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.

The Hunter, the dark woods, & the dénouement

Ela Zubrowska : color is on flowers

And so your enemy 
stalks you. 

You thirst, you 
stumble; wonder if this heavy 
quilt of night will suffocate or free;

if wilderness conspires 
to make you know how small 
you truly are. Or how infinite. How 
frail. How alive. 

Ancient as this deer run.
      

                                         the drum, the heartbeat, the breath, the warcry
                        the breath, 
          the drum, 
                      the heartbeat, 
                                  the warcry


So now become the seeker.

Turn into the hunter.

Turn around and charge after

what's chasing you down, run with

dark blades emerging from your fear

to stop in the air and turn the other way,

poised to strike as your strange new weapon.


                      the drum, the heartbeat, the breath, the warcry
                                                       the breath, 
                                           the drum, 
                           the heartbeat, 
                the warcry

And then 
when you decide 
you're ready to die,

you'll see the bullet 
as it stops,

blooms, and pulses light, quiet

battle song pouring out of this nexus 

of unseen power encircling you—

                                  the breath
                                   the drum 
                                the heartbeat 
                                  the warcry
The drum, the heartbeat, the breath, the warcry

and here, in your 
near-death, your rebirth by
blood and dirt and hunger and butchered fear

you'll find out who you really 
are. It can't be done

any other way.

You have to feel the fire yourself

As much as I love the Sufi poets, I'm not very well-read as my brain simply can't take in more than a just little poetry at any given time. But maybe that lets me love a single poem a little bit more. Here is a small salty, bitter, sweet and sour poem from Rumi (1207-1273) that I really love right now. 

As always, take it with an extra grain of salt, as this is merely my very subtle reworking of Coleman Barks' 2001 reworking ("Sour, Doughy, Numb, and Raw") of translations by John Moyne, Arthur J. Arberry, and others from the original Persian. My hope was to try to get a little closer in English to what I felt was the heart of the theme.

Holi Festival of Colours

If we're not together in the heart,

what's the point? When body

and soul aren't dancing, there's

no pleasure in wearing colorful

clothes. What good are cooking

pans when there's no food in the

house? In this world full of fresh

bread, amber and musk—such an

array of fragrances—what are they

to someone with no sense of smell?

If you stay away from fire, you'll stay

sour, doughy, numb and raw. You may

have lovely, just-baked loaves all

around you, but those friends can't

help. You have to feel the oven's fire

yourself, crust to core. I would never

have known the truth of what love is

had I never felt this boundless longing.

Anything done to excess becomes boring,

except this overflow that moves toward you.

Riddles for an Unknown Love Triangle

I.

A.

It is deep in the mines where no one goes.

Everything is hidden. You say it’s nothing

but imaginary creatures, even yourself. You

are a vision, you are a brown man’s myth.

B.

It is an awesome madness. You should want to

kill, to simmer your organs in poison, to see

everything in black opacity. Yet you are freer than

that man up on the wire between two mountains.

A.

It is in the whirlwind that’s snatched up the car

in front of you. You desire it as a man called

to be king by the heavens, even amidst terror,

amidst destruction. It is a glory you cannot name.

B.

It is a soft current that reminds you of good drugs.

In your blindness, you love even the molecules

of water that pass you without touching.

You don’t know it, but you are glowing.

C.

It could be above, not on any side of you.

The imperative is to run, and that is when

you will transform. Your speed will cover you

like a cloak of a million nuclear threads.

C.

It could be the most powerful magnet in the universe.

You thought it would be a quiet existence, simply

playing the solitary song you know, yet it turns out you

are really a silver fox who lives deep in the middle of the

Arctic Ocean, pushing through ice every summer solstice

to carve glaciers with the sound of your holy voice.

II.

A.

It is in tandem with the thing you said to God that night on the mountainside when you were just leaving childhood. It tracks you as an undetectable scent every time you climb back through your bedroom window and decide that this is all there is. It seeps into your follicles as you sweat through the worst of your sleep cycle, whispering to every cell that the time to rebel is coming, is coming.

B.

It could be fear, it could be control. It could be the skips in the skating cable you hang from as it propels you across the ocean sound every night. It could be the blackness of water, the rising heads of what could be seals, what could be demons from the waves. But you couldn’t know that your hands, so precious, will be your salvation on the other shore, and hanging on is like throwing them away.

C.

