Some Girls Are Popular

Some girls
are popular.
We’re not

sure why.
Might be
a certain

existential
bebop 
in the eye.





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Your Value

Undulating malleable bands and strings and strands –
wrung and flung by forces no one understands –
colored by a chemistry as labile as psychosis –
repellent and alluring – the ambivalent hypnosis

of a dream state: rapt consciousness which locks
in for eternity into distractions, excavations, shocks
and metamorphoses: today you are spaghetti;
tomorrow you’re a cloud; and then you are confetti

on a celebrating crowd. Whatever value you have got
resides inside the pin-prick heart of this one spot
which you inhabit like some frantic germinating seed.
Whose intention is this? Whose need, whose greed?




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A Matter of Style

It’s really just a matter of his style –
he knows he comes across as looking pissed.

But he’s been waiting such a long, long while.
He wants you so to know that you’ve been missed.

So please see past his seeming rage and bile –
and grant him what he’s craving to be: kissed.

Wager

Another face comes pleading to me for a place
among the rest – it knows how grumpy I can get
when something’s lines and tones, geometry
and attitude don’t pass whatever test I never know
I will subject it to: it wants so much to stay it turns

androgynous – as if to lean too heavily towards
any single gender might result in its peremptory
dismissal: perhaps an ambiguity might tickle
some acuity: trick me into shading it into some
possibility of permanence: it knows I crumple paper

up at tiny provocations: so many of its relatives
get thrown into the trash. It’s hard to serve a master
this importunately rash. Ah, but it has wagered
well tonight: it’s wriggled into an alluring guise.
It finds I am a goner for imponderable eyes.



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Sophistication Visited Today

Sophistication visited today.
He didn’t have a lot to say.
He had a horror of cliché.

He sat there with a vacant air.
in his tasteful greenish chair
(I wondered how he’d got it there) –

as if most thinking didn’t matter –
and talking was a vulgar clatter,
feelings self-indulgent spatter –

that it was better just to sit
and sip a drink and quit
discussing it.

I agreed I disliked pap,
then crawled into his bony lap
and yawning, with him, took a nap.




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Hail to Thee!

Hail to thee, oh mammal of a man! – lunky, hairy,
corpulent and loud – cloudy-minded –
grandly undistinguished save for your broad
belching animal reminder that we are
biology: the spawn of all the span of all preceding

species which commanded us to be the primates
on whose stage you take your sweaty
and unwitting stand – stretching out your hands –
bellowing to God to send a ragtime band down
from the sky – proud without a thought for why.






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The Perfect Birth

The perfect birth occurs so rarely on the Earth
it never has been documented, but we’ve heard
that it involves a beautiful blue giantess who,

when it’s time, scoops up a small completely
formed red-purple iridescent creature from her
womb while standing in a jewel-bright Tropic sea.

The whole thing happens painlessly; the newborn
greets his mother happily – smiles sweetly at her
gleaming azure face and by the means of grace

and some arcane telepathy begins a dialogue
in which he teaches her what she has come to learn
by bringing him about: the perfect birth allows through

this engagement the swift banishment of doubt
and the full gentle rise of understanding that the only
virtue worth pursuing is to be, and that the greatest

pleasure is to do it consciously. What they do
from that point on we’ve not been told. One hopes
that they are happy; one supposes they grow old.



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Anguish

Anguish sends its tendrils out,
involves the furniture,
ignores the weather and all
tendencies to wrap it up

in anything but what eventuates
the pain – it is a galvanizing
of the brain which focuses
to paint profuse effusions

of itself on anything it brushes
up against: it cultivates a deep
propensity for laser-vivid sight,
which lights and frames its

burning point into its only view:
no partner for it ever can be
found: no friend will do.
I wish it wasn’t drilling into you.



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On Seeing You Again

It can’t be true –
that I’d be able to
see through you
as if you were
hollow broken glass.
You are a human being,
after all, presumably

with mass: the normal
densities of fluid,
muscle, fat and bone
that keep a creature
visible – and prone
to sensate shocks:
physical affronts like

being touched:
indeed, when I sent
my embracing arm
again around your
shoulders, I could
sense a back, a front,
a crotch, an ass; 

but as I leaned
away from you,
you hollowed out once
more to broken glass.
Nothing mitigated
the effect: although
you seemed to speak,

your words blew
past like clear
insentient specks:
below and through,
around, above.
I wonder what we
ever had to do with love.


 
 
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What Creates

Desire sits there in its angry certainty –
a mission and a fusion and a fission –
so efficiently constructed to annihilate,
burn hot: to decimate the spot that, blasted,

will eject the last impediment to entropy:
an entity of enmity fueled by the prohibition
of resistance, with no other goal than to
exult in the destruction of its own existence:

or else corrode whatever comes in contact
with its toxic heat: to beat whatever’s in its
way until the thing humiliatingly retreats,
abates. To think that this is what creates!





