Elsewhere it’s true nature never leaps and
nothing comes from nothing only down here 
utopias can spurt ex nihilo 
from a cornucopia and divers
insisting on their right to gravity 
will splashlessly land where we have dreamt
of a pool or lake thus making is not is
with unhobbled playfulness juggling all
four elements to suit our desires
elusive nymph and tree salesman and bug
we shuffle physics with fatality
bent on meaning and gaiety of heart

Lucidity that is as good as French
relished while reclining on a bench
idly feeding pigeons, toting up the crowd
parading primly by, is neither loud
nor argumentative, each small insight
an aperçu whispered to the twilight,
for this world’s poison the sovereign serum
pure as the Pythagorean Theorem
proving itself.  A trim neo-cortex
is fit for calculus though not for sex,
a let-there-be dividing light from dark,
the music from the motions of the park.

Down below the routine pyrotechnics
of climbing in and out of queen-sized beds,
out and into jeans, life ticktocks with the
apatheia of a Stoic’s heart, the
stupid detachment of a bomb that while
we are otherwise engaged may strew 
archetypes across two intersections,
three counties, one green desk blotter.  With Love
and Strife unreconciled Empedocles
dove into Aetna’s fire; so bubbles and froths
the subcutaneous life where dreams are
forged, hammer strokes to shatter all our plans.

I would like to be surrounded by happy 
people.  Well, perhaps not altogether 
happy.  Steady happiness can make 
one dull, shallow, insensitive.  So is 
what I really want to be surrounded by   
people who are worthy of happiness?  
Sadly, such people are seldom happy.
In fact, it’s their wretchedness that
makes them deserving of happiness.
Think of Dickens’ ill and hungry
orphans, or pestered Penelope waiting 
on Odysseus who must also suffer 
his way to their reunion.  
                             Abraham’s 
most Abraham atop Moriah, not 
two weeks later on a tranquil Beersheba 
night, dozing contentedly before his
tent after the fires have been banked, 
the camels seen to, Isaac laid to bed.