The poetic moment has passed
it dwindled in the shop keeps
was laid off, left, downsized
shunted, made the small, out-of the way,
a corner in the mega-bookstore
a series of collections,
left in second hand book stores
where aged hippies smoked on the porch
and gestured inside that poetry was
'in the back' by the bathroom
while even now, they remembered
Auden on the green and could recall
if asked, what it had felt like before
poetry crested and fell away- unrequited.

You Don't Comment on my Poems Anymore or the Lass that Loved a Sleeping Sailor

The poem I wrote when I was listening
to the Beatles didn't work out
the way I hoped it would.
Matt played frisbee instead
he gave in to the elliptical (perfect)
over the keys
and the pressure
the tension of writing
something he wanted to be good
or, at least, true.

Middles are the worst parts
the frisbee reminded
resurrections are only possible when
the dead can rise
but they have to die
(and dying's never fun)

I have scissors on the desk
and maybe I will cut this part if I don't like it
well, enough.

Middles, ends, they almost move the same way
progressing seemingly
to this ephemeral conclusion
an artificial construct
things don't ever just end
expect people.

And then again-
their ends are called,
not ends at all.

introspection

it was dawn or something like it
black box, light at the end, streaming
consciounsness, moving images, more than
shadows, almost corporeal,
if you could look through, into the place it was real

faces absent, absorbed,
a boy hooking up with a girl
in the upper left
in the place where society didn't really mind
and smiled because society too had lost something
of itself in the dark hall
the shadox-box projected corridor,
the dreamscape society had loved and lived to
love when society was young and naive and still
believed.

the man had been hacker once,
he was on parole and living a tough life
when the beautiful black woman
had come and tempted him back
for oral sex, cash, techno soundtracks
and the promise of eternal glory:
he hacked the gibson in the thirty seconds
with a gun to his temple, and still
made the benediction, and cracked NASA with a
smile on his face.

Houdini, some sort of victorian wet dream,
for the age of the actual and still yet the
decieved. if he fell in the river, bundled
and chained, he really did fall in the river.
and sink and struggle and emerge from the waters
unfettered
no actor, a legend, amortal

but did houdini really fall into the river?

i've seen the photographs, and the posters,
i've seen houdini smile out from amusement park
rides named in his honor with cheesy senace subplots
he'd never had approved,
but still did he fall in the river?

i was somewhere across middle earth,
when I remembered what the dwarves had awoke there
and stood back in horror to observe
the master of the secret fire
do combat with that ancient evil.

i was the movies.