A Possible Sufficiency

Such passion in resentment! –
such kick in vitriol! –
perversely sweet contentment
in swallowing it all

and spitting back vituperative
blasts of sharp retorts –
who cares about recuperative
peace?; to storm the forts

of huffy egotism,
pretentious wannabe’s,
while savoring the schism
that brings them to their knees,

comprises such proficiency
in viciousness: a state
of possible sufficiency
to muffle your self-hate.

.

Zeitgeist Hair

Sweaty twenty-something
punk meets art nouveau –
in and out of a transgressive bed –

the site of the enactment
of erotically perverse proclivities
better left unsaid;

but wait: the artful mussed-and-wild
bespeaks, as well, the child,
rubbing puffy eyes –

up from a nap –
reluctantly pulled off
a warm and musky lap;

and there’s the beast one sees
(one hopes, sans fleas),
nuzzling, grizzled, fuzzy,

disingenuously unconcerned
with its rough fur,
abruptly teased;

and most of all
the scary imminence of childhood’s
fall: invoking sexy adolescent mess

whose ruse of randomness
consists in the deployment
of a mousse.

Voluptuously,
slyly
loose.

.

Sleep, Recently

Sleep, recently,
has been like
scrabbling in a cave –

grabbing at the waists
and swatting asses
of small misbehaving

demons – scrawny
gremlins, proto-ogres –
stealing when I can

into a murky corner
to inhale its heavy mist –
to lose resistant bits

of consciousness –
until I’m kicked again into
a shallower cognition

by some final squiggling
green-eyed sprite –
whose tiny

sharp repeating bite
informs me
I am done with night.

.

On Hearing That Someone You Knew Died

Some gallantry is what you’d dare
to hope for first –
here or there, no matter where –
that it might bear
the gently bursting air –
the generosity – of something
graciously alert – concerned –

though with enough
cool distance to insure
whatever prepossessing breath –
detachment – wisdom – were
required to assess the larger view.
A mild availability and receptivity
and firm consistency,

you’d hope, might so comprise
the tone – that of the sort
of softly reassuring sighing lullaby
you’d want to overhear
a mother sing to some already
sleeping child – that it would quiet
every tremble, trepidation

at the prospect of the wild
and savage truer nature of what you,
alas, at last, are sure
we have to face instead.
There may be Paradise
for an Eternal Life –
but there’s no heaven for the dead.

.

Wouldn’t Want to Scare You

Fortunate you aren’t told much
at the outset what you’ll have to do
to re-construe yourself into a viability –

the craft you’ll have to master to produce
an instrument as true to your peculiar
spangled depths and curves and paths

and hints – angles, tints and traits –
as you can make from tools you’ll also
have to make. Surely a mistake to tell you

too much of the fortitude and disrepute
and aptitude for bearing next to
an intolerable incapacity to get it right

that you will need to cultivate to fight
your way to any kind of equanimity:
the keen-aged surgically precise

necessities of knife and tincture, blade
and hook that you will need to cook
and slice and splice and spice a life.

Better not elucidate the rife inevitably
killing fates that lurk ahead to dare
you. Wouldn’t want to scare you.

.

Deep in Daylight

It’s as if – now

that you know
just where
the wormhole
to the cavern is

for sleep –
your mind
cannot now
not go back there –
deep in daylight:

it’s as if to breathe
that rare infinitude
of air is now
your one
imaginable prayer –

for whose
sweet invocation
you must
kneel down
wide-eyed –

waking, breaking
through the inner
night to its
extinguishing
illuminating light.

Here’s the sphere:
to have it
all ways:
be both there
and here.

.

Avant le Deluge

Your dinosaur refrigerator
is unplugged; begins
its slow defrosting melt.

Proportionately you are melting too:
deliquescing – beckoning the flood
you’ve sucked up and subjected

over eons to a freeze: blood and breath:
the mud, ice, barnacles
of psyche seize and weigh you down –

drop in dollops toward a death:
the slew of fluid-y accoutrements
that life applies and now

is slowly wiping off: agglomerated
imprimaturs: been here, done that,
don’t know much, however.

Given all one’s stamps and proofs

of purchase and endeavor
(peeling off as one

defrosts), one plausibly

might have expected not
to feel so lost.

.