1.

The sun’s intensity
In open eyes – the conflagration
Is explicit.

The bedrock is conflict
And what peace there is
Is brief.

We see one another,
Speak and collaborate,

Yet the blood is hot
And the belly hungers,
The mouth dries in need

Of water and love
Is a separate intensity.
Schopenhauer’s

Proposal complicates
The simple construct
Of satisfaction and need.

The question is now crucial –
We have already abandoned
The animal. Strange days,

Time pressing upon us,
Not the abstraction of time,
Real time, the time

That chains us
In its fragility.

Some see portents
In any kind of weather yet

We mistake our definitions
Of history, what is inside
And outside.

2.

All now is omen
Where it was once
Speculation.

Some perceive
The hand of God
And others the accidents

Of history.
Mao to Nixon:
“It is a symptom

Of our disease.”
Sitting in the library
Of logograms –

Language
That fails us.
Between argument

And agreement
The world continues,
Its economies

Of self-preservation.
You may as well ask
The caged animal

To cease growing
That there be room enough
To breathe.

3.

Of power, the fear of the mind
That believes the world
To be clear

As the sun’s intensity,
The blind eye that portends
The illuminations of paradise.

To speak clearly
Without thinking or to
Think and not to speak,

To understand, wholly beyond
The limits of satisfaction
And appetite to the demarcations

The words illuminate.
In white spaces,
Interrupted, the world is

Revealed. The design
Is blind, paradise
Is now and

Its luminosity bursts
With the simplicity
Of lit paper.