Five Failed Sonnets, FWIW

1.



The lover wants what he does not have.

You know those squirrel-proof bird feeders?

The lover is like a squirrel: have

You seen his eyes? His focus? His ears

Cocked forward, his tiny brain mighty

In concentration, devising a way

to get those seeds? What he wants is right

There but he is confounded, stuck, may

Never figure it out. Something like

A miracle, an act of God, a

Eureka moment, a lightning strike

Is what he needs. He can't hold still, stay

away, or ask for help. This is a prize

He cannot share. He would rather die.



2.



All our desire is poised on an axis

Of paradox, lack and ownership

Its poles, lust and death its steep taxes,

Love and hate in circular orbit,

Strangeness and familiarity,

Familiarity and strangeness,

Round and round with the regularity

Of our backs' heaving under duress.

We pray, ask for help. This is the prize

We cannot share. We never arrive.



3.



In the City of God we built His house

To house His absence. And we filled the

Empty spaces of our hearts with busts

Of heroes, memorials to the

Dead, and monuments to the utterly,

Unutterably lost and insolvent.

We filled the bland domestic quarters

House by house, with grudging affection,

Needing the walls and roofs, but doubting

Their security. We checked out our

Neighbor's wife in the market counting

her coins, her skirt handprinted with flour.

Help her carry that home. Don't be shy.

You'll walk her home but never arrive.



4.



This place is a mere crossroads, a pile

Of coincidence, an eddy in

The torrent of commerce. Some square miles

Of zones of uses held in position

By regulatory agencies

Beholden to the insurance and

Underwriting industries, finance

Interests; and the soulless strip malls and

Secure compounds are from elsewhere, or,

At best, from nowhere, from some ether

Of algorithmic blind groping after

Profit, multiplying to the last sure

Decimal the civic futures sold short

For private gain, a vast edgeless space,

A res publica without a face.

5.

Around the squalid center, [a pit

of pestilential poverty, too

intractable to fix, too unfit

for investment or civic ado],

spread the compounds of the like-minded,

those whose politics are hog-tied, bought

and sold, whose speculation reminded

Pound of lost pride in good craft, whose

Neuroses play out in spas and bedrooms

and restaurants and spasms of lust in

the glow of monitors and dread and

anxiety and sadness too remote

for drugs to fix. They fill their houses,

vast and cheap, with their longing and they

turn up the volume, hold it barely together

with the tight twine of indignation.