Wellbeing

Wellbeing
is a baby

swimming
in a trance –

without
pants.


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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The Thing That Doesn’t Want To Be

The thing that doesn’t want to be
is stuck here for what feels, to it, like an eternity –
which guarantees, of course, it’s not:

but rather merely lots and lots of undesired time.
It’s locked into its vast inarguable premise
that it didn’t ask for this. It is devoid of fear –

which might at least have lent it focus.
One might suppose that its inertia
would result in some repose, but no rest nourishes:

indeed, not one thing flourishes –
not even hatred, fury or psychosis. Sometimes
it daydreams (since it never sleeps)

that some thrombosis might deliver it
from having to exist: but it creeps through
another eon and persists. Its blood runs ruthlessly.

It seems to know that once you’ve come,
you cannot go. At least not for a trillion trillion
trillion trillion trillion trillion years* or so.


-------------------
*“…By the time the universe is 1 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years old, the black holes themselves will disintegrate into stray particles, which will bind loosely to form individual "atoms" larger than the size of today's universe. Eventually, even these will decay, leaving a featureless, infinitely large void….”


http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101010625/story.html




.

Galatea

The relic of a passion, fashioned carefully
by hand – too many years ago to understand –
remains in situ: not a statue, just a bust –
come upon by accident (if there is ever
such a thing) – emerging in the dust on the long
shelf that lines the edge of the abyss of self.
You see it there and without thinking, pick it up

and press it to your lips: the kiss brings to it
a small flushed fairy tale exuberance, lit
from within – as such phenomena have always
been, two layers down in a dimension still
illuminated by a pleasure close to sin. Memory
is Galatea, glowing – sometimes – unpredictably –
as if to call you to embark: then growing dark.


 
 
 
 
 
 
.

Wilderness of Witnesses

The mind’s a wilderness of witnesses.
We’d like to think they come to guard,
forewarn, protect, exert what internecine

subtle nudges they can breed in us
through neurotransmitters and hormones –
or via other strange synaptic thrashings

prod a range of bright obliquely useful
dreams – but I have come to think
it seems they’re merely here to see.

Why they have an interest is beyond me.
Perhaps, for them, it’s fun. Every time
I shut my eyes I see another one.







.

The "Do" of Change

While delight eventually may ensue

from adaptation to the new,

your apparatus first grunts: won’t.

To the “do” of change it bellows don’t.








.

Collateral Conditions

The blue god hauls the yellow
through the red:
creates collateral conditions
which have bled

into infinities of purple,
orange, green.
Trinities give birth
to the eternal in-between.







.

Bubble Babies

Bubble babies sometimes drift into the psychic sky –
precipitants precipitately wash the inner eye –

they come to touch identity; that is, when they’re allowed:
summoned by some drum, their soft collective cloud

of influence – precise and light, unsentimental –
permeates and lifts resistance to the elemental:

gathers up the static of self-scrutiny, and pulls it
into something sleeker – a little freer of the bullshit.

Slowly, knotted tangles evanesce a bit: don’t vex
quite the way they used to about aging, death and sex.


 
 
 
 
 
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Prayer to the Void Man

Void Man,
bleeding colors
from the night:

when I lay it down
to sleep, please
hold it tight.

Squeeze it into
senseless form
all strange and bright.

Make it
blind, then
give it sight.







.

Holy Shrapnel

Your anguish is a beaten ghost in his late teens
who’s bound his worst parts up into a lightly
bleeding gangrened little mummy. He offers it

to you to keep, to place it by your pillow while
you sleep, to let its glum effusions leak out through
its bandages to queer and tweak the atmosphere

and drag whatever happened back then here.
Sneaky silent cosmic laughter in the wings attends
your deepest sorrow incrementally. Eventually,

on some morrow, possibly before you die,
although it may be later, sick emissions from
the pent-up glop will finally have stunk sufficiently

to reach the top hilarities of sky: excite, incite, ignite
a greater volatility in soul and mind and eye than
you could possibly have known. You will be blown

to smithereens, and free that sorry spirit in his
teens, and blast the whole exactitude of crap
into a cloud of holy shrapnel. Bye-bye hell.


 
 
 
 
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Varieties of Meat

They say whenever any creature
meets another, each picks up
quick clues that point to whether

they should run away – or kill
or fuck or eat it – or compete with it
to kill or fuck or eat. Desire

for domination seeks varieties
of conquerable breathing, mobile
meat. Other living flesh therefore

invariably constitutes potential
prey. That’s what they say.
But I have seen them play.





.

