Friday, May 31, 2013

Trapped, Sapped


 
Trapped:
by causes, effects
we think we can name.

Sapped:
neglecting to bless,
resorting to blame.










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Thursday, May 30, 2013

Summer Suit


 
Let us reflect on
the phenomenon
of form when it is warm:

its check against
the slippery fluidity
of hot humidity:

its circumspect agenda
to hold up and hide the rot –
to keep the tulip in its spot –

correct – erect – within
a vase for several days
so no one will suspect

how close to entropy it is:
the crystal that contains
the business

of decline: the vine
on which reclines
the skin that barely

holds within
the runny plummy fruit:
the summer suit.








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Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Something Central Somewhere


 
Pleasures – stolen – in those
sweet interstices of mind
that open up when you have
left the day behind

and dare to face the larger view –
to care for the exquisite
composition of what something
central somewhere seems

to want of you. Late May
applies its brush of summer
volupté and nothing doesn’t
yearn for you to play.










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Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Some Thoughts, Other Thoughts


 
Some thoughts
arrive subaqueously –
swimming through

the liquid of a feeling –
never quite revealing
in their cool suspension

their intentions –
past the wedded ones
of charming you with their

shy show of meekness –
and alarming you with their
sly flow of sleekness –

as they undertake
to overtake you till you’re
quaking in their thrall.

Other thoughts
don’t come
this way at all.







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Monday, May 27, 2013

Yet Another Zone


 
Emergent life seeks reassurance
from the get-go – to let go of the yelp
of undergoing anything is best
achieved by getting help.

And it will more than likely come,
all dumb with sweetness and affection –
caressing you, addressing you –
effecting something like the sense

you’re not alone. Then you’ll proceed
to yet another zone, and yet another
zone. You’ll find that you
were always on your own.









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Sunday, May 26, 2013

Preponderance


 
Preponderance – dysmorphic flesh and hairless heads
and necks and thoughtful eyes – and furry chest
devised with nipples in a state of faint arousal:

another blunt espousal of the theory that full redemption
can be had through bursting metaphor: that somehow
in the indiscriminately thirsting more might be

derived a drop of indisputability. You’ve worked on this
contraption, as you’ve worked on every other one,
jonesing for an adequately harrowing facility.











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Saturday, May 25, 2013

Talk Talk Talk


 
Convoluted conversation –
endless qualifying clauses –

and no pauses:
unrepentant sounds

abound among the three
of us today. We haven’t

yet agreed on any ways
or means or ends.

Perhaps one shouldn’t
argue with imaginary friends.










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Friday, May 24, 2013

Insomnia


 
Disparate expectancies. Misalliances between
complacency and misery and doubt. Surely
something soon will ream them out –
release you from their demons and upend
their scheme. Then you can resume the dream.












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Thursday, May 23, 2013

Our Mysteries


 
Oracles and angels are bewilderments.
Surely we can’t know what they can.

But are we right? Let’s look past
the bluster. Every woman and each man

has psychic luster. We’ve all got
something like clairvoyant sight.

I look into your eyes at noon: they’re full
of night. You know more and I know more

than either one of us will say.
Our mysteries bewitch the day.











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Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Meteorological Prognosis


 
Systems of a season-less
humidity convene like spies
inside the hollows

of a bright Manhattan sun –
clouds of happy apprehension
rig suspension of the day

the Weather Channel told you
might be fair. It won’t be fair.
It’s never fair.

Beatrix Potter Springs
are rare in New York City:
plan for chilly March or sodden

mid-July. That’s a meteorological
prognosis upon which you
may decide, in May,

you might rely.
Except for when you can’t.
Evidence for anything is scant.









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Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Moment of a Breath


 
Dispassionate, affectionate:
safely miles away –
there’s nothing really
very much to say.

To hold it in your arms
suffices: a gentler sentience –
inward – warmer:
murmured tensions

are released. A ceiling
reached, a feeling caught –
marks the moment
of a breath of thought.










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Monday, May 20, 2013

Surface and Substance


 
The surface is
the substance

and the substance
is the surface

and the whole
shebang’s

been lighted
and will melt.

That doesn’t mean
it isn’t deeply felt.











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Sunday, May 19, 2013

On Finding Words One Isn’t Sure of in Henry James


 
Procrustean
titivations! Hem
them up! Shun
runs of them.

Play them on
the flugel-
horn. Look
them up in Google.












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Saturday, May 18, 2013

Today somebody asked you what you do.


 
You said that you
pursue a daily strategy
of forming intimate

relationships with
strangers. You lure
and bait them. You didn’t

add that you create them –
because that would
have been a lie.

Look! – they have arrived
again: fluent with their
private sea, fluid

with inconstancy.
They take their places
on your shore. Again,

you’ll give them what
you’ve got, though
they’ll want more.









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Friday, May 17, 2013

Facing Mortal Illness


 
Its leaves are tender
and it’s night.
You’re on your own.
Should you steal it –
or appeal to it?

Timidly you wonder
what you have
the courage to effect.
Your motives are suspect.

Photosynthesis
and breath persist –
for now. Existence
will allow. For now.











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Thursday, May 16, 2013

Fun to Watch


 
Struggle’s fun to watch.
Bloody blotch
on white.
Unconscionable fight.

