Here are the disturbed, pacing in circles, making 

the same muttering journey day to day, chasing their tails 

around a single point as if one half is trying to catch 

the other and the other hardly cares. Every day

I see them turn.

And wouldn’t our collective madness be just as clear 

with only a little perspective; if you could only fly up and over

and follow the width of the gyre we travel daily; watching blank

bodies move three blocks then right, three more then right again 

intent upon nothing more complicated than the process of living?

Right enough, the circle is the shape of madness

for what’s crazier than something that refuses to end

that has no purpose but to start again, infatuated

by its own surrender, admitting no distinction

between beginning and end.

That’s why this mad world moves as it does, why it dances like

a wheel and speaks in ciphers; why our primal minds pay homage

to the sun and the path of the planets and the spirals of pressure 

scribbled across our atmosphere. Maybe, only the craziest of us realize:

A circle is a mad shape, but bitterly necessary.

A sorrowful shape, without relief or rest or ending.

A sacred shape, lonely in its holiness; shape of an eye

an apple, a mouth when howling. On and on everywhere

and a little more insane 

with every pass.

Our cities are made of circles of a sort, and on a turnpike

somewhere, the same car has been driving round and round

for hours, so that those who saw it on the way to work

meet it again on the way home. Day after day.

There are others.

This figure, in rags on the corner of my street, makes a blank 

pirouette, pivoting on the balls of his feet as he mutters 

in brute cycles–him, her, them, then, now later, today, tomorrow. 

His circle continues 

only because it can’t find any reason why it should not.

Los Angeles, CA –May 2024