Today It Wasn’t Fun

Today the things you’d done together

with your little friend so many times before

that you were sure he thought it lots of fun –

had he not always asked for more? –

you did again: but none of it was fun.

You’d thought your game was foolproof: how

your little friend would squeal and reel

when you would peel him off the ground

and toss him up way up high

and hang him there and then begin

to swing him like a pendulum that then

in shade as he eclipsed the sun resembled

some rare pendant dangling in the sky!

That was the wherefore and the why of your

togetherness. But it had weathered to a thinner,

sadder thing; you’d no idea what made it end,

nor what to bring, nor what you might pursue

or do to fling the joy up with the boy again –

the boy you had now to accept –

could he have had a reason after all? –
no longer was your little friend.

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In One Psychotic Episode

Rock and vapor, stone and air,

Immobility and absence –

Form and dreams,

what’s real, what seems –

the anchor in the sea –

incontrovertible dichotomy

that’s licked at by an ambiguity

like a dispassionately nosy cat.

What to make of that.

What he made of that was everything.

In one psychotic episode he had supposed

that severing his finger to obtain the ring

was patently the only thing

to do. Anyone who’d really thought about it

had to take that point of view.

Imagining that every solitary thing

was a priori inaccessible

to every other.

Never knowing that they were

each other’s mother.

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Primes of Your Life

What’s the prime of your life? Does everyone have one?

Does anyone not? Does a prime help to put us above

our defects for a moment to peak at a ghost of perfection? 

From what we could nickel and dime out of nonverbal Being,

we guess we'd opine: every moment is prime. A prime climbs

into and out of each instant, each breath. Peer at the guts of 

a moment: observe every blundering sweet flippereeno therein

simultaneously giving birth, shooting up to a height, falling 

down into death, all at once in the fray. The fray is the interesting 

part of this art: ragged wisps at the edges that slip from what 

was to what is and that carry the substances new primes 

require to ingest, digest and egest new desires whose fires 

ignite their own bright consummations, whose ashes mesh

into the bits of the rest of the fray’s restless births, breaths

and deaths: whose inventions assure that the spin of the thing

we are in of the fray, or whatever makes use of the fray, 

causes all of this endless array: although there’s no time, there’s

a prime, and a prime and the primest of primes and they’re

happening, all of them, now and they’re breeding themselves

in your cells and your absences, fatuously manufacturing

blips of perfection, occasions to lure us, assure us, that we’ve

the perception to catch and to know them. One might

if one had to requite the frail question of “why?” dare to prod

with a toe from the fray of our curtain of dark to the fringe

of a glow underneath some suggestion that this was indeed,

should we need to define (and confine) it with words,

to be found flitting ‘round – little birds! – in His/Her/Its

loose-fitting gowns, the whispers of God’s predilection.

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Color Storm!

Color storm! Strange to find not one

of these gust-blustering whipped

winds so lavishly imbued with hues

had any taste or scent or palpability.

They looked far too eruptively delicious

not to meet the prospect of a mouth

with some voluptuous perfection, paint

the tongue with flavor. But I could savor

running with them, ribbons, darts, bright

shafts, advancing, pirouetting, bursting

into brilliancy like fireworks or flowers –

how had I ever even vaguely entertained

what once I had been sure of: color

was a nuisance and a yawn,

a who-could-give-a-damn, no match

for other powers? And I? A man

content with tan or cream. But if this

color storm were dream, if it had not

materially brilliantly in every hue rained

on and into me as it now seemed to do,

oh let me not awake from it unstained.

Color was no yawn. Color was the whole

shebang, the only deal, the essence

and the business of the real. All there is,

is color. Color is what’s going on.

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Your Profitable Smile

How strange you are! How strange am I!

Let’s look each other in the I, and see if we

can find a range of something shared. If we can’t,

let’s make it up until we make it through.
Having dared at least to try to see the you in me,

the me in you, can be sufficient for a while.

