Strange how when you change your diet
foods grow sentient – wake, and riot:
greens and roots and fruits resist.
A broccoli floret’s a fist
raised angrily: the steamy doom
of its demise fills up the room.
A carrot lies, mute, in its thickness –
powerless against the quickness
with which it is julienned.
An eggplant mourns its bitter end –
its funereal purple is a cry
against its sentence: slice and fry.
Truth falls off a grocery shelf.
Life exists to eat itself.
.
I wonder if there is in each of us the neurological
equivalent of mille feuille-layered photographic film –
micron-thin – pervasive with the shades of every
human face we’ve peered at in the day and dream of
in the night, or in late autumn afternoon, when light
begins to do its tricks and fix us with afflictions:
addict us to new simulacra of the soul. I wonder
if the brain hides whole the mass of implications
in the vast arrays, soft panoplies of patient gazes,
angry brows, erotic mouths, and other facial aspects
and distractions we amass through looking – all
unclassified and cooking in our humid psychic heat:
spilling sweet into the deltas of our consciousness
like dancing sea grass, waving in our optic estuaries:
unconsidered beckonings of babies, dentists, prostitutes,
professors, wrestlers, aunts. Today two golden
fellows billowed up and caught me in their glance –
fully loaded with surmise, troubled hunger in their eyes.
.
Every love begins
and ends in flame.
No one is to blame.
The heat, though,
can be devious –
rarely like our previous
experience of it.
New ardent flesh
always feels fresh –
accommodating –
we seem younger:
conquering our hunger
for deliverance –
before it hurts.
The pattern disconcerts.
Is it solipsistic
to imagine
that its pageant
is the merest repetition
of the old Big Bang? –.
when that rang
did it ejaculate the Universe
into concatenated orgasms? –
are we involuntary spasms
before we're dust?
Let’s not be rash.
Perhaps it’s holy ash.
.
Of the involuntary symptoms
of the vestiges of the ejaculations
of her Big Bang past, the one that
lasts the most tenaciously for Cassie
is her vast capacity for laughs.
Thinking makes her fickle; drinking
leaves her pickled in the clink. But
Cassie loves it when she's tickled pink.
.
So many big green bags.
Every dawn another one shows up –
the latest spawning ornaments
that don’t relate to Christmas. Ah! –
earrings from an isthmus – suddenly
you’re spangling and gangling
on its beach: jangling out of reach.
Accompanied by yet another lighted
yellow quadrangle: fish-line face –
seducing random space. Reassuring.
Existence is alluring. Put a little
toffee in your coffee. Break your fast.
Watch your whirling world go past
until, at last, its consciousnesses sag.
Await another big green bag.
.
I know exactly what you want –
too bad for you I’ve got it.
I see right through your blasé front –
you slaver when you spot it.
But you can’t have my big red prize –
I’d die before I’d let you.
You’ll take it after my demise?
I’ll rise – come back and get you.
.
Veronica woke up to the phenomena
of feeling such gradations of well-being –
such a reeling panoply and range of gladness –
she wondered if she’d happened on
the central madness of all happiness – stranger
and more dangerous than deep depression:
what was this large unnerving glorious
expression she could feel begin to glide across
her face until her smile became so wide that
it began to ache? Was this some mania
remaking her – or was it joy? Boy! She dared
to think she might have stumbled onto some
bold drumming secret of the heart: the part
of her, and life, and all the Universe that
was and is eternally untainted; something
actually pure. Her cat was not so sure.
.
Life sits there like a fact,
all fat and naked, long gray hair,
rouged lips and beard –
as if whatever she or he will see,
has all appeared already –
holding steady for rejuvenation, though –
which always comes –
and always goes –
expanding into throes
of numerable generations –
not infinity. Someday, in some vicinity,
fat bearded lady life will sit down
to what he or she expects to be
another cup of tea and neither tea
nor she or he will be.
.
People and their pets
beget a mystery.
That so few regrets
attend their history
can’t not confound.
