In all their seeming harmless flatness

words come dangerously close

to slicing us up.

As with schizos, each attempt at self-protection is shaky

and uncertain.

Yesterday the maple was suffused with gold,

inclining slightly to saxophones.

Today it can’t shudder off its stark black edge.

The photograph struggles with its negative still.

In the realm of abstractions

the circle is serene, but split.

Solitude amassed in phi (∅), the empty set;

twin Janus hemispheres disregard each other,

a brittle little tao that cracks like an egg.

You gossip about yourself at the backyard fence,

clanking out your double-talk,

like Paradox naming names.

And then, there is the night

that recoils from the edges of light —

And the lies we tell each other

in uninterrupted moments only.

And then the truth of day —

the news comes on, enlightenment.

To remember the lies we turn away

to the promises we made to future lives

not to forget the pain,

oaths of anxiety kept better than curses,

festive as locusts in the grain.

A language of my own, these troubled times.

But as good as anyone’s, my artful dodge.

I’ll give you good advice, the simplest kind:

watch yourself writ terribly small,

but stronger than the blades of grass,

like beetles clambering in the mowed-through thatch,

inheriting the earth.