So then the question is

So then the question is

Intro to religious thought is a freshman honors class, not to
say that all students are freshmen nor that all

are in honors, the University is gracious to acknowledge
that religious thought is not limited to the extremes of

pendulum academia, but it still worries me that I am in intro
to religious thought as a senior, perhaps too late for

my uneducated spiritual mind, you see, I thought I had been
studying such thoughts this whole

time, but my transcript say differently and so I sit and listen to
the professor named Power, tenured in religious

thought, from having lived long enough to cite most sources
on a first-name basis: Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed,  etc...

I hesitate to ask of his last conversation with them, after
all I am just here for my certificate, but from my

vantage point, looking up for wisdom from the crown of
his balding illuminate head, it seems as if I have

oversimplified my creator's dialogue: having sought faith
in the glow of a morning-after thrill, enamored by

the daffodilled skates of a railroad track in full bloom, or
the stifling breath of a dream in frost, then

renewed, in agonic tussle with my own thought from the
helm of my two-story bed, as prayers remain

heard but unsaid, in drunken reverie of the crush of
my best friend, I told her he loved her and

that was the end, from the vantage view of a rooftop
ladder, saw God and Hell and a sun set on

fire, then spoke of love like a four-letter word, then spun
it, a web, to mask my desire, then stood up on

stage to remember how bright, the grimace, the freedom,
the encompassing light, then returned home like

a prophet with Manna, to share, to give, to cherish and
to raise with the night, after having done all these

things and then now to look up, at the reflective dome of
my teacher's wisdom slowly, slowly impart, to

see the pens of my peers' scribbling incessant, without
looking up they know the next sentence, so then

the question is, he says once again, what is the purpose
of existence (pause for the answer)

Street Corner Symphony

This isn't a fully-established poem, but I don't really want to spend more time on it, so I'll just post it and leave it behind.
----

There is rest, rest assured, in
     sleepy lines of cardboard dressed in
          silhouette trappings of beanied hood-rats

You stand there. You watch it (pronoun unknown)

There is no register, no key
     to capture the sound of silence in
          this broken piano-hand's song as it

Waits for nothing. You stay for

something: you wait for a response, a reason, a
       request, to help make it make sense, so you
       don't let it, pass, it sitting, you stand, hold
       out your hand, a dollar, wait -

Think of nothing. You stay for

reasons you don't yet understand
     it doesn't seem right, you should leave,
          you have a thousand times before when

You didn't see. Things were

easier in childhood, never knowing
     beyond your doorstep, or that some people
          had no doorsteps, then you got older and

believed that this was a tragedy, like
     an awful accident of fate, of fallen grace
          in a piss-colored corner of circumstance.

It looks for nothing. You were always

wrong, it wasn't the one that was
     searching, it had found the ground, found
          rest in that shadowed form of concrete and

was not looking, but you stand so
     still as if you had seen hell, as if you could
          compare it to your imagined vision of heaven

Waits for nothing. Why do you

expect anything different?

Drawn to the Flame

Drawn to the Flame

1.

water surely cleanses,

           but not as surely as fire.

2.

the devil's business was never with God,

                                    but always with the flame.

3.

only sunlight breaks the fog,

            but lo, from where does sunlight come

                                                            the sun! the sun!

oh, mortal sun.

The Water Cycle

----

whirlwind parameters set on
                     one constant : flux

paraded by face montages, shifting
                     landscapes on a palette of
shifting situations. You shipped

to sea on a Greyhound
                     bus, while I beget the

homefront war on my living room
                     floor, cracking knuckles to
the slow premise of blues: you

will be amused to know that I
                    dreamt of dolphin calls and

imagined an ocean world where I
                    was (the ultimatum: live
long and forget that you

were the sky) but inevitably, I
                     rise to fill your clouds

this is the only method for juncture
                     so I wait for your rain to
fall in phone-call conversations. We

breathe eachothers' worlds only briefly,
                     strange air which is not fully air,

laying stones to a castle in the
                     sky we once watched, together,
and believed in.

----