Fevered Valentine

The hands of the gods are tied

Behind their backs when it comes

To directly intervening in our affairs

Or offering some advice if not petitioned

In the stern summer we can feel

Their gazing on our backs

Their lightening starting fires

In the spring-abandoned hills

Approaching our locked doors

One disaster so a worse

Doesn't have to happen

But still at night asleep

They soothe our feet with their hands

They cool our fevered brows

Whether Valentine

Wasn't Copperfield correct

Whether we will live on our ideals

The only route to survival

Or flounder in appearances

Let's get serious and sublime

For once it's like those men

And women who built the pyramids

Laborious stone on stone

We're still speculating how

The seriousness of suffering

Erects monuments to the sublime

What the mind is capable of

The body performs

The landscape replaces its castle

Pedagogical Valentine

A shy smart-aleck I was back then
A phrase derived from a con man
Who exposed an evil prison system
Another kind of Alexander
'Defender of Humanity'
One crying out in the classroom
Feasting on figs and honey
'This is all hogwash'
A cursed science
And a lost religion
We came to get baptized
In water and fire
To remember our errors
And be changed by them

Schooled Valentine

Things do or don't add up

But there's always that subtraction

At the end of the column of want

Sitting on my lap she likes

To reach up and place her paw

On my throat what desiring

Her claws sheathed her eyes pleading

Now I know I'll be back

I want to leave this hurried note

For my future eyes to find

Today it was summer here once again

So as usual we left the earth

In the schools of heaven

We were yearning to return

Summer Valentine

We have to look up steadily

To see the clouds gathering

And the smoke in the air

That look like an X-ray of teeth

Only three left in the lower jaw

And looming brightly over there

A continent of snowy lakes

Thawing in the desert sun

Still bucolic and amazing

To get past the blue veil

Into the outer darkness of things

To see nowhere

There are not stars

Nowhere the way is not lit

Zurich Valentine

There's nothing imagined in a photo

Not the real Lake Lucerne I imagined

We crossed to get to the 15th century

So cold I had to keep walking

Or temporarily freeze in place

On the shore the old churches of desire

And a story-book of ghosts waiting for us

But we keep moving snapping

Pictures of what we would soon forget

And have to re-imagine years later

Through the memory of these pictures

Each one a calendar shot

And yes we were actually there

What felt like coming back   

To You In Care of Persephone Valentine

I wanted to write to you today
But I've forgotten your name
And now you have no address
Though I think you'd remember me
After a few easy reminders
What's interesting about forgetting
Things is where they go
Into the meantime world
But I want to thank you anyway
For truly stirring me
With your words and example
What's so moving about memory
She who lives in the shadows
Is how she seizes her moment to return

All Crime Is About Revenge Valentine

That good may grow in me

Deliver me from the evil one

I thirst for my daily bread

But doubt my debt

To the I of the world

Will ever get repaid

I cling to the four directions

To what's above and below

To what's in front and behind

My heart is either bowing

Or dancing I can't tell which

Or where I am sometimes

In the calendar of my lives

Inside and all around you

Your kingdom come

Call From None Valentine

He fulfilled the perennial fantasy

We all have of running far away

Of throwing ourselves into the elements

Proving we could go back

To our life among the winter trees

The deft runners in the darkness

Close to the slightest shift of breeze

So no one would know they're there

But a shameful desire to retaliate

To return the hurt that hurt you

Secretly fueled your amazing will

What you were really running from

The mushroom in the forest

Blooming where no one sees him

Biographical Valentine

We work with time
Not knowing how much
There is of it personally
While the world looks
Younger than we know
Though it's dying and a new earth
Is always creeping into being
We work with pictures
Sketches and water colors
Then we lay down the bricks
And decorate the walls
We worked with words once
But came to find them wanting
So now we work with silence

Chris's Valentine

Forced into felonies to survive

In a self-imposed exile

You abandoned all human warmth

And what you can't talk about

Must have been horrific

Shame is the best jailer

To be dead and not yet dead

Safely sleeping in your grave

Yet stealing to stay alive

Which only adds to the cold

I knew someone like you once

Who felt his spirit crushed

Under the knee of the world

Fresh out of second chances

Uncle Tony's Valentine

We're still wanting to get
Directions to that hidden falls
Uncle Tony took us to that once
If we only knew him anymore
And besides it's miles away
But whenever I think of him
I think of that falls that day
The long hot drive on dirt roads
All the windows open
To turn a corner and see it
The summer you were ten
The white water plunging from the rocks
So we could stand under it
And have our sins absolved

