MARS WANTS DESPERATELY TO GET MILKED
Mars has roughly 50% of the energy it takes three
otherwise fit blind men to blow up a weather
balloon six feet across and let it
float athwart the Grand Canyon near sunset on a
Wednesday that's Mars
Mars casts a shadow on its neighboring planets Elsa and
Sonrietta although we can't see them because they are basically
ethereal and their inner light prevents them from
gross human visibility
Mars could if someone were able to make it stand
still balance on the head of a pin or on a
tall-necked bottle over a warm draft because of its
nature of weight and counterweight plumb and thumbnail
These are little-known things about Mars just as there are
little-known things about our selves both when irradiated with
euphoric joy and inflated past normal poundage
or deflated rapidly due to bad news of a loved one
or defeated especially hard by the severing of a
limb or the deprivation of dignity over a long
period of time
Mars takes longer to make one complete orbit around the
sun than ambition to fall away from a tyrant or
the thought of gracious compassion to enter the
mind of a dedicated rapist
The planet remains staunchly Martian after even
repeated attempts to understand it with all its
pebbles and boulders and all its half-squinted
views of us so far away to the right over there
three light years from the galaxy with no toes
or the spiral nebulae's uncanny undulations against a
sea of glorious stars
mars has only three minutes to get its act together poor
Mars whereas the self and soul of us
is given reprieve after reprieve until the
cows come home all moony and milky and
presenting those very cow faces of theirs those
big wet eyes and hairy chins with
Mars somewhere over their shoulders up there
grinning at us day after day and
wanting so desperately to get milked
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MARS IN THESE POEMS
Mars in these poems is a
place of unearthly splendor a
warrior with a planet for helmet ready for war
A woman even a woman personification wily and glamorous
a veritable Rita Hayworth of planets
And could also be a cloud a flying clod a
clue to our origin or destiny depending on your
vantage point which end you're coming from
And maybe Mars might also be the human heart with all its
crisscross scars of possible early water
The caveat being that we send all this expensive equipment to
find out of there's life on Mars
Why not spend it to find out if there's
life on earth? O God what's
real life in our very midst? The Mars out our
rearview mirror! 2/6
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LIGHT
Light everywhere moves with an anonymous precision
over smooth terrain or rough-hewn scabrous dilapidation
up stainless steel smoother than glass or through
sick teeth of alligatorish quadrupeds or millipedes
proceeding not with caution but full speed ahead
going at its own sudden rate faster than most everything
spread like God's lightning fingers wherever they may point
unjudging and unjudgmental though throwing light in all
seemingly inaccessible cracks and corners
leaving no stone shadowed in its path
from this visible pen-scratch to across the entire galaxy
this selfsame light (though right
now as it's night I'm writing by electric light)
flotillas of ignitious angels even they bathed in its endless icy
silvery glow
penetrating far into the dark
and all our own faces show up in it changing expressions either
good or ill though we usually put our
best faces forward in full-lit lineup or in
low-lit romantic bistro
as little actual star flashes float in the air to some soft electric
organ music
He is Light Light of the heavens and earths and He said
“Let there be Light” as if there had
been none before though planets like dolphins
leap through its rippling waves as they
lovingly pursue it
Light like the ocean of our hearts our most natural
aqueous element in which waves of light are our most
nutritious moisture
God's flags that unfurl past the
endlessness of the end from before the
beginning of the beginning
where we can only wave goodbye to
everything we ever knew or will know
yet even here find ourselves
bathed from head to toe
in Light 3/9
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DUE MEASURE
Each world falls away to show another
Behind a field of trillion stars dimensions unfold and
in a pinhole more gigantic whose adjective is so
inadequate because gigantic is for polar bears or
canyons while this is
a sideless box no top no bottom in which everything we
see and are
all our planetary and constellational vastness and
complexity the whole known or speculatively known
universe is the size of the hair-tip on a gnat crawling across
a suspended tightrope thread
all deep space original Big Bang coagulations and
spin-offs gorgeous golden Spiral Galaxies and Cats Paw Whirlpool
Bracelet twinklies insinuating worlds of infinite complexity
fit inside this miniscule hair-end wobbling along on this
tiny gnat inside this huge box that is no box in a vaster no place
that is not a no place but we have no possible
word for it and The Merciful is the Lord of all these
worlds contained within the heart of the believer
I'm almost incapacitated at the thought and
float out among them freefall in
perfect orbits of His Grace with
nothing more to say
the hair-tip cosmos into another even tinier hair-tip
within each time another even vaster cosmic box that is
no box at all that falls away to show
another beyond beyondness more deeply
silent even than deepest silence is
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