Friday, November 30, 2012

Do What It Will Do With You

 


Persuasion’s
yellow.

Likes to meet
a fellow.

Thinks it has
to bellow.

Skepticism’s
violet.

You can’t
beguile it.

But don’t
revile it.

Do what it
will do with you.

Take it in
and file it.











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Thursday, November 29, 2012

Conjunctions




 


 
Evening turns

to periwinkle blue,

and all your little household

crowds around the prospect of colluding


with the warmth and reciprocity of you,

and fall is falling

into winter’s spell,

and all is well.











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Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Naked, Shaded in Gradated Greens



 


Naked, shaded in gradated greens –
unforeseen – a couple now convenes,
it seems, less for a conversation
than for unknown oddness: the relation

they appear to occupy to us
relies more on some strangely luminous
intention to distract with their insistent hue
than to communicate with me or you

through some syntactical vocabulary.
We therefore do not hold a very
sanguine feeling towards them, nor
can we imagine what their psychic torpor

or their rampant verdure signifies.
What is being offered to our eyes?
Something strange in all the glowing
signals some new way of knowing.








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Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Secret Habits



 


The circumnavigation of your days
entails meticulous attention to the ways
details of what conduces to your ease
comport with one another: in the breeze

of every open-windowed dawn –
when you get out of bed with nothing on
and trundle toward the sweet sufficiencies
of your abode’s machinery's efficiencies

which, at a toggle switch or two,
will summon light and music, brew
your coffee, ready you for your ablutions
at the bathroom sink – you find solutions

to the daily challenge of existence:
drink in, with your java, the persistence
of pursuing what you’re craving most of all –
to tie new ribbons on the pretty little doll

that no one knows you’ve got.
Secret habits hit the spot.








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Monday, November 26, 2012

The Lot of Us

 


 
Twenty-three from mommy,

twenty-three from dad.

 

What a mix of chromosomes

the lot of us has had.














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Sunday, November 25, 2012

Entanglement


 


 

Strange how intricately calming

entanglement can be –

as if it’s only in impenetrable mesh

that we can fathom being free.














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Saturday, November 24, 2012

Verve



 


Quentin Crisp says,
“Fashion is instead of style” –
but how to find your style?

Drop your guile.
Serve your verve.
Cultivate your nerve.












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Friday, November 23, 2012

When We’re Through

 


I know what
let’s do.

You sit here
reading me.

I’ll sit here
reading you.

But let’s not
talk about it

when we’re
through.












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Thursday, November 22, 2012

Your Pastel World

 


Today you woke up powder pink
immersed in sapphire blue
impinged upon by two
lugubriously ghostly mint-green

and banana-yellow creatures:
features in a pastel world
you never bargained for.
But what is ever bargained for?












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Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Flat and Sweet and Bright as Day

 


Everything’s what it appears –
it’s all what it would seem.
Just as the conundrum clears
the rectitudes of dream –

you burn into a consciousness
you’ve never known before.
There is no paradox, no mess
to fix, no fairy lore –

you’re fine and full of purpose –
there is nothing in your way.
You live right on the surface –
flat and sweet and bright as day.










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Tuesday, November 20, 2012

It Isn’t Easy Being You

 


It isn’t easy being you.
Others plot their paths to affluent satiety –
while you pursue the virtue
of exploring the bewildering variety

of sleepless mind. You’re up all night.
It seems to you completely right.
To let the merest swatch of conscious light
go by without your overt scrutiny

would surely cause the mutiny
of everything that mattered
in your thickly laden mental habitat.
A nap? The craven irresponsibility of that!

What psychic mildew!
Missing nothing’s what you will do –
pursue until it’s filled you.
So far it hasn’t killed you.








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Monday, November 19, 2012

Reflecting on Manhattan Crowds


 


Permutations of the human
shift in random patterns: cognates
rambling, not with any urgent purpose,
towards the novelty of sense:

they hop the fence between the known
and unknown every day and night – looser,
possibly, inside our dreams than in our
daylight schemes, but always probing:

spiced by some faint echo of the shout
that started everything: the genesis
of supernova, and Manhattan, light. It seems
inarguable, in the grand descending curtain

of November, that our spanned fraternity
of morphing souls has only one great secret
interest which, however unacknowledged
by its vast collective convoluting self,

is nothing else but this: to feel eternity.
Which I do when I call up for Chinese
takeout – szechuan steamed wontons,  
shrimp and snow peas – give the man

who bikes them by a hefty tip: we greet
each other as if we were strangers in on it
together, which we are. Kaleidoscopic
metamorphoses of star.







.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Before Long


 


 
We don’t know what you are, my dear –
we don’t know why you’re here.
And least of all have we the least idea
what you are thinking. Are you contemplating
randomness? Sinking into warm despair?

Is life too much a mess to care?
Your private calculations leave us
outside your domain. And yet we shall remain.
Nothing is that bleak. We haven’t anywhere
to go ourselves: Before long you will speak.











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Saturday, November 17, 2012

A Puzzle in a Parcel


 


 
A realm where gravity begins not quite
completely to pertain to how the naked
pink man hovers in a baseless yellow
beach chair with his two feet seasoning

in blue: the sourceless water slaughters
reason – which, despite that it abuts a slew
of background dead amorphous depthless
green, no less conduces to the strangely

sweet serenity and solace of the scene.
Is this a dream? You aren’t sure. Pure
surrealities procure you, snare you, take you
places so entirely beyond improbability:

nothing you are feeling could be possible.
You are a puzzle in a parcel on its way
to fathomless illumination – smelling, hearing,
seeing, tasting something like creation.