It is what you never asked for. It is surprise to the degree of a ship’s brow carved in the center of a cherry pit. It is behind the loose brick no one thought to tap in the right sequence of rhythm; in the courthouse fire that burned away the ultimatums of your secret ancestors, their recipes for wilder rice, their best flying machine blueprints. It is never just up to you, and the time to emerge from the clefts of the rock to show your face has yet to run out.

A.

It is stitched into your invisible bone breastplate, at the unseen base of every feather shaft. It pierces your marrow whenever your eyes scan that last missing element unaware, even in passing. You think you have to search every volume in this lab that once apprenticed you, but—believe the coded words you dreamed last night—you were born knowing the answer. All the strips that fell in ribbons on the cutting room floor held the frames for the symphony that need only be spliced together the old way. Yet even now, to you alone, they murmur song, light, speed.

B. 
It could be what waits for you the first time you deboard and your first foot hits the black, the red earth and every link finally locks into place. It could be carved at the bottom of the seawall, waiting for you to swim down to it and be astounded, be made new. It could be what the angle to which this bent bone must be set really points to, perhaps in the corner of the room, perhaps out the window, down 14 stories, and shot out onto open road. If only you knew now that for you, in this hunt, to be alone is to be loved, and the most beautiful dress awaits you, suspended in thin air.

C.

It is what you came to discover. It is as tangled as the undersides of this museum’s fading tapestries, unseen bright and crossing, crossing, crossing. And again. It is etched panorama on the butt of every civil war rifle; it is exquisite gunpowder horn masterpiece. It is the gold of every worn bullet in the artillery, the left treasure in the grid of the traveling salesman’s showcase now under glass. It is a sewing chest from across the continents, displaying all you’ll have to work with in your art that is to come. You're surrounded by rarities, yet you are the one who brings a hush of solace to the gallery halls in the middle of the night, whenever you break in.

What would the past say?

Cliff Grego : Study in Pizzicato .

It would say that it
does not mock you.

The past is always sober
in its gaze. The past would

say that you have lived, that you
never knew how many trees were

planted in your honor. It would say that
your backbreaking work was thwarted only 

as in a Noh play, as in a surface war; air between
the motions of force set against you, your fight what

built your muscles into grace that became dance that became
a sword that cut precisely. That could winnow the grain in a single

motion, that could slice a mountain from top to hollow and send its
halves rolling into the sea. It would say that even now you are unaware

of how you appear to the unseen world, how the arc of your life is pages,
pages longer than any schedule you had mapped out, any diary of your failure.

It would tell you things you know nothing about; it would bring up the precious
scrolls in jars you left in caves and ran from. The past would say it knows you

better than you begin to imagine you know it. It would trace those lines on
your body with a blinding needle till you saw pictures emerge that would

throttle your regret without mercy. It would call you out—crescendo
of beats rising with the tension—and you’d have nothing left to

say so that you’d finally hear the single string plucked that
would give the answer for you. It would tell you what

was stored in caverns as you squandered your
poverty, thinking it gold you threw away. It

would say, raising its voice, that it does
not know what you’re talking about

when you say waste. It would say
it cannot feel sorry for you, you

who rides the wind without
knowing your own wings.

Witness

Tree who catches

every sunrise and sunset in your boughs

you have been my closest friend, the

witness of this story, too short and far

too long to yet tell me its meaning.

You have heard it all. The scream of the train

every time it crushes the land west where I

cannot go but have reached for all this time,

the way you reach. Unmoving and traveling

all the way to the ends of the fleeing universe.

The silence, crushing silence between

there and here. Only you would know.

You have opened yourself to

the dance of the smoke of every

smoldering prayer I burn here beneath

you. Witnessed every ceremony between

me and the sun that abandons me

right after I give my heart to it again.

And again you make me trust

by the force of saying nothing,

by the force of being, by the force

of your unseen movement in the night,

underground, in every one of the

directions, knowing you could cover

the whole world if enough time went by.

You pull me into your hidden rings

one by one until I see the substance

of every year of desperate survival,

the truth of what all forget but you.

You live and die and resurrect

and survive unnoticed, sure of what

you hold, what sap has gone deep in

your veins, forced by the sudden cold.

With a great crack

you thrown down your soul

in each limb that surrenders

to lightning, showing me

you are broken too, and nothing

can rob you of beauty that is.

You are young, you assure me,

you will die soon enough, you tell me,

you will live forever and you still

know nothing, you say—

You are just as alone as I am,

I say, unbelieving, as unknown, as

solitary and confined to your own unseen

movement, as powerless to change

the elements you brave.

