Act Three - Guy Kettelhack - Poetry & Ephemera

Patently Depicted in a Hat

2012-02-02T14:01:00.000-08:00

She thought she’d round up two

of her annoying alternate identities –
from whom she felt the worst attack –

and have them patently depicted in a hat.
Not to make some grand esthetic point,
or anything like that – but rather

in the hope that if she gave them air,
perhaps they’d cease afflicting her
with such extravagant despair;

that she might learn to dread them less
if they were unapologetically displayed
for all to see in a theatrical head-dress.

Alas, the milliner she called on to erect
its mass and sew its seams invoked
their faces half again as large

as they appeared to her in dreams.
Each now aims at her a sidelong
haughty glare, and schemes. You’d think

she’d take it off. Instead, she wears it
everywhere – emitting, now and then,
a soft embarrassed cough.

.

Insuperable Lack

2012-02-01T14:41:00.000-08:00

Phenomenal,

the energy that funds,
and funnels into,

holding back –
contracting and sustaining
strain as if it were the only

way to feed the brain.
Resistance is existence –
the persistence of which

soon becomes
the only conscionable
heroism. Terrorism:

aimed at the contrivance
of a certainty
that cramming yourself

into stasis will
distract you from
insuperable lack.

.

Sitting, Aging

2012-01-31T14:11:00.000-08:00

Today intention carries out what
it intends: swarms of semi-sentience
take a singular collective form: to indicate
that everything must have a shape,
suggest a symmetry, including me –

despite the gaping lack of meaning
February, coming back, appears
again to promise on its eve. I’m sitting,
aging: shocked at being slim – skinnier
than I have been in years – in thermal top

and overlying purple t-shirt, black
Joe Boxer underwear and white irregular
Fourteenth Street socks: when – out
of my unprepossessing actual
and metaphoric sleeve – arrives another

couple of regenerating presences,
as pleased, apparently, as they can be
that they are here. I find them queer,
but so am I. I am particularly left
bewildered by the yellow onion guy.

.

When We Revert to Ectoplasm

2012-01-30T13:06:00.000-08:00

When we revert

to ectoplasm,
might you find

the wherewithal
to come around
and chat?

I’d hate to face
the harrowing
great vastness

of eternity
without a bit
of that.

.

Tight

2012-01-29T15:14:00.000-08:00

Set a wooden face against the white of your bewilderment –

carve and varnish hardness – force its shell
against meticulous incursions of the hell

inside: the fearful spill – lament –

fermenting out of sight.
Spout the party line.
All is fine.
Tight.

,

Why the World Did Not Turn Gray Today

2012-01-28T15:45:00.000-08:00

This afternoon my pink and blue

and yellow muses fled to find
some respite in whatever realm
supports such colorful sorties.

(They invited me, but
owing to the incompatibilities
between dimensionalities,
I could not come.)

They’d had enough
of giving birth to orange,
green and purple and the rest
of all the tertiary tints therefrom

to want to shun
the whole damned tedious array.
But just when they believed
they’d got away

great blobs and slews
of apricot and peacock hues
they’d spawned came on –
and they began to feel dismay.

Parents love their children,
and they knew they’d
have to go back home
with them and smile and coo

and propagate anew:
in other words, to stay.
That’s why the world
did not turn gray today.

.

Oh, to Find a Willing Fellow

2012-01-27T17:13:00.000-08:00

Wish he’d morph

and torque
and billow

into poplar,
maple, willow! –

resonate
between
your legs –

while his ears
turn into pegs!

Oh, to find
a willing
fellow

you could play on
like a cello!

.

Fluid Moment

2012-01-26T13:08:00.000-08:00

Let’s grow

our hair

down to
our asses –

dye it brash
varieties

of yellow-green,
aquamarine –

flow and mingle
like sea-grasses,

swim and sway –
be a fluid

moment
in a bay.

.

Until It Screams

2012-01-25T11:00:00.000-08:00

Squeeze the dream

until it screams:
force it
to come true.

Everything must
turn to pink,
so you’re
no longer blue.

.

Only Density Will Do

2012-01-24T14:55:00.000-08:00

It comes in layers and persists as cloud –
meteorologically teeming in a crowd
of apperceptions and emotional humidity:

faint prods of mild agenda – softly pressing
influence the way a body swells: expands
a chest to heave a breath, and leaves it,

less to leave it than to breathe again:
imperceptibly precipitating consciousness –
a venture into mist – something briefly

larger than existed just before this silent
pour of an identity – this deluge of a refuge
into thinking you are you. Its bits become

your point-of-view: thoughts personifying:
reappearing, disappearing, morphing
into something new. Only density will do.

.

Wet

2012-01-23T14:19:00.000-08:00

Wet from the sea

of an epiphany –

colors are too bright! –

too much white!

.

Her Heart

2012-01-22T15:05:00.000-08:00

I lost a friend today.

She didn’t die.

She called her heart away.

I don’t know why.

Night

2012-01-21T15:48:00.000-08:00

Finally!

The facts.
Night is subterfuge
and parallax.

It billows round you
until dawn –
thrilled that you
have nothing on.

.

The Holy Cardinal of January

2012-01-20T15:06:00.000-08:00

Every sin is pardonable

to the Holy Cardinal of January.
Blessings make him wary:
he has no truck with Jesus:

he believes us perfectly
redeemed just as we are –
the random lone
detritus of a star –

frozen ova sown from some
exploding supernova very far
away. Prone to sway
and swoon at scarlet –

wed to shades of harlot red –
he doesn’t like when
it’s assumed that winter’s only
right when it has bled

to white; it’s never quite
convinced him; crimson’s
at the center of the hues he’d
choose, and does –

bears witness to resistance –
proclaims the blood’s insistence.
Otherwise he wouldn’t think
of making bold:

he hides inside, enfolded
in the heart: hopes
you’ll know he’s there
despite the cold.

