What's Won.

I could not fly away with wings,
unto the most impertinent things-
with hats, and bats, and rats, and swings,
I move with grace and fly with rings.

Don't take outside what you can't get,
without going outside you'll get yourself wet,
I feel without the feeling's set,
and half an ass is better met. 

When you talk so far as far is gone,
and the night is now over and done,
everything is bitter at dawn,
and the grass is yet to be sung.

(And what's won is won,
what's gone is gone.)

The Stem Is Outward.

Temptation leads to temptation.  The ending of all things.
It is, at best, a mixed blessing-a crow in a field of tunnels.
The fields sprout dandelions, wildflowers, sunflowers-I am
at rest in the middle of a field.  Clouds fly high above me.
It is spring, and wild grasses nodding.  Sometimes, I see
a deer galloping across the grass, or bending down to nibble
a stem.  Sometimes, I read things-books, pieces of poetry
stuck to veins.  My arms are spread out about to my middle.
Nothing is born here but the darkness-the darkness spreads
outward, like a puddle slowly dissipating.  I am the dissipation.
In Japan, Africa, Taiwan, things are different.  There is more
suffering.  I have become the suffering-I am depleting it with
the will of the self.  This is the will of the Nile, the holiness
of it.  My words are sharp points like scabs.  The suffering
is minimal.  Today he had cake.  Tomorrow he will have
oatmeal-it will become stuck in his tooth, but it will not
become a part of his pain.  The littleness is what it makes it
all worthwhile.  Truth is in the pain.  I suppose everything
most suffer at some point, every twig, every grassy limb,
every photogenic flower.  I pull the stem of it-and, the stem
pulls me-outward, in.