Pretty Woman Seen Conversing

Pretty woman seen conversing on a couch,
her fingers on the gray fur of a sleeping tomcat on her lap:
is there a more completely human thing to see? –

to watch her looking into her dim middle distances –
to spot her swimming through her inner life – all while
she talks to you and me? I wish we could recall the words:

perhaps she was rehearsing what she’d tell
her dumb ex-boyfriend “really happened,” or expounding
on the more confounding aspects of the Fermat Theorem,

or working out particulars of how to bring about
the secret serial destruction of a team of Wall Street CFO’s?
We’re almost tempted to suppose she wasn’t telling anybody

anything at all: but simply sitting in the thrall
of her existence, promising her cat a cassoulet for Saturday.
Perhaps it doesn’t ever matter what we say.


 
 
 
 
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Ruthless

The work would not be left to doubt,
held back, or re-defined.
Its requisite: to be brought out
exactly as designed.

And so I did what I could do
to help the thing erupt.
I failed. Disgusted, it was through.
Departure was abrupt.







.

All It Takes

Who knows if it is bad or good.
You’d kiss it if you could
because it’s there.
That’s all it takes to care.








.

This Face that Sometimes Comes to Me

I catch it only clumsily,
this face that sometimes comes to me:

bright visible glissandi adumbrate its path –
kaleidoscopic shards of it – a fractal math

in Chartres-worthy stained glass color –
make its glory even fuller

than the last time it arrived.
It seems to have derived

from dark demanding need –
hard to tell from greed –

although I do not know if it is mine.
The little thread I give you here is but a tiny vine

amid an Amazonian rich growing thickness –
surging forward with a quickness

that suggests synaptic power.
All I have to do to see it flower

is to shut my unresisting eyes.
And there it sometimes is, insisting on surprise.





.

Big Ripe Woman

Today life is a big ripe woman with a past –
alluring unapologetic mass of inconceivabilities
with an enormous gorgeous ass on which
you are invited now to plant your lucky lips –

watch her roll her ample hips and jut her perky nips
around beneath a see-thru sky-blue negligée,
warm intimacies of which you’d be crazy
not to slaver to assay. Assay away.







.

Stained

Today I am the pot
and I’m the wonton soup
inside it and I stir it to a simmer
over flames that I am too
and when it’s ready
or I’m ready
or the implements I also am
are ready
I will steadily consume
myself abetted
by a spoon
which bears
resemblance too uncannily
to me not to be me.

Psychotic narcissism
run amok? (Don’t ask
me whom I fuck.)

I stain
each thought and thing
to which I bring the least
attention so completely
that there’s nothing left
but my bereft
self’s sweat.

Or else it’s all untrue,
and I am you.





.

The Wardens of Purgatory

Purgatory is a state of mind
run by minor functionaries.
You know the kind:
self-important, full of facts,
dropping names

like thumb tacks. (Ouch!)
Grouchy, arch, pretentious
bureaucratic wardens
of inadequacy: how effortlessly
they remind us of our lowly

station! Maybe they deserve
some admiration.
Cultivating woe to such
a fine extremity, their incapacity
seems infinite: they may not

know the way to go, but oh,
do they know how to stay!
Let’s tip our beanies
to these meanies.
Then let's get the hell away.





.

A New Yorker Considers "Nature"

Today I looked up at a tree
and it looked right back down at me:
with mild curiosity
a whiff away from glazed indifference –

maybe not untouched by some covert
belligerence which I suspect always
obtains between two utter aliens.

I harbored no opinions strong
or pertinent enough to share:
it didn’t seem to care.
I’m glad, however, it is there.





.

The Big Word

They say you don’t know anything
if you don’t know its inexplicability
and bliss, as if we ought to thank
whoever “they” are for allowing us
to sniff that pot of piss. You once
adored a man with such immensity
that it stuffed every thing which wasn’t
him into a pin-sized airless hole,
which quickly got as hot and swollen

as an abscess. Unholy messes teach
no lesson. Confession and release
are said to lease you happiness but
who knows what the hell that means.
The thing still leans into you like
the stone that blocked the tomb.
(Cliché rhyme with womb.) You know
nothing you can say. And yet you hold
out for the damned thing every day.





.

Memento Mori

Kindness sits there
like a lump
of softened butter,
waiting for a knife.

Devolutionary life.

.

Until One Day

It’s got it bad for you.

It’s at the ready

with a steady flow of what it knows

you want to hear –

what matters. It flatters

with dispassionate, arresting authenticity –

relates its observations, calmly,

of your finer traits. It plaits your virtues

in a verbal braid which it parades before you –

touch of shyness –

touch of sass.

Knocks you on your ass.

Strange subductions

of seduction! Involuted

geologic pushes, pulls which quake

and snake down through the center:

unrelenting! – twist and overlap

until you can’t resist.

It’s got the key to your locked door!

Until one day you blink and look around,

relieved, that it’s

no longer lurking,

looking for you

anymore. 

Pensée Un Peu Malade

A thought just leaked out of a rhinoviral aperture –
and sat here like a pretty paradigm.

It seemed to want to look like nineteen-twenty-six.
I'm not sure why. Flapper fever time.










.