Why do all these alien
duets abound –
amid the piss and feces,
shedding, scratches, bites,
expensive visits to the vet?
That we set to rights
the traumas that beset
both stewardee and steward
in the propagation
of our blunt untoward
miscegenation
(so to speak)
begins to want to leak for me
into a looser rhyme and meter scheme:
better to suggest – account
for – our affection, predilection
for each other. One needn’t have
a human sister, father, brother,
mother, lover to be close to something
else to love that breathes. And so we
stroke their pelts and they regard us
as necessities – and we leave
unresolved our interspecies mysteries:
let them spill and splay, like puppy play.
.
The twirds and swoony-boobs
are all aflutter and atwit –
Sumer is icumen in
and they can’t handle it –
without, that is, expectulating
through the greeny air –
ferflucking impolitely
just as if we weren’t there.
While they crudely celebrate
June’s all-too-longest day
by rudely eskajaculing,
we’ll look the other way.
.
Every time she read
it bred
a chemical reaction in her head.
Pigments through her follicles and pores would spread
up from her neck to her split ends and then retread
to cascade down again, thus having bled
into a spectacle that wed
her surface to each literary nuanced shred
of her reaction to a page: so to shed
her inhibitions and her dread
of being seen as who she really was: it pled
her situation like an open book until she went to bed
when every summary and prefatory color fled.
.
Youth sits bare in groundless
orange – hanging
in a swing knit from a blue
vociferous transparency.
Youth thinks that it is thinking
of a kiss when it is
actually contemplating
the abyss – confuses time
with timelessness –
doesn’t know it’s in Eternity –
doesn’t know it can’t attain
or gain a thing suspended
in this swing – and yet to swing
is destiny. Most strangely true
(to Youth, to you):
being is the only thing to do.
.
Not many human eyes are blue.
My dad’s were, though,
and mine are too.
He made little mammal noises when he drew.
I do as well. I did just now –
remembering him coaching me –
with charcoal in his hand –
dismembering reality
in some mad vow to swell it into shady versions
we could understand.
He growled and mewed
as his soft carbon pencil prowled
around his manifesting point of view –
Da Vinci in a zoo.
But I won't sever our translucent ties
by trying to be clever.
What I can do is draw his eyes too large,
too blue, and saturate the paper
with the hue – careful to
suggest his tender gaze always engages him
elsewhere. Happy Father’s Day,
sweet dad, to you.
.
Someone snuck in,
replaced my head again.
He brought two bins of possibilities –
he’d only brought one bin last time.
It’s evidently harder now
to change my mind.
.
The Golden Youth looked down and found
what he did not know was a Kloptikon.
Kloptikon looked up and thought he’d
found his mother. Each experienced
the Other. Neither knew who either was.
And yet they liked the buzz that they began
to feel as each experienced the reeling
of connecting through their eyes: revealing
the surprise of seeing something more alive
than either had before encountered.
Care surmounted curiosity and turned
to empathy which cavalcaded into love –
until their destiny required that they part like
hand from glove – return to their respective
fairy tales. Somehow they’d each leaked out
of Chapter Three in different books. Ah,
but they’d exchanged those looks! The stories
they went back to would not stay the same.
Happy endings had been stained. Thanks
to Kloptikon and Golden Youth, two fictions
had been hopped upon: now told the truth.
.
Cell phones rivet eyes
like plasma of a spirit come
to haunt, exhort, advise, extort or taunt:
but they are holy too.
The heart’s affections
know no bounds.
Its predilections run
from what you crave and fear
to querulous hot pink
exorbitances gleaming without
warning on a screen –
abounding with abandon
like a child’s
sudden mind.
You will not find
a devil here.
Unless you find a devil here.
Everything is holy.
Consciousness is queer.
Let the pap of apps
elapse, collapse
into their fractals.
Miraculous!
Virtual is actual.
.
Sweet deep sleep –
a quarter of five in the morning.