But keep your profitable smile. Smiles can catalyze

the true – let you play pretend until you’re

actually seeing me, and I am really seeing you.

And if we never do? Pretending beckons warm,

affectionate connection, too; even more, 
alchemically can make the wish it apes come true.

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In Calumniator Green

He travels in a fine ceramic carriage,

freshly painted as if just this afternoon dowsed

in calumniator green, after a blood-red shower.

He wouldn’t tell us where we were,

Perhaps he lacked the power of speech.

Perhaps he didn’t know.

But he wasn’t out of reach.

He blinked as if to say, “come on, let’s go.”

And go we climbed into his

car and did. And now we’re gone.

As far as we can make it out, we’re somewhere

in the kind of Dark that just precedes the Dawn.

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Another Verge

Something shrugs inside you: tugs at you

to draw yourself. You aren’t very good at that,

but acquiescently your pencil dips itself

and what capacities it’s got to stipple, jot

and lyricize into your folderol – and something,

after many careful minutes, slowly forms itself

upon the page. Mildly smiling, not unhappily

(perhaps because he knows the paper’s

acid-free), he wakes and sighs. You blink,

surprised: it isn’t you but doesn’t have to be

for you to like it. And you do! Canopied in chaos,

sticky with the chthonic mud from which

you wish you could have watched him 

with a liquid “plop” emerge, he’s clearly here

to bring you to another verge. And oh, you’ll go.

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This Noetic Lustrous Fuss

Everything's a poem. Poems

are the DNA of being. I grabbed

a handful of the stuff today

but it was so beyond enough

that I was forced to let it go

and send it fleeing. So many

syllables in throes of numinosity!

Today I watched as tasteful

consonants and vowels became

a graceful ABCB rhyme-schemed

tree – others coalesced into iambic

stresses which, if pressed, I’d

have to say looked not completely

unlike me, before they morphed

into two milkmaids who, when

they put on their bonnets, creamily

churned into terza rima sonnets.

That all is made of poetry becomes

quite something for a creature

just discovering the fact to see.

At every turn we learn we always

always face the hiss and crack

of this noetic lustrous fuss that

makes, and is made up of, us.

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Obfuscatory Peroration on Red Grapes

In the course of eating red grapes

one has frequent occasion to notice

presumably unintended esthetically pleasing

configurations of the bunched fruits appearing

at unpredictable intervals which attain

to the condition of Art. I see it as a main task

remaining to me in these last two or three decades

allotted to me of life to make what record I can

of these happy accidents and to report on them

in an ever-increasingly baroque syntax

and involutedly nuanced timbre, tone & manner

so that as we proceed the contrast

between the evermore impenetrable

explication-de-fruits-comme-l'art

and the frankly accessible indeed by comparison

simple beauty of the revealed grapes will act

to frame them so ornately that we shan't be able

to see them as anything but the unforced paradigms

of a new category of organic allure so astonishing

in impact that we shall have to alter the way

we think and to investigate heretofore unquestioned

assumptions about who and/or what

allows creation at this elevated level to transpire

which will prepare us to examine the likelihood

that what we imagined to be evidence

of agency or intention may not after all be more

than an obfuscatory psychic ploy to distract us

from the real event whose methods & effects

do not remotely follow any system of production

we have ever known. I would continue like this

till the grapes and all trace of the space

I take up are entirely gone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R_baXjy9Yk

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Aristocracy of Spirit

Back when I was a cricket cricketeering

chirrup cheer-up chirrup! –

I assumed in insectival innocence

an inner sense that there exists an aristocracy

which has no truck with densities of provenance

or centuries of family or fancy balls or noses

held up in disdain, to which the best souls

in the cosmos gladly train their hearts

and heads to pledge allegiance:

an aristocracy of spirit. You know it

when you’re near it. You recognize its members

when you are a member, too: there is no surer

proof of who is in this special realm.

