Endless Sonnet

  

Each wave is identical

Also completely unique

Repetition: practical

Their differences oblique
Each person watching waves

Is completely different

But like banister staves

Cooperate in bent

I sit by the river

Of autos driving by

Observing, I wonder

If there’s a reason why

Why do I consider

The altar of nature?

Abyss Sonnet



Into these temporary abysses

Merrily we fling our bodies & souls

As if this misery would dismiss us

From human’s* self-imposed soul sucking holes

The deeper we venture exploration 

The more absence and nothingness we find

The harder it is to play our station

And dream of some mortal human justice

We find within existence’s vortex

Only artifacts of our endurance:

Despair’s abysses will stun the cortex

& synthesize spiritual assurance

Don’t seek the abyss of nothingness yet

Life, humbly-well-lived, will better get

Abject Victory



There is a brief moment 

Of abject victory

Where we must own it:

Our superfluity

When we get what we want

& accept emptiness

Human goals do daunt

With their meaninglessness

We can’t desire nothing

Flesh is a cruel master

Although too much wanting

Can lead to disaster

So acknowledge your needs

To best avoid greed’s deeds

Garbage Sonnet



Garbage Sonnet 2

 

My curiosity embellishes

All the detritus of modern living

Seeing waste & litter replenishes

My connection to this great world’s giving

 

Soberly I realize that life’s junk

Isn’t made for my edification

But In productions’ full caves I spelunk

I’m mesmerized by litter’s invention

 

Thank you god for these moments with garbage

Your detritus sings me a secret song

Though litter’s capitalism’s carnage

It’s also the charged tea leaves divining

 

The litter we stream behind us in space

Is the comet’s tail: our visible trace 

Spring Snow Unwanted



Sometime in April under some black crust

This winter’s last filthy snow’ll liquidate 

No flowers can obscure this world at rust

Snow’s death & decay commemorate

Spring will unleash the green harpies of youth

Fighting out of future switches, blossoms

Adorn ev’ry curling muddy shoot

To which the superficial’ll say: awesome

But as my personal shadows lengthen

I miss the frigid hassles of my youth

Tribulations’ texture made me strengthen:

Learned surviving, becoming astute

Beautiful winter recedes to black muck

Which, if you live long enough, you’ll call luck

Elevated Subway Sonnet



Elevated subways arrive with force

Rumbling, earth shaking thunder under foot

Terrifying physics without remorse

They’re massive dragons that we tolerate

As they rumble off into the distance

With inhaled passengers from the platform

They seem light serpentine monsters of chance

Bending and curving to the land conformed

Watching elevated trains snake around

The buildings and steeples of our New York

Is both magical as well as profound

Making umpteen tons seem float like cork

The iron gìant that we rely on/

Ferocious, fearful and yet somehow wan

Spatial Mass Production of Oppression Sonnet

Gleaming galvanized mass-produced fences/
Looping concertina wire, chain-linked checks/
Assembled minimum wage defenses/
Adorns buildings old & new: the hex/

The architecture of oppression has become/
Leitmotif of modern society/
Protection of pecuniary sums/
From unwashed masses of the laity/

Grand spaces of former democracy/
Grows the mold of Guantanamo’s new style/
Easily assembled theocracy/
Detritus of oppression by the mile/

Freedom will be stolen by production/
Not some foreign uniformed invasion*/

*Not some swarthy brown person invasion/

*Man Gone Down* by Michael Thomas Haiku Review

*Man Gone Down*
by Michael Thomas
Haiku Review

1. Starting *Man Gone Down*/
Gently riveting to me/
(I “Identify”)/
#haiku

2. Confronted by youth/
The youth that hides in novels/
With happy sadness/
#haiku

3. Fiction converges/
With readers’ realities/
History revised/
#haiku

4. “Strange… to go through life/
A social experiment/
Understanding… Gone”/
#haiku (Thomas 99)

5. “You can tell when someone’s been loved; they don’t question its presence, nor do they despair when it seems to be gone” (Thomas 165).

6. Three hundred pages/
Of fearing his decisions/
Vicariously/
#haiku

7. Protagonist’s life/
Both Virtuous & sinful/
Flirts with disaster/
#haiku

8. Faithful to his wife/
Staying sober, kind & fair/
When cheating is rife/
#haiku

9. Crazy decisions/
Like evading a mistress/
Are perfectly right/
#haiku

10. “I was born a poor/
Black boy of above av[‘]rage/
Intelligence[: CURSE]” /
#haiku (Thomas 216)

11. The Expectations/
Placed upon Smart Black People/
Prove to be unfair/
#haiku

12. “Representing” Blacks/
Burdens folk who need to live/
Simply for themselves/
#haiku

