The heart of the truth told dark
That the shadow knows in the bright sun,
Following, laying on hands
As we touch the warm pavement to take our measure.
Ample tug of the ten thousand sensations
Gripping our imaginations just beyond reach
Where desire stouts up our walls of identity and
Furor builds little brush fires
To signal virtue abroad and contentment within.

All a lie, a fiction at best, useful in explanation but
Utterly lacking the reach of the original feeling now forgotten,
By constitution and alliance with nature’s unfolding,
We lack fixity and correspondence even with mind to world
Though this would seem to be a human strength.

We are weaker, more vulnerable,
More apt to be turned out numb
In the cold last lines of ignorance,
As the cue around the corner
Shuffling the line,
Even as the banks have no cash, the baker no bread, the poet no truth.

Make it louder for the show,
Work the angles for the next breed and sure enough
We are on to some oppressive other
Whether whetted over our heads or tied head long to ankle
Beneath the bridge, muted by a kerchief
Amid the tents and flags of the destitute
Proclaiming our shared hunger.

One might be able to say something,
With the traffic rolling by only feet beside the trying to sleep people,
The cramped bodies at toilet crouched or the lungs respiring exhaust,
Hydrocarbon poison of the additives to the sweet black oil of ancestor animals
Buried but for their bodies turning to tar.

From afar, it’s a few degrees warmer, humid, precipitating
With dogs chewing through the leash, cats raining down
With a hiss of bird hunger, drought stumps, expansive sand
And the bright skies left after our cities and cars are dark.

The apocalypse is also a lie.
Don’t neglect the secondary gain,
Don’t regret the beauty of not knowing awhile.
Look at me, failing, falling open
As the wind to a dust squall rising,
Crackling the dry air with static electricity, even thunder
But I am no rain, no god, no maker of heroes like
A stature of absurdity on the lawn for all to see, all to behold.

They bury us here as the lives of the poets
Lit like a bon fire of chairs and desks and undergrowth shrubs and raked leaves,
Our hair askew as the burned mountain and the smoke.
Ever the smoke, regretting the industry of ancestors and
Laying in the coal for the cold to come.

I come asking, sensing deceit
But see Emily and her statue of things said, just so,
Folded up as a note with bread and lasting.
The lives of the poets as Tuka says
Before the face of the meeting rivers,
In the séance of abundance,
In the poverties of solitude, habit removed,
Opaque as glass
Ask that it can be so,
Otherwise be shunned and ever outside oneself
Looking in as a dream of a lover with a flash light in the camp,
Stumbling around the mounds of hairy dogs sleeping,
Pushed up like the sand of the water line that creeped up
To where we once were sleeping, now drenched, confused, looking
Back as the farm of inwardness might bear fruit if
You can give it all away
As starting over the harvests of rich experience and her shadows
Leading like swaying patterns on the ground of leaves in a moonlight
Of moist breezes from the very heart traveling through your pursed lip,
Your moist tongue touching,
You as much a lie as me, we lie together,
Hurried to beat the dawn back home and remain undiscovered.