prayer leaves the lips like leaves

1.
Prayer leaves the lips like leaves
fallen on the surface of that water
which moves slowest down streams.

2.
Behind quiet
we were afraid to stay.

Behind the boredom and fidgeting
of hours, the feeling of God
staring
pins one down
so that it is difficult to breath. Behind

God—the dishes pile up, a woman
on 5th street drools outside the convalescent
home, the birds on Fourth Street and Cherry
swoop down from telephone wires and poles
in flurries, electric inner city, mad with
the littered lots, the tagged walls, the shuffling
psychosis of an elder man who yells into pay phones,
the indifferent gleaming of traffic, the window shops,
and one styrofoam coffee cup atop a public mailbox.

3.
It was so hot today everyone was buying icecream
from the truck with its high pitched static melodies.

But the day will get cooler in a few hours. We can
open the windows then and let the warmth go
from inside, let slight breezes be, let the sky be
still faintly lit.

4.
Asleep later, I took my unhappiness
off like a bundle from my travel weary back
and tossed it down at the base of a silouetted tree,
his crazy arms thrown up above the black rim of earth.

We can rest our minds just like that.

5.
Some crazy men have resisted all dark
to follow the fleeing edge of light,
and it has always meant not stopping.

the real saints hung

The real saints hung
their hearts in heaven, their only cloak
on the door hook, with thin white
legs, thin hair, hung their modest
prayers mid-air.

The real saints burrowed each gospel word of theirs
in the ground, ate the locust they found. Piety
put holes it their sandles, so they washed each other's feet.
They would eat at a wooden table, dim light. In the commune gardens
burrowed their lonliness to dig up what they might.

Christians go sick with themselves (so full of freeways, so barren).
They swear the graces of God have gone still
as surfaces of lakes in morning will: our lives,
the long slow wings of a heron, so methodically
near but never breaking surface, façade, veneer.

So, we wait in lines at McDonald's,
impatient. So, we run
away from meditation, from secret.

And I can not say I see it, but do not despair
all you who suffer from a Kingdom we fail
to receive here. We are real, and still
simply become as the one real saint who hung.

Only repent. It has all already been done.

translucent, I think

Up in a tree, maybe a silly place
for me to be at twenty three,
to see how the air gets thin.

The air does not. Wonderful how science will lead you
inevitably into the rediscovery of some forsaken childhood tendancy.

Back then I went to climb
closer to God, I told people.
Really I went to stick my head in the spinning stratosphere
and get a view of all the kingdoms
of the earth and their glory, namely the cul-de-sacs,
alley ways and small patches of field still left undeveloped
that I ruled on my bicycle as a kid.

Up in a tree for scientific reasons, now I tell people.
Really I just feel a little far away from God, maybe.
I go to think things through, find self
acceptance or whatever
magic the clouds have to hang so delicately
alone
so high it hurts the neck to watch.

Up in a tree for the pit of the stomach pain in me:
a pair of shoes with their laces tied all up in knots.
I mean lots and lots of knots like
the game I used to play with my dad’s shoes to see
if he could always untie everything.

If only every exasperation, every at a loss,
could be cut off
without losing what might actually be hurting for good reasons
just not heard by anyone yet.

I sit alone in rooms. I go on walks. I let words get carried away
on adventurous tarings out through brush and rock to see what they say
from inside me. Now I even climb trees again to hear if the hurting
will use it's voice if I manage to go with him to the right hideaway
or high enough up over everyone else's daily business.

I have tried to be as translucent, I think,
as cirrus. But as for the clouds, they
can not just simply receive me either.

pilaging goes on (reading Allen Ginsberg recently)

The freeway faster loud
exhaust pilaging

goes on. Pilaging like
taking a more cautious man’s eyes and turning them down in a speeding wake,
eyes that look on billboards of Corona life perfected
only feet from that cautious man’s daily treading back and forth
between labor and release, labor and flickering images of blue
at night, in many many windows,
private windows, fridgerators humming all,
toilets sighing all after the midnight peeing blank
stares into the inevitability of well timed alarms
forcing cars back onto the highways.

Treadmill running goes more subtly
than the disappearance of laughter
after the last drunken joke in a bar before dispersals.

More subtle than the half empty feeling of every place
with alcohol and t.v.'s and ambiance, to say nothing
of the servers who mostly smile and will ask for requests.

More subtle than poems written about ladies
with extended left arms out drivers’ windows holding
cigarettes in the traffic of the 405 South on a Friday.

Such ingress and egress cannot be healthy
when the beaches charge twelve dollars for parking,
the city meters empty on weekends, lawn mowers
now every day of the week pushed by hispanics
with tennis shoes stained grean.

The western man is going places in planes
and cars, less on trains, we mean

to run away only to return towards
what can not really ever be taken as ours.

The farmer's skin black or dark
stands in the tomato feilds
between Bakersfeild and Fresno.

The trucks take their loads grean piled
toward many places across the earth
all of which named Albertson's, Stater Brothers', Von's, Ralph's.

of sunshine through swaying

Through the window bring in
the late morning light and wind.

they will teach like

how to kiss a cheek,
how to splash in water:

how simple a shadow is, contours
of sunshine through swaying
curtains, playing over my bare feet.

on the news this evening

The lights go out in Los Angeles. The slow loss
of electricity now undeniable,
points of intersecting
traffic backed up miles
motionless: the sun
can only be let to fall, it's last mettalic
lightening dazzles itself down
the mirrored windows
of the U.S. Bank building, we can not but let now
the darkness fall.

These stalwarts, steadfast
and secure, do not always hold up well
under the deteriorating sky,
above deteriorating dirt, built
by deteriorating human
sweat and their crying
glory like the lightening
of last bits of sunshine
gone dazzling now down the glass
walls, Los Angeles,
into dark.

Enter into dark
and repentance.