in the USA, the prayer rugs
are kneeling, are
bleeding.​

Bible verses whispering
amongst themselves.

Wandering out there among the bosons
and fermions, kicking back while others stretched out
before us, seeking to amuse us, to show us
the errors of our ways. Particulations
devoutly to be wished.

Witness a hopeful face when the cancer
has been located. Surrounded, cancer appears

in a window of every other house.
The only victory is to deprive it of a body.

Think of ash trees in a front yard,
budding before their last leaves drop.

Likewise, there is no body, no thought
missing from a chain of thoughts.

A beginning ends what an end begins.

He holds the camera-phone at arm’s length to take the selfie.
A breeze kicks up, the leaves turn, and the air is crystal clear.
He holds the self at arm’s length and the distance grows.
A new breeze twirls a leaf around the self, a leaf around the air.

Adam is dreaming of a bomb      atom become A-bomb       so many atoms in this @

Like a black wing angled out
     of water, it rose, lured

by the shadow of our boat.
     Circled us—no seal—turned

north. I loved a banker then.
     The boat was his. Perhaps

the water, too, its small, tin
     mirrors. I’d never known the traps

of wealth before: the rigging
     of its baits, its blue-barbed hooks.

I, too, have circled, mistaking
     metal for a meal, duped

by instinct. Wide, the sea. The oar:
     the heart’s dark sail, its hunger.

Interlocking plains of constitutions, verdant, mortal, birth
a send-up of absurd proportions skimming the margins
of oblivion, death-rate in its wake illuminating the awe-
struck mind fresh from the ripeness of non-existence, or is it
simply there?, alive, awake as cardinals climb into their hot
chambers of insistence to clash in vocables over the shining
stage for contention of place like a glistening word on nature’s
page, diamond lost in a world of diamonds as light strikes
water, shining upward from where I sit before its levitation,
the dilation of what is within that which was thought to have 
been all along, as an advancing edge, ever-changing nature
of question, today the northeast corner lost in a warren of green,
a hut bound to water-roots hanging blindly down into pond’s
warm stillness, feather soft in mind and touch, yet immense,
heavy as a drowned heifer, my shoulders sore from dragging mats
to shore, wrestling bio-mass from the heart of that which pours
so fully forth and into all the world, both existence and its un-
doing, as I climb the banks of this bright hole whose glassy
presence, sheer, upcast, encases cicada’s scroll in silver
light, song within the song, It is the mind creates the finite.