.

We Think I’ll Do It

2012-01-19T14:57:00.000-08:00

Today three large

undifferentiated masses
of myself lay on their asses
in a comfortable pile.

They hadn’t bothered
to assume a hue – beyond
a partial offhand dip or two
into a lazy beige.

In their dispassionate
complete release of style –
suspending all expenditure
of energy – they blandly

beckoned to the rest of me,
respectively, to see
if possibly I might
not want to have what

they were doing turn,
collectively, into my destiny.
To think we mightn’t
ever have to do another

thing at all had most
of me in mild thrall.
We elected to pursue it.
We think I’ll do it.

.

Foxy Bunny in a Tree

2012-01-18T13:00:00.000-08:00

Assertively ambiguous,
equivocally equivocal,
congruently incongruous,
concretely metaphysical:

inequable equality!
Loudly unemphatic
serious frivolity –
mousily dogmatic.

Resolvedly irresolute,
irrelevantly relevant,
ambivalently absolute
uncelebrating celebrant!

Foxy bunny in a tree:
and a lotta bull.
Oxymoronically
ontological.

.

What They’ll Say at Heaven’s Gate

2012-01-17T14:14:00.000-08:00

Welcome

honey.

Poke
and jive it.

What’s

so funny?

Joke
is private.

.

Extreme Love Poem

2012-01-16T15:53:00.000-08:00

When the brutal blade
of New York City winter light abates –
abrades into the frigid darkness
of another January night –

there is no greater odd assemblage
of affectionate companionship
than that whose spell ignites
my heart in my Manhattan home:

the heat is generously on
and in the shadows
lavender creates a kind but
burdened-looking 1890s maiden aunt –

perhaps a murderer – who holds
a small pink-hooded being
in her arms – who gazes back
into her eyes as if to keep the embers

and surprise of seeing deeply
warm and lit, alive.
I live in the penumbral essences
of this ingloriously glorious strange

city’s history – whose blistering
exorbitances send sweet mitigations
of its ghosts to host me
through my moment

as I spin my own sins through
its tales: cruel winter in Manhattan –
to a man who loves Manhattan
as extremely as I do – avails.

.

Taste Treat

2012-01-15T13:52:00.000-08:00

Today the day’s as gay and bright

as carnivals.
We are not feeling gray and grim
and beaten.

It is as if a festive band
of cannibals
can’t wait to taste the treat we’ll be
when eaten.

.

Those Parts of Them that Cannot Stay

2012-01-14T15:31:00.000-08:00

Those parts of them

that cannot stay – the way
the structure of her face
gave way: exquisitely
in place – bruised

in the bloody fall she took
a month before she died:
her inerasably black-eyed
and swollen flesh
the bane of mortuary art:

impossible to take
what life, not only death,
had wrenched apart
and put it back into
a simulacrum of a woman.

Somewhere in memory
the glimmering inimitable
and unsullied traces
of the presences
not only of my mother

but of every other absent
essence I have known
of human soul
hang strange – and soft –
aloft and whole.

.

Elle est une écrivaine.

2012-01-13T14:33:00.000-08:00

Elle est

une écrivaine.

She uses people
for her pen.

Generally
men.

.

Nothing’s Safe from Faces

2012-01-12T16:47:00.000-08:00

Nothing’s safe from faces.

Everything’s personified.
Progressions of expressions
of the human
bloom in forms

and ride through spaces –
Mother Nature, Father Time –
we don’t see anything
that doesn’t rhyme with us.
Perhaps we shouldn’t fuss.

"God’s a man."
What else could patriarchal
primates understand?
But some suggestion presses –
seems to lie beneath

familiar skin – morphology
that’s not tautology:
as if the answer isn’t in
the things we think it’s in.
There’s an allure to shape

and hue in which the human
image can’t entirely construe
itself, secure its being.
Nothing might be
what we’re seeing.

.

Let Us Now Consider Human Speech

2012-01-11T17:37:00.000-08:00

Let us now consider human speech –

distinct, one must suppose, from that
of crows who evidently (so the crow
researcher’s record shows), have,

in their caws and quid-pro-quos, at least
an inkling of what everybody else is
crowing on about: they get the gist of what
each corvid undergoes: varieties of signal

fears and doubts, among inimitable
other woes and pieties in crow societies.
But what has that to do with human
speech? Oh dear. Beyond our reach.

.

The Colloquium

2012-01-10T16:56:00.000-08:00

The colloquium convened –

and reconvened –
and reconvened –

hoping by a summary consensus
to have overseen – at last! – the formulation
of an adequate pronouncement –

sufficient to do justice
to the patent mess around them
they'd commingled to address –

but in defeat had to confess
that though they’d sorted out the more-and-less
of the declarative and the comparative –

today, alas, again,
would have to lack
a narrative.

Some found this – if in private
(asked, they wouldn’t tell) – sort of swell.
To others it was hell.

.

Reasonable People –

2012-01-09T12:39:00.000-08:00

Reasonable

people –
doing normal

things –

seasoned
and enfeebled –
by the swarm
and stings –

of reasonable
people –
doing normal
things –

.

Like Any Fragile Creature

2012-01-08T16:33:00.000-08:00

Thoughts have roots and veins.

Each takes pains
to prove why it’s essential.
Like any fragile creature,

each campaigns to be retained –
to be bricked into
an edifice of common sense –
or picked to ride astride

an ideology wherein it might
survive in sweet suspension
as unquestioned fact.
Like any fragile creature,

it will hide – and strive to stay
intact. Some do, some don’t.
If you’re fortunate,
most won’t.

.

