The Keepers of the Genesis of Form

The Keepers

of the Genesis of Form
devote Eternity
to making sure it’s warm.

Without their
soft solicitude,
each blasted cold
vicissitude

of chaos
would erase
all vestiges
of grace.








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Suitable Prize

Oh, to nap

upon the lap
of someone
you find wise
and beautiful!

That prize
might be
suitable.









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Your Pertinent Impertinences

Sometimes to rev your engine up,

an unforeseen enthusiast
will glide out of the psyche –
try to kick your butt: erupt
into a fundamentalist faith healer –

do a hands-on touchy-
feely zeal-y thing
to gloomy aspects
of your personality which cling
to stasis – do not want to move.

Full of zing and on a providential basis
he will prove they’ve lost their way
by singing deedledees
and spindaloos and waddlelays
to deities which, like all gods,

lack provenance but woo with lots
of entertaining hoop-de-doo.
Today your pertinent impertinences
hear him crying it,
but they’re not buying it.







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Oh Well. (Oh Hell.)

Recollections harbor

ardor and affection
for each other just
when they are threatened
with defection.
The mind does not appear
to want to die.

Espying in its eye
the whole trajectory
of life you’ve lived
derives from the propinquity
of imminent extinction:
sieved into the final lie
you’ll know:

that you will stay alive
if you surrender
the immediate and total
memory of everything:
recapturing the flow.
Oh well. (Oh hell.)
You go.







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Honeymoon on the Styx

On the Styx –

hit or miss –
alluvial lips
kiss –

hiss –
as preface
to this:

the abyss
of connubial bliss.








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Something to Find

Strange to feel

lost in thought
with a friend –

wondering
if you’re in trance
with each other –

or if you are,
each of you,
wandering

far from the start
and the end
of your separate

peregrinations.
The latter
is probably true –

and yet you
do not mind.
You both

have got
something
to find.








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Consoling

Consoling isn’t easy.

Softening unpalatable fact
can make you queasy.
Warmly, sweetly wielding tact

in face of your forlorn
companion’s certainty of doom –
for which he’s borne
inarguable evidence into the room

of your attempts at reassurance –
likely will not work.
His understandable abhorrence
of the optimistic jerk

and spasm of your reflex
to insist that it will be all right
is almost guaranteed to hex
you both into a sleepless night.

It may not matter what you talk about.
Presence helps the heart rebound.
That can have a little clout.
Just stick around.








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