Man in the Maze

Here's a reworked way old poem to celebrate over [allegedly] 10,000 page views of poems that have appeared on this here Rabbit's Gone Missing over the past years. (Which is cool but scary because we *know* lots of those views are courtesy of our spammer frenz around the world. *wink*) 

Apologies for posting so rarely for so long. Cheers to all, especially all who actually read...and even more to whomever actually finds something to enjoy, whether written by me or by those wonderfully alive mystics in South/West Asia whose words we English-speakers have only attempted to translate into our own world of language. Next up: Rabi'a (Al-Basra). Look her up!

John Singer Sargent :sketches

[a word from the muse]

Fate is not the architect. Fate is for 
weak gods and bad storytellers. Which 

is why you’re so enraged with this 
inaction, this gliding track, this resigned

fall from the skyscraper

Which has no builder, no path, no root 
language of travel. So who’s your enemy 

now? You’ve been set up, maybe; 

you’re both double agents, you and 

fate, more in love with what can 
never be when what is still forms

Collage that we are here for.

The mystery we keep unfolding
and folding into birds of prey that,

at rest, fit over one another into a rebuilt
umbilical cord that keeps saying we're

always home. While always lost.


Which is why what we will make is still
mystery to me. From which I am drawn,

made, drawn


From so many smoldering ash-stricken
remains of what was once forest, hill, home

mansion deer bone burial mound past lives
in all the ephemera that gave and hid life and

death and life and—


So it’s a heavy load, sleeping while this 
castle’s built out of thin air, the lion 

drinking dry the lake lap 
by patient lap because 

your spoon was inadequate

As all the nights you’ve fought back 
against the tide and the sand, your back 

to my hot frozen form always there 

shadowing silhouette but never quite 

touching

What is so much bigger than you. You 

have no idea, you've no ideas,               you have 


More than a conspiracy, more than plans 
to take over the world; the idea is about you 

walking from here to there, getting into 
your car, choosing not to kiss, getting out 

to kiss; 
thinking, 

not speaking. 

Speaking and thinking

It will become beauty again

Your junkyard heap and flow of perfect 
juxtaposition of every surface you believe in, 

I love it all

Like those green turns of the circuit

board pulled from a jagged slum dump—all 

its silver circles and minute black holes, its 
curves and symmetry, its convergence and 

imbalance—soon 

to be made new and become 

even beauty 
again.  

Exacting.  A 

galaxy unto itself

And the circle maze hidden in the 
blanket, the basket, the locked box

that's mystery yet line-carved into a single 
woven point, its lines moving with you, 

seamless, 

no real detour 


needed. Yet it will take your whole 
life to travel, whole, beyond the linear

fall of dominos, walls only now 
we escape. Only now


We create.