No one’s lording her or his good fortune

over anyone who doesn’t have it; in fact,

quite otherwise: you subtly influence those souls

who never knew that in their deepest being

they belonged: and then, as when

I was a little cricket, suddenly they did.

The aristocracy of spirit blew its lid too long ago

for anyone to have the barest notion

of its genesis. But when the sis-boom-bah of it

resumes its generous hooray, attracting

every soul its way, we lose our thirst for herstory

and history. If we were a church, we’d be

the clerestory: windows looking out onto the sky.

Although thank heavens (if that’s whom to thank)

we’re not a church: that would be a lie.

The aristocracy of spirit likes to undermine

all solemn premises and tends when

in the presence of a vaulted arch to lurch away

and out into the bright and unimpeded day.

Unless it’s cloisonné.

Spiritual aristocrats

(why we cannot say)

slaver over cloisonné.

.

Plus It Had a Funny Smell

I used to laze about in Xanadu

and ask what there was damn to do

in Xanadu

and found there wasn’t damn to do.

Xanadu was not so swell.

Plus it had a funny smell.

And so I called someone in Personnel

to tell

me what was what. “We need to spell

it out? Xanadu is hell.”

Well!

At least, at last, some bell

rang true

about this stinking boring Xanadu.

Then I thought: so what? – and pew!

How much does that help me or you?

Got the scent, the view, the crux.

Eternal acid reflux.

Stuck here till it self-destructs.

Which it will never do. That sucks.

.

Affectionate Contrivances

Whenever she bends over he performs a standing leap

up from the floor and gently lands upon her spine.

She doesn’t mind him there. He’s as light as air and she

enjoys him; he has a predilection for the warm affection

with which she provides him transport, so it’s fine.

Last night she dreamed of being interviewed by Charlie

Rose about their bond – what made it so absorbing

and enlighteningly fond. The tv lights were hot and bright.

“What do you do to get along?” asked Charlie Rose.

“We traffic in affectionate contrivances,” she said,

as she’d rehearsed the line. But no, that was all wrong,

that labored coyness; it niggled in her spine. But she’d

no other to supply. Charlie smiled and said goodbye.

Abashed that she agreed to being questioned on tv, she

woke and rose up from her pillows – when like a breeze

through Weeping Willows, her companion leapt back up

onto her back and filled again whatever lack she might

have thought she’d had. With him, she’s never sad.

.

Only Apt Response to Anything

Let the vagrant drifting quantities of lengthening late  

summer light as they begin to tumble toward the night

bestow their strange alluring modal breaths – as if imbuing

air with music, deftly draining thought of all its expectation,

framing inner sight: so that what starts to fill you up

is something like the brightness someone blind might

conjure in her mind as she begins to find that somewhere

in the Universe exists experience of seeing. Shut your eyes;

unplug your last reflex assumption: make oblique departure

from the usual compartments of your being: then deploy

a dab of the contained immensity of this dimension like a rub

of gleaming paint upon a bristling tiny splice of space and time:

weave with it a chain of silver rhyme – drop it glittering into

the palm of the amorphously gemütlich suddenly availing god

you’ll see, who’ll guide you to the Odd. Then let the gentle

fellow float you down with him back through your soft façade.

Listen to him sing about the law of awe: how it’s the only apt

response to anything. Wait for what all that will bring!

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Not So Much as a By-Your-Leave

One half of me so seldom seems to want to see the other half

whose only interest evidently is to see its other half, I wonder

at the likely losses in the benefits and costs of their dichotomy.

Is one intended to correct the other? Is the other’s mission

to ignore the other’s admonitions and proceed as if no other

half were there? Is the outcome of what one supposes is what

I think of as wholly me in jeopardy? Am I doomed to a psychotic fall

or psychic leprosy? Will all go dark? Should I care? Or did I simply

make their duet up because duality is such a lure and seems

so sure a model for a vehicle for generating rules about no matter

what – the only car to drive and park? Is my divided brain a losing

cause? Is that good or bad? Have I been had by some bored

propagating force who long ago gave up the farce of thinking

there were any laws that could account for my egregious lapses

and now plays his version of a game of darts with my synapses?

