This Beautiful Planet

- 1978-

Please tell me that I was a good child
And that I did everything right
And that the atmosphere was exactly certain
I want you to love me
In ways that you never have
So that I become a forgotten world
With rainbow sunrises over dark green trees
And the cooling of the day
Becomes normal again
We will sit and watch the body of water
That we once called a sort of death
You know even in my dreams
You say I’ll never get it right
This is not a dream
We are burning here with no escape
But no matter how many times
They talk about the moon
It does not take a poet
To know that the moon
Is still only an illusion
Only an illusion
The moon calls out to all of us
Come back, it says
But we don’t hear it
Already on our way
To somewhere

Me and the Otters

Love makes you feel alive 
Johnny my animal you have no idea
How beautiful you are to me in the morning
When it is 5 a.m. and I am lonely
Everyone is dying around me
I eat spinach bread to keep my sanity, I am
Like Lisa in the mental unit with my father
I am Muriel who throws tables
I play blackjack with the clowns
Oh yes I do all that for a salad
Your black hair is better than a piece of fate
I find in the sky when I am looking
45,000 miles above the earth
For things that make it all worthwhile
I do this for you but you will never know
How dear you are to me
You chop leaves in your house in New York City
Dream of glamorous women and even too they are great
No one will ever love you like I do that is certain
Because I know the inside of your face
Is a solid block of coal and then it too 
Something that is warm like warm snow
I hold the insides of you in my palm
And they are warm snow, melting even
With the flurries glutted out of the morning
When I get on the plane the stewardess tells me to let loose 
My heart, the man next to me was the same man as last week
Whoever those postmodernists are that say
There is no universal have never spent any time with an animal
I have played tennis with so many animals
I can't count the times I have let them win
Their snouts that were wet with health
Dripping in the sun, then we went and took a swim
Just me and the otters, I held them so close
I felt the bump of ghosts as I held them.
There is no poem that will bring back the dead
There is no poem that I could ever say that will
Arise the dead in their slumber, their faces gone
There is no poem or song I could sing to you
That would make me seem more beautiful
If there were such songs I would sing them
O they would hear me singing from here until dawn

To be the thing

To be the name uttered, but not to have the burden to be
To be the name said, but not heard
To not breathe anymore, to be the thing
To be the thing being breathed
To not be about to die, to be already dead
To not have to disappoint
To not have the burden of being late
Or punctual
To not eat, to not have to eat
To not feel anything
To not be the one whose affect is criticized
To not pick up the fallen over boxes
To be everywhere but the boxes or plates
To not break the plates
To be beyond breaking
To have been broken 
To not bear the burden of not being present
To not have to feel the pain of being hurt
To have transferred that pain over
So that hurt is only part of the imagination
And the imagination is everywhere, is every color
To not contain color, to be color
To not make sound, to be sound
To not have language, to echo, to plan language
To be the stream of words
To not be sad for
To not have those to be sad for
To not eat alone
To not fuck those who do not find your corpse attractive
To not fuck
Or stuff
To be ashes and non-placed
Not displaced, but to not be in any place
To enter the ocean on not a whim, but a physical force
Where there is no center
Where there is no safety
There never was
There was never any anger
There was never anything to look at
I never looked at anything
I just went and walked
I tried to love
But love is hopeless
And I have lost all hope, so bleak I am beyond
I am beyond what might be considered low
There is low nor high, space or time, I have 
Gone away from that which is uttered
I have not burdened to be spoken of or spoken for
To croak everyday to the livelong bog
I do not speak a thing
I exist
No, no I don't
I never did
And you may have
But I never did 
And you may have called out for me
But I was already gone
And I am already there
That which you speak of
I am already spoken for
In a world of light and ashes
They all call my name
They have waited for me
And now I know
I was always
Already there 
With them

