly Fly Brooklyn Birdie

    Thundering upstairs neighbor
    Where are you going?
    Walking back and forth
    From midnight to morning.

    Your footsteps betray
    A sense of unease
    A life’s work undone
    Malignant ambition.

    Is it a family dynamic
    That’s left you pacing the miles?
    Your mother perhaps who lives downstairs.
    A man burdened as someone’s child.

    Someday you’ll fly lighter than air
    Not even stomp up the stairs
    To the third floor, one farther away
    Then glide off the rooftop and soar.

    Or perhaps your mother may drag you
    Flapping and squawking
    Up to the top of the nest
    And fling you out over the streets of Brooklyn.
    If she knows what’s best.

  • In the Absence of Ambition

    Sometimes, the voices in my head are so loud, they come out of other people’s mouths. The “should” becomes the theme of self destruction. Wayward desires conspire to confiscate the joy of a passion or an honest vocation. If I heed the voices, hurled from surely loving directions, I may become lost in a dilemma of indecision, self reproach, even loathing. Yes, it can be turned against the host–an autoimmune anti agent of urgency.

    If the throttle of messages is regulated, there comes a stillness, pervasive and persuading, to ease the force of steel will. A light and modest unleashing can then take place, in the absence of murderous ambitions.

  • The Tarzan and the Bunny

    Tarzan and Bunny.
    Two sides of the same coin.
    My coin.
    My grandfathers.

    Tarzan was a wild man.
    Bunny was a mild one.

    In pictures I’ve seen,
    The dash and style of the grand one,
    The intense eyes of the shy one.

    Tarzan got his name from his children—a fearful yet affectionate term, earned by holding the attention of six daughters, with volume, and primal paternal gestures.

    Bunny is not so funny. ‘Twas a childhood polio name, perhaps the cause of much hopping shame. The name remained intact, with his wife’s perpetuation biting to the bitter end.

    Tarzan lived large, and wider than beasts from the constrained and neatly maintained forests of convention.

    Bunny died a rich man in a moth-eaten cardigan, with a million dollars in an iron box in a freezer in the basement covered by fifteen year old meat.

    It seems that my coin has fallen most often on the Bunny head side. But Tarzan always lurks below, on the flip side, waiting to swing down the stairs and cry out in a burning jungle madness.

  • Denouement

    An absurd explosion comes Spring.
    Waking violently from her primal sleep.
    Forcing everything out from its decay.
    Into the burning flash.

    Suddenly there is communication
    The air conducts in our favor.
    No two blades of grass alike.
    No souls to occupy the same space.

    Deep deep beneath the winters’ woe
    I managed to stay warm
    The thought of Spring ignited hope.
    Desperation turns to solar flares.

    Incantations are new to be heard
    Floating up from waking spirits.
    A loving denouement cascades
    The formula is tested once again
    And once again chaos fails.
    The blessed circle is closed
    Overlapping with sameness
    Infinitely growing new.

  • Diamond

    My illusion is grand today.
    It presents a new quotient of thrills.
    An infinite amount of space to fill.
    Another chance to find the way.

    Buildings sky and people’s faces.
    Some things of beauty I must turn away.
    Artificial simulations provide no grace.
    The magic floats rose upon the grey.

    Armed with cannons of illusory invention
    I aim trajectory to further bounds.
    This grand facade of surface tension.
    Is coming down.

    A neutron bomb of beauty comes.
    To vaporize the pomp and fluff
    Leave behind only the true one.
    My diamond in the rough.

    I do a lot of scraping on the carbon hardened surface.
    This imaginary protocol of modern life.
    Just below the impenetrable crust lies the interminable purpose.
    Deep deep dreams, dolphins at the bottom of the ocean, my wife.

  • I See the Storms

    I saw a tiny tornado
    On the street
    Just at my feet
    A hundred thousand people
    Who would be witnesses
    Saw nothing

    Life rarely happens below knee level
    In the New York City horizon
    Too many synapses shouting
    Too many body parts
    Anxious and lustful forensics

    Be it granted, a micro twister may not
    To others be the experience of glory
    That it is to me
    It raises many questions
    It invokes the entire universe into a day
    That otherwise has much to bear

    I almost didn’t notice too
    The girl weeping right in front of me
    Another silent tsunami
    Lost to eyes on the open sea

  • Space in Between

    What are these sounds? Vowels and consonant Japanese? It pleases me to know that this city brings the world together.

    Still we all see ourselves as separate, different. Sometimes I see the ever changing infinite variety of an organism. Whole and complete, not in a goofy hippy sense, but in a completely unfathomable scientific mystical babies born from thin air number of stars equals grains of sand why did she do that I’ll never understand sort of way.

    What about the space in between the electrons protons neutrons quarks and strings. It’s an inward fractal spiral of thought if my mortal mind gets caught. It must be love. The intangible antimatter anti energy. The force that binds.

    I’ve pondered this space in between, the thoughts taking me to places I care to never see again. Now there is peace in the not knowing. And that space is growing. Letting in much more of that which I will never know.