Pillars of Ash In the beginning Nature had no voice. Then the gods threw a pest Of fire called language Upon the world And are watching it as it blazes. Now fire clings to the palate, Burns the throat. The smoke of rhetoric smarts our eyes. Tongues of fire consume the page — Paper curling into ash, Perusing fingers sifting to ash, Bodies stiffening into ash, Pillars of ash that’ll topple and disperse In the coming wind and rain.

Let His Dwelling Grow Let him retain his secret self unseen— A quiet core beneath the outer guise. His thoughts drift far, where none have ever been, Untouched by earthbound sound or sorrowed cries. He shapes his fate by sovereign will alone, And spends his hours by choice, not blind decree. Yet boredom gnaws the pleasure of his throne And drives him forth through mists no eye can see. There in the vale, he finds his kindred near, Who sense he will not linge

All the World Was Broken: An Ecopoem On weightless air, the cocksure ravens flew. Wild sheep chewed grass; deer And bison chewed too. On a slanted hillside white mountain goats Enjoyed a lofty view. In forests, eucalypti, fresh-minted, grew. And fire-green firs with purple cones, Did too. For the silver-studded starfish there were oceans Wet with green and blue – And oceans for the whale and dolphin too. On blackest soil, the man called Adam grew His

The Selfish Self I am my world – A world apart. Apart from me there is nothing. The world is mine. It arises from the uniqueness of my life. My life is the world and the world Is how things stand. And how things stand is my life – And only my life. What counts is me. I number myself: A one wrapped inside a zero. I stand alone, a single bulb Lighting the whole room, Enclosed by walls that are my sphere. I have no doors or windows. No

Money Is Everything No, I don’t wish to talk about money. In no way does it interest me. I seek an infinite leap beyond money. Even with my good eye I am blind to it. How awful for a soul reliant on the body for money. If something has value it is desired. Money has value because it is desired. Everything adds up to money. Money is conceived through itself. Its essence involves existence. Money is the index of everything that’s false. An artist can make many things But money

The World Is Folded in to Every Object The world is folded in to every object And each thing or idea is the folding And unfolding of space, time and history. And the atom is folded and refolded Until the outside becomes inside And matter becomes thought. Matter folded and refolded And unfolded over and again, Until it's thin and translucent, Like consciousness.

Seven Worlds God turns -- and the fishes dance blue gold silver beneath a yellow sky. Another turn, the boughs of thick trees become as air: invisibly light. The third turn, nothing but pea-green lizard eyes and cochineal blood. The fourth, an angel with four faces tolls the caked air with a dead bell. At the fifth there is only a fagged-out planet and the light of dead stars. The sixth, and it is said, “the former worlds shall not be remembered.” The seventh, and the land r

Ecophagy God was striding the heavens when a snake emerged from a bone black gap between the wet green grasses. Six days passed and earth was in the belly of the snake and the cosmos reduced to a pile of newsprint. And God tore his clothes and made for himself a garment of lamentations but snake, pitiless, scoffed him beneath the apple tree. And the universe was void of life, except, of course, for snake and you and me (obviously).

Titan Zero The weight of the earth is loss: The titans have vanished from the page and Krónos our captain (carrioned by his own creations) lies heavy, buried beneath the playwright's stage, (hammer and reaping-hook too). Father and son to time’s gravitational pull (but never victor), it will take more than a god to undo the things he’s killed, and more than a star to see flesh returned to the world.