Monday, September 30, 2013

All Too Often


 
She loves it when it’s angry.
Settles into its big lap
like other people take a nap.

Lets it rage so nobody
will notice she can’t turn
the pages in her life.

The red hot virulence
of maddened strife
and strangled tears

is mother’s milk to her.
And is to me, when
I am she, which I can be.









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Sunday, September 29, 2013

Commandments


 
Commandments
you can’t
have imagined
proceed from
your hand.













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Saturday, September 28, 2013

De Trop


 
Put on your
thinking cap,
they said.
He did.
It grew a head,

and then
three more.
That made four.
Not, of course,
including

that which bore
the cranially
overburdened
pink
chapeau.

Something
had to go.
Five heads
were
de trop.









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Friday, September 27, 2013

Conditions of Existence


 
We’re neither
a retreat
nor an advance.

We’re dancing
in a trance.












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Thursday, September 26, 2013

After You Make the Thing You Make


 
After you make
the thing you make,
what do you make of it?
What’s in the wake of it?

Does it enthrall?
You can’t recall.
As soon as it's done,
you’re onto another one.












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Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Etymology of Forget


 
Old English:
forgietan --
un-get.

Haven’t
grasped that
yet.

Next time
before it's gotten
you, you’ll let it go.

Forget –
and time –
go to and fro.

Heighdy-ho.










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Tuesday, September 24, 2013

You Know How When


 
You know how when somebody walks in
when you’re dancing naked
and they’re so amazed by your exquisite
grace that they begin to cry? Neither do I.














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Monday, September 23, 2013

What We Know About the Gift



What we know about the gift is, it came
prowling into your first apprehension of it

like a genie floating on a towel, pretending
that it needed you to minister to it. Soon
you sensed an attribute more sinister in it.

Petulant, it fidgeted -- and flew away –
as if to chastise you for leading it astray.













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Sunday, September 22, 2013

Barely



 
Last night you reached
down to the strange thing
sleeping on the floor
because you wanted more

than you were getting
all alone up there without it.
You barely had a doubt
about it.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Saturday, September 21, 2013

Jamesian Heroine


 
It was part of the charm attendant upon
the prospect of the daily exhumation
of what she could only think of as the rarest
part of her soul –

indeed, part of the charm which conduced
ineluctably to the whole –

that she, though having evidently meekly
and completely met the expectations
of her time and subjugated place
in Eighteen-Eighty-Two –

was able in her silent privacy
supremely to eschew

what she’s decided
she will not confide
to you.







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Friday, September 20, 2013

The Naked Thing That Screams


 
Are you the naked thing that screams?
Or the naked thing it screams at?
Damned grand hypotheses and dreams!
You wonder what to aim a scheme at.











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Thursday, September 19, 2013

Multi-Necked and Quadricranial


 
Multi-necked
and quadricranial,
today you were
a great success –

you seem
your best
when there are
four of you.

But what might
you have been
had there been
more of you?











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Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Existential Pups

 
 
You used to think
you wanted to be
let in on
what sort of creatures
creatures were
but then you gave it up.
 
Really all you need
to know is
what you know
already:
every one’s
an existential pup.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Artifice


 
Oracle framed in a carnival booth --
straining each organ of sense --
artifice aimed at proclaiming the truth:
being its sole recompense.












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Monday, September 16, 2013

You’re Here.


 
You’re more than a surmise:
it waved
and looked into your eyes.
You're saved.















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Sunday, September 15, 2013

Pencil, at Dawn


 
Just now I let my pencil roam
and it proceeded to
collude with powers not my own
that hadn’t much to do

or had to do (I don’t know which)
with something relevant
to something that was not a finch
or pygmy elephant.

I’m afraid that’s all that I’d
be able now to say
about how its soft lead applied
itself to dawn today.











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Saturday, September 14, 2013

Instead of Talk


 
Extraordinary, really, when
we manage to convey
one tiny tittle, jot or whit
of what we want to say

in any way remotely that
does justice to the thing.
Perhaps that’s why with you and me
instead of talk, we sing.

Not that we expect to make
more sense this way too soon.
But we have lovely voices
and we rather like a tune.