Not the jittery-panic kind –
the voluptuous-panic kind.
Emptiness torn.
Something else born.












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Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Beyond Your Bounds


 
Exigencies of existence
breed despair –
the sense that incarnation
is a trap – a lethal dare –

which makes you care
beyond your bounds about
what you can’t bear about
what you must care
beyond your bounds about:

betrayal, sickness, death –
existential loneliness.
There’s no redress.
But stick it out.








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Tuesday, May 14, 2013

In the Constitutive Shadows





Another soul has shed its raiment
and it manifests as usual
as naked ghosts: hosts to gossip –

undermining and corroborating
flotsam-jetsam evidence
in all the constitutive shadows

of the human being to which they
bore witness that a life was had.  
On balance, they were glad.









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Monday, May 13, 2013

Another Sweet Ebullience


 
Your story keeps absconding with itself –
you had it neatly wrapped into a sweet ebullience –
and then it came back morphing all its characters
into a random range of unknown creatures,
whose new traits and fates and features,

while not terribly unpalatably strange, were now
conniving to pursue a different theater from the one
you loved and knew – a cast unutterably foreign
to the last – a lot for you to swallow, because
you’re forced to turn your page and follow them 

onto heir stage: you have no voice to alter their
direction: no choice but to submit to this unalterable
insurrection: construe a brand new tale, and find
another sweet ebullience in it – find the makings
of another story to regale, and spin it.









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Sunday, May 12, 2013

Terpsichorean Meditation



 
She sat there –
softly falling
into
trance –

imagining
unlooked-for
opportunities
to dance.











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Saturday, May 11, 2013

Brutality, Beneath a Complicated Pact


 
The rootedness of England –
its template sir-miss-madam-ness –
its sense that human nature

is brutality, beneath a complicated pact –
that someone’s always
sitting on your back –

and all that can be done
is to go in: that you must bear
your own unconscionable sin:

no Emerson can tell you otherwise.
Something got me this time over
the Atlantic Ocean – a severance born

of surmise become a certainty – a notion
that millennia of human intercession
have produced a monstrously alluring

darkly polyphonic song –
and that it’s that to which I think
I may have finally discovered I belong.









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Friday, May 10, 2013

Good Sports


 
We are organic compounds
with a confluent collective smell –
a sort of existential potpourri
for whose strange seasonings
so far we haven’t found a reason.

We merely find we’re here.
We’ve gently meant, and bent,
and spent our meaning, leaning
on whatever data it supports.  
We’ve tried to be good sports.










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Thursday, May 9, 2013

When the Spirit Moves


 
When the Spirit moves
it must remove itself
from where
it had been hiding:

manage to resume
its plumy
gliding through
the motley-colored air –

get to overt “here”
from covert “there” –
prepare for
the abrupt catastrophes

of change that it exists
to bring about –
which if we’re lucky
we will sing about.










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Wednesday, May 8, 2013

As if in Some God’s Cosmic Lap


 
Oh, spacey naked
Baby Boo!

What is to be
done with you?

Warm upon a sweet
pink flannel wrap,

you lie as if in some
god’s cosmic lap,

your body in-between
two halves of nap –

ever at the brink
of happy heaven –

fat and smooth and ripe –
at forty-seven.










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Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Encore une fois!


 
Captive in your aptitude
for autobiographical exactitude

your pen cannot not wend
its way – nor not not fend

off all the bites and stings
the superficial critic brings.

Sweet single beat!
Repeat, repeat!

Ecrivez ‘moi!’
Encore une fois!










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Monday, May 6, 2013

Mutant Miscreant


 
Mutant
miscreant –

or some
new beauty –

manifested
quirk –

the sort
of work

you do
not do

intending
to.

Relentlessly
pursue

what can’t
be thought.

Chase
till caught.








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Sunday, May 5, 2013

Sat On It


 
He planned
the thing 
with sweet,

efficient,
and complete
dispatch –

then sat
on it
and waited

for it
endlessly
to hatch.











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Saturday, May 4, 2013

Politesse and Cheek



Wellbeing can presume
a lovely union
of complacency

and ardor – bartering
between desire
and the certainty of calm –

a balm which blurs
but won’t put out the fire
in the human heart:

replenishing its aptitude
for wielding the fine art
of startling  reassurance –

politesse and cheek.
This is what happens
when you speak.










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Friday, May 3, 2013

The Things They Thought


 

The things
they thought
we’d do today
we don’t.

They told us
we should
do them but
we won’t.












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Thursday, May 2, 2013

What We Decided



None
of us
has ever
had
a mother.

So we
decided
to climb up
upon
each other.












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Wednesday, May 1, 2013

England


 
Something half-came back with me
from England. I’m too jet-lagged
to decipher what. But
as I ferreted through shreds

of the remains of my dim consciousness
today, colluding with Manhattan to return
me to its mix and sway,
I sensed I was the object

through my haze
of a determined gaze –
a distillation of the past
innumerable-seeming days

when England spooned me up
and swallowed me –
a fix of Caliban-ish eyes
which bade me undergo an absolute

refusal to resume whatever compromise
had held me up until that moment.
The sort of thing that ought to foment
change. Rough magic. Strange.







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