Thursday, January 31, 2013

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Qualitative Methodology


To summarize, we’ve had to say
we couldn’t find another way

to wed our bodies to our minds –
to see the modes in which each finds

conversion in adversity,
immersion in perversity –

without describing devious
behaviors of our tedious

component parts, from head to foot,
up with which we’ve had to put.










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Tuesday, January 29, 2013

You’d Think You’d Find It





Why is it so hard to read a mind?
You’d think you’d find it in expression –
the tremor of obsession in a wary blink;

the glaze of an immobile stare –
the glare of a determined impassivity –
repression of some hot internal blare

of terror, rage or sexual fixation;
the heavy-lidded daze and slow predation
of ennui. So much should be obvious

in you and  me – strangenesses we fear,
plenitudes for which we long. Strange
we almost always get it wrong.









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Monday, January 28, 2013

Dressed for Circuses and Stripped for Wrestling




In the inky black
of the Unconscious
they reside: a larger side –
and smaller side astride it:
dressed for circuses
and stripped for wrestling;

waiting to emerge
to train the brain to entertain
more untoward moments,
they contain those bits
of anarchy without
which you would

stand no chance
of gaining mastery
of the ineffable. They aren’t
terrible at effable, in fact:
you might decide
to call them back for that.









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Sunday, January 27, 2013

At Times, Of Course, Like This

 


You find that you like gray, some
days – how it achieves its say,
perceives the cool array, subtly

holding sway, managing in quiet
to convey its calm vicissitudes,
allegiances, proclivities – the ways

it beckons you to stay and take
a seat and listen. Rainy gray
that glistens is a treat – though

can, of course, entreat your tears
to reappear, invoking fears,
reopening despair, those cares

deriving from the countless
recollections of your catastrophic
loves and flitting broken trysts –

your endless undone lists. At times,
of course, like this, gray can
make you want to slit your wrists.








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Saturday, January 26, 2013

Posing for a Formal Portrait




Posing for a formal
portrait makes it seem
as if it isn’t only possible
but normal to be dressed

and pressed into a scheme
wherein some consequentially
defining meaning might be caught –
so that in some bedimmed posterity

when you are thought of,
if you’re thought of,  
something might be known,
by something shown: a swatch

of an incontrovertibility: that you’d
been seen, and could be seen again.
That might be nice.
Let’s get painted twice.








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Friday, January 25, 2013

Another Unavailing Artist’s Manifesto

 


 
Think you caught my kink and quirk –
laid me bare?

The work is all that’s in the work.
I'm not there.













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Thursday, January 24, 2013

Contrive to Coincide

 



Resistance and dispassionate benignancy –
the two contrive to coincide.
The former crashes into its malignancy –
the latter hangs on for the ride.
















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Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Looking In Your Eyes




What you long for
and belong to! –

the throng of you
must surely sing

the song I hear. Clear
sensibilities appear –

such strong sleek intuition
in my heart! – always near,

never far – ripe now to impart –
the closeness of its nuances

to art – the fullness of its plot:
you must be everything

I think you are. You
say you’re not.








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Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Dancing Made a Difference




Dancing made a difference.
It was something we could do.
After sifting through the tease
and slew of inexcusabilities

the undermining missions
of existence with its fissions
and its fusions and its shifts
and its resistances -- when we

emerged from its resurgences –
when we at last came to –
dancing made a difference.
It was something we could do.








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Monday, January 21, 2013

If You Asked Me If




Milk of magnanimity
is not exactly
brimming In the cup.

My lease
on equanimity
is up.

If you asked me if
I’d had it,
I’d say, "yup."












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Sunday, January 20, 2013

Your Private Parts




Everything’s important.
There’s the rub.
Every impulse is a fraught

incursion in the club
of your convening multitudes
of thought

bent on becoming
a persuasive new agenda.
If I were you, I’d spend a

night away
from them: entirely alone.
Pretend the tinkle of the hotline

phone they’ll use to ring
inside inside inside your mind
is what a star

sounds like when it is burping.
Investigate your prospects
of usurping power.

Make love
to your private parts.
Don’t take a shower.








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Saturday, January 19, 2013

About As Much As We Can Bear




We’ll burgeon out of winter white.
Do homage to our nothingness.
Acknowledge that we know no system

of sustainable serenity and permanent
self-care – nor that we know as much
as what the difference is between

what you call here and I call there.
Strange the gladness this can lend.
About as much as we can bear.











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Friday, January 18, 2013

Playtime in the Mind





There’s surely something else we can’t recall.
Despite the daytime dictates we’ve defined,
redeeming darkness till it’s lost its pall,
we’ve hit a wall. Back to playtime in the mind.