This Business

2012-01-07T13:54:00.000-08:00

This business of feeling

unhappy – or glad –

shifts like what happened

at Marienbad –

Hum a Few Bars

2012-01-06T13:52:00.000-08:00

Death comes up

sometimes
to listen

to the rest of what
is going on –
to hear

that glisten
of a whisper
of a Universe

hum a few bars,
strum a few stars.
Music of the Spheres

brings tears
even to
an abscessed thing.

Doesn’t
mean he
isn’t King.

.

Existentially Shy

2012-01-05T15:46:00.000-08:00

That we’ve no idea
why we are here
did not prevent

our intimately
propagating
into three of us.

Should
we
repent?

Perhaps
this was
too free of us.

.

Indiscriminately Yearning Eyes

2012-01-04T14:05:00.000-08:00

Some strangers look

at you like puppies –
and for moments can

persuade you through
their indiscriminately
yearning eyes that –

were you able, in this
instant, to reside inside
each other’s arms

and thighs – you would
receive the prize
of unimaginable love:

should, that is, push
ever come to shove.
Sometimes it does.

.

Sometimes it’s Good to Walk your Banshee Out

2012-01-03T14:26:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it’s good to walk your banshee out
into a winter afternoon.
It isn’t realistic to imagine you can banish doubt
in banshees, but quite soon

the unforgiving and acutely glaring light
will often mute the worst
of his intolerable wailing. That it’s not night –
for which all banshees thirst –

perhaps distracts the banshee for a moment
from his reflex to complain
so unrestrainedly – to rile up, disturb, foment
so much excruciating pain

which feeds on late-night rain and wind.
Perhaps frigidity
and January-angled sun somehow rescind
despair’s futility

a bit in banshee consciousness.
Oh, he still brays and balks –
but seems a touch less of a mess
on daylight winter walks.

.

Same old, same old.

2012-01-02T16:13:00.000-08:00

Another off-white lumpen Incongruity
stops by to drop more bits of its light ingenuity:
two ovoid plops of ambiguity

for you to slaver over:
two celestial plover
ova –

gelatinously tame and bold:
shameless and lubricious, uncontrolled,
deliciously pernicious. Same old, same old.

.

Who Belongs to Whom

2012-01-01T15:51:00.000-08:00

I own the sentient bag – the brew –

the zig – the zag – the jig –
the snag – the gig – the skew –

the zoom – the acquiescent bloom –
of you. You’re who; I’m whom.
No one else has room.

.

December 31, 2011

2011-12-31T16:49:00.000-08:00

It’s hard to say what sort of day it is:

precipitating mysteries

the way it is.

Cabal

2011-12-30T11:13:00.000-08:00

Ideas crash, ad hoc,
out of exasperating vastness,
crass and shocked as sunlight,
cracked and cut and bleeding,

stained with black blood
from the mutha-flooding kiss
of the abyss which sucks back
at them till, at last, of course,

they can’t resist. But meantime
they consort in a cabal,
breeding secrecies and plotting
to corral impossibility into abject

submission. And for a moment
death plays dead: finality
is in remission: hope amasses.
The moment passes.

.

Night-Blooming Human Head Plants

2011-12-29T12:12:00.000-08:00

Night-blooming human head plants
can’t be counted on to conjure up
romance but they’re good company
when bleak Existence looks at you

askance and it is two o’clock
beyond redemption in the loneliness
of last chance sleepless night: when life
will not agree to any even slight degree

to help requite your least desire;
you're sinking in the mire, and things
are getting dire indeed. But then,
sometimes, as if they sense the need,

night-blooming human head plants heed
the plea: know what is required: a soft
endearing word. Once murmured –
and once heard – equivalently

captivating vegetation joins the chorus:
whispers more – therefore allowing you
to feel rapport with something actual –
a sweet reprieve you cleave to: better,

God knows, than the raw deal of your
own internal spiel. Oh, be relieved
night-blooming human head plants,
anyway, at least, are real.

.

What a Mommy Must Know

2011-12-28T16:13:00.000-08:00

As long as she hasn’t killed them,

here’s what a mommy must know:
whatever it took to build them,
the point is to let them go.

.

Harry and Mahatma

2011-12-27T15:11:00.000-08:00

Hanging out unrobed
like Mata Hari – ruby earrings
dripping from their lobes –

is Harry and Mahatma’s way
of cheering themselves
out of after-Christmas doldrums.

It’s swell to feel yourself
insouciantly lolling on a plum-
red velvet throw, not worrying

about how things will go,
with precious jewels
as your companions:

just the gift to lift you from
the canyons of post-holiday
despair. After all the folderol

of promulgating vol-au-vents
rempli de champignons
et truffes all day – that stuff

can make you swear! –
it’s lovely to recline, aloof –
expensively decline to care.

.

In the Mirror

2011-12-26T08:35:00.000-08:00

See the threads and shreds and strands
that coalesce out of the shadow-lands of being:
streaming into, breeding bodily capacities –
random chances massing into form;
glance at the enigma of your eyes and hands:
this build-up to a warm and human viability –
with its inevitable liability: vulnerable – visceral:

ephemera which trick your vision into registering
symmetry and outline from the swarm –
the threads and shreds and strands that weave
and melt into a course of sieving this, retaining
that, exacting strategies for taking, giving –
this force that you call living. Regard this blessèd
and exquisite mesh – this conscious flesh.

.

The Problem with Imaginary Friends

2011-12-25T11:44:00.000-08:00

The problem with imaginary friends is,
when they hang around for long enough
they start acquiring autonomy –
abandoning the clear taxonomy of traits

and psychic states through which they
once definably were present. Now they
morph from unequivocal to unpredictable,
which isn’t always pleasant. Quixotic

ambiguity is what they seem to gather
through the mystery experience
imbues – their vagaries bewilder
and bemuse until you aren’t sure

who is imaginary any more. They soon
are indistinguishable from the rest
of everybody else who may be actually
knocking on your door. That’s a chore.

.

