Wednesday, October 30, 2019

I Need a Bella Donna Fix



for Donna
.
.
What’s going on? Your phone rings and rings.
No answering response from anything brings
any trace of you to us. What new gorgeous things
.
in you are coming true? Are you warm as a scone,
fresh baked in an oven of puffin-hewn stone?
What have you done? Simply stayed home alone?
.
Happy about it, no doubt. But your impatient fans
erupt in a rout, not having heard over spans
of silence a sigh, a laugh or word. Whose plans –
.
devil-vandals’,  as wily and flaming as wicks
in candles – swallow you? I need a bella Donna fix.
What do you conjure, what do you feel? What tricks
.
do you intend? Can’t we get at least a little view?
Is some auspicious being now entraining you –
preparing us for something harrowingly true? –
.
yet, being you, with the lightness of a dove –
are you a bird below – craving to explore above?
Whatever’s going on in you we know is full of love.
.
Come on! Spell it out! Flash a Mona Lisa smile!
Let us see you run toward a crimson sun a half a mile,
all dressed up. Let us bother you again for just a while.
.

Sunday, October 20, 2019

The Mind’s Sole Province



.
Headless, heedless, needlessly afloat,
the body of a king thrown off a boat
repines, expresses discontent and frets
over its loss: its crown! Cancel bets
.
that what’s befallen it could never be!
It’s a bit of foreign matter in the sea,
untenable, unpalatable even to a shark.
And what’s above it soaring like a lark?
.
What is this orange consciousness
aloft, amid rich-tinted flows that dress
and frame, protect it so it can proceed
from what against all odds – with speed! –
.
it now finds it has fled? A flying head.
Is this a dream? Are you in bed?
Are you floating flotsam, jetsam?
Or are you shooting off to get some
.
new perspective you’ve suspected
you must find, now you’ve defected
from the flesh that kept you dull.
The mind’s sole province is the skull.
.
You can’t accept you don’t exist.
You haven’t told this to your analyst!
You must wake up and make amends.
This can’t be how the story ends.
.

Thursday, October 17, 2019

What My Murderer Thought

What My Murderer Thought


.
Dr. Seuss plus Ginsberg? Some people
have sometimes said that. “Like giving 
good head to the Cat in the Hat!,” opined 
an acquaintance of mine about one or

another vociferous verse I’d subjected him to 
which I'd thought rather fine. "I just spew out 
the stuff," I explained. He looked pained.
“Well, you’ve spewed out enough,” he then

grunted as if he were tough and took out
a shotgun and shot me. Now that I’m dead 
I just keep writing more. Some habits defeat 
breath and death with their depth and their 
.
breadth but god knows what this one is for.
I think I write just like Pussy Galore
freshly back from a weekend of whoring.
But my murderer thought I was boring.
.

It Wasn’t Too Much to Expect


.
.

However unwittingly, two men
quite fittingly found themselves
sitting companionably in proximity
on a late afternoon F train today,
.
each as if humming a kindred tune --
reframing refrains of the other.
One held a smartphone whose size,
shape and color resembled the hue
.
and the contours and heft of a cup
from a thermos his neighbor held up

about at the level the phone occupied, 
from which on occasion he'd sip.
.
The eyes of the man with the phone
seemed in tandem to sip data out
of his own cyber brew, and suddenly
somehow I felt I knew more than
.
before that flirtations transpired
between the unseen and the seen —
sipping data or tea unobtrusively
seemed to join both in a mystic
.
romance of relation: it wasn’t too 
much to expect an impalpable thought
and a palpable touch to beget yet
another grand dance of creation.
.
Or so I decided I'd bet as I watched
the unknowing duet of two men
with a thermos and smartphone get
separately off at the following station.
.