Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Spent


 
Something’s spent.
It’s like the Father left the Holy Spirit and his Son
to deal with the Existence He engendered

and has rendered
his remaining Duo impotent.
Not unlike what this new spike of loss

you’ve undergone has done to any prospects
of another tolerable dawn. Strange you
can’t identify what’s going on.

Your warp and woof
have lost their weft.
What left?











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Tuesday, July 30, 2013

140 Characters


 
Say a thing to somebody
so someone else can listen in.
Existentially you'll rub
the feeling in. Like a purring
cat. Nothing wrong with that.

 

 
(to the uninitiated: 140 characters are the limit of what you can post on Twitter. There are 140 characters in this poem.)

This Thing



 
This thing that’s always
running with you,
will it go away?
Is it supposed to stay?














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Monday, July 29, 2013

ATP


 
There’s a sleep switch in the brain –
a toggle in the hypothalamus
which flips to fog you into slumber –

put you under – undermine whatever
keeps you in the active grasp
of conscious living’s strain: exacting

your obedience to an expedient
immersion in the vat of its luxuriously
soporific stain. It keeps you sane.

It’s gained through the beneficent
release of some availing molecule
called ATP. ATP’s okay by me.



Sunday, July 28, 2013

Promiscuous Acquaintance


 
Fallow growth –
loosened  thread –
hollow intricacies waiting to be fed:

painted, sullied, tainted, vandalized –
irreverently compromised: making
the promiscuous acquaintance

of whatever isn’t us –
a minus turns
into a plus.












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Saturday, July 27, 2013

I’ve Lost All My Allure


 
I’ve lost all
my allure.

I haven’t
any more.

I used to be
so sure

I could disarm
with sexual

vicissitude
and kindred

kinds of volupté,
aplomb,

and not quite
licit charm.

But now
I just alarm.










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Friday, July 26, 2013

Talking While You’re Walking Through the Water


 
Talking while you’re walking
through the water
in the warm dry Summer air
suggests a rare conundrum:

what is going on beyond
this range? Partaking
of so many elements
at once is strange.












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Thursday, July 25, 2013

Another Surreptitious Sibling Moon


 
Betting he’ll be
better at it
than his brother,

another
surreptitious
sibling moon

has moved
into the place
of ours.

His unscarred
face now
scours the sky.

We’re hoping
he’ll find
evidence

before his callow
lunar curiosity
runs dry.










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Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Ambiguity in Summer


 
Ambiguity in Summer rides a different breeze
than it is prone to fly in other seasons --
as it undergoes fleet shadows, blatant beats
of heat, and unapologetic angles of the light

which generate unreasonable generosity: to dare
to reach for, eat the peaches that the Sun has
undertaken to incite into voluptuous exactitude would
seem completely to reject ephemera and subtlety –

and yet we sit in each translucent coolness
we can grab, the ever-hesitating you and me,
inhabiting our comfortably sweet uncertainty.
We will not give it up. In our way, we live it up.










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Tuesday, July 23, 2013

The Formation of a Point-of-View


 
You're never through 
with the formation of a point-of-view.

It’s always in the stew
of some new

brew
of blue

unmentionable aperçu
it can’t eschew --

to do
with you.










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Monday, July 22, 2013

Parties


 

Foolish
smarties!

Ghoulish
parties.













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Sunday, July 21, 2013

Mojo


 
Mojo’s in the shadows,
not the jeweled blue and red –
though sometimes may reside in those
instead. We’re never sure what bed

in which he may decide to sleep --
or where we might discover him awake:
how shallow, narrow, wide or deep
he'll be -- or if he's there to give or take.











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Saturday, July 20, 2013

Buck-Ass Naked, Yodeling



Everybody thought they knew what color they would be –
but nobody came out the way they’d planned.
Suggesting untoward existential possibility,
their hues appeared themselves to take command.

Orange-yellow, violet – instead of pink and brown --
seem to lead them now through life, against the sky’s background.
Exhibitionistically, they amble through the town,
buck-ass naked, yodeling: and glad to be around.











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Friday, July 19, 2013

Depressed Woman Daydreams at the Beach


 
Oh golden goddess from the sea!
Who’s sitting on your head?
“Simulacra-mom,” said she.
“The real one’s dead.”

Can mothers of divinity expire?
The goddess nodded yes.
“They'll die to take away desire --
and leave the habit of distress –

so that forever unforgivable, you might
reside inside their sorrow
which wouldn’t hold you quite so tight
if there were no tomorrow."













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Thursday, July 18, 2013

This Pot of Blue


 
Tasty little
slew of stew,
this pot
of blue.

You wonder
who
commands
the view

of it in back
of you.
Perhaps he wants
some too.










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Wednesday, July 17, 2013

The Love of My Life





The love of my life
was requited today.
New York inspected me –
said I could stay.











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Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Invading You


 
Out of the amorphous air,
cumulously prodding
you to care,
the understanding

comes: you’re from
somewhere not evident.
You sense
its beveled edge –

you’re on the ledge.
You've nothing you can
point to of your own --
except the vast exquisite

moan of everything --
invading you
and baiting you –
creating you.









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Monday, July 15, 2013

Three Subtleties


 
Three subtleties
are huddling
in the heat.

They’re losing
nuanced
ambiguity:

the Summer’s
lambent cruelty
has got them beat.

Each endlessly
translucent
trait is dripping

through the grate
like thin diluted
purple paint.

Exquisite
sensibilities
they ain’t.










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Sunday, July 14, 2013

Ignore the Art


 
Barter
for the larder

of my heart.
Ignore the art.

