Peculiar Possibility

 

Let us now consider

the peculiar possibility
of guidance -- that somehow
blending like a pure soft note

in all your blue blue slew
and static may float evidence
of something purposeful --
ecstatically, extensively

concerned with you.
Imagine that was what
you'd come here
to construe. It could be true.










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Today Let's Entertain the Possibility

 

 

Today let's entertain

the possibility
that essence pre-exists --
resides in some dimension
under-riding everything --

presides incontrovertibly --
resists our existential
certainty that
it is phantom folderol --
yet marries with it all.











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The Vatic Curse

 

Judi Dench says when her daughter

was a little girl and she was asked
what she would like to be, the little girl
replied, "an acrobatic nurse."

The vatic curse with which
she didn't live but under whose mad fix
too many of the rest of us believe we do
and did -- the itch we've been afflicted by --

is the inordinately sly intemperately
wicked lie that each of us is burdened by
an alien and awkward arcane prophesy
that only tests like Myers-Briggs

could possibly dig up for us
and therapeutically decode. Which means
we bought a load of crap that others
know much better than we know

the nature of what traps us and what
might deliver us from evil. This is not,
presumably, the sort of psychic crisis
that besieges the boll weevil.

So what's innate in you and me?
To run a small confiserie? To be a belly
dancer? Let's imagine any question's
always loaded with its answer.

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Your Trinity

 

 

Your Trinity?

Calamity.

All enmity.

no amity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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What Can’t Be Said

 

Today I fiddled

for two Russians –

one was living,
one was dead:

a passionate
abrupt conductor,
and Tchaikovsky:

both disruptively
voluptuously
expert

in what
can’t be said.











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Another Dream Has Dropped You …

 

Another dream has dropped you in its tumult and its fray –

you wonder if you like what you espy –

you think you want to touch it as it starts to glide away –

it’s harder to decide if you should try –

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Two Feelings

 

Two feelings

in ambiguous
relation

to each other
may appear
to take

an adversary
stance. In fact
they’re at

the onset
of a dance –
conjugating,

as if rune with rune.
Soon you’ll hear
a tune.











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Middle Distance

 

 

What’s in the middle distance?

You ought to know.

It’s where your eyes spend all their currency –

release their flow.

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Room for Rapture

 

 

Fate makes room for rapture –

supports it with aplomb –

its sweet release – and capture –

its detonating bomb.

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Like Gray Rhinoceri

 

 

His thoughts,

like gray rhinoceri,

betray the sun,

waylay the sky.

 

 

 

 

(I know. Rhinoceroses. But c’mon. if ever poetic justice were needed...)

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As If They Know

 

They gossip, disapproving

and concerned:
as if they know the bridges
you have burned.












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We Wondered What it Would be Like

 

We wondered what it would

be like to understand
that we inhabited eternity –

all the expectations of which
we might then be rid!
Then we understood we did.











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How I Like to Fathom You

 

Investigating form

for evidence of content

is what the eyes
exist to do.

 

But surely noses know
more than mere

ocular appurtenances
ever could construe

from this inevitably
superficial view.

Smell is how I like
to fathom you.









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Pajama Party

 

Three ideas intent

on reassuring
one another held
a late pajama party
in my bed

and in my head
last night. Alas,
they couldn’t reach
agreement: nothing
passed the test;

nobody got rest.
I served them
copious equivalents
of cognitively lulling
chamomile tea

and soporific
cocoa-in-a-cup –
but all that did was
make us have to pee –
and keep us up.








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Words like “Me” or “You”

 

Sometimes friends can sit together and suspend

the need to talk – and in that quiet, thought
may loosen from the mind to find another home –

roam into the atmosphere, construe an ambiance
instead of brewing syllables, so that constabulary
functions of vocabulary now no longer matter –

but scatter into air. It’s not like no one’s there, but
separation seems untrue. Words like “me”
or “you” no longer mean quite what they used to.









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A Fuss

 

I don’t mean

to make a fuss

but: nothing
isn’t interesting –

nothing’s not
miraculous.












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Exulting in Ennui

 

Today you aren’t sure what catches

or what liberates: to tell the truth, or try –
sometimes it is as if you’re crammed

inside a carny booth next to a turbaned
mystical automaton who for a coin or two
will offer random fortunes one of which

might be your jackpot – and so you slip it
pocket change, until it seems strange
not to stop. At other times you’re like

a figure lost in gold baroque but rather
loving what your curves and all the curves
surrounding you evoke, yearning

for the riches they appear to be about
to drop, until it seems strange not to stop.
Mostly you’re at sea, exulting in ennui.







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October Blue

 

Nothing is remotely what you thought

you had intended. Somewhere into this odd
enterprise, suspended in its co-creation

to which you inevitably bring your own
surmises and unwieldy gifts, sifts some strange
other yielding consciousness: the separate

imponderable part. How effortlessly
rhymes attach to “part” – “art” and “heart”!
And yet you will not start or end with that foregone

assertion. Esthetic theory alerts you: use experience
lubriciously – officiously parade your lusts
and loves and sensory appurtenances to distract

the passing eye: resist the comfortable sigh
of the abstract. But you can badly lose
your bearings doing that. I am waiting in the dark

until some different bumpy thing abides –
decides to ride – affront – flap in. I won’t go away
until whatever that is wants to happen.









