Sunday, January 31, 2016

Having Reckoned with the Second Month


Having reckoned with the second month,
spelunking through the caves of February winter,

Twenty-Sixteen soon will be the sprinter March requires
to run the course toward Spring to bring the opening

to everything beyond – particularly through
to Summer of which all years seem to be most fond.

Desires will be met and left in Fall – then swallowed
by a cold return to the illusion we have had it all –

heralding the heaven of the unforeseen –
dismembering December into Twenty-Seventeen.








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Magenta, Gold & Blue


You like magenta, gold & blue
of which the most descriptive hue
for you
is blue.









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Ghost of Blue Youth



Sitting there naked,
the ghost of blue youth
sustains what Keats knows:
beauty is truth.









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Bird Flower



Evolution turned up
to the sixty-seventh power
might, if we are fortunate,
assemble a Bird Flower.










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Saturday, January 30, 2016

Algebra Teacher, Retired



She taught algebra to everyone who ever lived –
at least it seems that way to her, now that she’s done with it –
and in a hapless manner multiplies by x the ones she did
teach x y equals y x to. Her head is large with recollection –
full of her mathematics-ridden aptitudes which were
her ticket to a life. She never married, though had she
been born a man she would have passionately loved a wife.









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Friday, January 29, 2016

A Hush


You tell your friend what happened
and it snaps you back
to all the shock and actuality –

the block of factuality
which will not let you rest. Best
to let it drop – but how to stop

its rabid push?
He whispers reassurance –
precipitates a hush.









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Thursday, January 28, 2016

Not-So-Secret



To have it widely known
that you’re the most exquisite
of your species can become a bore

(all that Jungle Red, Chanel, Dior!) –
and yet it’s not-so-secret
that you couldn’t love it more.









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Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Ergo


Dream figures hold assumptions, too –
each thinks that it can see right through the other:
head off at the pass whatever reverie is on its way

so it can substitute its own revered array of story –
take the glory and the reins and lead you solely
to the strains of its suspense and recompense.

Ergo, dreams don’t make much sense.









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Bemused


Defused, bemused, at sea.
There are worse ways you could be.







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Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Her Centrality


Her centrality
had lost control.
Her golden hair
comprised her soul

and she was
losing it.
Had she been
abusing it?









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Monday, January 25, 2016

Half


Half man
and half ceramic bibelot,

there aren’t many places
he can go.












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Sunday, January 24, 2016

Enmity is Easier than Love


Enmity is easier than love –
until you lose the taste for it –

and find it easy to replace
with curiosity and humor

and bewilderment and awe,
which prod a law of wonder:

a sort of thunder in the heart
some label gratitude –

a mystic longitude and latitude
which rise like Delphic vapors

from below and float about,
around and down like sunlight

from above. Then you find
that nothing’s easier than love.






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Saturday, January 23, 2016

Voluptuous Obfuscation, An Exercise


Information emanates more strangely
than we think, or know. Much of thinking is,
in fact, a way to thicken and to sink the flow,

break down the fleeter sweeter bridges
over which we might more efficaciously
discover Soul – to quicken and to aid our sight –

to radiate sufficiently capaciously through means
which don’t depend on grammar’s hammer or on
the illusion of a logical phylogeny of thought

for truly generative thinking’s light and flight.
Electing to release instead of fleecing facts
in some erroneous attempt to undertake

the fraught inspection of their use, can quite
magnificently squeeze the fruit of life for juice,
tease out the only antidote to psychic strife.

Wielding syllables? – a Lilliputian enterprise:
chasing silly swarms of dull varieties of gnat.
We can do more with consciousness than that.









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Friday, January 22, 2016

In Her Bathing Suit


She’s listening
for something
down the hall.

Anything at all.












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Thursday, January 21, 2016

Inimitable Grandeur


She chose her friends in terms
of their inimitable grandeur –
and had her picture taken with them

so to offer up the sort of photograph
that you could hand your
mother when she asked with whom

you had affectionate relation.
She’d show her mama one of these,
no hesitation.









