Conducted

From the persistence of dream we hear the moaning strain

The swelling song which nightmares break

When all have gone who must then remain?



All but they which to dreams are chained

Whose midnight murmurs revolutions make

From the persistence of dream we hear the moaning strain



When all is a dream, then is sleeping in vain

from our imagined darkness, wings we take

When all have gone who must then remain?



In little lines lumbering from where we have lain

From the public square to the poet’s private lake

From the persistence of dream we hear the moaning strain



It is said no man is free from the main

And so as one our minds begin to shake

When all have gone who must then remain?



We ran to bed with hopes to gain

And now without we must awake

From the persistence of dream we hear the moaning strain

When all have gone who must then remain?

Priam

The old half-eaten tamarind of a man
Stands in the mirror watching
His skin sag in the breeze
His neutral-colored remembrances
Are of little comfort now
“...but my was I a sight to behold”
His poetry hangs in the air like a vacuum
Nature spares him this customary judgment
For a pity it keeps unpleasantly
“I really could have been something if...”
Each new haiku runs and
strands itself amid the crowd
as it knows itself unfulfilled like their maker
stacking and piling in the mirror
There is no shining city in the glass
“I guess I’ll go back to bed”

Mastectomy

As she stares at the bottle of pills
The thing that hurts is not the cancer or the cure
But the insistence that a woman is made entirely of two breasts
She bites an apple more sensuously than ever before