Crossing a Distance

justice is a caravan
of individuals
their dreams shifting
between confluence & conflict …

Your Voice Alone

your voice
alone
in the humid sphere
of competing
midnights
ancient unswerving …

The Presumed World

these days everything bends toward conspiracy
—the wealth of nations the family bound
by democratic ideals as applied the outliers
united in opposition to time’s flow
the problems the solutions the stories
that recount what is or is not yet known—
all at once both natural & unnatural
—we are each of us a conspiracy of tendencies
the adopted pragmatic mischief of semi-
conscious [...]

Holy Vessels & an Invitation

if your road is wine-dark & you drink
& your blood is sunlight & swimming
if the little freedoms that form you
taste like clean winter air
if the whole of time finds itself & disappears
in the geometry of your breath
if you are prone to becoming
those things you always doubted
if genuflection is an artform
& you place all questions inside [...]

Lessons for Cross-cultural Communication in What was Not Done in 19th Century France

We must, in this age of integration and complexity, work to recognize those areas where we can learn from cultures that build into our own, that enrich or sustain us, that give humanity, broadly, its metaphysical sense, its creative-adaptable quality. We know France as a place of great culture and profound philosophical insights and a highly developed legal system. But we tend not to think of France as a country whose most famous culture is simply one of many that came to dominate, and very really did stamp out the other cultures competing for survival, in a fractious agrarian society outside the capital, in the 19th century.

Like Egypt & Strawberries

Landscape of desire
timing and fluctuation
all the improbable flurried tasking
we undertake thinking
that nothing else can be
or can be justified
or can be ours
to own and savor …

The Silt Quarry : negotiations with silence

Tight sectarian interim
Waiting for news of successes of fortitude
Waiting for hope to make gains on quiet panic
An army of would-be critics is massing
Time is being distilled to its essence
Pressing compressing
Misery comes winnowing hindrance shimmering into view
Hunted by satirical improvements over small dominion
This world is a sketch tattooed into weakness…

Assumptions Snowball

he speaks one hopeful half-truth
because the whole truth is unknowable
or pregnant with peril
& she hears most but not all of the half-truth
because she too has filters erected
a discipline for “seeing rightly”
if not clearly
& they agree in part
& fail to agree elsewhere
& more than half of this process
remains concealed…
with the passage of time
the half-sense of [...]

Honeyed Things

“With a bundle of fruits & honeyed things”
her summation of the whole imperfect journey
on the verge of arrival
as the palate of her mind
touched down on the nature of surrounding space…