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Thursday, January 17, 2013

Random Love Doodles




An instant has as much to do
with time or you as time or you
have got to do with endlessness.

This is the sort of streaky mess
you’ll get from me when it gets cold
outside, and gray. Though we are

warm inside, and old, and good
for nothing in a sneaky way.
I love the stuffing out of you today.












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Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Gentle Nexus





Expansively and malleably blue –
chances that the gentle nexus
of this faintly sorrowed
happiness will last are surely few.










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Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Sublet




Sublet the dark apartment
of your heart.
Whatever takes it doesn’t
have to stay.
But let it play its little part.












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Monday, January 14, 2013

Bigotries




Bigotries need slaves
to haul them ‘round.
Surely nobody who wasn’t
made to do it could be found

to lift one pound of them
from here to there.
And yet so many of us act
as if they’re light as air.












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Sunday, January 13, 2013

Something Possibly to Do with Art


You regularly leave things in the middle – diddle
on with this or that small section of the whole –
when, uncontrollably, another part cries out for you
to complicate the fold – and there you are again –

amassing disembodied limb and tint and mind and hue
and heart: something possibly to do with art: scattered
hints, perhaps tomorrow, with some luck, you might
just find instructive – if Imagination will resuscitate

its pluck, permit the blessing of some coalescence –
wait to bait you into the creation of another singing
thing. It’s the sort of random outcome some deep
yearnings have been not unknown to bring.











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Saturday, January 12, 2013

I Could Have Danced All Night


I could have
danced all night,
but had I

danced all night
with anyone
I might have liked –

oh, the fleshy mess
we would
have made!

You’d have to have
removed us
with a spade.











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Friday, January 11, 2013

To Lighten Up the View


Nights are long and tedious.
Days are short and cold.
Aches and pains are treating us
as if we’d all grown old.

To lighten up the view,
let’s trade some tit for tat.
Don’t let the kitty sit on you.
Try sitting on the cat.
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Thursday, January 10, 2013

Jogging Naked Through Our Neighborhood


Jogging naked through
our neighborhood
before our neighbors
have arisen from their beds
may be sufficient
to arouse the feds – that is,

if some retired CIA man’s up
at three to take a pee
and looks out of his bathroom
window inadvertently –
half-dreaming still of some
horrific terrorist cabal loose

on a spree – and, thinking
they are you and me,
alerts the Government a.s.a.p.;
but otherwise let’s not
expect a fuss. Almost
nobody has ever noticed us.









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Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Memorable Conversation Between Friends


Memorable conversation
between friends depends
less on affectionate beginnings
and extraordinary ends than

on what lends some sense
that something’s spinning
in the soul. With you, my dear,
I always come out whole.










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Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Off the Wall


Let’s be off the wall:
drip slick
lubricious druids! –

enjoy a viscous fall:
sip thick
suspicious fluids.













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Monday, January 7, 2013

What You’ve Been Really Undergoing


Out of nothing you could
name that doesn’t seem
or feel like your habitual
amorphousness,

how strange, this morning,
to awaken to what you’ve
been really undergoing:
metamorphosis.










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Sunday, January 6, 2013

Waiting is Extremely Strange



Waiting is extremely strange.
It makes extraordinary use of the illusory.

The malleable range and tractability of time
appears to serve us, while we’re waiting,

like a sneaky slave: nickeling and diming us:
behaving as if nothing mattered but

our chock-a-block invention of the numbers
on a clock. Ticking seconds strive

and beckon – carrying the narrative
of exigent conditions: proclaiming

the perdition we shall pass into if we do not
pursue The True: predicated on the hope that if

the yearned-for thing occurs we all be all right.
But sometimes, while we’re waiting through

the night and day and night, the burrs
and feathers of another inner sight

may ferret us away. Time is then
forgotten – waiting, misbegotten.








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Saturday, January 5, 2013

You Again



Gelatinous
fatuous
fellow.

Half-man,
half-tangerine
jello.

Here you go
spewing your
spew again.

Telling me
what I should
do again.









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Friday, January 4, 2013

January Is To Blame


January goads. It loads
the senses with itself,
not like July, with a supply
of redolence and ripeness,
but with its peculiar brand
of barren brightness –
an implicit icy invitation
which incites – ignites –
the inward thought,
a sentience wrought
from loss: of memory too
buried in the psychic
permafrost to matter
at the surface: but which
soon imbues the winter’s
darker blues and moonlit
hues of ivory and gray
with purpose – not intended,
or much understood. Tonight
I thought I smelled the ghost
of burning wood: a fireplace
I sat by when I was a child,
frightened and beguiled
by captured flame.
January is to blame.
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