I get distracted easily.

I think the way to enjoy a live performance
is to pick out the most beautiful woman in the audience
and laugh and clap only when they do.
or
I think the way to enjoy a beautiful woman
is to take them to live performance
and laugh and clap only when everyone else does. 
or
I think the only way to enjoy laughing and clapping
is to do a live performance
with an audience full of beautiful women.

all I meant to say was

all I meant to say was

"here's the place that made me,"
or at least
"here's where I don't feel guilty
for my mind drifting."

and
"here are my margins
and necessary empty spaces
all pushed outside"

location, location, location
like a constellation of thumbtacks
in a cork-board map
or a chorus of crickets, each loud voice
specific and unknown.

all I meant to show you was
my state, a field, my origin.

water, place, and names

Along the heritage waters of Corinth,
triremes once knew the coast
and held along the continental shelf.

I have to be known by a landscape, scoped into the diorama...

A gudiye is silent, it pushes the floes
of Icy Bay along its ridges
and the Tlingit hunt seal this way.

...where the landmine is sacrilege to the Earth.

The canoe and the kayak are their places,
with the personality of a river
and the width of a man's arm.

a vivid cinema dream I had in the middle of the afternoon

I was probably eleven years old with a younger brother
who ran behind me out of the station wagon,
around the A-frame and through the woods.

Mother had worked out a deal for childcare and vacation
at the cabins of our friends.
The first night set up the scene of a pale savanna landscape
and dust in the 70's.
It was immature exploration and news of a grandfather
who had recently and unfortunately gone away.
Then, "come in, have dinner and go to sleep, kids."

The second day was a drive to an estate sale at his house.
The widow was there in a chair in the corner
and my brother and I explored the trinkets
of an early time
in this man's life.
On overhearing the adults' conversation, I learned
he had spent the last several years
journaling evidence to convict a man, who was deep in crime.

That man came into the house next, dark and rough and tall
and he brought three others with him.
He had no respect or use for us boys, so he ignored us.
I think my mother was petrified, my father wasn't around.
They had come for the proof.
He had passed away but the grandfather's
paper trail was still haunting them.

They figured it out soon enough, that what they came for
was hidden in the second-hand sale.
An old camera still had film it in, so they ripped it out
but the film wasn't ruined, it showed black outlines and schematics.
I pretended to help examine the negatives, holding them to the light,
and I found it.
I had to quickly hide the incrimination in my lap.
Then they found a sticky typewriter ribbon of his article
and that too I had to wad up and shove beneath the table.
I had to show them everything they found was meaningless,
"It's just his transactions and stories," I lied.
I had the feeling they wouldn't be merciful if I was found out.

I wrapped everything up in newspapers and colored paper
and made an excuse for leaving,
though I know I must have looked guilty on my way outside.

I came out the front porch and onto the dry lawn.
A brown sedan was gently coming down the dirt road,
a man with his young son in the right seat. I think he knew the family.

I made them stop, threw my armload into the backseat
and said "here's all the evidence you'll need
now get the hell out of here."
He heard the urgency in my voice.  He understood me,
he turned the car around,
and he sped away.

But the road was quickly blocked by the henchmen
and their long cars and the tall man was soon there too.
From where I was down the street,
I could hear him yelling and see him look into the backseat,
freeze for an instant,
then shoot a dirty glare down towards me
and I knew it was all over.

It was dusk by now.  I quickly climbed into my own car
and though it took me a moment to understand,
I put it into gear and accelerated as fast as I could
toward the group in the road.
I could feel myself picking up speed.

I could feel myself waking up, now, in anticipation of the crash.
I had to decide whether to wake or recommit.
I knew the story wouldn't be authentic, so I got up.

east is a vector

east is a vector,
on the maps a stubborn serigraph
though two blocks east of here
the gyros are concrete
and the used furniture is nearly abandoned
and a recording studio is dressed like it's abandoned
for safekeeping.

an atlas is the compass-card collage and key.
I can adore a place name
before I meet the landscape.

at a backyard sale were biblical texts, ancient blazers,
and high school primers
for each subject three decades ago,
and an outdated road map, more valuable now.

in western thought, life is directions:
high school is a venue, university an avenue
marriage a journey, and the furniture store
is still two blocks east.

there's no love in a punch card

oyster once a week and morning twice a year,
short fragment of synesthesia and memory
like an old time card, a routine perforation
so my faith is in card stock, correction.

what a visceral road trip! the whole effort
reminds me of catching a fire with fishing line
sleep moves us both, I think, more than anything.

an outline

still above

violent spiral
hot damn hurricane over
satellite image

the crust of a planet - part one

whenever I look down--straight down if that were possible--
I see all we humans have done to the landscape and our infrastructure
we build to make life optimal or efficient or easy or familiar.

but what strikes me
is not that we are tearing up the soil
or ripping off rings of bark

nor is it that we're becoming advanced
or that our civilization's blueprint is spelled out in roads.

what strikes me
is that we're all children
digging holes to China and not getting very far
before we give up and try again a little further along.

and that we're clawing at our planet to make it a reflection
of ourselves, but our fingernails are still only in the varnish.

the crust of a planet - part two

along the wooded hills of the South we carve long corridors
for our power lines, the grassy pencil marks through the geography,
the graphite that links our spaced cultures.

electricity takes the shortest distance, but highways wander
at an engineer's whim and follow hillsides for the view.

between Purcell and Lexington, 77 is a bridge
cleaner than the mud and river it spans, and riding its correct latitude.

and we fight with nature to prove there are four cardinal directions
but water doesn't mind direction, only height and temperature.
we are laying our graph paper over ink blots and wax drops.

the crust of a planet - part three

but I've forgotten two things:

we aren't foreign and our metropolises are spiderwebs or cobwebs,
a creation of nature and in turn part of the natural world.
we like to claim we're apart from it like a tattoo is foreign
to the complex biology underneath

or like the printed word doesn't interact with the cells
that were pulped and dried and bound up underneath.
but life and the inanimate are only a series of steps apart.

the other is that I've only been looking down.

the clouds are a part of our earth's crust,
they have only escaped upward for a turn.
and our engines send plumes, which I contend isn't poison
but oil paint that's difficult to manage.

take time

Take this time for yourself, but to be healed.
I think you are complex with nothing on and nothing on your mind.
You are a colorful universe puzzle like an apartment complex.