Related Poems

How We Lived

           2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022…

And sparrows unthread nests, bring their young nothing
And shadows best seen inside the pitch of a cave
And three hearts stabbed on a train because of courage
And jacarandas flick cinder and blacken the ground
And the harbor horn is a creature roping hulls to the reefs
And the reefs gleam with chrome and absence
And absence is welcome
The bullet is welcome
The malignant cell is welcome
The gray faces and their merciless tongues are welcome
And a father is reptilian in his regard. And a mother stitches
Her lips like a wound.  And the wound smells of silence and its blaring
And a child lays hands on a mine.  And a man swallows his lies without measure
And a woman is told she is less than him she is less than the bodies left
Behind, less than the unmade, the never-was, the dirt forgotten by the tracks
And I no longer care about the losses. I no longer care if the last 
Bit of bark is stripped from the earth, if the starved possum survives
The road, whether my neighbor coughs blood while she drags off a red
Or the hand turning the knob means me harm. I no longer fear 
The inexorable diagnosis, the oceans rising to such heights
In my dreams they are monstrous but we are all still running 
Towards each other, in this latest hour, refusing to shutter our eyes.

Doing

I often don’t know what to do. Or if I want to.

Dawn has long broken while I still drag my feet in the mud inside my head, hope for coffee, make a B-flat moan. To prepare the plunge into action. Or not.

Maybe I want to cast only a passing shadow. Feel like my mother’s “Thank God” when she took off her corset.

But I am worried there’s something I ought to be doing. Afraid I’ll die without having done anything. “Realized” myself, you call it, but wouldn’t that just mean limited myself? A cement mixer stuck in one motion, even if it helps build a house?

So I delude myself into thinking I’m doing something when thinking. Or when descending into the night with the cat and dreams of the cat.

You say, no doing without sweat of the face, thorns and thistles, and bringing forth children.

Should I look, instead of worrying about fine distinctions that escape my eyes? Listen, instead of fretting about the size of my ears? But can I cultivate my garden without becoming a cabbage head?

The hand gets ready to write. Could we not call this manual labor? Or a stage in the Great Work of rendering the corporeal cat incorporeal while giving her body to the bodiless word? Even if it‘s from despairing of my own body?

You say, my writing is so slow it’s more like gravitational condensation. Or dust gathering on the cleaning supplies.

It’s true I’m dawdling as if I had time to watch the formation of geological layers. Though night already seeps through my brittle bones.

I certainly don’t know what to do to end my days “gracefully.” But the body dies all through our life, thousands of cells every second.

So everything should be very clear.

"The world is a beautiful place"

                The world is a beautiful place 
                                                           to be born into 
if you don’t mind happiness 
                                             not always being 
                                                                        so very much fun 
       if you don’t mind a touch of hell
                                                       now and then
                just when everything is fine
                                                             because even in heaven
                                they don’t sing 
                                                        all the time

             The world is a beautiful place
                                                           to be born into
       if you don’t mind some people dying
                                                                  all the time
                        or maybe only starving
                                                           some of the time
                 which isn’t half so bad
                                                      if it isn’t you

      Oh the world is a beautiful place
                                                          to be born into
               if you don’t much mind
                                                   a few dead minds
                    in the higher places
                                                    or a bomb or two
                            now and then
                                                  in your upturned faces
         or such other improprieties
                                                    as our Name Brand society
                                  is prey to
                                              with its men of distinction
             and its men of extinction
                                                   and its priests
                         and other patrolmen
                                                         and its various segregations
         and congressional investigations
                                                             and other constipations
                        that our fool flesh
                                                     is heir to

Yes the world is the best place of all
                                                           for a lot of such things as
         making the fun scene
                                                and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
                                         and singing low songs of having 
                                                                                      inspirations
and walking around 
                                looking at everything
                                                                  and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
                              and even thinking 
                                                         and kissing people and
     making babies and wearing pants
                                                         and waving hats and
                                     dancing
                                                and going swimming in rivers
                              on picnics
                                       in the middle of the summer
and just generally
                            ‘living it up’

Yes
   but then right in the middle of it
                                                    comes the smiling
                                                                                 mortician