I'm talking to the radio.
It doesn't answer me,
Just goes on singing about roses
And "if she comes back to me"
And "my baby drives a beautiful car"
To a sweet cliche of a melody.
It says nothing to me,
Though I'm asking all the questions I have.
But if I turn it off, see,
The silence wouldn't answer me either.

Ari/The Climbers

High upon the monument
A monument himself, he stood
For surpassing
The heights of the past

This was a monument to peace
Here peace became a solid thing
To be climbed

With the hope and the love
Of the past
He stood atop
The monument now 5'7"
Higher than ever

I was eight
Afraid of heights
Ari beckoned me
Hand over hand
When I reached his foot
He lifted me to his shoulders
The monument stood 27'

I must build the next story
Ari was telling me
By keeping me safe high in the air

The lesson did not endure
Many years have passed
Rough weather
And peace is more elusive
To my mind

A Platonic ideal
Never to be glimpsed in the real world
Only shadows

Still it's both a comfort and a goad
To remember
When peace was marble stone and human flesh
And I will climb the monument again
With some awakening child

My Signet Ring

My signet ring is gold, and round,
and smooth,
and encircles my finger roundly.
It bears my initials, D, G,
which were also my father's initials, D, G,
before he changed his name --
after, they were D, A,
and before he died --
after, they were mine.
My signet ring is smooth, and round, and
gold, and encircles my finger
with its firm grip.
It is my size, a 6, not
my father's size, because I
shrunk it to fit me.
My signet ring is round, and smooth, and gold
like a wedding ring,
and it sticks to my finger when I sweat,
and when the jeweler sized it to my finger
he erased the engraving from the inside.

The following poems were written under a pseudonym, but also while I was in college.

Electric Phoenix

1. Electricity
                    as static,
makes the air thick
with fuzz; come
darkness, massages light from
glass around an empty space
around a wire. Embrace
its power to move
mountains, to prove
theorems, to torture
prisoners.

II. Phoenix
                you can be sure
she will rise.
She dies
only to wake once more in the fire.

III. Resurrection
                      her pyre
this century is electric.
Click.
The heat in winter,
the light at dusk, all lure
her to rebirth. Reborn,
she rends. The torn
flesh of the captive,
the earth, the truth, we give
to the electric fire. Ever higher it burns.
This Age gives birth to our death as it turns.

Fiery Eye

The eye's fiery repose
Signals a halt
While curtains, raised by martyrs,
fall back in place
raggedly, like recruits in some desperate army
The eye burns on, lazily feeding the fire
with fuel of emptiness
Closed curtains
No one will come to see the show anymore,
And, although the money hasn't run out,
no one will give his life anymore
to raise that curtain one more time.
The eye burns on, and no thousands of dollars
can buy water in this desert.

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