A tiny shiny aberrance is dawning:
strives to undermine the gladness
of the plenitude. (Anarchists
hate peace.) A little flick –
a crease – a click – a creak –
as if a cricket cricked – a tweak:
the lumbering encumbrance
of the wondrous somnolently
mumbling jumble that you are
ignores it like the monarch
that you are, determines
to enjoy the Berlin Philharmonic
playing Brahms beside
the naked orgy of defrocked
hot funky hunky monks
who sing along in harmony –
the German Requiem!
“The heck with them!”,
hiccups the little buzz of beast
who’s just begun to make a feast
of wrecking everything
and ripping it away.
The monarch is dethroned.
The boner is deboned.
Another stripped-down day.
.
At the moment of epiphany,
or even mild revelation,
the Rest of Everything
is just as interested as you.
Nothing else has ever had
your point of view.
So when you next inspect
the bottom of your foot
don’t be surprised
if something inexplicable
looks on behind you,
emitting gratified, soft sighs.
You are the Universe’s eyes.
.
Why was it electric yellow? It wasn’t that there wasn’t
lemon in it – oh, there was: and egg yolk beaten
to a froth – and honey ladled in to render sour citrus soft:
she’d iced it all to cold bold gold. Inga worked hard:
prized her summer soup. But this one threw her for a loop.
Blinding as the sun, it seemed to want to float aloft. And my! –
it was a chilling sight! Something she had done to it –
that grind of Swedish cardamom? – had undermined
a law of physics – leeched a cosmic secret out: her soup
emitted light. Its brightness flowed in bloops and bloats
and glows out from the bowl, slowly rising, separating
into clouds which coalesced somewhere above
the ozone layer of the sky to cause abrupt eruption
of a spry new universe. All Inga knew is that her soup
had disappeared. Well, that – and that her cat would
soon appear to lick whatever had been left: “Here, Marabelle!”
The kitty came, and tongued the faint remains of baby
Universe – the kind the theoretically inclined call Parallel.
Marabelle has turned a little strange. She flickers
in and out of range: she’ll disappear and reappear
and purr. Some say she belongs to Schrödinger.
.
I’ll never have a son or daughter.
I’ve been, of course, the one to slaughter
any hope of it. It’s not just that I’m gay.
I might have fostered progeny in countless
other ways than through the missionary
mounting of a female. I’ve been a son
and brother: I am the witting beneficiary
of unwitting chance: the coupling of a father
and a mother in the old accepted dance.
I wonder what I’ve done with
what’s inside my pants. Venus
hasn’t met my penis: Mars too often has.
And yet I’ve known a kind of jazz epiphany
through something that might be construed
as procreative sexual abandon: libidinizing
life – as if I’d had a wife with whom
I’d peopled all the substance of Manhattan.
New York City is my spouse and child,
and I am its.
If I have a generative purpose,
here’s where it sits.
.
The soul’s a song-and-dance girl,
waiting in her dressing room,
ready to play any role at all,
thoughtful about keeping up her range:
Gershwin’s always nice –
Sondheim’s pretty strange –
ballad and a patter-tune –
salad, light on oil, for lunch –
singing Noel Coward on a Friday night –
for that cynical elusive bunch
for whom she’s yet to do
a damned thing right.
The soul’s a song-and-dance girl
hoping to perform, keeping
every dance and song inside her warm.
.
Too many curves and coils
and superimpositions – spoils
of secret internecine wars fought
in the shadows of what absolutely
no one knew was there but you.
Nothing left. Shot your wad.
Sometimes there’s a loneliness
which so surpasses any other
human feeling that you have
to think it comes from God.
.
Slender stems of sentient
polyp-plants, each
sprouts a human face:
greeny-pinky-yellow –
middle-aged chiaroscuro:
studies in inscrutability.
They won’t stay long:
they never do: they hang
around for just a few
breaths of an ambiguity:
just enough to render
and surrender slight shoots
of a presence: bits of blessed
and unblessed essence
from which new forms
might derive – up to me
to make. Consciousness!
Too much to take.
