Poem: Videoku #2 Pray Afghanistan…

A late-night videoku, extemporized before hitting the video button (I will confess), but only a moment before… and responding, May 7, 2009, to sad, gathering clouds…
Pray Afghanistan
be allowed to breathe easy
among the living

Poem (video + text) A Breath of Fresh Air

A BREATH OF FRESH AIR
A breath of fresh air
sailed over the highest mountain peak and
down into the valley enjoying its
nonchalant pace over grassy plains as
green as unripe apples and the
breath of fresh air turned with the prevailing
current through a massive gorge and
just above a river where tumultuous waters as they
hurled over [...]

Video Poem/Embedded in the Velvet is the Thorn

EMBEDDED IN THE VELVET IS THE THORN
Embedded in the velvet is the thorn
and at the tip of the thorn choirs
When you take off your face and sit down
something happens to sunlight bright silver envies
I have never been here before though the doors on the
corridor are locked I can
see right through them to the
multi-colored horses standing [...]

POEM: SOULS

There are so many souls worth saving
the face wreathed in roses whose eyes tell tales from
before civilization when trees were sturdy giant ferns cut from crystal
The grandmother with ten white horses on a steep green hillside
whose middle name is a secret she calls on to heal
the cut finger the burnt tongue the earache the limp
the [...]

Poem: A Thousand Armies

(Note: I may have posted this poem somewhere some time ago, but I am posting it now with a lifelong lament at the violence of our human history, with its resorting to armies so callously and often irrationally when it is a matter of individual human bodies and individual souls, and the destruction of life. [...]

Poem: A Little Door

A little door at the bottom of it all
opens up and when you
crouch down to get in
it’s as vast as the sky itself
You can pick out the stars by night
and the planets by day
Get up from your crouch and
extend throughout all its heavenly spheres
where nothing is really holding us back
except ourselves and a few tall
mountains [...]

(from The Nation, June 30, 2008 )
I sing to the last the equalities modern or old,
I sing the endless finales of things,
I say Nature continues, glory continues
I praise with electric voice,
For I do not see one imperfection in the universe,
And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last in the universe.
______________
Walt Whiteman, [...]

Poem (text & audio): If All the Wood in the World

if-all-the-wood   (audio)

If all the wood in the world were to sing
and every rose gave a political speech
and every cloud took pity on its neighbor
and every stone composed an epic poem about
being a stone
and every dust mote were aware of its
mortality as it lay or drifted onto the
curved or flat surfaces of things
and the blind archer [...]

Video Poem / Salmon

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AUDIO POEM: The Only Real Life

AUDIO POEM: The Only Real Life

Video Poem: Silvery Radiant Song

Commentary on DeenPort Haiku

The war’s fourth birthday…
Congratulations? ka-boom!
(all predicitions true)…
While some celebrate, others mourn, and others die – many, many others. My incomprehension soars that anyone could continue to support this war except for covert reasons that never seem to get articulated. Iraqi and American lives have been massively and tragically disrupted, the middle-class intelligentsia of [...]

Comments on the passing of our brother Imran