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.









.

Commandments

 

Commandments

you can’t
have imagined
proceed from
your hand.













.

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.









.

Conditions of Existence

 

We’re neither

a retreat
nor an advance.

We’re dancing

in a trance.












.

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.












.

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.

.

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.














.

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.













.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

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.







.

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.











.

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?











.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

Artifice

 

Oracle framed in a carnival booth --

straining each organ of sense --
artifice aimed at proclaiming the truth:
being its sole recompense.












.

You’re Here.

 

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















.

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.











.

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.










.

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.

.

The Thing You Want

 

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










.

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.










.

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.








.

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.







.

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.













.

Another Incarnation of Yourself

 

 

Another incarnation

of yourself
slips through the slit
and angles to be it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

Otherwise

 

Every form
has sentience
and intention –

develops

memory and fear.
Existence

otherwise

would be
unable to appear.










.

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.








.

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.












.

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.









.

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.











.

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.










.

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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