The body has life and death
True self does not
Attain true self

Attach to the head, hand
the face, bone, looks
they are body, not “I”

True “I” has no life or death
only pure broth of essence
Simmer it

Man throws a bone  
A dog runs away with it
Truth is within sip

I

The city is in decay -
Has been since it sprouted from the earth like a sapling,
Will be for as long as it still stands.
The only permanence is entropy.
Nature makes its bed
To unmake it.
We are eternal and mortal.
The jellyfish unbecomes itself into the polyp.

II

A millennium ago,
The ocean fell from the sky, drop by drop,
And dragons were a myth.
Dinosaurs came around
And dragons were a myth.
Humans came around
And dragons are still a myth.

If time is linear, time travel is impossible.
If it is cyclical, I have met my descendants.
If it does not exist, then I am still two and twelve and seventeen,
Young and old, a child of Schrodinger,
And eternal.

III

A cup of tea sits hot and cold.
It should one day be ice,
But not today.
Today it is full of salt.
Moses parts the Red Sea
And a motley crew of revolutionaries
Wait for tea leaves to steep in the harbor.
It is somehow simultaneous and distant all at once,
Another child of Schrodinger.
The sea rushes closed on an ocean floor
That is still made of sand.
Dragons are still a myth,
But the fish neither know nor care.

The tea goes down the drain,
And I replace the salt in the shaker with sugar,
As it should have been,
And for now, All is Well.
I walk into the adjacent room and
Immediately forget why I am there.
All is no longer Well.
The world forgot where it came from,
Mammals forgot the dinosaurs,
****** forgot he was Jewish,
And I forgot what I wanted here.
I want more tea,
But I don’t want to remember the salt.

IV

Time is short,
Born, spent, and dead in an instant,
But born and born and born again after that.
The city is in decay.
Teotihuacan was once New York.
Machu Picchu decays into the mountain again,
Venice and San Francisco will one day be underwater.
Kings held slaves when the monarchy thrived,
Nazis rose to power in their wake..
The people revolted against the crown
As their descendants march for peace, pay, and freedom.
There is no originality,
Time has proven this.
It unbecomes itself into the polyp as its feathers turn to ash
And pyramids are born in Egypt, the Americas,
In the courtyard at the Louvre.
Only time remembers when dragons were more than a myth,
And quarks became friends with each other.
One day, humans will be the myth,
And no city will stand, so no city will decay.
Tea will come in only salted flavors,
And dragons in none.
The only permanent is entropy.

River sparkles under scowling sky
Flowing curves
Serpentine sweepings
Amidst steel and concrete.

I lived in a ghetto box here.
Nothing is permanent.

Let’s go
in a boat
through secret underground streams
to that place
deep beneath parkland roots
of elm, ash and hazel
where wise old rocks
with lime green beards
sit still in wisdom.

Do they envy us movement?
Moss is slippy underfoot.
Nothing is permanent.

Let’s alchemise emotions of liquid
Peel off layers
Abandon those old world clothes in a pile
Slip
naked
into pure warm water

Soak
in a healing cave
of glowing amethyst
Until
Through a crack in the crystal
We enter a shaft of light
Magnificent and frightening
Then emerge
into pastel skies
Return to earth
Boisterous
Forever transformed by the fusion
Welcomed back
By a squelching piano
Made of our ancestors’ mud
To play
To sing
To be.

sweetly swimming
in the colder tides of
emptiness—
tidier than the backseat and
your umbrellas; tidier
than the rolling crests of
suburbia;
tidied by the frayed smoothness
of sea.