Magnitude

It manifests as blush –

whatever matters happens
as an upward thrust:
a rush of blood to flush the skin –

to hush, re-size the mind –
to brush against its blindness:
unsentimental kindness
far beyond the merely wise:

like an orgasm’s epiphany:
breath gasped, death grasped –
head to heart to crotch.
It’s worrying to watch.









.

Confession

Fragile, stark,

rooted in the dark –

immune to most communion:
your impulse to connect

still – nonetheless –
elects to probe –

project its expectations –
be lured into the globe

of human possibility –
to interact: refract

its light – find traction
in a bright encounter

where it can –
with a man.







.

Here We Go Again

Pressuring oppressively, it shoves you –

whining, mauling, prodding you to care.

Humidity hangs on as if it loves you –

then breaks as if it never had been there.

.

Caught

Caught –

in grammar
of its lone
perception:

thought –
enamored
of its own
reflection.










.

Morning Prayer

Dimensions of affectionate inspection –

aspects of the flesh and breath regard each other
as the morning fully separates itself from dawn –

brightens to a story and a glory we must all take on –
lightens as the night’s bewildering incitements scatter.
Here we are again as if we matter!










.

The Ampler Fund

We think we’ve got a handle on why we

are three instead of one: we are the ampler fund:

a you and me and you: a trinity of points-of-view
necessitated by the exigencies of complexity:

manifesting a triumvirate of minds because
collectively the triplicate it makes us finds a better

chance of understanding why the sweetness
of the city summer and the bluest sky which

tumbles into late July retrieves the pristine fullness
in us that it does. We are the peach without

the stone or fuzz: the bee without the sting or buzz:
a clarity – a triple paradox of singularity: we are

the meaning of the thing that sings until the song
is done. That’s why we are three instead of one.








.

On Buying a Red Blanket on Sale at ‘Bed, Bath & Beyond’

The leavening of internecine
schemes into a dream –

the gentle fight –

the germinating light –

generating inward sight
less interested in a solution
than in flight:

that’s what I will
find in my red bed tonight.








.

Resisting Red

Well, we do not know what to say today

about the way you’ve pressed your passionate intensities
into our palatably softened densities: it’s gray and rainy
and a little like the nineteenth century right now,

outside, in this precluding afternoon, this cooler
intermittently precipitating gentle swoon of silver, green,
faint yellow hues: Manhattan beckons you to muse in quiet –
not infuse a riot of inexorable red into the psychic diet:

but you persist.

We resist.









.

The Cost of Comfort

So large!

So blue!

No charge

for you.












.

The Hypothetically Holographic Heart

Hovering above
the hypothetically
holographic heart

of our Existence
is apparently
a startling blitz

of darts which
physicists persist
in fathoming as

sub-atomic particles –
theoretically teased
by super-symmetries

into a trickery
of familiarity –
manifesting

in ostensible
resemblances
to you and me.

It’s all a bit too much.
Let’s try to stay
in touch.








.

Idées Fixes

Hanging off your head,
making bets,

pink and naked,

smoking cigarettes:

idées fixes make
lousy pets.









.

Social Skills

Increase your social skills.

Invite your alter-egos in to chat.
Cleaning up the spills of your dissent with them
might well permit you to relent

at least from some of the exasperating spats
and spikes of all the passively-aggressed expressions
of your separate, complicated likes, dislikes
which long have kept you so remote from one another.

Take your brother selves down from their shelves
on a vacation from the notion of dissociation
to the balmy ocean of association.
Don’t quit until you fit.

Unless they just can’t handle it.







.

Cannibal Manhattan

Skateboards slap the concrete –

sodden breezes seize the trees as if afraid to let them go;
the city in the middle of July regards itself as dangerous,
completely accurately: apropos

to every quietly conniving steaming sensibility that rules
your New York mind this afternoon:
everything is always on the brink
this far past June

in Cannibal Manhattan
as it lifts its mask
and, slavering, applies itself
to the rapacious task

of eating up all expectations
you will not be eaten up –
of relishing the prospect of innumerable ways
you will be beaten up

for its indifferent fun.
Thick in its gestalt,
it plans
its next assault

as thoughtfully
as if it cared for you –
its hot intentions, goading like a set
of reddened buttocks, bared for you.






.

I Will Fall in Love with You Today

Something sensed: an inextricability which generates

felicity of heart – facility for the refreshment
of the impulse of the whole thing getting up again to start:

first in the living human face and, in that face, the eyes –
whose undisguised collective mission signifies seduction –
the abduction you effect whenever you elect to look at me.

Oh, Emily – Miss Dickinson! – to learn your pronouns! –
to catch the words inside the rides of “I” or  “you”! –
elusive birds your slyer view sends flying into

my Manhattan’s humid summer night. Imagine grasping
the vast inextricability of their odd light! It makes me sway:
it makes me say, oh, I will fall in love with you today.

to wit:

http://hellopoetry.com/poem/why-do-i-love-you-sir/

.

