A Poem

A poem

It is its

Own problem

That It seeks to solve

As it is written, as it unwrites reason

It exists

To be qualified

By extraordinary speech

It is equal to

Itself, its identity

Nothing, equal to nothing but itself. 
Totally unique

Speechless, leaving itself

Wondering what happened

Leaving itself, ‘X’

Here

To write poetry, Paz said, is to erase the written,

To write the unwritten on what is written.

"Poetry 
           is a sudden rupture
suddenly healed
                              and torn open again
by the glances of others
                                           Rupture
is continuity"

Toward far places in the past and future times poetry extends,

Carrying on its dignified discourse and everyday speech.

Poetry is a question mark and an exclamation mark

That reaches beyond the page

Into time. It opens up a space that is transparent 
And once silent.  It copulates with silence
And becomes a poem. It becomes clearer the more visible

It begins to speak and wrestles with an end

In which it is never again glanced at, becoming invisible.

Poetry is a valiant attempt to create something immortal,

An artifact that outlives its time of creation,

Conquering the present every time it is read.  

Of Abandonment and Gravity

          Of Abandoment And Gravity

Momentous descent toward the sudden center

Wings just as water –

Stones just as air –

Fire, sodden and deliquescing-

Mountains, a draft of wind.

Emergence of the quintessence

At every axis point of time-space,

An imploding cynosure

Of gravity’s abandonment to love…

The myriad things intent upon a whisper

Dissolving in a single heartbeat

A blossom of lightning in the blood

A spiral swiftly pulling a pearl's iridescence

Down to a shuddering point-

The long cry of earth to become gold.

August, 2019.        North Beach/Hilo, Hawaii

House on Fire

I am a house on fire

Down the road,

A Hawaiian town swallowed in lava

An ancient tower that falls in battle
A fool

Struck by lightning
I am a poem written by a drunk, ancient Chinese poet
Who still drinks beside the river in his poem.
I am an 18th cent. painting of a ship wreck
In  the style of the terrible of the sublime

I am an old philosophic poem written by a forgotten Roman

That exists only in fragments
I am the 24 hour long train ride from Qingdao to Hong Kong

I am an astronomical calculation of vast time and distance.

I am all the various paradoxes of Omnipotence

I am a poem that I struggle to finish