Not Exactly Having Fun

He wonders at what strange requirement –
what surreal change in the environment –
he’ll have to undergo in his retirement:

as if there ought to be a time when you
should laisser-faire yourself into
effluvia and goo –

thence to rust –
crumbling into crust
and dust.

Clearly no one else is jealous.
Tell us
how you’ll hang him on a trellis

and how he’ll try to find it fine
to drip like wine
or turpentine

in the sun
not exactly having fun
considering the option of a gun

soiling the lawn
from dawn to dawn
until he’s gone.





.

Dragnet Boulevard

Movies made in 1950 act like they discovered grim.
Dragnet Boulevard, dank film noir: an ostentatiously neurotic hymn

to grinding existential clichés of despair: rabid Robert Ryan – he
with badgered Barbara Stanwyck flee in black-and-white spite: Irony

all undertaken in an undertaker’s accents: laid on with a trowel.
Wipe their rank sweat off with Fred MacMurray’s towel.

Let it moan and groan on, though,
on Turner Classic Movies’ show:

post-war sociology – or art – or crap,
it makes a lulling background to a nap.


 
 
 
 
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Interspecies Inspection

Truth be told, one didn’t know at first
what ought to have alarmed one –
was the gleaming flow and run
of verdigris that eased from those

limp glowing limbs (thin stream
approaching flood) its shedding blood? –
or did it herald the involuntarily untaxed
release of pheromones as it relaxed? –

did it feel pleasure? – or was it
an engorged attack: a measure of green
poison which would joylessly bring wrack
and ruin through one’s skin to all one’s

vital organs – rout it out and in?
(One thought one ought to have been
naked while inspecting it: one didn’t
want to stain one’s clothes. One

therefore had disrobed.) Correct
inspection by one species of another
surely ought to summon one’s great
sympathy and courage: good intent.

However, once again, one’s rapt
investigation led to naught (who knows
what a desire to connect requires?):
one’s curiosity was spent. Still

one shan’t repent. One wants to open
oneself, as one can, to the unknown.
Perhaps one’s next encounter will
result in one’s not feeling so alone.





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Let us Praise the Goddess Glitchitatta

Out of the blood-red cosmos of her realm,
the goddess Glitchitatta takes the helm
by conjuring imaginary creatures as her friends –
thus to distract her from the terrifying ends

to which existence in her haunted universe
appears to doom her: that its curse
from which she cannot extricate her being
must imprison her to the eternal act of seeing

that not one scintilla of a thing will last
more than a nanosecond: one swift blast –
too fast! – her least small prospect of affection
will proceed to the irrevocable dark defection

every atom must by some cruel fiat make.
She’s wielded godly astrophysics: tried to quake
a revolution in the aberrant perverse mitosis
that prevents all stuff from staying. That psychosis

finally became her fate should not surprise.
But she has so astutely managed to devise
a non-existent family of souls of such immensity
that they have generated adequate intensity

to travel through her Universe’s membrane into ours.
And this has granted us imaginative powers.
It is inarguable that we owe a debt to her, in part,
for that stark inexplicability we label “Art.”




.

Sentenced

Let’s play among the things that slink
and think they know what’s going on
beyond the brink: let’s sink into the kink of their
green steamy world, surrender to their twirled
dark dreamy internecine paranoia:

and enjoy a stark wet brush with the confusion
of the wanton rush of a conclusion
that if we don’t voice the proper choice –
alight upon the right decision based on all
the cloudy imprecision of a trust in absolutely

nothing sure, that we’ll endure, until we can’t,
the crush of an intolerable sentence, so untouched
by any application of repentance, and so weighted
down by semiotic shroud-y sludge, lush chants
of cant and easy idiotic rhymes like these,

that no one could begrudge the satisfaction
of our yearning to be put out of our miseries:
let’s drink insentience from a sentence
quite as long as this, and see if we
can stand a taste of its abyss.




 
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Turtle Love

Sharing
bowls
of newt piss,

staring
into each
other’s eyes –

what could lie
ahead
but bliss? –

sweet
turtle love’s
surprise!


 
 
 
 
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What a god told me today

Life is a condition of existence, nothing more.
Death is senseless metaphor:
a simultaneously shut and open door.

I am nothing but divinity
precipitating from infinity –
floating in an endless swarm of progeny

of such as me and such as you,
doing what we’re here to do:
conjuring the true.







.

Boy Toy

Can’t find it in your
neighborhood?
Like you wouldn’t
if you could.

Get all preternaturally
woo-hoo on the sly.
Hide it, guide it, slide it in
and ride it to the sky.

Diddle with the fiddle
in the middle. Lick it
in the beach chair,
in the bathtub, on the floor.

Let it know you
want some more.
Take it, and then
show it out the door.

Well,
that might
have worked
before.




.

Homely Truth

Homely truth
does not enjoy
interrogation.

It will peek out
when it’s called,
but won’t explain

itself. It figures
if it can’t be
seen in its

blunt plainness,
then it can’t be
seen at all.






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