the world creates you (found poem, from an interview with Gabor Mate)

just before they got to [Budapest]
where my mother and I lived
under Nazi occupation

(this, I tell you
has informed so much of my work)

the pediatrician said
“all of my Jewish babies
are crying”

(the child is very open
if the mother is suffering
the baby is suffering)

the parents' pain
is felt and passed down

the iniquity of the fathers
visited upon the sons

with our thoughts
we make the world

but what I want to add –
before you create the world
the world creates you

jazz vs. jazz

listening to some old timey
female jazz vocal songs
with sappy trumpet, strings
and one note per bar bass

I do not know
if my urge
to return home from the cafe
to listen to Miles and Mingus CD's
is sacrilege, good taste, pigeon business
or simply garden-variety monkey mind trick

Frank's

totally engrossed
in the weight of sensation
of behind on seat, feet, plopped on floor
pen in hand, hands on notebook
static with commercial radio ads
sizzle of steak omelet on grill
swoosh of metal cooking utensils
eyes on more than one perception at once
hearing eyes, feeling eyes, visual eyes
trained on Bic flowing across lined paper
at Frank's Falafel House, in dead of pre-dinner rush
I am alone with my thoughts
and with the lonely waitress, who
with big eyes and wrinkles like dimples
waits for my order with me

the grow

the push upward
the pull inward
fill to fill-line
complete the race
you are chasing love
which was at the start
and at the finish
it is the road
it is your heart
the beat that drowns you
has found you
tracing your way back
in circles

mirror of the moment

the quiet of voices
of humming refrigeration
of twangy pedal-steel guitar r&b
the innocence of young women
baring their secrets, for all I know
there, across the room

I sit with these solemn embers
burning bright in the midst of daylight
forever for a moment
in excess of contentment
where an invisible mirror lives
smiling back our luminescence