A dizain written while ill with pneumonia (in 2001)

I am seeing almost angels here tonight.
As my fever climbs the ladder they applaud
and microscopic fires inside me light
up faces looking something like the Lord
that I draw from mirror images I’ve stored.
I fill their features in and we embrace.
They lift me up and lead me as we trace
remembered dance steps to a flatted tune
they say is normal where we are in space.
I’d rather live a while, at least till June.

‘My god,’ he began and meant it. This sparked confusion
among the gods on watch beneath the dome
that poets call heaven. He had not meant to shun
any other gods but he had. The space deities roam
contracted to a point that’s everywhere.
The tuning fork of time cracks. Lightning cackles
maniacally on being loosed. The stare
of Zeus goes cross-eyed as Fate itself unshackles
the dogs of ways and means. It’s all much more
than the man expected when he prayed or swore.

Did She Have a Name

I live at infelicitous levels of abstraction.
Instead, for example, of knowing a friend’s last name
I remembers countries such surnames usually come from.
I look down at her and say, ‘You cannot do that
semantically.’ She had said that she was leaning on the floor.
She says, ‘Should I’ve said I’m lying? I say, ‘What?’
We take tin cans connected by a string
long enough to let us go to separate rooms
and phone each other. Did she have a name?
We agree she did. I say, ‘Maybe it expired.’

Did I Have a Name

She lives at infelicitous levels of abstraction.
Instead, for example, of knowing a friend’s last name
she remembers countries such surnames usually come from.
She looks down at me and says, ‘You cannot do that
semantically.’ I’d said that I was leaning on the floor.
I say, ‘Should I’ve said I’m lying? She says, ‘What?’
We take tin cans connected by a string
long enough to let us go to separate rooms
and phone each other. Did I have a name?
We agree I did. She says, ‘Maybe it expired.’

He stares at the ceiling. The ceiling returns his tired gaze.
He thanks it wth words that he cannot be sure if they’re heard.
Musts and must-nots compete for control of his mind.
It is dark everywhere that his near-focussed thinking can reach.
Rearranging the lines that he thinks in a story occurs.
It gets graded and lauded and when it moves on it’s forgotten.
The ceiling and he and the darkness add up to half-three
which he thinks is the time but it isn’t. The normal world sleeps.

The New Church proclaims that the four winds are green
And that salvation is for those who believe.
The truths if they matter remain to be seen
But mothers of first doubters grieve.
The crowd fed the doubters to the Dragon Obscene
And all that’s been found is one sleeve.
The Priests of the Dragon wear green robes and preen
And will not permit us to leave.