The Holiday Boys

2011-12-24T16:56:00.000-08:00

Mild tensions ignite.
All feels contrived.
No poem is right.
Now they’ve arrived.

They turn it about –
wielding their wizardries:
Christmases turn out
not to be miseries.

.

A Bee Than Whom

2011-12-23T13:36:00.000-08:00

A bee
than whom
no other was
ever born

with a finer
or a stronger
instinct for
perfection

of excellence
in execution
of his
apian-issity...

ah,
Swinburnian
bee!

.

Certain Troglodytes

2011-12-22T14:24:00.000-08:00

The certainty of certain troglodytes soon draws the curtain
on the barest possibilities for chat. They stand there in their
troglodyte-hauteur beyond the reach of caring what you think

about what they call “this” and you call “that.” You wouldn’t
mind relaxing with them – praise their dahlias, pet their cat –
bantering about the bliss of watching premiere ballerinas

do their pas-de-deux and entrechats – or asking them where
you should go on a vacation: Cap D’Antibes, Mount Ararat?
But any topic taken up with certain troglodytes goes splat.

.

Unforgivable Transgressions

2011-12-21T15:05:00.000-08:00

She rides a lover like
a politician rides a scandal,
flies it high, ties a handle
on it, strokes it, stokes

its hopes, soothes it when
it chokes, glides behind
the plume of toxic smoke
that lust and smoking coke

evoke: she’s not the nicest
girl you’ll ever meet,
but she thinks she’s a treat:
a naked pink and orange

sweetmeat. Unforgivable
transgressions fill a lack.
Anyone who’s ever
had her wants her back.

.

Archetypal Elderly in Flight

2011-12-20T15:11:00.000-08:00

The shock!
We just caught sight
of a delighted naked flock
of archetypal elderly in flight!

Spirits of who we might be –
if they could only stir
us up sufficiently to see
beyond the blur

in us
of mortal terror’s hold
on us.
Getting, being old.

.

Manhattan, for a Moment – Late Night December

2011-12-19T17:59:00.000-08:00

Habits and agreements –
city going on –
copulating rabbits –
rutting through to dawn –

and old men
wearing cologne –
sweet – strange:
being alone –

.

The Shaded Man

2011-12-18T16:17:00.000-08:00

Let’s all praise
the shaded man –
evasive and abrasive
and invaded man –

the man for whom
chiaroscuro was invented –
the man in whom no sense
is circumvented –

whose adumbrations
of the heart suggest
minute circuitries
that can’t be guessed –

the man who lets
enigmas bloom –
the fully human
being in the room.

.

Philosophic Phlegm

2011-12-17T15:33:00.000-08:00

The metabolic processes of psychic progress
are a deep bewilderment. What are the biological
imperatives of Soul? How does it cultivate the messy
fleshy whole – the rest of what adheres to it –

what springs from it – what rings in it to make us us?

We mesh: we mostly get along. But what about
when things go wrong? Does something central harbor
markers of catastrophe conditioned in some future

to explode? – existential DNA which hankers to unload? –
promises to blast the last of us away? Is the plasma
of our genesis devoted to its final day? Who can say.
Philosophic phlegm. Silly words. Tired of them.

.

I Wish I Was an Avocado Mousse

2011-12-16T16:30:00.000-08:00

Oh, to be a rich addictive dip! Subtly
spiced, accessible – in high demand –
soft enough to slip on melba toast –

voluptuously thick enough to boast
about – to grandstand on a cocktail
table in the middle of a chic soirée

full of extravagantly hot grandées
for whom I’d be an aphrodisiac –
the last transgression to which

they’d succumb before they left
to you-know-what each other numb.
Dressed with fresh Wisconsin cream,

the juice of Spanish limes, a touch
of kosher salt and Indonesian pepper –
oh, the hubba-hubba I’d inspire –

oh, to be right at the center of desire!
For that I’d gladly suffer sacrificial use.
I wish I was an avocado mousse.

.

Some Fun

2011-12-15T15:53:00.000-08:00

Feeling less than sultry
in the dawning morning light –

sitting half-awake in the ill-fitting

irony of her pink-hearted bathrobe –

one importuning suitor at her left,
another at her right –

she’d once supposed
ménages-à-trois might be all right

before she’d had one.
By now whatever slight

je ne sais quoi her two relentlessly
attentive boy toys

might have had for her
had run its run. Some fun’s no fun.

The end of love
can be abrupt.

Especially when you
make the whole thing up.

.

Refocusing

2011-12-14T17:26:00.000-08:00

Out of the vivid pink of living light
our sentient presences alight:
ignite each other’s interest.

Stained with lurid brightness
by the shocking sight of difference,
we wonder if we’ll ever reunite –
or if we ever were a unity to start with.

The universe regards itself again
through us: a lotus noticing
it’s opening – refocusing.
Another vision we must part with.

.

Why Mutant Creatures Tend to Thoughtfulness

2011-12-13T16:14:00.000-08:00

Living with a set of limbs or mind or spine
or point-of-view which by the measure
of most other beings is askew first seems
to doom the mutant creature to a labyrinth
of aberrance: every day a Pilgrim’s Progress

through innumerable turns and twists of bodily
betrayal – persisting like unfathomable
sins it hadn’t known it had committed –
of a size and strangeness so intransigent
they can’t not manifest again, again, again:

until one day it spends itself – and in a blink,
the mutant creature finds that it can think.
And thinking makes the Universe crack open
like an ostrich egg into a flood of cosmic yolk.
The mutant creature gets the joke.

.

Change

2011-12-12T15:20:00.000-08:00

Globular to angular –
amorphous
takes a form;
through incremental
stages shapes accrue;

softnesses,
once warm, now cool –
contract – exact
an edge:
sharpnesses ensue.

You want to bear
the loss
and love the change
in metamorphosis –
and almost do.

.