13. “Representative/
Man” must undo and fulfill/
All stereotypes/
#haiku

14. Protagonist can’t/
Simply exist for himself/
He lugs history/
#haiku

15. Meditative run/
Through the Brooklyn Bridge’s ribs/
Explored though nicely/
#haiku

16. Digressions of thought:/
Thinking man in thoughtless world/
Explored New York well/
#haiku

17. Manual labor/
Suspends thinking men in toil/
This book explores that/
#haiku

18. Texture of labor/
The Psychology of work/
Is rarely explored/
#haiku

19. The isolation/
Of immigrants languages/
Exposed in this book/
#haiku

20. Job sites’ loyalties/
Along and across language/
Was a nice detail/
#haiku

21. Surrendering job/
With a violent outburst/
To keep pride was nice/
#haiku

22. Swimming under the bridge/
Like a weird aquatic troll/
Strange symbolism/
#haiku

23. Impossible acts/
Of the damaged superman/
Kept me reading on/
#haiku

24. When he cheats golfers/
He falls to earth a human/
Though they needed it/
#haiku

25. Boston backstory:/
Old Friends on the edge expose/
Promise’s burden/
#haiku

26. He survives for friends/
Not the noble ideas/
Placed upon his skin/
#haiku

Fire Island Day One

5. Fire Island Morning/
Slept late until workers came/
Strange busy rush/
#haiku

6. Dozens of workers/
Carpenters creating decks/
NOT on vacation/
#haiku

7. Human contrast ‘twixt/
Workers & vacationers/
Reminds us of life/
#haiku

8. Sandy’s destruction/
Demands new categories/
Of more skilled workers/
#haiku

9. These high skilled workers/
Are not camouflaged in meek/
Knowing their value/
#haiku

10. These workers remind/
Vacationers of priv’lege/
Strange awarenesses/
#haiku

11. I’m grateful knowing/
The Work that creates idyll/
I’m part of this whole/
#haiku

12. Strangely this morning/
Nature supplanted people/
Vermin assert life/
#haiku

13. Clouds of mosquitoes/
A verminous blood halo/
Renaissance of bites/
#haiku

2 Sad Sights

In the last couple of months I’ve seen two of the saddest things. The first was the paralyzed squirrel that had spent part of the fall scampering around outside of Building 7, pulled only by its front legs. I guess someone must have been feeding it, maybe the nice lady who feeds the cats also brought something down for him to eat, because he was there for a few weeks or a month. The next to the last time I saw him was right by the service exit. He clawed his way out of the bushes and looked up at me as I was heading out with my bike to work, He paused and looked straight at me and I thought, “hope it gets better, you’ve been scrambling like this for a while.” I got on my bike and pedaled off, hoping I’d be able to stay un-paralyzed.
When I was walking Lucky later that day I saw the squirrel about 20 yards from that door pulling autumn leaves up around himself. It was like he was making a little bed by one of the trees he could no longer climb. I guess I knew he was dying then. But why the cover of leaves? DId he want to stay warm? Did he know he’s soon be somebody’s dinner? Did he want to avoid being dinner? The wind blew and exposed his nonparalyzed upper limbs and head and he quickly pulled some leaves back over him. I said goodbye, because I knew this was his end. I was kind of sad, but also happy that I was aware of this struggle for life in nature.

The other calamity I saw was on recycling day on the Upper East Side the day I went to the Whitney with Linda and Mary from California. I was running to the cafe that Lennox and Chandler were sitting at to bring the Calvin and Hobbs book I was carrying to them. On 76th street between Park and Lexington I came across a jumbo clear recycling bad that was full of maybe 30 Kodak rotating slide carousels. I had to know what the photos were of, so I tore a small hole in the bag and pulled out two slides from one of the slide-show carousels that people used to give slideshows before the internet made sharing and collating images so east. (I remember when one of my parents hippy friends came back from some exotic trip (Dan Deitz to Germany? Judy Geisman to India?) and we were all dutifully assembled to see one or two carousels of that trip with their commentary (as the adults got high and drunk). It was boring, though the images were interesting, as they got high and drunk the adults were less and less interesting.
The two slides I got were of Sofia Bulgaria. One was of the “Church Alex Nevsky” (that looked like a mosque), the other was titled “rush hour, Sofia” Both were lettered in sloppy fountain pen writing. I would imagine that the 10,000 slides in those thirty carousels were all also titled in fountain pen. Someone spend their life visiting Eastern Europe (& other places), taking photographs and editing them into slide shows. After each slide was viewed, labeled, carouseled the photographer-traveler, tourguide and slide-show purveyor would invite people to live vicariously though his travels.
Alas, he dies and someone put these slides to the curb to be recycled. What treasures of a life were in those bags? What treasures am I saving for Mason or Chandler or Lennox to throw to the curb some day? Nothing so exotic as a trip behind the soviet Iron Curtain. Sigh.