Chaos in the greenhouse

New poems

+15

Beware

Those who claim to know things

Those who claim to know things that they can't put into words don't.

Pinwheels at the beach

Deviations from self

Once "self" is established, deviations from it are usually viewed as suspect.

Of whom too much is asked

On desire

Desire is the essence of focus.

Grid

New poems

+15

Consumer Christmas

On death

Death is the harvest that feeds the voracious mouth of entropy.

Yet another Christmas tree

Another Christmas tree

Christmas trees

Christmas concert

Always

It is always a losing proposition to put yourself in opposition to reality.

New poems

+15

Christmas aliens

More

I worry more about what I don't manage to include in my poetry than about what I do.

Christmas woods

How many (Lerner)

How many out-of-character things did I need to do, I wondered, before the world rearranged itself around me?

Ben Lerner, 10:04

Christmas mouse

Truth & beauty

But are truth and beauty really desirable, or are the false and the ugly just so unbearable?

Christmas elephant

New poems

+15

Christmas town

That of someone else (Stevens)

If the mind is like a hall in which thought is like a voice speaking, the voice is always that of someone else.

Wallace Stevens

Treehouse

The self

The self must be somewhat predictable, and that is its downfall.

Sailboat

Within the context

We measure our strength within the context of our weakness.

Middle-aged man

Perfect (Mayer)

If nothing else is perfect, why should a poem be perfect?

Bernadette Mayer

Gold mountain

The loss

The loss is the loss, not the acknowledgment of the loss.

Abstract colors

New poems

+15

Asteroid mining

Dependencies

If a species is dependent upon a particular environment, you can be reasonably sure that that environment is in some way and to some degree dependent upon that species.

Magical evening walk

Art is

Art is a conversation with the world and a conversation with the self before it is a conversation with other people.

Black light poster

Ugliness (Mencken)

Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States.

H. L. Mencken

A boy and his bird

Pay attention

People say "Pay attention to me."

Poets say "Pay extra close and special attention to me."

Twas a dark and stormy night

What is it

What is it that makes people let go just as the thing they've been reaching for forever falls into their hand?

Vista of color

How different

How different the world looks at a glance than it does under a gaze.

Uncharted

New poems

+15

Enlightenment

Profit

Profit is the name we shamelessly give to the interest that accrues on suffering.

Fall in the park

An unacknowledged truth

An unacknowledged truth remains as true as it will be that future day when people declare it self-evident.

RIP Moby

The eye

Abstraction

Abstraction is the defining marker of the human.

Kaosmos Tunebane?

A lot like

Striving can look a lot like struggling.

The sedge has withered

For the money (Aaronovitch)

Lots of people do it for the money. But only the ones that lack ambition.

Ben Aaronovitch, False Value