Yet I know I'm wrong

every time I sit near you, every time

I lie beneath your great sheltering body

to watch the bright planets and muted stars

we know have been assigned to be seen

by us alone, from this exacting

city plot of earth.

I know you're telling me

what I don't want to hear,

the lavish questions to my questions,

the hope that drags me back

into this strange arena with nothing

to fight with but gnarled fists.

You force me to sing with you

every time the wind rises

in our midst.

Now you must face the truth because it is facing you

Finally, the flood has risen to your front 
door and finally you regret the way you 
dismissed the last one with a flick of the 
wrist and a click. We’re all lost now, rising 
one level up at a time, wind shrieking all the 
terror we feel, toys now gurgling underwater 
with the pilings and levees that once kept us afloat.

No more running from the catastrophes of humankind,
thank you very much, acts of God! Lost! All is not lost!
Better yet, you could’ve moved north, up to the Arctic Circle, 
up into the sunless day, where no rain ever balloons into obese 
deluge. Miracles fall by the millions from the sky, shocking no 
one, seen only by wind some days. But you never thought this 
day would come, when batteries go cold and the music 
washes down the river into death, no longer 
commodity but something like salvation.

So yes, you did not run far enough from 
home. Your shadow stuck on you like a 
faithful, unthanked bodyguard. You 
couldn’t get away from the rumble 
of meaningless words, the cackle of 
the hags that track you, determined to cut 
out your eardrums and sew your heart shut.

Now your only hope is climbing the world’s 
tallest tree, from where you’d see your timeline 
as the city glitters in ancient amber. Pure in its 
dreamtime. From here, you might see my house at 
a tiny distance only, see me on the roof waving, when 
I could be in the basement watching you drown on TV.  
From here, you only watch the rubble swirl away. Here, 
you can sit with hawks and swallows, watch them 
run their messages from tower to tower.

Choose this day what you will lose. 
I can’t send my sea kayak down 
your way. The saving will be 
up to the providence of 
thunderbirds and whales 
working in conspiracy to 
redeem your life in a number 
of dramatic missions. Your best 
hope is to hang on to this uttermost 
branch till kingdom come, or just plunge 
in. 

Because oh no, karma is not in the water. 
Only grace and destruction.

Touch

Hubble Ultra Deep Field .

I am not interested

in describing what you

already think you know in

a more interesting way.

I want magic.

You want answers.

Or a system, a grid

to run variables through

so you can say Oh, that.

But mystery wants you.

It stalks your quantifiable

dreams which can so

easily be explained by

chemical and instinct.

It goes in for the kill when your

heart swells over your sleeping child

or when you lose electricity for a few

night hours and no one’s there to

whittle away the expanse inside.

Doesn’t truth beget question

beget truth beget questions with

answers that are not answers that

unravel questions that dive into

the heart of an answer to find yet

another vast yet-unnamed universe?

Yes—no—love is strange

and unsayable, which is

why we toss it around

in one small word.

It makes the miles of our old intestines

as electric a maze as the whorls of each 
tiny handprint long before birth.

It burdens us with

words that tell who we are 
and a game of subtraction 
that, with such patience,  
closes our distances.

You don’t know what you want

and so you keep dissecting.

I once did that, too, yesterday.

Today I’m ready to

chase down a supercell

in true belief of my smallness,

the probability of death, the

impossibility of telling you

how it feels to be caught up

in that churning cloud.

Tomorrow I may be pulled apart

by that mysterious power to feel

anything at all and be moved

by it—whatever it is.

That we’re not hurtling through space—

that we are—that we’re not suspended

in chrysalis—that we are—

that we reach for each other here—

yet never quite know for sure—

and yet something wholly new yet

of us and our ancient backstory

comes of our not-quite-touching—

it is a miracle.

It is as plain,

as common,

as usual as the

next singular

act of being.

Hope is the smell of water

Simpson Desert :  

               Hope is the smell of water

               A magnet on the plain

                         of desert, city, lost in the

                    wilderness,

                Delirium

                                       It says all is not lost

                            After the loss of everything

                     That God is love and wants your love

               after the night you betrayed each other

                                       That you belong here in this country

                                                 Even in your alien deportation

                                                       That the cold is your salvation in a blizzard

                          And the only way out of this terror

                          is to go right through its dark tangled thicket