Lovely How the World Treats the Unloved

 

I. The Order

Tangled in a knot, I hear the barback
ask for my drink order.
How do I count the knots in my stomach
and take the order back?

I want to say the words I feel.
Torture is not good behavior
for an aspiring human.
Some tragedies belong to the imagination.

I gather my strength.
“Vodka soda.”

He turns his head,
whispers to the person beside him.
They agree the order is sufficient.
Why they do this remains unclear.
They should be more careful.

Shouldn’t we all be more careful?
Sometimes the order is not the right order.
People forget the exchange is a choice—
between the one who asks
and the one who serves.

Some tragedies are held too long.

Lovely,
how the world treats the unloved.

Some days the rain stops.
Sunlight breaks through mist.

II. The House in the Forest

Circles and triangles dance in my mind
around the house I built
in a small forest
by a narrow creek.

Smoke rises—plumes of circles and squares—
threading the trees.
Small birds chirp the leading tones
of Bill Evans’s melancholy voice,
prancing toward a space
beyond the horizon of a heart
cracking in the fireplace.

On my bed beside the hearth
I clutch a pillow, hum a simple prayer.
Hands extended to warmth,
I watch spheres and cubes
march up the chimney.

I am a small boy—
head resting on the bed’s edge—
feeling the fire grow warm.

Nothing but calm energy
carries me to sleep.

For now,
nothing feels wrong.

III. The December Rule

Can we, as a people,
decide in December
that our mistakes were never ours?

If rules are revealed only after they are broken,
what kind of system is this?
Such a structure assumes
the rule-makers are fair.

Rules should rest on judgment,
not reaction.
When architects of order lack wisdom,
what they build
is not shelter
but trap.

IV. The Phoenician Merchant

Peering upward through brine,
my gaze harrows—
a jolt, tingling with haze and sorrow.

I am a Phoenician merchant
in a foreign place.
Below me, a little girl
with bow-tied hair floats—
buoyant, light—
yet she sinks with me.

Crying here makes no tears.
The salt refuses reprieve.
The phonetic note of grief
carries no song.

Down, down I go
into dark.
Up, up rises
the chorus of my breath.
Down, down goes my soul
into the deep.

V. Reductio Ad Absurdum

Triangles collapse into two-sided figures—
reductio ad absurdum.

To hold two truths at once
is a fallacy.
Yet logic survives
only if its conditions remain.

Sun to cloud.
Cloud to rain.
Rain to river.
River to valley.
Valley to desert.
Desert to open ocean.

I speak in circles.
I listen in squares.
Hummingbirds sing their melancholy.

A child whispers,
once—

What is it
I am hearing?

VI. The Flâneur

“I am not poor; I am a flâneur,”
sings the child—
androgynous, page-boy hair.

“Shelter is where I make it.
The nectar of the gods
is my drink of choice.

Deny me nothing.
Give me plenty.
I am not poor;
I am a poet.”

VII. Phaedo’s Sphere

I am:
dew at morning,
mist at evening.
A bouquet—fresh, abundant.

I am:
an eccentric mystic,
a philosopher
contemplating the universe
in my own face.

Many visions wait
as I rise—
airborne, unmoored.

The daimon of my sophia
stirs
inside my dreams.

I rise toward Phaedo’s sphere—
philosopher in garment,
poet
in the making.

Fin