Decoded Valentine

In the ruined graveyard of words

I pass through on my way

To the shining beach of words

I learned their alphabet

By running my blind fingers

Over the names and numbers

So when I reached the sand

I could read whole sentences

Of a language I was learning

But couldn't understand

One day I put a stone and a wave

Together in the same word

And broke the code

No longer was the world absurd

Nowhere Else Valentine

Memory doesn't use the Dewey Decimal System

Or some obtuse algorithm

It is not an instrument of the state

It's more an act of magic

That appears nowhere else

In the world an image

Comes up on an inner screen

Triggered by some taste or touch

Body memories soul memories

That night on the beach

What if we lived in the future

As much as we live in the past

And knew once done

Nothing is forgotten but returns 

My Book of Names Valentine

I wish now I had written down

In one book all the names

Of the people I've met over time

So that I could read them to you

Some names actually have faces

And can speak for themselves

Not by my remembering them

But by a power of their own

Appear before me so I can ask

For their contrition their forgiveness

Now it's clear we all signed

These pages and pages of names

Where I searched and searched

And finally placed my own

Ahistorical Valentine

We made music

Before we spoke

We danced and broke down

Into song we said

Love before we fought

Ecstasy against despair

We were done with time

All we needed was the space

Infinite and ever-churning

To call home this lostness

You still keep the photo folded

Of a horse in your pocket

Your pride is as long as your hair

Still cantering toward the future

Faced Valentine

O all the ways of saying sorry
Mea culpa please forgive me
I prefer je suis desole
I am desolated
My first translation
Or better I have devastated myself
The second heaven of despair
The sorrow of demonic stars
I have exaggerated myself
Je suis desole
What else can I say
The wind has taken my will
I am slowly blown to pieces
That come to rest on your faces

Red Valentine

All the places red shows up
Something brilliant is being born
That stops us in our tracks
Like a piercing cry
Blood or fire or rose
The fire of the roses
Burning down the mountain
Outside our window now
Do you know how wicked you are
The fire asks the rose
How pure how driven

Can you even imagine
How much I've loved you
Rose asks of the raging fire

Kept Valentine

Every night because I love them

I water the parched flowers

Of my soul I drench them

With a flood of dreams

So by morning they stand up tall

Ready to bloom and bear their seeds

But by noon they limp along

The desert sun beats them down

If I didn't come to rescue them

In a week they'd all be gone

Why keep this little plot of leaves

Transplanted from a kinder world

Where they belonged and flourished

Always longing to return

Returning Valentine

Every day on the rays
Of the sunlight reflecting
On the earth we send out
Our wishes and intentions
Seeing the little things we do
To solve our problems
Are weak and ineffective
We let them go like balloons
Out into the reaches
Of a higher understanding
And then we wait so long
Sometimes we forget the question
Until a full moon rises in us
Illuminating the way back to the sun

Legal Valentine

We keep rushing back

Into a cul-de-sac

Of disease and disruption

All with the best and worst intentions

Each country fears its friends

Are few and each person ends up

Becoming someone else

If they live long enough

We are all our own uncertain species

Each one relevant and indispensable

So what if we made a law of kindness

How many would get convicted

Imprisoned in tiny cells

How many would get forgiven

Verdin's Valentine

A wee verdin in the garden

Weaving like a bobbin

My attention to the pattern

Of four women on the horizon

Like that needle-point you worked

Of the seasons where did it end up

From here it's hard to tell

If the women are ascending

Or being swallowed by the hill

Urgently rushing toward me

Or just standing in tableau

The verdin like a thread

Pulls me steadily along

As I go out to meet you

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Personal Valentine

Thinking makes us aware

That it is nothing without feeling

And that unless you will every moment

Thinking is just sensation

The will makes thinking conscious

Of its origin and destination

While feeling seems the journey between

The traveler staring out the window

A picture looking at a picture

Out of the wedding of thinking and will

The child of feeling is born

The only really personal thing we have

Since thinking is never completely our own

And will can't always be counted on

Offered Valentine

Made up as we are

Out of many lives

Interwoven enfolded

Yet we can live only one

Life at a time moving

From place to place

This makes everything specific

And a little distracting

In our search for the overlapping

Sounds of waves of praise

Rising up from the lake

When summer begins

And another better life

Offers itself again

Escaped Valentine

You have to have enough intelligence
To comprehend the abyss
And thinking leap across it
Or you have to have enough tenderness
To follow a donkey down
Into its endless depths
And have enough dumb luck
Not to be completely broken
Smashed on the rocks below
You have to remember this
Incomplete journey back up
The other side always asking
Are we there yet wake me then
Having escaped with your life

Background Valentine

A dim chorus of sweet voices in my brain
As we wait for the soloist to appear
Who after several incarnations
Sings his heart out for three seconds
Underestimating the applause
From an audience of one
Locked in here as we are
The only way is further into
The higher reaches of thought
Into the old country of the dead
Who are raising us up
We feel them before we see them
Their obvious endlessness
And ever-present hum