AGGRESSIVE LIVING

I guess it would have been better if I skipped
this saying, remained tight-lipped,
carried messages myself instead of having them shipped.

In other words I could have stayed
silent. But where would we be then? A ray
of light descends and folded in it is a day

I'll remember well. What about another's life?
In other words a series of decades spent as wife
to a man who stands amazed as drum and fife

parade by, beginning his prayers with a peach
sucked dry to the pit? To each
a variation of the same, a skinny arm that reaches

for a quiet heart and from a bony chest pulls it out.
(As God in the form of a nauseous wave cast Jonah out.)
That's what aggressive living is about.

But I sit passive in the sun. I must be one of the ones
not chosen to enjoy his stint. Sticky buns
are baking in the oven. They're sweet. The sugar runs

down my chin, my tongue (how I wish
it was as wide as the whale's!) rolls up with a swish
to savor what it can of the delici-

ous remnant.

COMPOSED ON A COMMODORE 64

Sounds are muffled as the gradual obsolescence
     of machines like these, whose ghost-keys go tap
and then torture the typer for something better to say,
     to write, is insured, not because of faulty design
or the pace of the world increasing beyond
     their capacity, but because reason as activity
was not conceived to cut clear through to cold
     spelunking dawn; and the operator understands,
as he listens to the last gasps of his machine,
     how any love withheld, or curses addressed
in the computer's general direction,
     might be better braided into ecstatic
appreciation for tasks made easier and possibilities beheld.

YOUR FRIENDS THE SEAGULLS

Collaborate on dawn,
embattled finches.
Today I intend to
purchase a new pair
of sneakers. Do you
know where they
were made, embattled
finches? In a far
away land the sun
drove to dawn
or will soon
drive. And what,
embattled finches,
do you think I intend
to do with my old
sneakers, splattered
with monsoon reverberations?
With my old pair,
bubblegum and dogshit
bottom-blessed?
I intend to put them
in the dumpster
with the garbage your
friends the seagulls
seem so happy to crown.
Dawn and white
sneakers, finches, are
two immaculate facets
of the same shapely
existence I am proud to
call my own, or will
be soon, as soon
as you get your acts
together, finches, and
chant a resounding
waking hymn, one
that goes ‘Wings
are mighty shackles too
but nonetheless fly
we desperately do...'