​The image of the world having been
Forever, of earth and asteroids,
Comes from the despotism of 
Imagination, from trapezoids

And Mandelbrots that spin
Their dizzy, silly information,
That patterns printed on eyelids,
The maps demanding adoration.

The skin of the onion makes
You cry, your eyes blur, your
Will sags, your body melts.
Remember who you were? Snore!

You’re gone, your rotting straw.
If you sip from this infected canal,
You will find yourself driven,
A mile or parsec, from the locale,

From the path, of the superior light,
You will live in your cilia, your
Head will jerk at every passing
Attraction, until you are heartsore.

Your harsh heart doesn’t know a thing
That’s right, and you find yourself
In the boondocks, in Humnabad, in
Segue 2, and from the shelf

Your brain topples, splat! Your
Eyes wander and they cease
To see, and the power of the 
Shafts of light, pump and release,

The solid stone wall, your jigsaw
Deeds, and our hearts are sundered,
Crabs scatter across the sand,
Weeping refugees are plundered,

​Every mind sees its own tree
Or the blocks of stone, some
Vertical, some horizontal, 
The secret within the cranium,

Some perceive strokes of music
In the creaking swing, some
Formulas of the pendulum, the
Science of the tympanum,

The Inuit, the Bharata,
The Chhetri in Nepal,
The teardrop of the Maori,
A Bulawayo kraal,

The mind spreads from Reunion
To Peru, the Minang, the Malay,
The female brain and the male,
The ribosomes, the Milky Way.

Even the poorest of the poor
Are healed when they give
A drink of water, a blanket,
With no light but the instinctive,

But that does not diminish
The light of the inner caves
Of the mind, the flashing 
Choruses of seraph enclaves.

​The mind must spiral out, it must
Survey the wealth of quark and
Strands of galaxies, of the golden
Hairs of glass, the clicking strand

Crabs, and time squeezes and flows,
It walks the Planck, and space
Bubbles froth, the froth goes down
The drain, the shiny eyes of plaice.

​If the sun didn’t shine, then all
Of the asteroids would not shine,
The planets, and at home the silver
Shining on the timberline.

The wheels turn because of the motor,
And the driver follows a map,
Everything acts as it should,
The milkweed and the thunderclap.

Know, faithful heart, that all
That you do is rewarded. The bikers
Have left the road, the Grand Canyon
And Death Valley swarm with hikers,

They are rescue teams, they carry
Compresses and tourniquets,
But you who consider scripts and moons,
Who think with and without alphabets,

Will always have your cabin, so
Never cease your examination
Of the soil, your study of
The wind, the secret observation.

​You’re good, you’re so good,
The trouble is, you’re tired,
The trouble is, you couldn’t pick up
Your own body without having perspired,

You creep along the street,
You sit down and you fall asleep,
You hurry home and take out your key
And discover nothing in your keep,

You discover that the top of your head,
The part with all of the marvelous inventions,
Has mysteriously disappeared,
Well, there go all of your great intentions

And your brilliant scintillations. 
All those great plans, wrapped in tar paper,
All of those engines creating thoughts
And deeds are drowned in greasy vapor,

Until your fingers feel tired, you
Who need a guiding hand holding
Your elbow, feeding you oxygen,
Exercising your brain, unfolding

The map before your feet and guiding
Your desire. And when you see
People who are so far from what 
You value most, from the tree

Whose fruits are only yours, but they
Are good, are kind, are sweet,
Then your bitter thoughts collapse,
“My life has been a nothing and a cheat,

I worked so hard and didn’t gain a cent,”
And your soul is beaten flat and thin.
But what would be the fate of the entire
World if it weren’t wrapped in the skin

Of the lion, whose roar is sweet
And holy, whose home in the savannah
Is a plain of holy names, with
The morning scent of dew and manna,

And how low and empty the seabed
Would be if your gut broke, if
You escaped and forgot your text
And only knew a painted hieroglyph.

​When your faith is consumptive,
It is faith in numbers, in a building,
Faith in knives, in burning kites,
In the book cover’s gilding,

It is a curse, it is decay,
It is a rot the spreads across
The world. It is drinking the mash,
Gathering and clinking the dross,

Devotion to the dirty water
Trickling between the cobblestones,
Wrinkling into cracks that have
No beauty. They rattle magic bones,

Those who see them shake, they
Have sixteen rows of teeth, they
And the graves where lust still smoulders,
And fetid smoke curls into the day.

​The desire for many gods,
The snails clustered in their
Thousands on the bending stalks
Of grass, are a careening prayer,

They are Pluto and its compatriots,
They are the scribbling of a spastic
Hand, the scratching of a branch,
From the silent core, bombastic

Sputtering, and when you see
One cloud above the wall of rain
Sweeping across the valley,
Tree sap, leaves shadowing the terrain,

Then everything is encompassed:
The fat wheat grain of the field,
The nesting storks, the row
Of moss where the wounded earth healed.

​Seeing a jumble of rocks, he thought
That each came from a separate
Mountain. This, he thought, was
Magnificence, the sky violet

Over a towering range where
Lightning flashed and the deep
Rumbles of thunder and the water
Tumbling down a deep

Ravine and each flower was its own
God, each stamen and pistil,
The village filled with deities
And quartz and crystal.

​All those spider zebras, they
Scuttle on the stones, their
Four eyes gleam, their palps
Quiver, they blindly stare,

When there are so many of them,
We forget the one, we forget,
Before “one,” what do you count?
(the light from the future confused with regret)

Until the greatest light beyond
Light itself causes you to stumble,
Spits out water, bitter, you
Feel the aquifer, the earth, rumble.

Here comes a light, at least
We call it that, it is a faith,
At least we call it that, 
It is, or the world is a wraith,

It is one, it is the invisible core
Of the greatest talent, inner
And upper, it sucks in the righteous,
An inner gift transforms the sinner,

It is a flag in our hands,
It is the gift of tongues,
It is the song that is son,
The letters of the name upon rungs,

It is a portrait of your face
Before you descended, it is really
You, it is your progeny, 
And how they spread their gifts ideally.

​The lizard runs along the step
And it stops. The sides of its
Head pulse, and every time
Pulse with invisible benefits.

There is the sense of touch
And beyond that sense the sense
Of God. That is the strongest,
Timeless, most intense,

It is more than sapience,
More than each appurtenance
Of life. The urge for rain gods,
Luck, spells, inconsequence,

From a hut with a shrunken head,
The slavery to wind and sun,
Until it splits into worms
Spawning on a skeleton,

The remnants of a life
That ceased, the crawling
Explosion of impulses seething,
Seeking, flaming, brawling.