Proverbial Sonnet (51)

Content yourself with rice; reveal yourself
with tea. Be childlike and sandwich bag the seeds
of summer's watermelon compassion.
Souvenir not only any rocks and shells
from the days you staked your ground at the beach
but the paper parking pass as well. Cash in
all but one of your chips from the casino,
or no, shake, rattle, and roll with emptiness,
but emptiness meaning weight divided by
itself, not that ticking, clock-faced zero.
It's not the heat but the resulting sweat.
The pounding sun begets the day's black eye,
not heavy rain or snow, not hurricane winds.
It's the commonplace that exhausts all means and defeats all ends.

Proverbial Sonnet (50)

Free will is a mountain. If you are moving
forget it. Turn on your radio and
detune it: the big bang can't be changed. Yet.
The crackle you hear is the echo from
a squirrel breaking an acorn open in
the shadow of a tree you can't not see
if you close your eyes and imagine that
furry irritable reaching after fact
with all of the pathos of climatology
or the arctic circle of a harp seal's birth—
let's go pick some elderberries. There is
no wisdom like elderberry wisdom.
Near wet ditches, dense thickets, or along
stream banks, we purple and break off easily.

Proverbial Sonnet (49)

In other words, you can lead a horse to water
but the bear, well, he eats you. Where do you go
from there? That's the burro in the valley waiting
for you to chinook your way down the holler
hillside. The deer that narrows across the road
to grok the other side chills, innovating
more intimately than most of us ever
will again. Nothing rocks north like a crow.
Get on that horse and cross-saw through the hate
of flies. Swat away time; anything clever
you cased inside, bandana, pack, and unload:
smoke out the force of comfort to contemplate
that patient valley burro who doesn't care
whether you dustle down or swivel in your chair.

Proverbial Sonnet (47)

It's comforting to know that life is a
rough draft. Life is not a rough draft. It's more
of an improvisation, which is to say
it's like a rough draft that's final. Record
what happens, scoff and repent and be on our way
leaving behind those things we had in store
to share at least with those we loved if the day
had been uncluttered enough to allow for
those rough works, that sedimentary clay,
to come to light. Too sentimental? Sure,
but walking the picket line with mom when you're eight
will mark your words that way, your musical score
or iTunes playlist, your GarageBand remix. Tonight
we're going to party like when doves cry.

Proverbial Sonnet (46)

When plans B, C, D, and E, all fail,
it helps to take a walk in the rain, maybe
bring an apple, kick a can along the ground.
Don't mind the sewers that remind you hell
sits under us at all times, how daily
we wrestle its static energy, hands tied
behind our backs, like bobbing for apples
in a cauldron of seething excitations.
“Then there is a time in life when you just take
a walk: and you walk in your own landscape”
and snap a few photos with your iPhone
to post on your blog with words like leaves that shake
as a nervous squirrel creeps out along their branch
and peeks at you for some sign of your plan.

Proverbial Sonnet (45)

If this is part of a serial poem, I'm not
supposed to read what came before, what words
I put or fell together late last night.
But what do I care about cautions and theories
regarding the way I should make my poems
these days? I'll sit here and over-read
what I have writ if that's how I want to roll.
What's OK by Herrick is OK by me.
It takes more than two to flock together.
The line is a manner of looking things up.
Wing it, sing it, and bring it. Fling your feather
against the sky. Snip the paper cup
and pick the coated pieces for our new nest.
Theory's restless worm will lead us to it.

Proverbial Sonnet (44)

Who care's about the chicken or the egg?
What matters is more along the lines
of a fine mist: you can't feel it on your tongue
unless you stick it out. What matters is
a bad penny, the work that's never done,
a moss-covered stone louder than words.
After a storm comes, the day begins again.
What matters is the earth that angels fear
to tread; knowledge is up there in the clouds
for most of us to grab. What matters is
a puddle in the mud: there's no walking
around it. The rain is worth a thousand words
fools write down and rush to tell the world
about. What matters is a bird in the mouth.

Proverbial Sonnet (43)

It's like what the kids say: the heart is tangled
syrup wood. Love is a mangled metaphor,
an electric tiger stalking the avenues
searching for someone to play Scrabble with.
You hope it whispers a word or two to fill
in your rhyme scheme, but instead it opens wide,
grabs you around the waist, and wanders off
with your head and limbs dangling from its mouth.
You don't play Scrabble that way do you? With
a twenty-point bonus for making a word
that rhymes? Love does. It's wrenching. It takes the nuts
and bolts of the tangled tiger heart and twists—
lefty loosey, righty tigthy—until
its teeth dig through the engine of your mind.

Proverbs of Heck (42)

Wash hands, wash mind. Life is a process
of decomposition; what appears, at times,
to be growth is a mysterious symptom
having nothing to do with the outcome,
or at least that's how it feels when I peel
a banana or stand on the beach waiting
for my boy to pass me the ball, shoulders
hunched, arms half dangled, and hands slightly
curled, as the crashing waves wash over the back-
ground mind, like a theater in which the spot-
light shines not on the star's climactic speech
but on an invisible hand backstage.
Art is a production for breaking up sleep;
a banana peel tossed on the compost heap.

Proverbs of Heck (41)

No words without lips. No thought without
nerves. The mere act of walking is made
more beautiful with every new transportation
invention, till walking is like dancing
and dancing is like walking without legs
the way you and me rhyme in the heart of time:
two bodies, one motion, three minds, composed,
as a life is a composition, with syntax
of action and diction of thought and accidental
hitting of the caps lock key. You can't stack
a second brick until you've laid the first,
but you can imagine it, paint it, frame it,
and have it hang in a gallery for others
to see: the nerve of a brick stacked on air.

