A Dream Escaped Again

A dream escaped again.
Whatever it had just devolved into the mixing and the draining of –
whirling bits of algebra, illicit lust and grandma’s withheld love –
it seemed, according to its ever-unknown scheme,

to have achieved whatever it decided it should do –
quick-slipped and slicked right out of you
back to
wherever dreams go on.

One wonders if they also undergo the dusk, deep night and dawn
they make us voyage through.
Perhaps they are a cosmic psychical contagion
passing through: infecting us

with blurry hope and rue.
Perhaps they are a kind of glue.
Perhaps without them we’d evaporate from view.
Rather like they do.


 
 
 
.

A Treat

Sitting, strangely pleased with his cacophony –
as if he were the product of a sneeze –
a god’s divine, unplanned, unpalatable allergy –

a rank mistaken circumstance, unmeant
and irredeemable, but here – he found
within his weirdly colored random angles

more than ample reason to feel cheer: to be
complex without significance was almost sweet.
This Existence thing might be a treat.


 
 
 
 
.

Another Human Face

Another human face
amalgamated in today
to place its yellow, pink

and black voluminousness
into white unheeding
space in front of me.

I never ask for anything
I get. But I don’t fret –
I have the prize, no matter

how disturbing are its
contours or its colors
or its size – or if it has,

like this one, more than
usually pensive inexplicably
tormented eyes: as if

it thinks I might decode,
define the strangeness
in its carnival disguise.

I hate to have to tell
this pink, black, yellow
man I never can.


 
 
.

Disquisition on the Nature of Him, Today

Cosmos equals panic –
broken, badly reapportioned
sets of limbs and torsos,

savagely undone by sun:
color is too brutal
to be undergone. Everyone’s

an imminence, a bomb –
outfitted peculiarly –
hormonal volatilities

that charge your old
mammalian barge
and make it tremble, bulge

and steam like hell.
Someone rang the bell.
Throw the towel in.

Open up a crack. Blow
a little agency into the hole
in you and see if anything

comes back. Nothing
stops. Call the cops.
There are no cops.


 
 
 
.

My Muse

She ministers to shimmering unlikelihoods,
persuading them to congregate and conjugate and play –
she gathers all-but-slaughtered colors so abused
by notions of il faut they’d long ago forgotten where to go –
she gives the great grand quantity of the ejected

some experience, not of the stodgy condescension
of respect, but of the gladder gallantry of no-holds-barred
affection – baking in the sexual contextual
expression of Imagination’s oven: seducing,
just by introducing any rank unpalatability to any other –

to permit another coalesced impossibility a swooning
entrance to the coven which, as witch, she rules.
She remonstrates against unquestioned tastes
and vindicates most fools. She wears embarrassments
like jewels. I’d like to let her loose in schools.


 
 
 
 
.

Brilliantly Awry

Sorrows bright as circuses
came up today in pieces.
Shards of feeling
in a reeling thesis –

whose premise seemed to be
that agony arises stained
with random beauties
that the heart has rained

upon it: nothing isn’t
brilliantly awry.
So much
meets the eye.


 
 
 
 
.

Naughty Adjective Audition

All day naughty adjectives come by!
Makes me want to cry.
“Let me show you how I’d modify –
believe me, sweetz, I qualify,”
one simpered, aiming each blue-shadowed eye

straight at the spots it knew I craved to satisfy:
the swelling blankness that afflicts my
bare nouns, naked predicates. “Add an L-Y,
honey, and I’ll be an adverb – on the sly.”
Eyed my fly. Naughty adjectives aren't shy.






.