Im Munich Ist Ein Hofbrau Supermarket

Satiety
And silliness,
Twin jesters of
Our existence,

Are like frothed beer,
They don't smell well
Against the walls,

Or on bookshelves,

But they do sit
Well in the guts,
Sometimes, of those
Who consumed them

And are giddy
For a glimpsed bit
Of Galilee,
Freely foaming.

Inaestimabilis

"It is the kind of object you get lost in, and such wandering has a way of yielding unexpected discoveries and connections, as any number of chivalric knights discovered."

The long procession shimmers
In a haze of contexts, far
And near from your perspective
Where you watch it ignore you,
Unaware of you, even
As it drums drums, blares its horns,
And performs its gymnastics

To attract your attention,
In hopes of enticing you
To inspect it more closely,
The whole elaboration
Of borrowed junk and fine parts,
To get lost as it unwinds

And opens coils around you.

Topological inverse
Of the known Ouroboros
(Suffocating constrictor!),
This serpent that parts the leaves
And draws in by opening
The view, knocking down the fruit
Worth chewing, hard to digest.

You pick up that fruit because
The jugglers and the jongleurs
In that long snake they parade
Are tossing fruit and candy

And baubles mixed together.

The truth is in there somewhere,

As Eve found by accident,

But it's not really the point,
Is it? Not even the prize
You're really hoping to catch.
Who wants to know what God knows?
Omniscience! What a burden
That would be: every damned thing
Locked into place forever.

You want mischief, diversion,
Entertainment without end,
And the long, dusty parade,
Indeterminate, wearied,
But still full of surprises,
Encourages you to keep
Paying attention, begs you,
With its antics, keep reading....

Swad

Sweet, suave, hedonistic pleasure,
Appealing to the senses,
Changing little through the ages,
Meaning quiet and leisure,

Freedom from aches and visitors,
If you ask me. A soft hour
Of uselessness, for stories dour
But romantic in plot twists

And denouements for underdogs
To read of alone and laugh,
Parodic selves as epitaphs,
Wanderers' wondering thoughts

As they traverse gothic forests
Unsuitable for real lives
But out there, far out past the mind
That does its chores. Sweetness rests.

The Resistance

"If you are reading this, you are the resistance." -Aleksei A. Navalny, texting at the moment of his sentencing

My treasured friend, the artist
And costumier, midway through
Her eighth decade spent in two

Cultures, two languages, two
Halving-the-world traditions,
In neither of which she was

Wholly native, both of which
Claimed vast empires at her birth
That fought each other to death

As part of a global war
When she was a child stranded
Under bombs on the losing

Empire's side, having been born
On the winning empire's side,
Family left on both sides,

Said to me, not long ago,
That her acupuncturist,
Diagnosed as terminal

With cancer and determined,
As my friend put it, "to play"
With whatever time she had,

Had gotten "a little bit
Crazy" in their last session,
Reasoning out loud with my friend's

Aching hip, talking to it
Like a recalcitrant child,
Finally telling it, "Fine!

I'll leave you alone!" My friend
Turned on the table to ask
The woman just what she meant

By getting upset at her,
And was told, "It's just your leg
Has got so much resistance

I'm going to have to leave it
Alone." And then she left town,
To spend her remaining time

In this world with her cancer,
Camping with dog and partner,
Somewhere way up in the woods.

The anecdote was well told
With a wry smile, a chuckle,
And eyes wide with that true smile

That implicitly says yes,
There may be something to this
Nonsense, you know, resistance

Is something that is out there,
Even when it's coming out
In some invisible way,

Some crazy way out from you
That no one can verify.
Resistance demands respect.

Veiled

It thins again. I know
What this means. A chaos
Of dark swans beats their wings:

This is the white, falling,
Passage of passages,
Drenched in unexpected

Rains that roll into fogs,
Storms of pure blue skies
And scorching surprises.

Take it all in. You can.

I know you can. You have.

This is it when it's thin.

Sometimes, Dark at Night

Sometimes, dark at night,
When I hear my heart beat
In my ear, it sounds like your footsteps
Down the narrow hall of Shelly's
Trailer home in the Kootenay forest
In the wee, warm hours of June and July
When the late-night runs of wood chip trucks
Down the winding, wooded highway

Rumbled by. That hollow hall,

That holy passage of convenience in the mountains,
Thin wood over empty crawl space over slug-dotted lawn,
Could make the small tread, our toddler's pitter-patter
Thump around like tympani detuned
After a long orchestral vacation.

Process Fractionalization

Mosquito hour. The hunger
That doesn't share its torment
With consumer and consumed
Can't be called hunger at all.
Bless this pest. She's all that keeps
Drowsy me alert tonight
When I most need my wits kept.

Sleep waits to take us apart.
No, not that sleep. That's hunger,
Death is. Ordinary sleep
Is the process that divides
Awareness into pieces
And removes them, as does drink,
Bits at a time from the mind.

I said something to someone
Last night. I forget until
A mosquito reminds me.
I might say something tonight
Except for a well-timed slap.
Oh, no bees have ever buzzed
As loud as starved mosquitoes.

Bless them, but they won't succeed.
The ones I don't kill myself
Will drink their fill, die somewhere
Else as I collapse to sleep
By stages, losing ego,
Senses, hunger last of all,
And God slaps away at dreams.