The Whole Shebang of Them and You

2011-12-11T16:18:00.000-08:00

Today another sentience mounts her head
and wraps it like a hat – introducing lulling
thoughts which seep expansively into her skull
to render her, for once, at last, dispassionate: allow

a clear-eyed new increase of the idea she might,
some night, discover she quite likes this going-it-alone.
(Craving tenderness had gotten tedious.)
Although, with this accommodating creature,

she’s not going-it-alone. In fact, new entities –

now that she’s noticed them – she daily sees release
her into realms in which she hardly can be said
to be remotely solely at the helm. She’s in a crowd.

Thoughts, like pets and problem children, can,
of course, get loud: wear out their stay – until,
that is, that final possibly delicious day the whole
shebang of them and you implodes – and falls away.

.

Waiting for a Cue

2011-12-10T19:06:00.000-08:00

What are your eyes up to?

I search each pupil for a clue.
What would they have me do?

.

Cloud and Puppet Show

2011-12-09T15:25:00.000-08:00

Sometimes a feeling
like a cloud calls up
another feeling like a puppet

and they both put on a show
you never know about.
Benign as lambent sighs,

they lilt around like spies
until they find their
separate ways out.

All you can surmise
is that an inexplicability
somehow erased a doubt.

.

Guardian Angels, Revised

2011-12-08T11:07:00.000-08:00

One stridently demands you’re an agenda.
No absolution.
The other wants your utter quick surrender:
your dissolution.

.

What Love Might Be Like

2011-12-07T15:43:00.000-08:00

What is this private holy war –
this secret insurrection?

What storms the door
of solipsistic introspection –

sets off these soft alarms?
Why do I want you in my arms?

.

Oh, Let’s Have Sex!

2011-12-06T15:26:00.000-08:00

I seem to want to keep the link alive
to waking consciousness all night.
I do not turn the TV off. I let the sounds

and unseen sights of BBC World News
and other PBS enlightenments ignite,
make bright, a shamanistic purgatory –

a liminality that veils, regales the inner
and the outer and persuades them
to unite. To feed, to feed, to feed:

to end the blight. Tugs-of-war excite,
incite – breed between dimensions. Sex!
In this space where nothing’s known,

beseech the Universe! Oh, let’s have sex!
Nursed and vexed – Soul erects.
Assembles and dissembles. Trembles.

.

Desperadoes

2011-12-05T18:00:00.000-08:00

Symbolizing clarity,
or purity, or God,
transparency seems odd.
Being loves disparity –

conundrums in the shadows
which pass through glass –
evade, amass –
subversive desperadoes.

.

Testosterone Reflects

2011-12-04T16:24:00.000-08:00

Testosterone in muscularly musky splendor
sometimes sees the ghost of something pink flash by –
and wonders, as it’s brushing past, if pink might render
him a little softer and more feminine: supply

the means of knowing from an inside view
what women are; sense aspects of the female genus
he must surely constitutionally misconstrue;
beckon to a little estrogen; let Penis rhyme with Venus.

.

Agnes, Myra-Ann and Lila-Sue

2011-12-03T19:28:00.000-08:00

In a universe wherein dimensions
number only Two, three mystic sisters –
Agnes, Myra-Ann, and Lila-Sue –
herald the presence of a Third:

“Chiaroscuro!” “Front and back!”
they can be heard to call to all:
“That's what we lack! A Holy Thickness!”
Other flatnesses dismiss this as absurd.

“These girls breed moral sickness,”
they all hiss. “Their deity deceives.”
And so they flat-line Agnes, Myra-Ann
and Lila-Sue. Nobody grieves.

.

Under Cover of the Light

2011-12-02T17:48:00.000-08:00

You find the colors bright.
You see the sun is out.
You press it to your chest.

You dimly grasp the wonder
under cover of the light.
You doubt. Assess.

Strangenesses surround it.
You can’t quite clasp
your hands around it.

You ache. You take
a breath. It isn’t love.
It may be death.

.

Coco Chanel Said It Was So

2011-11-30T13:18:00.000-08:00

It’s nice to have a man
around a hat –
to take him out
of everything but that –

to burst his narcissistic
little bubble –
to put him where
he can’t cause any trouble.

Coco Chanel
said it was so:
Mettez vos hommes
dans vos chapeaux.

.

Certain Serpents

2011-11-29T18:10:00.000-08:00

Certain serpents –
be sure! – are best met and addressed,
as it were, perpendicularly.

C’est à dit:
do not walk up, abrupt,
and confront them straight-backed
with the palpable proofs of their lack:

let your spine be an offhand surprise,
not a prod to attack,
not occasion for something
they’re likely
to find they despise.

Praise them for all of their morphing
amorphous and multiple
unending sizes.

Careful (with all of those esses)
that you do not spit on them.
Then, if you ask very nicely, they may
let you sit on them.

.

Apprentices

2011-11-28T15:26:00.000-08:00

Depression takes apprentices
who pay a hefty fee
to learn the arcane nuances
of clinical ennui –

so they can sneak them into you
with assiduity –
as well as slip a complex few
obliquely into me.

.

Blinking Child of Chromaticity

2011-11-27T18:10:00.000-08:00

In the realm where colors roam –
effect investigative introductions
to each other, rest inside an outline, or more
subtly overlap – to capture light – to find
another home for off-off-white: in this bright
crucible wherein innumerable hues become
the muses and the mentors of unprecedented
pinks and tans and blues: in this arresting
mine of brilliant ores, this sea of glories –
weave of interleaving shades –

sometimes a mutant breathing bit of stuff
pervades the corner of a bloom of fire-red
or tulip-yellow: and abruptly heaves out of infinity
a random unsuspecting fellow. He sits there
naked in a rainbow he cannot begin
to fathom, dazed that there is such
a game with such a claim on him – amazed
he is its thinking progeny – a golden
and beholden scrap of datum – blinking child
of chromaticity. That blinking child is me.