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Friday, November 16, 2012

Today We’ll Be A Barren Tree

 


 
Today we’ll be a barren tree –
rejoice in the obliquity
of cold late autumn morning –

feel Existence in the dead
exemption of the fallen summer –
look ahead to winter’s warning –

let the hungry gremlins
in our hearts run deep into
internal dark and leave us

to blue outer icy light – in love
with prospects of the ever
incrementally enlarging night.









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Thursday, November 15, 2012

Self-Analysis

 


 
Just when you decide
you’ve got it sorted out,
your psychic waters rise –
and suddenly
you can’t afford to field
your speculative doubt –

or wield meticulous surmise:
bold cognitive
foundations now are cold
and wet and getting colder,
wetter – nothing’s getting
better: all is heavily

becoming mud. Soon
the apparatus of your
delicate calamities
will soak it up like blood.
Dumb thickness will replace
your fascinating sickness.

You’ll blink instead
of think. Some blundering
amorphousness
will steal your evanescence
like a thuggish thief.
Oh, the relief!







.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

You, and You!


 


 
The weatherman
is drumming in
the warning that a cold
front’s coming in.

You, and you!
Come bundle into me
so we’ll be three.
What toasty camaraderie!

Relish it! Imagine
just how warm
we’d be in our
conglomerated form –

like baby birdies
and their mother.
Let’s wear and intersect
each other.











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Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Android


 



You thought you could avoid the void
by catching up with all your trendy friends:
no longer would you be alone with your

pathetic little phone. You searched among
innumerable technologically global-roaming
marvels: finally your fraught imagination was

seduced and goosed and loosed: it swooned
amid the zeitgeist’s feisty Smartphones till
your heart deployed its love, and caught one.

They never told you that you’d turn into
an android when you bought one.











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Monday, November 12, 2012

Something Large and Faintly Blue

 


 
Something large
and faintly blue

appears to be  
in love with you.

Could it
be true?

Did someone
slip hallu-

cinogens
in your stew?











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Sunday, November 11, 2012

An Untoward Form of Happiness

 


 
Today an untoward form of happiness
began to sprout up from your psychic terra firma
to beset assumptions and make tenets squirm. A
chance, at least, to turn what you now guess

had been your certainty you’d lost all chances
to feel gratified and perfectly aligned.
You’ve changed your mind.
Some secret dances.











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Saturday, November 10, 2012

Your Bodily Dysmorphias


 
Scrubbed inordinately
clean and bright,
so as to be inordinately
seen, the sight

of all your bodily dysmorphias
(attired in scanty white)
today, improbably,
does not occasion fright.

So much
you thought might
happen hasn’t:
not a single fight –

no arguing
from spite –
no caring very much
who’s right.

They don’t look bad
in all this light.
One wonders what
they’ll do tonight.










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Friday, November 9, 2012

My Clown



 


 
Poundin’
the ground
downtown.

Cartin’
my clown
around.

Man gotta do
what a man
gotta do.

You knew
my clown,
you’d do it too.











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Thursday, November 8, 2012

Upon Our Pink Upholstered Chair


 


 
To bed we’ll soon repair
but first, let’s bundle up and sit
affectionately in our warmth
upon our pink upholstered chair –

insert ourselves into the end
of yet another day –
reflecting not so much
on what may have transpired –

what we created or dismembered
or desired – most of which
now languishes unloved
and unremembered –

but on the way we managed
somehow to prevail –
defray, delay or trundle past
the catastrophic possibilities

that lie all round us as if waiting
indiscriminately and indifferently
for us to die. Let’s be grateful
somehow we got by.






.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Day After Election Day


 



Here are we again.
We think we’re fine.

The one we hoped
would win has won.

Of course Existence
still besets us with

impossibility, delivers
kicks to our behind.

The universe is still
a smoking gun,

pursuing its peculiar fun.
But we don’t mind.

The one we hoped
would win has won.











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Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Assemble Your Triumvirate

 


 
Assemble your triumvirate --
those other two, and you --
to take a moment to decide,
perhaps, on what to do.

But if you find you disagree
about means and their ends,
let it suffice to know you've nice
imaginary friends.












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Monday, November 5, 2012

Remember and Release and Reconnoiter


 
Gentle tensions soon obtain
when strange November takes the rein --
exerts its obfuscating change
on soul and weather -- tethering
the temperature to intimations of an end --

as if it's true (it may be, too)
that everything is growing old
as well as cold. It's nice then, when
November shadows loiter, to remember
and release and reconnoiter -- with a friend.











.

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Bring It On, Babies

 



Yesses, no's, maybe's --

all of 'em hit the spot.

Bring it on, babies.

Ready for what you got.














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Saturday, November 3, 2012

Unassailable Logic

 



One would have done what one had had to do
if one had thought that one had had to do it.
But how could one have done what one had
had to do unless one knew it?

That one had therefore had to misconstrue
what one had had to do is hardly something
to review anew -- as if some apercu thereto
might then ensue sufficient to pursue it.

So screw it.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
.

Friday, November 2, 2012

Let the Bats in Belfries Sing!

 



Today we've found the agency!
The catalyst!
The poltergeisty twist!
The vagrancy

residing in the heart
which counts for everything!
Let the bats in belfries sing!
Consciousness is more than part

of what permits the pearled blue sea
to swoon with you --
to spoon with you.
It's what allows the world to be.











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Thursday, November 1, 2012

Those Archetypes

 


 
Those archetypes arrive again -
ambiguous, this time.
In fact you can't remember when
they took so long to climb

back into their mythology.
They seem a bit at sea.
Once ruled by their biology
which set them on a spree

of wild and unexamined lust --
inveterately hot
to trot -- now they've begun to rust.
You're ready, but they're not.











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