Stimulus Response

Right now a three-year-old galumps upon the floor

above the ceiling under which your head applies itself to this.

Your fingers hit and miss: not in search of poetry –
or any point at all: each joint in them would like to tap

and tease the keys in rhythms like a ragtime rainfall – Milagros
skeletally dancing up a squall. The little tyke just paused:

stopped clomping down the hall – you miss it. New York City
is a thunderball – always blasting to illicit bliss: breaking laws.

Toddlers stomp through ancient tiny rooms in small apartments –
all in thrall to something nobody can see but everybody feels.

The whole thing reels, and out of nowhere something warm
and alien appeals to your unguarded shoulder, leaning

on you, importuning you to love it. The little three-year-old
has just begun his hippo-clomping run again above it.

.

He’s Starting

Unsentimental kindness –

curiosity that welcomes care –

without a coward’s blindness –

he’s starting to believe you’re there.

.

Recompense

It’s hard to deconstruct one’s friends,

with all their curvatures and bends,
unfathomable modes and ends.

It’s harder still to let them be
as if their blunt cracked oddity
were not some stunt – perversity!

Ah, but then: their sweet nonsense! –
so richly packed – so strangely dense:
that’s recompense.










.

Ungodly Bomb

Here you are again. Hanging ‘round my head.

Stoking a disruption. Choking an eruption out

of memories of everything
I oughtn’t to have done today, or said.

Exploding the ungodly bomb, not caring
where it takes us. How oddly calm it makes us.










.

When Hourglasses Fill the Bottom of Themselves

When hourglasses fill the bottom

of themselves it isn’t strange

that something swells

into the vacancy

above.

Like

airless

ghosts of love.

You give their butts

a little shove. A glance –

they mingle. A dance – they tingle.

 

,

I Know What Let’s Do

Let’s lie around preparing for the unforeseen.

There’s surely much to think about in its vicinity.
Although we readily confess we’re green
about the business of infinity,

and we imagine it will take more than a little time
to get the ebb and flow of it,
and we’re perhaps a little past our prime,
let’s make a go of it.










.

Your Guests

Emanating from the right –

extending left –
pensive or elated or bereft –

transmuting consciousness

into dispassion, passion –
inhaled, exhaled breath:

welcome all your guests.

.

Oopsy-Doopsy

Whatever wields the arts

of repositioning your parts
and your approaches

finds the strangest ways
of taking over – making over
every last vicissitude

of what you’d once imagined
was shrewd management
of your resources.

Fall in love, believe a creed –
shoot your seed
and pee against a tree –

plot courses for a certainty –
erupt from ambiguity
at last to see at least

what’s true for you –
well, soon, some unforeseen
developments construe

a different view,  collude
in the construction
of the upside-down

and obsolete.
Oopsy-doopsy.
Hands are feet.






.

Empty Bathroom!

Perhaps it won’t entirely disparage

the peculiar alchemy of marriage
to risk one suggestion only:
it isn’t so bad feeling lonely.

Worse to twist yourselves into a taffy of
white-knuckled and eternal love
because you’re scared you’ll die alone
if you do not – thus to postpone

the existentially inevitable fact
that no sweet sentimental care or tact
will keep Death from its fatal fly-by –
or keep you from a solo bye-bye.

It might not be so terrible a sin
to find you like it in your skin -
and even like it better single.
Empty bathroom! Makes me tingle.







.

This New Timelessness

A glimpse of it –

an intimate excursion of the soul –
flashing something

like a picture of the whole
with something that awaits you
at the bottom of the bowl

of an identity –
as if you had been sent to be
instructed in the wider grand amenity

of going on – connecting
to an unexpected neural network –
ties that bind you to a size of mind

you hadn’t known: a kind
of spider man allowed
to spin yourself into

a view
where you belong –
in which for this new timelessness

you seem to find that you can stay –
strangely certain
you don’t have to go away.








.

What My Babies Said To Me Today

Take a friggin bow.

You fathered us.
Okay, okay.

Now
you bother us
Go away.










.

Weather Isn’t Human

I took a nap this afternoon

and woke up blinking at the bright hot
sky of meteorological July – thinking:

weather isn’t human. What relief!
Daylight otherwise seems
such a thief: stealing equanimity:

goading you to do, pursue, pursue
and do – in lieu of hanging loose.
When all that’s going on is angles

of a planet wrangling with
an atmosphere involuntarily colluding
with the sun and its inexorable transit.

Something may well
be accountable
for this, but I’m not it.







.

Ecstatic Bird Droppings

Situated as you are

beneath the deluge,
eventually you discover
that the deluge is a refuge –

which arrives
in color.
Antidote
to dolor.

Droppings from varieties
of an eternally ecstatic bird.
Agonies
deferred.








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