Make a deal.
I want to feel.

Call up the drummer.
Set up the dance.

Throw me a summer
romance.










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Trigonometrically Stuck


 
The world
is madly
arousing
itself --

trigonometrically
stuck
on
its shelf.













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Saturday, July 13, 2013

What Are We Doing Today, Today?


 
What are we doing today, today?
Oh what are we doing today?
Perhaps it’s the day to roundelay
and sway and play and sweat.

Or maybe today’s the day
to fade away –
stay home --
forget.













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Friday, July 12, 2013

Taking Off Your Pants



Destiny
and chance --

promulgating
everything in one

unconscionable
dance.

Strange the stuff
that comes to you,

taking off
your pants.









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Thursday, July 11, 2013

Unanswered Mail


 
Open me.

Give
me
a grope.

(Ho-hum.)

Fold me

back
into
my envelope.

Let
me

mope.











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Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Buerre du Soleil


 
The sun came out today like some great naked
melting butter man stuck to some lesser naked
melting butter man more palpably averse
to dancing. Their flagrant vagrancy could
not keep one from glancing. And oh, the rays! –
one sweated hollandaise.












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Tuesday, July 9, 2013

All But Glandularly


 
Transcendentalism recommended light –
opining that aligning with it was our right: that
there’s a kind of all but glandularly openhanded

underhanded understanding looming in the Universe --
grander than the reticence in woman or in man –
spanning and expanding without any irritable thought

to every motive, notion, source and outcome --
ocean, bird and tree – not to mention you and me:
nothing fraught, left out, or banned. But ah! –

some unforeseen thing seeps into the sea, another
creeps beneath the bark. Not everything is sung
by some celestial lark. There’s also dark.










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Monday, July 8, 2013

Your Physiognomies of Thought


 
Your physiognomies of thought
once brought you comfort:

back when you were sure
what faces meant and could secure

an explicative gestural expression
to each whim of yours –

each was purely good
or purely not; simple as a drop of ink

in milk to spot. But now the faces flood
ambiguously – and no set of eyes

apprises you of what it has in mind;
there’s nothing now to find. Strangely

though, you undergo no
crisis. The eyes are kind.










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Sunday, July 7, 2013

The Scrotal Sac, the Garlic Bulb


The scrotal sac, the garlic bulb,
the sacrum and the ilium and their
associated ligaments, the backward

forward pivot of the ankle, foot
and knee, all balled and budded,
nippled, fleshed, and ripened on a tree,

wrapped up in apple skin and lizard
hide, astride the breasts and muscles
of the bride, the roominess inside

the blooming  groom, the scything
of a sigh into an unconsidered breath,
the histologically complex kiss of death,

exhuming body truths of fishes, figs
and ferrets, marmosets, root vegetables,
monkeys, parrots, garnet, granite, freshly

incarnated newts, carnations, penises
and fruits and lava flows, and guavas,
roses, noses blowing in the bumbling

wind: no one’s sinned but everybody
who would dare to take a form
and stumble out into the storm.









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Saturday, July 6, 2013

The Moon’s Inverse


 
The moon’s inverse.
Vicarious.
Ostensible.

Immune – and worse.
Nefarious.
Insensible.

A swoon -- a curse.
Precarious.
All tinsel wool.

The Universe.
Hilarious.
On principle.











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Friday, July 5, 2013

The Terwilliger Trio


 
The Terwilliger Trio
hang out
until dawn.

Willig would
rather the lights
were turned off.

Ter and Er
like them
kept on.

A minor dissension:
they’re happy
enough.

Now that it’s
morning
they’re gone.










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Thursday, July 4, 2013

Dissonance in Joy


 
There’s dissonance in joy.
For instance, that sweet
meditative boy all woven
into yoga postures on the beach,

intent on fostering serenity
through something
out of reach,
and that bleached blond

quick whirl of fleet gesticulating girl
whose feet kick-danced and twirled
a touch too rashly past him.
Got him in the head.

Then there are the joys
one knows in bed. Perhaps
we ought to have investigated
those instead.








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Wednesday, July 3, 2013

In the Piety Exacted by Anxiety


 
In the piety
exacted by anxiety
when you would kneel
to any god

and promise it
your soul –

if only it would
leave you
wholly
as you’d like to be –

when psychically
you’ve bled unholy red

and all the reassurance
in the world
will not assuage
the sinking dread –

the rapid blink
of imminent catastrophe –
 
effect abrupt
distraction.
Think
of me.







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Tuesday, July 2, 2013

The Thing To Do Today


The thing
to do today,
you think,
is to

consume
an idea
unlike
you.











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Monday, July 1, 2013

Prosem


 
If homo sapiens had a full palette of emotional response 
and the capacity to understand that we each will die -- 
but lacked drives -- it seems to me that ability to foresee

our own deaths would cripple us into complete inaction,
and foster a single resigned logical belief in suicide.
It is those drives -- our ferocious insurmountable lusts

and hungers, and their sublimations or transmutations 
pious determination and moral imperative -- which deluge
us not only with the compulsion to go on, but with the ability

to 'forget' for most of our drive-impelled lives that it will
all end badly. They are also what permit -- in fact,
require – accomplishment, 'good' or 'bad'. Where are love

and the 'spiritual' in this? Somehow they contain it all.
But I don't think we can ever get at them the way, biologically,
we can't not react to our somatic blast of a lust to live

and to keep on going. All the selfish megalomania that fuels
the world is as bright an index of vitality as our insistent
acts of generosity. The drive to be alive trumps all.








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