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Wednesday, January 20, 2016

The Thing That Makes You Turn Around


The thing that makes you turn around
is sometimes not the thing you want to see.
I learned this when the thing that made you turn
around was me.













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Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Ends and Means


Fate takes you in hand and you think it’s the end.
And you struggle against it – until you discover it isn’t the end
nor the means to an end since there isn’t an end.











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Monday, January 18, 2016

The Désespoir of Birds


There aren’t any words
for the désespoir of birds.

Avian depression
can be sunk by an oppression

unimaginable to our species.
Conjure up explanatory theses

as you will.
But birdy blues can kill.









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What I’d Call a ‘Myself’


First Person slips off the shelf.
Keeps missing whatever I’d call a ‘myself.’

Second might do, 
through its sneaky ambiguous ‘you.’

‘One’ has a sort of a Jamesian tone,
but it sits rather too much aloofly alone.

Personal pronouns keep missing the bus:
they only report what purports to be ‘us.’

So I tried to look ‘I’ in the eye.
I drew what I saw in the mirror. Oh my.

Something looks back from the page.
Quiet, polite – but in covert outrage.








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Sunday, January 17, 2016

Terror’s Spectrum


Terror runs the spectrum
from the terrified to terrifying –

fearfully expected treasures
of a violent oblivion

to promises of tearful, numb
and spectral equilibrium.








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Saturday, January 16, 2016

Radioactive Spirituality


Crackling with radioactive spirituality,
its lyrically empirical reality catches
you unaware and makes you

stare and swear you’ve seen
and been the thing before and that
you’ll want to see and be it evermore.










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Friday, January 15, 2016

We Think You Did It


We think you hid it.
We think you did it.
You broke the laws.
You are the cause.












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Crucially Dual



We manage to manage to manage it.
Crucially dual, replete with renewal.













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Don’t Bother Him



Don’t bother him. He’s walking fast.
He knows the opportunity won’t last.












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Juggling Suns



Juggling suns
is fun.













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Thursday, January 14, 2016

Propagation


Beings propagate each other
all the day and night.
They keep thinking: “Maybe
this time we will get it right.”













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Donna & Guy's Magical Mystery Tour


 
Donna & Guy's
Magical Mystery Tour

Donna Boguslav & Guy Kettelhack

Atlantic Gallery 
Suite 540, 547 West 27th Street or 548 West 28th Street, New York NY 10001, 212-219-3183
February 23 - March 19, 2016

Reception: Thursday, February 25 - 5 - 8 p.m.


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
As the last changeling born to an Irish gypsy and a winding
Alaskan river, I packed my caravan early with little knives,
toe shoes, sable brushes, loon feathers, and a stethoscope.
I posed nude for magicians waving fine charcoal wands;
they taught me to paint songs on woven cloth. I followed
turtles building great castles; they taught me to scratch
dreams on dead trees. I continue my travels, midwife little
worlds, exist on laughter and mystery. I thank you and
every artist I have ever known.


---Donna Boguslav
            Sea Creature, Donna Boguslav


================================================================

In the twenty-five years Donna and I have known each other - and mingled our lives and spirits - we've explored a wide shared territory of life, and the great good news we can report from that exploration is that everything is goosed by the beats of cosmic laughter. To have the chance to mix our versions of that discovery in this show offers me the greatest happiness I can imagine. And I suspect seeing our work together may prove entertaining for anyone game enough to walk up to it. I'm the child of two artists, although mostly have made my way through life as a writer; however, quite without warning, I started doing a drawing a day on April Fool's Day 2009 - creatures emerging from which have accompanied poems I'd already been writing. Since then they've found their ways into art shows and poetry journals but mostly into Donna's hands, where I most want them to go. But now, in this magical mystery tour, Donna and I get to show our strangenesses to you, too! Come join us!

Guy Kettelhack



We Sense It Had To Do With Blue, Guy Kettelhack