.

Bearing Creatures to Their Fate

2011-11-26T14:28:00.000-08:00

Bearing creatures
to their fate
affords an opportunity

to witness
how they wait for it.
Humming

dum-de-dum some
ride along as if
they’re on the way

to brunch.
Let’s hang out
with that bunch.

.

2 Pan-Elucidations

2011-11-26T02:46:00.000-08:00

Personification May Not be the Solution

Exasperated’s beef with Calm ran thus:
“You’re boring as a bus.
I’m thrilling as a bomb.”
Calm nodded with his usual aplomb.

“Never mind that,” he replied.
“We’ve both just been personified.”
“I’d rather you were dead,”
Exasperated said.

2:30 a.m.

Perversity as overlay
on a convention
always works.

Subjecting something
to spasmodic jerks
through any means at all,

however evidently artificial,
pan-elucidates the vast
organic mute reality

behind all prettiness:
the gall which undermines –
and peels

the scaffolding away –
reveals
whatever skews

itself into
a structure
in its vulnerable

disarray.
Inoculate yourself
with that today.

.

Existential Jerky

2011-11-24T15:31:00.000-08:00

Art, and Thanksgiving

The thing about a manifesto
is, it’s blind. Because
it joneses to believe
in single-mindedness,

it does – in that buzzed way
compulsive sex erupts
into a specious All – grunting
to its blunt inevitable fall:

done when
it's no fun:
foregone:
a yawn.

And there you’ll be anon:
the spawn of something
you can’t recollect.
But heck: I’ll stay,

seduce you anyway.
I’ll bang your drum
and strum your heart strings
like a hooker. I’ll be

the looker you’ve been
looking for, cooking zesty
definitions. What is art
and what is not? Here’s

what’s not. Whatever thinks
it is what it’s describing.
Whatever doesn’t know
it has complete autonomy

from its creator. (See you
later alligator.) Whatever
buys its own PR.
Whatever’s not bizarre.

Eschew the turkey.
Chew some existential jerky.
Presto!
Manifesto.

.

Two Searches for Something Else

2011-11-23T14:49:00.000-08:00

1

The ghost of my grandmother dreams
of betting at the track –

and sipping out
of stenciled crystal
hypothermia-inducing
icy, gleaming ryes-and-sodas –

to help her

plan –
and cope –

deflect –
and dare.

2

My Host of Poetical Schemes
is threatening attack –

tipping his ballistic
juicy pencil
like a hypodermic:
Excise redeeming codas!

He yelps.

Abandon
hope!

Reject
despair!

.

We Suck at Seduction

2011-11-22T17:53:00.000-08:00

We’ve taken
instruction.
But we suck
at seduction.

We drop our hints
like bowling balls –
heavy, stupid:
all fall down

the wrong part
of the lane,
causing only mild pain.
If only we were wild!

That’s what undercuts.
We lack the stuff
that threatens.
Nothing beckons.

We catch a whiff
of sweat – of skin –
of sex – of sin –
of crotch –

disarming secrecies! –
that don’t proceed
from us.
It’s hard to watch.

It’s hard to cope
when you’re not hot.
If we had hope! –
but we do not.

.

There’s No Place like No Place for the Holidays

2011-11-21T15:49:00.000-08:00

Sometimes we’ll convene
to fuss and bull –
imagining the unforeseen –
to work out if it’s possible

to morph into more mutant forms –
release, for instance, our reliance
on the uninspiring norms
which keep us trapped in human science:

musing, more concisely,
if – sixth sense? –
we might requite precisely
our sharp yearning for a difference –

unmet for far too long a while –
to find a way, perhaps, to disappear –
effect with an unprecedented style
dimensional existence past what’s known as “here.”

The holidays perforce
will soon erupt.
You’ll understand, of course:
we won't show up.

.

Art Explains Itself

2011-11-20T17:13:00.000-08:00

When I ejaculate and spray –
or pray –
my hands become your child –
wild –

carnally arcane investigator –
transmutator –
at the helm –
cracking towards the primal realm –

.

Can’t Help It

2011-11-19T15:03:00.000-08:00

Today, en masse,
a quartet, duo, trio
of them came, intent
on making love to moi.

They leered – seductive
with eruptive brio:
seems I’m loaded
with je ne sais quoi.

.

This Strange Clown Inside

2011-11-18T15:13:00.000-08:00

Here you are again –
your doodling and you.
You can’t remember when
you haven’t noodled like this to construe

the least attempt at a summation:
ah! – the conscientious absence
of the conscious mind! Predation
of another kind breaks down the fence

between whatever activates a vision
and whatever jots it down.
Amazing: the precision
which proceeds from this strange clown

inside who evidently runs the show.
Funny how he has to make it rhyme
to make it glow.
Anyway, at least, again, this time.

.

A Private Morning Moment with the Green Man

2011-11-17T12:55:00.000-08:00

In the early morning light whose shade and tint
of chartreuse, jade and mint and celadon insinuate
themselves into the scents of his abundant verdure

(newly mown): a mix of flora and testosterone –
a blast of grassy Spring, a hint of skunkweed funk –
Daphne thinks he’s quite a hunk – before

he recommits himself to his green archetypal creed
and undergoes the swift experience of turning back
into his mossy leafy vine-y mobile signature man-tree –

though after he drinks yet another cauldron of green tea –
he sits and contemplates the role he is assigned
and finds it interesting that human beings need

so many symbols of the “pagan” – whatever pagan
possibly could mean. (He figured largely in the tarot
cards of Nancy Reagan.) It’s obscene, he thinks,

before he blinks and plink! – another thirsting bud
bursts up from some fast-thatching swatch.
Well, soon I shall be overgrown – tomorrow,

once again, new-mown, he muses – philosophically
scratching his deciduous assiduously sprouting crotch.
Then (so to speak) he “leaves” – resumes his watch.

