The menu is always placed overhead
So that the throngs of anxious customers
Much as penitents in old places of worship
Might have begged the heavens above
For signs of their imminent salvation or damnation
Look as one, faces upturned, contemplating
The lofted color-coded matrices that auger their futures.

Then revelation strikes, and those skyward faces shine
With a certitude that soul-tortured penitents never knew:
adoration of what’s for brunch.

Thus are menus ever prescient.

I have never learned to love, except as children do.

Manhattan

clouds consumed the skyscraper tops
and so in the muted light that robbed time from day
those headless figures of steel and glass
were as desperate guardians
that on their shoulders
bore up the ceiling of this tragic narrowing world.

And the silent peoples scurried below.

... wonders why human beings tend to create soulless systems when being human is anything but.

when the sublime that lies beneath every little mundane seeming thing builds up in me to a breaking point, I want to shout it out to the world, as if by keeping silent about the sum of little joys, I might come to disbelieve its existence, as if speaking and speech acts really did create something bodily, without which it might wink out and disappear into forgetfulness

you can't stare life in the face and not look at death sideways the same moment

(I said this to Del Sol, with whom there seems to be no end to the random shit we're willing to talk about)

water nestling in the navel sparkles like a diamond

there are crickets in the jasmine
that sing nights, and false nights,
which are days in the cloying shadows
and the lingering scent.

The crickets in the jasmine
sing nights, and false nights,
which are days,
in the cloying shadows
and the lingering scent.

I like the way the steel of the railroad tracks whistles and hums beneath the weight of an approaching train as it coasts towards the station

Is haiku for you?
Every line cut so fine till
Meaning flees the page.

Hate creeps in the bones,
then burning blood screams die, die.
But first it creeps, slow.

Rain slides, happy leaf.
Wind and rocks, divide so high.
Stunted roots, heat kills.