After the Law

I do not see you, for I am not allowed to look at your differentiated, individual faces. Looking you in the eye is not necessary to my address and would be superfluous to my sense of decorum. By speaking, which is all that I ever do, I am making the rules. Therefore I am blindly addressing an audience of phantoms, an imaginary, undelimited mass denying the presence of any rarefied individual. In this, however, you escape me and flee; you get into trouble and you refuse to conform to my preemptive norms. For better or for worse. You escape your destiny and my mediation of your place in the crowd.

Another January poem

 

A comfortable, daily rain

undramatically dormant

cold season of drizzle

in an evocation of derailed

trains, missed appointments

and cement sandtraps.

I miss the oleanders, the eucalyptus

of the California coast, the cliffs

of a sea not worth swimming

in a city not worth destroying;

there just might be one or two

here of the just worth saving.

1/28/2013

Florence