Proverbs of Heck (40)

When I say “Every poet is . . .” I say
what I am, not what you are, unless, perhaps,
you are not a poet, in which case it's
all good. The poem is a fountain, a boy
of about five or eight, a steady stream
of sparkling white water spouting up from
his blue-green penis only to dive down
into the penny-dappled water below,
meaning there is no meaning and not so much
an end as a slow dissolve into the shiny
layers of intention, attention, and inspection,
a meaningless catapult aimed at the sky
and stuck in a seemingly endless misfire
tinkling, raw and rigged, into that sturdy water.

Proverbs of Heck (39)

Silence is a mouthful of nothingness,
the alpha and omega of every poem.
I punch out at six o'clock and complain
about the long day, but the soldier's ends
only when bagged — not even returning home
and lying down in the American grain
under an empty sky will put it to rest.
It's easy to say what true awareness is
when I don't have a hood pulled over my head
and electrodes wired to my balls: best
not to worry too much about what happens
to the idea of solemn laughter then.
Eyes aimed at the ground like a tired surgeon—
more zen than glum, but I get the confusion.

Proverbs of Heck (38)

Say what you see, not what you know; but don't
believe it until you feel it. Intuitive
knowledge sees through time, speaks through silence,
and acts because. The Paiute shaman took no
offense at the Indian poker game; instead,
he pointed to the feather in his hat and laughed
as he slowly disappeared. True awareness
is solemn laughter. The rain falls on the tracks
we leave. A hungry stomach is the barking of dogs.
Wisdom comes like the wind over buffalo grass.
It takes a thousand voices like the stars.
Ask questions from your heart to see lightning
in your mind. Step lightly in the spring but pack
an ax. The old rabbit jumps; there is no death.

Proverbs of Heck (37)

The poem engages you or it doesn’t;
it reaches out and touches you or stays
in the corner and keeps to itself while you
make your way from another to another;
it bothers you, leading you to question,
pause, or trouble over, or it leaves you
alone; it works through you, on you, with you,
or, quite simply, it doesn’t. How can that
be faked anymore than a song or paint
on a canvas, gobs of it, lighting up nothing
so much as the sleepy hollow of your skull?
So a line isn’t always as true as it is
at the moment of composition. The poem
is sketched out on paper, carved out in time.

Proverbs of Heck (36)

Didactic poetry is canned dog food
but maybe that will change again someday.
Doubt’s the fox to imagination’s hens;
read like hell makes a pretty good shot gun
but so does I don't care, I'll do it my way.
I was raised by vague pronoun references,
schooled by dangling modifiers, and if
I want my life to have been lived in
the passive voice it may be that the things
I want are not so much my choice as they are
the sum of my previous experiences
impressed upon my genetic makeup.
A candle doesn’t care if it’s dark or light;
the utility of an object is, well, duh.

Proverbs of Heck (35)

All ambition, no heart. Better to fail
at a thousand poems going for a great one
than to write a hundred good ones? It takes
a visage. Ambition is not about scale;
it's all about aim and paying attention.
Making your way in the world today is abstract,
which is another problem with ambition:
it's too easy to point to after the fact.
Nothing to say and tired of saying it:
the middle manager's burden. Cash in
your chips or let it roll? Ambition snakes
and snarls, greases and growls, and leads you to
the crap table. If you can't stand the heat
don't cry for air and continue to tweet.

Proverbs of Heck (34)

“Wisdom is cold and to that extent stupid.”
Tom Clark wrote that once, and now I can, too,
but only because I saw it published in
The American Poetry Review. That’s the squid
in the pool I am hoping to wade through
quietly. Quiet, you know, like when
school is in. I don't want to tear down the walls
of the malls like when I was young, but I still
want to peel off the price tags. Anarchy,
why did I leave you? You don't take my calls;
you erase my messages. Time is a shrill
laugh, more couldn’t-care-less than snarky,
but it doesn’t last forever. Justice is lapsed
where the good are left to apartments of collapse.

Proverbs of Heck (33)

The Buddha knows there is no drudgery
even in a service economy
as long as you keep your self out of it
with right concentration and mindfulness
and don't violate the requirements
of there's-a-right-way-to-make-a-living,
and it helps to remember to stop now
and then to knock on the sky and listen to
the sound, but not while operating
heavy machinery or walking through
the halls of a hospital or high school,
then it's best to swallow the nothingness
and make like something is happening as
every move you make is making you, too.

Proverbs of Heck (32)

You can't drink water from an empty cup.
Too much water in the mouth will choke even
the thirstiest man. Art should be useful
like a toothbrush with gold bristles. Shut up
and let the scenery take you through the scene
you were about to make. It's beautiful
to listen, but more beautiful to respond.
Sometimes the best answer isn't a question
but simply silence, with or without a smile.
You can do better than take me by the hand. ;-)
Words without lips are bullets without a gun.
Say it. To speak is a spoke in the wheel
of the mountain bike we ride over the hills
and far away where nobody will hear us.

Proverbs of Heck (31)

It's not the heat but the humidity, meaning
it's the memories really, more than the life
itself. A vague notion is a fortune.
Sitting and thinking is good housecleaning.
Good poetry is carved out with a knife
while squatting in a storm that feels like sun
in your hair and kisses along your shoulder.
With art it's not always bad to lose sight
of your target; in war it will end your day.
We wake up from our dreams and nightmares older
and wiser when we understand them right.
Indulge the chattering mind until it walks
away and settles down under the oak
to fashion art out of silence like clay.