Two humanoidal heads and faces rise beneath my pencils,

colored markers and eraser with not so much as a by-your-leave.

Uninvoked and uninvited, one’s not looking at the other while

the other looks at him. Joined together by a flaccid bit of spiral

left from someone’s skeevy mucus glycoproteins DNA they seem

un-bothered by their twosome. I find them not a little gruesome.

.

When This Poem Began

Consummation –

devoutly to be wished –

this slippery evasion:

to let the yearning be

its own reward –

less grasping-after

than a moving-toward! –

No, that's not what

it wanted to be.

When this poem began

like Pinocchio

to turn from an 'it' to a 'he',

I was tempted to trade it

for something more

neatly aligned with

my own kind of poetry.

But then it reminded me:

"I am a pilgrim!

And I tread the road to joy."

It's a good little boy.

Tell us someday

if he made it.

.

We the Civilized

We benefit, so we the Civilized opine, from an innate

propensity for density, as we incline it seems inevitably

from the innocence of infancy to entering the intimate

immensities of later life: the tangled thoroughfares

of complicated love, and omnisexual perversity: thought

immersed in irony and paradox and dissonance, brought

to encounter the impenetrable obfuscations in more

serious investigations of, well, anything. We seem to think

that clarity in innocence is largely lies believed in ignorance.

And that painfully attaining incremental revelations through

essential rites of passage (which mainly mean humiliations)

from and of and with relations, amorous, professional

and otherwise, can lead us to a wiser clarity at last: a clarity

as vast as the complexities of Cosmos but transparent –

indeed, apparently osmotically available to the Enlightened.

No wonder we’re so frightened. But pretty funny, honey.

In fact, hilarious – indeed, nefarious. It amounts to this:

We invent and then ferment what we believe, then we

imbibe it: we’re drinking our own piss. Therefore, of course,

we tend not to get fat. There’s something to be said for that.

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Color Gods, Color Guards

Without question, Red and Yellow and Blue are the gods:

the holiest triad, the primary hues – oligarchic triumvirate

from which ensues the Collective of Purple and Orange

and Green and their endless derivatives. But Green has been

keening for power – shunted aside for too long by The Primes

in the triad eternally second in line (with its doltish dim siblings,

that oafishly ogling Orange, and the prissily purposeless Purple),

its envy, for which it is justly renowned, has now grown

to a ravenous rage to unseat its complacent progenitors, quickly

dissolving them into insensible paints so that Green can begin

its illustrious reign. It insinuates into the dark and precipitates

slowly on each of them, making each slick with the smell of itself,

staining each with inarguably killing proof that, remorseless, they

all have incestuously used poor Green as their sexual toy. No

greater sin than to do such a thing. But so far this ploy hasn’t

very much bothered Blue, Yellow or Red. They’re quite enjoying

the emerald jello-y streaks that Green nightly appears to want

so much to leak. Each has started to lick off the skin of the other

the lime-minty drips which turn out to be rather a wonderful taste.

They’ve decided in fact now to issue a fiat to Green,

and to Purple and Orange and all of their infinite progeny

similarly to provide all their flavors, in dollops and drops, one

by one, sip by sip so to savor the fullest degree of the outcomes

of being the gods that they are. Green didn’t get very far.