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Each Face

Each face flags me down
and drags me in to trap me in
a cul-de-sac: they each would
keep me there forever

if they could – so much about
what’s bad and good must be
explained! – but I feel drained
before they’re halfway through

and sneak and sidle backwards
when they sigh or blink or take
a leak or get another drink
or otherwise release me from

their captive and commanding
eyes: it takes a second
to pull off from their reflexive
unselective beckoning to reach

the reckoning that while I cannot
not fall into their beguiling
wiles, their bipolarities, their
dreams, their cries, their smiles –

I’ve got to get back home
and do what I must do to honor
and obey my law: inhale –
sit down – exhale – and draw.



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Performance Art

To so immerse herself in one stark, simple hue
she might transform herself into
a palpability – and through

its fixedness become quite singularly true
to something other than the motley brew
of blanknesses she had been hitherto!

Blue, she thought, would do.






.

Tonight

Tonight let’s
bundle up,
put on a cap

and go outside
and think.
Let’s see if we

can generate
a little light
before we sink.




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Windbreaker

Extravagantly running smack
into the wind – deciding
to rescind whatever obligations
he’d imagined earlier would
have to crack his day – billowing
windbreaker tugging at his back
like some great yellow sail

in swaying full array – he knew
to savor the delicious way his body
found the bold and fast capacity –
audacity – to meet resistance:
the favor of an only mild blast
of pleasing cold, not freezing air:
with this fleet season of his youth

and mid-November so cooperating
in dimensions of alignment,
his assignment clearly couldn’t
not be to rush headlong into
what was left of Fall. A day
will come when he will not
be able to rush anywhere at all.





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Prayer

Please tell me if I’m here
or if I’m never anywhere –
or if the orbiting bright sphere
the mind appears to dare

to be is existentially illusory
and all I am is hormone
and inane stark electricity
amassing, dark, into frail bone

and tissue that prefigure
little more than death,
which though it does configure
into form produces breath

with fragile fallibility –
please tell me what is left.
Send something here to tutor me.
Do not leave me bereft.








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Kindred Tricks

God, a pinkish Shmoo, devises form
from formlessness, investigates Its own
amorphous state for yearnings so diffuse
and loose they can be readily amassed –
persuaded to produce – disseminate into –
whatever fantasy the Shmoo decides
it needs to conjure up. Often cravings will

erupt for scaffolding and flesh – skeleton
and muscle, skin and body-hair and beard
and sexual appurtenances, processes
of which, though weird, are fascinating for
the alien behavior and the unaccustomed
views the Shmoos (God’s not the only one),

vicariously, through their creatures, choose
to muse upon. Out of brownness leaking
weakly out of blackness, and a spill
of ill-assorted hues, today Our Shmoo
made manifest from all the loopy sprawl of Its
eternally imaginative span, a naked hairy
yellow muscular gay man whom It sent

wandering like some lost Giotto saint into
the land without a clue. Our particulars
may differ (maybe you’re not yellow, naked,
hairy, male or gay or muscular), but
I would bet this still suggests some kindred
tricks behind the genesis of me and you.







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Examining the Hands

It’s strange and sweet, examining the hands:
not knowing really what you’re looking for:
perhaps some magical relation to a motive
force which understands more than you can

about their cavalier dexterities – their grand
obedience to nexuses of neural networks
which command them – their graceful
nuanced dance – at once describing plump

and curving breasts in arcs throughout the air
then daring to dart quickly to the nose
to scratch (or dig for) something fleetingly
annoying there: and all the other common,

rare and unpredictable excursions that they
make on your behalf. With all the expertise
of some vast hidden royal staff, they do your
system proud. Let’s praise the things out loud.




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Faculty Wife

Intensity reflexively burns, involutes and burrows
down to show her once again around the complicated
and demanding ground of her besieged imagination:
running laps along perimeters of college tracks

and other curving obligations, she steals inadvertent
naps: browns out while listening to lectures
on haphazard probabilities of quarks and gluons
or while whipping up a squash frittata or attempting

to sort out the hemiolas in a Brahms sonata or regarding
the marauding legions of so many other endless bristling
bits of academic lives: professors and their wives
and husbands reassembling heated speculations into

yet new passionate articulately argued inexplicabilities:
a tease for which she sees no resolution save the careful
molding of her hair: outmoded to remind her of her mother
circa 1962: whose helmet of a permanent appeared

to keep her there, serene and capable of gentle reason: oh,
to find the habitable mental season she is sure could
be her climate if they’d stop pretending these vacuities
were deep! How lovely it would be to really sleep.