.
Faint pencil has its way today:
tumbling shapes on paper –
takes from its amassing
secret vast menagerie
cloned rounded creatures –
fumbling into place –
features all alike in form, in face –
the paradigm a sort of penguin
with a floppy snout.
They don’t look clever.
I do not know what they’re about.
But then, when do I ever?
.
There is a look in certain pretty women’s eyes,
you’re sure, that schemes to gauge the proper size
of things: scrutinize with grace your blunt regard,
and sense the right degree then to retard
or halt or nudge along the pace of the encounter.
Such a woman never doesn’t know to count her
blessings in half-wittingly initiating the exchange:
she chooses purposefully from the range
of what she knows are her allurements
what to bring to bear, not for procurements
of a partner or a prize, but for the flaming light
she can invoke, not in her eyes but yours: bright
as life. Of certain pretty women this is surely true.
But most are maybe just as scared as you.
.
When you’ve finally got
that you are not
the only one,
the existential repercussions stun.
To actually recognize
the form and fact and smell and size
of that abrupt reality The Other
is like discovering you’ve got a brother
or a mother. People aren’t icons
anymore! Bygones must be bygones:
solipsism burns up in the pit!
Stan cannot get over it.
When he sees a being passing by,
he cannot stop himself from saying “hi.”
Find him naked, turning blue, uncouth –
daily waving at the shocking truth.
.
When Mother Nature goes out for a run,
she doesn’t cause a lot of fun.
Exercising her prodigious powers
stirs up more than bunnies, birds and flowers.
More than tornadoes, bad as they can be –
more than a flood’s catastrophe –
her drumming feet can cause a greater shake
than in the Earth: they’ll also quake
your heart: can make you feel you’re through.
Despair is part of Nature, too.
.
She bows her nose
the whole day long.
(I think it’s ‘she’ –
I could be wrong.)
She floats in on
an orange cloud
cribbed from the dawn.
She plays as loud
as it will take
to undermine
whatever’s fake
in the design
I bring that day
to living.
She brings a sway –
a giving –
to each tune.
Her news,
this June,
is blues.
Low and sad –
long – legato.
A little mad –
warm vibrato.
.
It isn’t nice
uncovering a vice
without at first alerting it.
To barge in with the mission of diverting it
when it has just begun
to get its orange fishnet on, and party until dawn,
is rudeness.
Even lewdness has its rights.
Oh, it will haunt your nights
all right if you don’t let it
have its little bites.
Be nice to vice.
Put on some orange fishnet
tights. Turn out
the lights.
.
Fresh excess of city: June air – lush
and hot, an ardent dare – rushes in
to barter with the sun, to be the one
that gets to take the first sip from the lips
of New York’s swift deliciousness: beget
a public demonstration: irresistible
to puny sorts like you and me.
Breezes kiss: a blissful constancy,
they cannot miss, so soft and strong
and longing – blue and gold and green
and gleaming like the sheen of sweat
on skin. Eros glides down Broadway
with a hard-on in the wind: sin-slide!
This is not the day to stay inside.
Today I saw the girl I never met and didn’t marry.
Pretty, slim and twenty-two, she sat there at a yellow
table on a yellow chair upon a verdant new June lawn,
her eyes direct and candid, soaking up the sight of me
from underneath a giant curving picture hat. She wore
a pinky-orange summer dress. Me, I was a mess.
Stood there like a sagging barn, sweaty large black
t-shirt on, stained as badly as my past – cargo shorts
hung baggy from my sixty-year old ass: feet in clunky
sneaks – at all of which she took quite thorough peeks.
She neither seemed distressed, impressed nor more
than mildly curious about the marriage that we never had.
I didn’t have to say that I was gay – she didn’t have to tell
me what she’d done instead of wedding me – perhaps
we wondered what a child from both of us might have
turned out to be, but mostly we accepted we were
ghosts. Funny, though, the glow of that unblinking gaze.
That’s the part of her, this girl I never met, that stays.
.