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But Maybe That’s Exactly What We Did

 

You try to tack a story onto everyone

you see – but human impulse
doesn’t lend itself so easily
to the declarative. Everybody’s reaching

in a fog. Resorting to the susurrating
narratives of blog. Sentimental
takes abort. Not every baby’s cute.
Relationship’s a doomed pursuit

if by relationship you mean an answer.
Everyone’s a fancy dancer,
hungry for acclaim, strangely eager
to take blame. No one is aware

of having asked to be alive.
But maybe that’s exactly what we did.
On some somatic pre-Socratic level
of the devil in the dive into

the center of a heart, perhaps
we planned each nuance of the theory
and application of the art – of being here.
Disingenuously we insist that all

will always be unclear: indissoluble nexus,
an impenetrable blot. But secretly,
insidiously – somewhere deep –
perhaps we know it’s not.







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(another new york city heart - preliminary drawing)

just for the helluvit.

 

 

Another New York City Heart

 

Find the quiet mind behind the winding intricate

ostensible agenda – bend before you think
you know what everything’s become: stick out
your thumb and blink and glide and hitch a ride
with anything that bums along to pick you up.

Every day I see another and another and another
New York City heart erupt: a fat man so obese
he couldn’t grease himself into three subway seats –
oh, how he heats the air with yearning! – burning
through his sad thick Jackie Gleason lids

for all the slinky-bottomed skinny-jean-clad kids
who slip enticingly, inevitably by him, crushing
for a moment flesh that feels. How Manhattan’s
sentient and collective being reels! Let our
poignant forms be scrutinized by alien wise eyes:

let’s subject ourselves to their dark gift: their stark
selective curiosity: apprise the outcome like
a sly detective. For almost anything that numbs
the spirit, breaks the heart, rips the psyche’s
threads apart, this may well be the corrective.









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Naked Aliens

Naked aliens

are running
to and fro
today.

We’re guessing
naked aliens
just sometimes
get that way.











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There’s No Way Out of This

 

“Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness.”  Quentin Crisp

Style insists. There’s no way out of this.
You’d like, you think, to break the bonds and boundaries
of all the stuff that makes you up – release into another feast –
perhaps to sink into a rhyme for “feast” you haven’t

thought of yet. “Priest” would not be it – though something else
as sacrosanct might fit. The least that you can do is prod
your pencil and, if not pretend it’s new, forget you’re doing
what you’re doing. Today two faces came pursuing me,

and would not let me be: black and white and breathy
in the dawn, and as the hours went on, attracting stacks
of colored pencil – more than I am used to wielding –
fielding, as it were, perhaps, the prospect of a catch

from some strong strange-armed creature
bent on stenciling a pattern of its own onto the wedded ones
to which I’m prone. I felt a force inside the source of them
sufficiently apart to make me wonder if my “art”

might bear at last the marks of outright otherness.
My heart involved itself: something subtler
than the tragicomic masks that usually press themselves
into this task evolved: I cared about the souls dissolving

and revolving in the eyes and facial contours of the spaces
yellow-red-and-blue-hued graphite layered into place.
Something hadn’t not been touched by grace.
But: here they are, as kindred to the rest of what proceeds

from my familiarly rotating star as I have ever seen.
There is a pulse, and something breathes:
my tribe’s arrived again. I’m glad. But there is wistfulness.
Style insists. There’s no way out of this.






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Not a Rhetorical Question

 

She hosts

her mother’s ghost –
unless the ghost’s
the host.

What’s between
the two?

What does someone
dying have to do
with you?











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The Cold Grand Form

 

Steady me against

the rising tide of night –
the waning of the light –
the sleek oblique
return to winter –
the sharper splintered
angles of the sun –
the cold, grand form.

Feel the blood run
to the center
of the question.
Hold my hand:
keep it warm.












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Tender Wontons

 

Today I Wikipedia-ed
the life and legacy
of Henry James.
I felt the sweetest bliss.

To think there actually
might have been a man
that ardently in love
with consciousness!

Henry wasn’t wild.
He stammered
when he was a child.

Every night without
(so far) becoming roly-poly
I consume what might
as well be Chinese ravioli:

tender wontons delicately

stuffed with bits
of content like a poem.

Like Henry, someday
I will show ‘em.






.

Oh!

 

Slow bit of wistful croon –

Faint minor third –

Low little glistening tune –
call of a bird –

oh! – to be listened to!
oh! – to be heard!











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There is no Story

 

Dispassionate dissociation
is the order of the day.
Persuasion does not sway.

Debates occur without
reverberating. Voices
murmur on about whatever

choices no one plans to make.
Some internal tremor
is occasionally felt to quake:

but nobody’s awake.
There’s nothing really wrong.
We’ll all get along.










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Collaborative Views

 

Pink begins to shrink
to parchment
in a sea of brilliant hues:
all of it is news –

collaborative views
that colors always take –
with which they make
relationships.

Blush sips gray –
youth kisses age today:
enjoy the gentle pace
of their embrace –

see how they get along:
see how they learn
no color with another’s
ever wrong.










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The Only Things that Interest Me

 

 

The still voice of the mystery
seems just now to have said,

"The only things that interest me

breed awe and shock and dread:

the meaning of infinity –

the empire of the dead."













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Dammit, I Think I’m in Love with You

 

October’s a fullback – rushing in rough –

killingly cunning and chilling and brilliantly
running and blocking and making it tough
to ignore him: “Enough!” I erupt at him:
jump up and hang on his neck like glue –
hold him so hard I begin to turn blue.
“Dammit, I think I’m in love with you.”












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