The Bones Of Night

Images are not numbers. Freud

tried translating them. They are

notes towards themselves.

A walled city represents its own

interests. I want to go in

but I don't trust -- its symbol

is the horse, no, an upended

flask of water. I've been there

once creaking like an old door.

Soundly to venture forward

into desire. This film

I think I've seen, but it changes

memory. I dream an entire

film. A recurring dream. Always,

I am some actor, falling into trees.

My mind churns up such thoughts

to bother me on weekends.

Distract me towards the sea, or

to you. My mind on the whole

has betrayed me. Love is strong.

Sunny villas, much running water.

The grasses hush together

in greenness. This stolen city means

so little. I will write it flawed and beautiful.

The Herd

There are few things harder to parse than the minor acts of injustice and betrayal perpetrated by good people. Tonight, riding my bike home, I meditated on this and it finally dawned on me: these acts do not make sense because they are thoughtless. Injustice, for good people, is a kind of wave or gestalt that overtakes them when they are weak. The only answer to such wrongdoing is to feel rage - raw rage- at the fear, not at the person and to refuse to, yourself, be afraid. To respond any other way is bound to hurt someone else, if not today, then soon.

Last week I rode
Last week I rode my bicycle past
a construction site

Where a crane was high above
a sculpture
to cut a tree

And the worker for the city
called out
called out in a stutter

To love a small child is to invest in the future.

Community is: you are just as scared as I am, but you know you cannot figure it out alone. You can't solve it so you hold onto the hand of the next person, grip really. Then they do the same, and the person next to them. It's like Matisse's painting "The Dance" some days.

But mostly it is like walking through the sky, not daring to look down.

I long for the day when civil rights are viewed the way that oxygen is: shared, essential and no less necessary to those whose morality is in doubt than they are to those with whom we sympathize. If the air is toxic nobody can breathe.The UN's website maintains the full text of this terrific refresher course in justice.

The Classics

Thinking about the poet John Forbes, for the first time in a while.

Running Out of Choices

Climate change - it's total impact on food prices, human costs from natural disasters, and in the context of a global economic slump- is, arguably, the instigator of a fearful zeitgeist, globally, that I think is being misdirected into all kinds of conservatism. We must direct our fear, instead, into action to offset and slow climate change and defend against climate disaster.

It is an interesting point in history. Just as the threat of nuclear war caused an uneasy truce to the arms race, I think climate disaster will ultimately result in a similar detente. What we are seeing now is the spinning wheels of fear.

Sexism is just one of the showers of sparks from those wheels.


Change is the only constant. This is not new. Some are already adapting to change.