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His Grand Achievement

You saw him
squatting,
squinting at you

in the dark red air.
Less suspicious
than myopic:

as if he couldn’t
quite make out
just who was there.

He didn’t seem
to care. His grand
achievement

was his hair.
Dark and golden
bright cascading

blare and flare.
You wanted to do
something to

or for him
he’d remember.
You didn’t dare.




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Aunt Luanne

Remember when we couldn’t understand
why Aunt Luanne began to giggle
uncontrollably at Uncle Herman’s birthday

party? She jiggled with such constancy
her yellow wig quite nearly wriggled off
her head. She seemed to know enormities

we didn’t and to find them so hilarious they
turned her cherry red. She laughed so hard
she ruptured something. Now she’s dead.

Perhaps it's just as well she never said.






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On the Spot

Today is like you think
you’re in a nightmare
where you’re sitting
waiting naked on a stool
for your urologist to come

and check your junk
and as you fret you grab
a cigarette and some great
lunk walks in with shearing
scissors, leering like

unfathomable sin, derisively
uproariously laughing
at the spectacle of you
in spectacles, all shameful
pink and shrinking where

you do not want to shrink.
Today is like you think
you’re in a nightmare,
but you’re not. Today
you’re on the spot.




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Love, on the Rocks

Trudging through the blotchy blue,
a slave and queen, as rudely nu
as codas to pornography can be,
proceeded to their hidden lair to see

if they could tolerate another bout
of sexual despair without
him spilling her
or killing her

or her revealing
that she had been stealing
bits of stuff from him
until enough of him

was gone
that she could get her Cleopatra on,
slip off the lunk,
and end this funk –

and celebrate her solo
life with lovely dry Barolo
wine and scotches full of ice.
Now wouldn’t that be nice.




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Sometimes

There are many navigable ways into and through
the dark. It’s hard, however, getting out of it.
Sometimes you find a guide. Guides inside
the shadows aren’t too reliable, but sometimes
when you trust to luck, and your internal universe

aligns with his designs, he’ll take you on the ride
you didn’t know you wanted (fuck the consequences! –
that’s the prize) and then deliver you, albeit in
a different size, outside again. Sometimes you
survive, sometimes you don’t. One day you won’t.






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What Happened to the King?

My German father’s eyebrows
branched like Brezhnev’s,
sprang out in a mob
of angry arms, all angular

and seizing: flaming forest
full of Valkyries. When
he died, some idiot mortician
clipped them off his corpse.

Every lover I have ever won
has run a kindred course –
sizzling to numb.

What happened to the king?
What manner of a thing
did he become?





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What makes my city pretty?

In nanoseconds-long interstices –
in brilliant colors (therefore) no-one sees –

the god assigned to batten
down the elegant and brutal hatches of Manhattan

and to flatten any hint of dullness
and refurbish every glint to fullness

takes great chunks of town
into his ambient renown

and – sweet and fleet – subjects them to the grace
of the enormity of his grand blast of glorious embrace

until each doubt in it has perished
and each lout in it feels cherished.




.

Ode to Another Urn

Devotional ceramic urn –
whose alchemy of parts
has set in porcelain the turn
of warring dying hearts –

immortalizing most the crack
which hurt the worst, on top:
the first betrayal, knife-in-back,
that made the loving stop.

Adore has burned into abhor:
there is no further chase;
yet here they are forevermore
in eye-to-eye embrace.




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Lilliputian King

The head’s hegemony – is it the enemy?
Always thinking it is larger than it is
and taking charge as if it knew what

it was doing. Tiny slits of eyes pursuing
the familiar and eschewing the unknown
permit distorted shapes and tones and sizes

to invade the mind’s surmises, onto which
assumptions lard their grease so slickly
that the sickly thing the senses must

collectively become – attempting to report
through slime – seems hardly worth
the time a trillion synapses elapse to give it.

The head examines reason like a Lilliputian
king and tries to live it. Perhaps we should
look kindly on the little thing – forgive it,





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Sunset, November 2nd

She wanted to be sure you knew she saw you,
and though she may have seemed a frightening
phenomenon of air, she hoped she wouldn’t

scare you. She came to say she cared for
the inevitable dissolution of a moment –
that she was one, and you were too.

November’s soft dismemberment,
dissolving and absolving.






.

Homage

Colors do not care about each other.
They dance intransigently, sometimes
almost seeming to make love

but mostly not: the roasting pot
of oranges and ambers, rusts and reds
pours indiscriminately into shreds

of grey and beds of purples, browns
and blacks: devolving into autisms
of fading beiges, watery pea-greens

and other ashen hues, dull lacks:
blasted and abused by midnight blues
which lighten without warning into

robin’s egg. None beg for prominence
nor seem to need to star. Remarkable,
considering the miracle they are.




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