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.

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.

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

The Art of Survival

You say it is waste—and you have a good case.

Your fire for life, for its wine on your tongue—

you’ve had to shut it down. Push it far beyond the

mines at your foundation to just keep breathing.

                                  one – two   three – out —

                    —in—

To forget yet keep the card catalog—that is the

torture that puts 40-watt light in your eyes, pushes

your blood forward, keeps it creeping toward your

heart and

                                                                          out—

you know you can never go back.

All the beautiful plays left unplayed—

bellowing risks simmered down into

a quiet poultice to be clapped on your

wounds at night—tiny battles of

five typed words won underwater

as the rest of the world sleeps, weightless.

This art kills you, you think.

You think it’s killing you cell by cell—

when you think about it—whenever

you see your vanished past leap

into the well backwards, on rewind,

to play out its phantom storylines.

And yet these shackles—

you believe it—breathing—

                               — in – one    two – out —

are something else—not wings, not

some false coffer of visible wealth—

but roots, maybe, not just roots that tear

down to the heart of the earth unseen—

but roots, also, that crack the pavement

breath by hair’s breadth, planning to

overthrow a great wall, a great mountain

one day—in a second—splitting kingdoms

with wide boughs that stretch out to

welcome in every rare living thing

to come build its home. 
Even if in miniature.

Maybe—

             breathing—all breathing—

                                                 in—out—
                                                             in—out—

              then this art will turn

that corner on which destruction

is revealed to have strange design,

on which bitter pathways gnawed

by insect, fire, disease—will turn

into a labyrinth—a waterway—a

motherboard of wonder—a home—

and this time you will live—

                                            and breathe—

                                and move—

             and have being—

—and you will

finally lose the argument

that death had its way

in this longest of 
winters.

 

Riddles for the Now & Not Yet

Stills from 新少林寺 (Shaolin), 2011

What

It is pain in the needle in the corner of the hall.

The ether of some vision that once stung you

with hope, the kind that brings fever.

It is the fire escape nobody knows of

that you hang tender plants in glass 
baubles from the iron rungs.

The tree in the middle of the tenement 
city whose tiny lights pierce the fog every 
night with a glittering code of love notes 
for ships passing by, lonely, each one.

Where

Holy city of flames beneath the 
log in the campfire.

The great carved wall behind the unreachable 
waterfall in the mountains.

That music box built into the innards of 
an old piano in a storage locker.

Places you hide your heart; places no one looks, and if they look, 
no one sees.

Places I only find, eyes closed, all else forgotten, 
fingers on fire.

Places worth climbing to, ascending 
inch by inch.

When

Now. No—then.

The night before.

A day later.

Your name was

written for you

in the book of life.

We sat in silence,

we left in silence,

we aged in silence.

Not now. Yes—then.

Another year later.

Another second before.

Why

You tell me.

I tell you fragments of the

story that surely you know in full.

Mystery loves me madly, and these vows

are a wearying thing, wearing thin.

I wonder that nothing is found.

I wonder that you still appear only to wander

when I know you battle by night; that you feel

the pain of this want even as you march forward,

straight-backed. As I crawl toward this sliver of light.

Who

The only truth:

we are to become.

And love for this becoming

is only grasped by the fools who wait.

And wait. And­—

You are; this substance

is held in cherished suspension, a notch

in history pulsing blue fire.

I am, and we

are pulled from the river mud with

joy, with pride. Even in the dregs of our slumber.

Put aside these thoughts of ruin;

you are here.

The Pearl

You cannot reason away the
blast of the sound barrier, the

neon fire that blankets the city
and melts your arm. It is

what it is, even when they
tell you it wasn't. No argument

to dismiss the power of the
pure at heart when it annihilates

a thousand viruses under the
microscope. No words are

adequate ridicule, even though
this cure, this beauty, this

suffering is a foolish bet to sell
everything for. You would throw

it all away for a pearl. You would
let them put out your eyes for a

glimpse of the coming kingdom.
You would ask the unknown

question. You sail in your skin
boat over the edge of the world.

Labor

There is no light; only morning.

And so I sleep with all my song-churning

organs awake and plotting. They are

for me when all else in my body betrays;

they plan to live, and live hard, this

blind factory that loves you without

protest, even as I doubt the weather I 

ask for.

I scent disaster, charred aims and burst

hope, yet my gut keeps me alive by making

bargain after bargain. It doesn’t matter

what pain is applied to the skin, inside or

out; the vice in my bloodstream meaningless

in the din of work. Can’t you hear it crash

against your psyche in the middle of your most 

troubling dreams?

One day all this faithfulness will see its 

reward in the shape of itself as a winged creature 

no one would expect. And then, like some rare bird, 

it will wake me with a flurry of unspoken reasons 

and carry my trudging heart in its talons 

to the resting place where 

every invisible sheave

is stored.

There could be holy fallout

These days when I don't have many words of my own...thanks, Hafez.  I run into you at just the right moments.

We are often in battle.
So often defending every side of the fort,
it may seem, all 
alone.

Sit down, my dear,
take a few deep 
breaths,
think about 
a loyal friend.

Where is your 
music,
your pet, 
a brush?

Surely one 
who has lasted as long 
as you
knows some path, 
some place inside
that can give a sweet respite.

If you cannot 
slay your panic,
then say within
as convincingly as you can,
It is all God’s will!

Now pick up your life again.
Let whatever is out there
come charging in,

Laugh 
and spit into the air,
and
there could 
be holy fallout.

Throw 
those ladders like tiny matchsticks
with just phantoms upon them
you thought were trying 
to scale your heart.

Your love has such
an eloquent sound.
The sky and I 
want to hear it!

If you still feel helpless,
give our battle cry again—

(Hafez has shouted it
 a thousand-and-one times!)

It is all,
It is all the Beloved’s will!

What is 
that luminous rain I see
all around you 
in the future,

Sweeping in from the east plain?

It looks like, 
O it looks like
Holy fallout

filling your mouth and your palms
with Joy!