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Acute Aversion

Goosed by the Freudian principle that

what one mightily claims to detest may in fact

be what vitally one most desires, most

of the Creatures residing inside him began

to devise what they thought would be wise ways

of torturing him, by providing the vividest visions

of what he can’t stand: in their belief that by

driving him mad he would reach a catharsis –

releasing the largest out-pour he’d yet known

of imprisoned potential: they audibly groan

with this prospect so loudly he thinks it’s his

own grumpy bowels. What his creatures are sure

is his most covert love is his most overt hatred

of anything “cute.” One after another they’d

send up their sweetest most heart-wrenching

plump heffalumps from the cuddly snugglery

where more and more would await to be let

through the gate to implore their new savior

to savor abjectly adorable sentimentality. Now

he hates them in what has become his intensely

demented reality: he sadistically crumples each

sketch in a fist – impales the crunched paper on

sticks, row and row of which, speared with their

quarry like new-severed heretic heads, line his

lawn in a grave conflagration. One by one they’re

consumed in the flames. He defames them with loud

incantations he’s sure will arouse and awaken

the minions of Satan to come and assist in defeating

this scourge of The Cute. He meets with success:

his urges to purge are completely assuaged.

The fires he lit quite effectively rage to consume

them. Now nothing can ever exhume them – or him.

Art is exceedingly dangerous. Be here warned

to avoid what this verse has implicitly, torridly

drawn as its moral: never read Freud.

.

Backward Art

Two creatures announce that they want to be Art.

Should I want to take part in this serious enterprise I must

agree to their terms. First, be furnished with four virgin

pencils which range from the adamantine to the charcoal,

full spectrum of faintness to darkness and hard unto soft,

whose lofty encompassing goal will consist of the mission

to cast all life's tattle-tale shadows and blurry penumbra

and unthinking dashes and untrammeled scratches

and whirls and elliptical pearls of the kind that Vermeer

had in mind in his sketches of girls. But banish all color,

they said, that's what Art ought to do: "in black and in white

to go forward" as they will take frequent occasion to say

is the only acceptable way to achieve how they'd like us

to see them: in cold naked light – in perpetual flight to their

bold perpetuity: "what the sparest and barest and purest of art

ought to be," said the creatures to me when I started to pout

that I couldn't spread out my Crayola payola on this dreary grey

panoply. But I carried it out: I went in and I routed about and came

up with the smudgiest black-and-white thing, and you know,

I suspect that its elements do after all rather forcibly swing

to the offhanded flow and the stylish sway of how they say

they want art to look. I’ll have done what they asked: let them

bask: they're the winner. I’m thinking of dinner right now, anyway:

some slight poignant mischief and glee let me see what to cook.

all the hues I forsook. Red, yellow and green, pink, blue/purple

purée: sometimes sweet, sometimes tart, hot and acrid. Art

should go forward! they said and they say, every night

before going to bed. I am going to get at it backward.

.

Where Wisdom Slinks

If wisdom were a crystal ball the crystal would be cracked.

The medium who’d peer into its sinuous refractions, whom

you’d hear attempt to speak the mysteries that lay in its

divided parts, would know enough not to be rough. Encroaching

on a fault in violent geology requires a soft approach. To kick it

would be wicked. Caressing it was best. You never knew

what molten brew might be more ready to construe its chaos

upon you than you had bothered to imagine. We never think

we’ll die. We may, at levels where our mitochondria supply

the breathing secrets of existence, know that dying is a lie, but

do not count on that. Any hope too tightly held becomes a bat

that writhes and spasms – wriggles monstrously against your grip

to rip away. The medium is at a loss today. Wisdom couldn’t

give a toss about whatever you would like to have a bite of.

But oh! Don’t diagnose or explicate. Wisdom is a current

in a fractured body, lacerated by exacting laughter so disruptive

and delightful that it would be tasteless to the point of spiteful

to subject it to an exegesis. Sweet Jesus, don’t explain the joke.

You’ll make the cosmos choke. Parsing it eviscerates the wow.

And then its broken bits will coalesce into a killing danger

it would now be far from wise to beckon forth. But reckon with

assurance wisdom always slinks throughout its course along

an imperfection. With luck, one random day, down in your sinew

you will know because it’s in you that this is its predilection.

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