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Friday, September 13, 2013

The Moment He Just Had


 
The moment that obtains
because of interstitial glitches
that the brain delivers randomly

in any course of thoughts
attempting to be linear –
in that great draught of senseless

psychic breath on which you
streak out like a storm of meteors
into the vastness of the blessedness

of unlit being wherein seeing
has no point and you’re anointed
for a timeless blip with an exquisite

cooling drip from some oblivion
beyond your last capacity
to grasp – as if welcomed,

kissed and clasped
by a primordially infinitely
loving mom and dad – well,

that’s the moment he just had.







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Thursday, September 12, 2013

The Thing You Want


 
A false front falls --
a face comes through.
Sometimes the thing
you want wants you.










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Wednesday, September 11, 2013

The Triumvirate of Pleasantness


 
The Triumvirate of Pleasantness
arrived today –
a threesome offering
a sweet array

of reasons to be jolly,
and to play.
Happily they
didn’t stay.










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Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Its Quarry (A Manifesto)


 
My life is not the source of poetry.
The things I do and think and feel each day
no matter how they sway me don't account
for what the art that seizes me

appears to want to say. Whatever the relation
my experience may have to it is so profoundly
incidental that it can't get in the way –
whatever runs this show won't let it.

The best thing I can do with circumstance
is to forget it. Which just as soon as pen
appropriates the page I do. If I imagine
I'm the point, I’m through. The bubble pops.

The whole thing stops.
What makes it go? I do not know.
The thing that speaks attends far less to me
than you. You are its quarry. I’m not sorry.








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Monday, September 9, 2013

What Interests You


 
What interests you
is how relaxed they seem,
the creatures
in your dream –

no internecine scheme all
fraught with mystery:
they hang about
as if they were the history

of an amorphous
nothing much.
The unconsidered
loving touch –

the musing
in the absent eyes –
their quietly peculiar
shapes are no surprise.

You wonder what you have
to do with them.
You ask:
the dream grows dim.







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Sunday, September 8, 2013

Allergy


 
Perhaps if I was in
a bright magenta light
it would ignite insight.

But is insight a thing
to want at all?
Perhaps to be in thrall

to color is enough.
Is that the necessary
stuff? I shuffle through

the risen and the fallen.
I snuffle, too. I have
an allergy to pollen.













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Another Incarnation of Yourself

 
 
Another incarnation
of yourself
slips through the slit
and angles to be it.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Saturday, September 7, 2013

Otherwise


 
Every form
has sentience
and intention –

develops
memory and fear.
Existence

otherwise
would be
unable to appear.










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Friday, September 6, 2013

Confession’s Good for Demi-Gods



Confession’s good for demi-gods;
their powers can sustain
such numberless catastrophes
that render psychic pain

sufficient to cause trauma
that to say the thing outright
can sometimes vent the worst of it,
and help them see some light.

But when confession’s not enough,
and they find they can’t cope,
and face a bleak eternity
devoid of any hope,

and given what they might have done,
and come to understand,
it’s strange how badly everything
can get so out of hand.

It’s then they start to envy
how our fates as mortals lie.
However badly we screw up,
at least we get to die.








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Thursday, September 5, 2013

Proof


 
Standing in the evening’s rising
blue and gold and red and purple,  

predicating new autumnal cool,
we school our bodies to stay close.

Your chin rests on my shoulder:
bolder now to touch, as if aware

that growing older with the year
is an accomplishment:

message sent – received: proof
of something secretly believed.












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Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Until You’re Carried Out


 
Whatever you are riding
from the start
until the end you hope
will turn out to be friend:
retain you on its back,

sustain you
from insufferable lack --  
and not retract
what seems to be
the mission it inscrutably

appears to have agreed
to carry out to carry you
until you’re carried out.
You may however
hope in vain.









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Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Best Told


 



You have to get up and gesticulate.
Body language is your lexicon.
Tales must pry and fly and titillate.
Best told with nothing on.












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Monday, September 2, 2013

What It Knew


 
It knew pink light
was flattering
and how to showcase
its full lips.

But it would be
amenable
to the consideration
of whatever other
beauty tips

you might want
to suggest
it pencil to its list.
It was no egotist.










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Sunday, September 1, 2013

Bacon Fat on Bread


 
They turn away from vacant green
and look ahead to red.

It makes them slink and dance
and yearn for bacon fat on bread.

It's sort of like the difference
between alive and dead.












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