NOTE:

This poem was the co-winner of the

American Academy of Poets Prize

University of California, Berkeley

December 2007

[071110]

The sport fanatic

with a resolute sneer

can’t sway,

and spawns a pole in the streetcar.

No longer are persons

the disparate flecks in the mosaic

after such a hard casing emits a mean jeer.

The hunched-over reader,

hurriedly acquiring designs

from the leaves of a dictionary,

and painted by the tangling wind,

has no time for arbitrary arrows

and cannot meet the man in the seat

beside him breaking the policies of prudence

in alcoholic haste to release his frictioned mind.

Our scholar is a doorknob,

awkward and lifeless but limitless,

with the skills to spark fury in a huntress,

docile but recalcitrant to demand.

We might denote the chap as secretive,

but really, no one wants a show.

The ragged hairstyle has divided

the bench from the bully to the brains,

and en route to spill his blank hostility

at an archaic strategic warlike game

the hulking flesh fans its intimidation

and aloud doubts the dreamer’s interior.

Knowing the only worth of Christ

(yet the cavalier is more devout),

the interrupted beaver stills

the tempest of being attacked

and smiles, resumes his breeding new ideas

as if artifice, impolite and spurious

assumptions were not off.

He holds his pen, highlighting text

as if no bother pierced his routine.

But how can an inquisitive one

harness the motors of art in life

without wielding the insolence

delivered at their lap?

The trap of inhumanity

and the balance over strife

is the wind

whittling away benevolence.

But what does it expose,

a universal misanthrope?

Is the indifferent nod

the noble response,

a pardon to avoid provoke?

I grope for an opinion,

to align with honor or with compassion.

I hope to commune with only

saintly, kind, open pilgrims

with softer tongues.

I hope that throngs

of pigeons,

undulating with a garbaged cluck

don’t peck away the egret

when its elegance is up for trust.