.

Preternaturally Present

2011-11-16T10:17:00.000-08:00

We’re fine with everything today, we think –
we’re feeling preternaturally present:
the dissonance which had us at the brink
has now become a plethorably pleasant

mystery.
We're feeling downright sister-y.
No mother of a brother
of a lover of a mother

has it over us.
As richly odorous
and unctuous as brie:
you, and you, and you, and me.

It’s nice to press our flesh together
in this prescient purple weather:
take a random nap
upon a random lap –

thereby to understand –
espy –
not much beyond the adjectivally sweet grand
experience of your, and your, and your, and my.

.

Henry’s Back

2011-11-15T15:57:00.000-08:00

In the eternal purgatory of his night
wherein his soul experiences yearning
so intensely it may burst abruptly into sight –
in those strange moments of the burning

of his ardor to disperse at last the steam
that otherwise impedes achieving
form – manifestation of the dream –
in that sweet chance of finally relieving

the unbearable condition of his being –
he will sometimes pop upon your knee –
and while you can’t believe you’re seeing
him all winged and plump and naked, he

will whisper – ah! exquisite consonantal spit! –
his unmistakable locutions. Henry James
is back, revealing every last salacious bit
of the explicit truth, naming names.

.

A Muddled and Befuddled One-Eyed Wyatt Earp

2011-11-14T16:34:00.000-08:00

And since there isn’t any time

past the illusion of it which proceeds

from those intransigently skewed

conditions which insist configurations

of whatever constitutes electrons

and their inexplicably dark contexts

must disperse out in an infinite

and quickening entropic spread

as fleet discrete ‘events’ from some

just fathomable big bang cosmic burp,

it’s easy to imagine you’re the lone

foregone equivalent in some unknown

dimension of a muddled and befuddled

one-eyed Wyatt Earp, parched

and gasping in a blood-red desert,

fantasizing what imbibable quintessence

there might ever once have been,

or might yet be, a man could slurp.

That Finger Thing

2011-11-13T14:54:00.000-08:00

Michelangelo may have been onto
something with that finger thing:
forces of Creation all collecting

to comprise collectively
a fine, divine, divining hand
to linger and to bring

another finger into its grand
fellowship of every swimming, standing,
worming, squirming, flying and reclining

bit of breathing creature – all the rest
of the menagerie the Universe
withholds, enfolds to feature –

and to spew
out like confetti. Ferlinghetti
touched a digit to the digits

of a Corso and a Ginsberg and a Kerouac –
now a Kettelhack
is visited by two escapees from his zoo:

a colorfully striped quasi-homo sapiens
who either entertains a little yellow fellow
whom he wants

to interview,
or has been summoned
by the little yellow fellow hoping

it might hear a quasi-human spew.
Who makes whom?
Big Bangs boom.

.

Lord Knows

2011-11-12T14:16:00.000-08:00

Each new thought

comes perpendicular

to its most recent
predecessor: crossing

at right angles,
after and before –

weaving burgeoning new
meshes like fish nets,

they quickly cover your
perceptive apparatus

from its ceiling
to its floor.

You might have wished
for something different.

Lord knows you’d never
ask for more.

.

The Frightened Psyche’s Ill-Disguised Psych Ward

2011-11-11T14:42:00.000-08:00

Locked up
and immobilized
inside the frightened Psyche’s
ill-disguised

psych ward,
Imagination plays along
while surreptitiously
imagining a bomb –

a face-ball
so replete with coded
insurrection
and imploded

incrementally
upwelling rage
behind
a parti-colored cage

adorned with variously
glazed expressions –
so apparently the picture
of benign impressions –

that the Psyche cannot
know Imagination will
before long
violently kill

and leave the whole thing
shredded, bloody, chopped.
Vision isn’t pretty
when it’s stopped.

.

Give It Up

2011-11-10T16:07:00.000-08:00

You never know
whom you will meet.
By every measure
it’s a treat to make
acquaintances –

a treasure to encounter
bits and squirts of human
bounty – stir its cauldron's
living spices –
sip from its forgiving

vices – maybe sit awhile
with someone on
an eggplant-colored-
couch and flirt
with minty delicacy –

vouch in flinty silence
to determine who it is
you’re with and what
it’s all about – then
give it up in all the senses

of that phrase you’ve
got the courage not
to doubt. Surrendering
to anyone and anything
is everything.

.

Existential Itch

2011-11-09T15:30:00.000-08:00

Secret skin.

Intolerable level.

Try to keep it in.

Scratch it like the devil.

Do they know it’s there?

Maybe they can see it.

You don’t care.

They don’t have to be it.

The Thing, Today, That I Forgot About

2011-11-08T17:20:00.000-08:00

Today I’m almost sure
I saw and caught
a speeding fragment

of the blasted paradigm
of human thought: something
burned my palm as it shot

through my skin to find my heart
to lodge like ice within it –
crystalline, impermeable –

yet impermanent: I barely
felt it melt into the flood of me –
so imperceptibly that it became

the thing, today, that I forgot
about. Tonight, now,
I suspect I recollect it

but I can’t be certain. I wonder
if it’s germinating somewhere
in my psychic dirt and grows

and sprouts as some
dark seed of doubt.
Or maybe I just peed it out.

.

Surprise

2011-11-07T15:30:00.000-08:00

You search around whatever’s left up
on the shelf for stuff to conjure up
a simulacrum of yourself but can’t.

You’d settle for a bit of living essence
to implant somewhere and maybe turn
into a friend. You learn there’s reason

to believe you can achieve that end.
You plunge your pen into your folderol,
and some of it – as you caress, cajole,

undress, or strike it – awakes and sighs.
You rub your eyes at the surprise:
it doesn’t have to look like you to like it.

