Author: William Cowan

I have gathered all the flocks.
That were left. The great beyond calls
The versifiers away from home.
Wolves call to the distressed with
Simple songs. Caterers mingle amongst
The vigilant observers waiting out the tryst.
Why dispose of the daily bread we cannot
Consume when jackals call out names
Of troubadours long gone to shallow graves
Unsatisfied in content, context or style?

We cast our nets out on the sea
Once more walking toward the weary fish
Unresponsive still in their routines,
Searching for the less impure.
What gallops across the waves this way
To smooth our brow, forgetting the tide
Follows and what is left is silt,
fodder that nourishes what remains.

I have chosen you to listen
To the inclinations, derivations of inclement
Weathering around the edges of what is
Known about the differences between

The settled and the set-up scheme.
I love baseball statistics, its categorizing
And rating of what may not even have been
Seen by the less than observant

Watching the hot dog wrappers blowing
On this late afternoon in a lop-sided loss
By the local team, looking at their scuffed
Cleats, thinking of future beers and not

Thinking about their batting average
Or the quiet of the hometown fans
As all analysis misses the learned move
To first that picks off the contemplative wanderer.

And all the fleeced have gone to sleep.
The last chips collected, there are no cheap
Replacement modes to gather wits or
Count what bodes ill or otherwise.
As flies pick the crumbs of buffets
Closed for the brief time it takes
To clean the commodes before the next
Dreamers arrive to wish upon the roll
Of the die that never ends, but only
Contends with the lack of dreams outside.

1. How to add to the ongoing conversation that is
web-like over us all is a question. Or subtract,
pare down to an essence of something.
Information is not knowledge someone once said
I’m sure. Leading, lending itself
to definitions, and the observer is the decider
I guess we could propose

as long as it doesn’t touch the nose
of all the observed that pine for retribution
to be started right after the next
commercial frees them up for compensation.

Package deals abound, just check the travel sites.
I’ve been to Greece in my mind, never Carolina.
Taylor never trumps Elvis or Memphis, but
I digress into subterfuge and list wanderings.

The clock ticks on, the birds clatter in their cages.
The dryer tumbles with buttons ringing
staccato changes to the invisible music that
Cage talked about. More fuel for sloth, etc.

Are we about to leave the tunnel entered some
administrations ago? The casual lack of truth
still seems to hold sway. The light is all fluff,
no substance. Parking in the vast lot drains one’s reserve.

Cue the studied attempt to really care this time.
I’m lost being elsewhere while here most
of the time. It’s compounded by all the
acquisitioning of what is truly empty.

2. Discernment leaves you unprotected. Please return
as the brain explores. My thought on this vanished
across the street as the wind ruffled the vintage oaks
into a friskier presentation. The day continues,
lightens up our looking into matters, like lunch
and which beer really gathers the mental chatter best.

Out in the distance trailers of clouds form-up
in huddles, traverse the emptiness that this time
lacks any other story. We’re overdue
at the bubbleworks called work. There the artificial
civility reigns supreme. Daubing on our “make-up”
we love the repartee that passes over the clientele’s heads.
Although trivia pursuit shouldn’t be a career goal.

Ah, but all this is invention of a sort. Sometimes
it is integral to the failing light
that holds out a promise beyond understanding.
The music returns again, fuzzing the vents
and off-shoots of plaintive study. What
proposes a finality to these suppositions is
left to your mind completing the numbers,
the colors, the whole panoply constructed
even as we all go on with our less than complete lives.

Fanning the radio dial driving away creates
unintentional stories that are part of all
our consciousness add to alluvial packing
of the frontal lobe. I’m enjoying
the break from my own self-created distress
signals and merge with traffic south.

On this blue sky day
the clouds are painting poetry.
Is the wind the author, I wonder?

Long lines wisp straight across the horizon,
could be “projective verse”
far as the breath will go.

The short puffs are Williams or Cummings descending
down toward earth, its vast girth the open
auditorium where this all plays out above.

The palm trees behind the wall are exclamation
points breaking the lines that ever
change and fall before our eyes.

The birds dot the phrases
with deft maneuvers moving
in and out of the spreading stanzas.

And as it all moves west what remains
is the zen of the capacious screen
in all its ravaging completeness.

1. The vertical and the horizontal extend out
to plain forever. The trees are dripping
leavings over unknown lives.
Collateral outfits crowd the gutters.
Last night’s bar bottles glisten in the street.

Coarse recourse & cheap sh*t talk
scatters the mom & pop grocery dirge.
We’re smoking & looking for options,
glassy-eyed, sun-blind, off course again.
Still pumping the stuff, waiting for enough.

2. Columns wake morning light stays
aspiring delivers sight caught rays
engulfs drains rashers part senses
glow listing strains fringe fences

as throws tilt amidst carnage doze
slows leeward bulks turns frees silt
raining, gathering, ameliorates lilt
sums, as the quiet after morning storm hums

When the space arrived at the end
when all else that day was done
there was nothing left to do about it.

The chatter, packing and unpacking of
the business day, banter of a shallow sort,
the very pretend was the reality that capitalism brings.

Those left quietly to their own just
desserts were holding empty plates as darkness arrived.
Those moments in the background static held sway.

There are no ends they will not go
to hold onto the pittance they have
acquired and turn it round again

as it wears thin
with this rubbing about
as the nuance wears out.

The part you are left with
is the same as the one
you started out with so

long ago before you
knew what is what
and what isn’t.

For Kay Ryan

The table is always empty
in their house,
where neatness is kin
to religion.
The idea of the horizontal
surface’s power to hold
disparate refuse of the day
never flowers in their room
where perfection in appearance
becomes a tomb.

We are so many
different places
part of the time.

Different places
define how we act, present
ourselves part of the time.

We are so many
turning about to hide
the others we show to no one.

I hold the hand
mirror behind my head
to show my leaving the others.

Alone with no one else to please,
no one else to be, releases
the others, and they leave.

I am not interested in how
you put together your life,
only that you were betrothed
to me in your conglomerateness.

Paging back through the bits
that made sense or were interesting
holds us enthralled like watching
the life of the aquarium in the city in the dark.

Pausing to catch your breath
as you exude it into mine is solace
of a sort I had imagined comes
to this age, this day, as all else falls away.