.

Big, Beautiful and Blue

2011-11-06T18:57:00.000-08:00

Over time one learns one rather
has to face the facts about oneself.
For instance, if one finds that one

is complicatedly, extravagantly
big and beautiful and blue, one may
be well and dutifully advised to take

these traits off one’s dim psychic shelf
of sighs to see to what sweet happy
uses they might more availingly be put.

Big, Beautiful and Blue must surely,
head to foot, be True. If this remotely
sounds like you, here’s what to do.

Construe your bluenesses as newness:
strut about your world with pride.

Soon everything that matters will be

on your side. Be the next hot rare

must-see. Take this recipe in how
to be. Look where it got me.

..

Consanguineously Lapidary Lovers

2011-11-05T17:28:00.000-07:00

Whatever quantum
oddities from which
our errant minds
have been contrived
arrived today
at an affectionate
consensus –

that each of us
should play
amanuensis
to the other: claim –
exalt! – our camaraderie –
as consanguineously
lapidary lovers!

It’s true our
colors do not
match and while
we think our species
overlap, we aren’t sure.
But this sweet bond
between us

is so pure –
so strangely
fabulous – we
simply have to say
how awfully glad
we are that you
imagined us.

.

Les Femmes de la Nuit

2011-11-04T15:22:00.000-07:00

The one who
looks like
she is sneering

isn’t sneering –
she’s a trifle
hard of hearing

and she finds
that when she
squinches up

her nose
and cheeks
it seems to help

her understand
the words another
person speaks

a little better.
As for the others,
I’ve no clue.

Though I suspect
if you decide
to introduce

yourself they will,
with zeal,
reveal the spirit

and the letter
of their separate
points-of-view.

.

He Wonders if He Wants to be in Love

2011-11-03T13:21:00.000-07:00

The oddness of arousal –
pitched into espousals
of devotion! Unnerving notion.
Romance makes him unsteady.

What’s the thing itself?
Does it always come with codas
that proclaim “or else”?
Strong – strange – bold – heady.

He wonders if he wants to be in love.
He doesn’t know.
If love is all, as he’s been told,
is he not in the thing already?

.

When the Boy Looked Back

2011-11-02T15:06:00.000-07:00

When the boy looked back,
he thought he saw a tear
in the fabric of the air
and was therefore not aware

that Existence was unraveling
in front of him. Strange
to have the whole thing bear
the brunt of him – then blow

into incomprehensible
shenanigans just when he got
a chance to see the flow. This
is how we’ll all feel when we go.

.

The Hang of It

2011-11-01T17:41:00.000-07:00

You’ve somewhat mastered form –

you’ve managed to effect a biologically

operative infrastructure which sustains the frame

and keeps it warm. It’s true it’s hard to recollect

the references. There’s so much you don’t want
to keep in mind. Bipedalism rankles you,
for one thing – how you’d rather swing or flump
or puddle blindly into an amorphous lump

than muddle through maneuvering
the brittle sticks and joints and linchpins
of a hip or ankle, knee or toe! Oh,
to be the drape and flow of some plush cloth

instead of trapped inside a droopy wrap of skin:
you’d rather be a towel than a jowl.
Where do the arms begin? How do fingers
reach the wrist? Where’s the list? You forgot it.

(You got besotted with the charms of ears instead,
and put too many on.) Intricately wearying, adhering
to the vertebrae! – or working out the trick
of the discreet evacuation of compacted waste

without attracting looks. Those masses of cooked
wood paste they call books have not been any help.
And yet – you don’t entirely dislike the yelp,
and yaw and bumble you’ve become.

Might one derive some useful art therefrom?
Bewildering, this endless roar and rumble!
Watch and wait: awake to the shebang of it.
Perhaps you’ll get the hang of it.

.

As If

2011-10-30T15:32:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a face pops up
from nowhere – as if
to tell you that contentment
can be had at any price.

I say “as if” because
one always has to guess what
any face expresses.

Not that faces aren't precise.

.

Finding We Are Here

2011-10-29T14:34:00.000-07:00

Finding we are here,
though not through any agency
we are aware we had exerted –

existentially deserted,
as it were –

why stir?

Too many curvilinearly
arbitrary possibilities
abound.

We’re thinking
we’ll just lie
around.

.

A Little Pull

2011-10-28T15:19:00.000-07:00

There’s evidently
always room
for more.

Apparently
the mind’s menagerie
is never full.

But what decides
what gets to barrel
through the door?

Sometimes
I wish I had
a little pull.

.

How We Could Get Along

2011-10-27T13:05:00.000-07:00

Massage my head.
Seduce it like a cello –
induce somatic music

in the hair and skin
and bone of it. Cajole
a sweet vibrato from

the chaos and the drone
of it. Console it like
it mattered more

than anyone could
say. We could get
along that way.

.

Sociology!

2011-10-26T15:08:00.000-07:00

Epicene
epiphanies!

Specious
exegeses!

Windy words
exalting

the foregone!
Hoo-ha!

Kinda turns
me on.

.

The Musing Mind

2011-10-25T16:18:00.000-07:00

The musing mind is never dark –
although it’s sometimes parked in dim
translucence – whose crème fraiche

palette soothes the eyes – the sort
from which an archetypal harlot’s hues
arise – which may then conjure up

the brick-pink Ghost of All Election Days
to Come – from which may well ensue
that gray-blue bold Walt Whitman Wind –

whose sum may fold the whole into another
spin – and spread – of luscious influence
than which there is no better butter

for the bread of thought. Rich but rarely
fraught – chaos in a cloud of cream.
More useful, really, than a dream.

.

Celadon

2011-10-24T13:07:00.000-07:00

Days are glazed
in celadon –
impossible
to carve.

They have to eat
their hours up.
Otherwise,
they’d starve.

.