Another Party with Oneself

https://youtu.be/cz9DPiGDvCE

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One's face, one rather has to think, may

in a pause pretend it only ever coolly

and impartially imparts how it participates

in the provision of the parts it needs to prod

into producing yet another party with oneself.

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In fact it is precipitously party to expressing

every last perception in a breath or blink,

all part and parcel of particulars presenting

the preemptively prevailing veil of its

preeminently prescient sentient particles,

.

those presciently intentional and present

participles in the grammar of the psyche

bent on prompting themselves into those

most actively theatrical plum parts to which

one is particularly partisan, while patently

.

partaking of each intimate presentiment

that fills a moment with its meaning, preening

with the prospect of perfection it may finally

be able to effect. One's face is partitively

partisan, dividing in the precincts of one's

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heart exactly where and how to play the play

in toto and in part, artist partner to the artisan,

parsing out the poetry to part the way toward

yet another parturition: speciously believed

by some as narcissistically, giving life to art.

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Don’t Hector Hector

https://youtu.be/UmVR2mKQiOg

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Mid-metamorphosis is not the time

to ask a fellow how he is. Should he

be turning into she or it or they

or otherwise revising his entirety

into another gender, phylum, genus

in whatever way successfully

affords him ingress to a new identity,

it’s not the time to query him about

his coffee break or politics or penis.

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Whatever secret laws beset a fellow

who would intersect the way

our Hector, here, has now elected

to effect (by opting to adopt not

this but that accoutrement and body

part of flying insect) will deflect

the sweetest gesture of affection

or the most ferocious spiteful

hatred or abject rejection.

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Mid-metamorphosis, you’re never

ready for inspection. The thing

you were is half abandoned,

what you are eternally unsure,

the thing you’ll be is a hypothesis,

the rest is endlessly behind a curtain.

Nothing’s pure or certain. Hilariously

harrowing to look around and realize

mid-metamorphosis describes the state

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of every bit of everything you look at

and of everyone you see. You’re

the middle of a complex, darling.

The middle of another one is me.

Perhaps we oughtn’t to ask silly

questions anymore. But what ones

aren’t silly? Oh, let’s bravely keep on

doing what we always do. Ponder willy-

nilly anything we feel the craving to.

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Today Instead of a Poem

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It’s impossible to do photographic justice to Louis Sullivan’s 1897 Bayard-Condict Building on Bleecker Street head-on. I assert this not only on the basis of my own stumbling efforts to accomplish the feat but on seeing any of photographs of the building done by pro photographers which depict its face in full height. To take a full frontal shot of it requires backing down Crosby Street toward East Houston far enough away to get the measure of the whole long rectangular rise of it - a distance which all but cancels out the music of the tension between its voluptuous adornment and audacious verticality — what had been for its time perhaps the first tall building in the city so frankly to exult in being tall.
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But sometimes, in certain conditions of angle and light (such as were afforded by today’s golden evening), I’ll find I’ve managed to steal a shot of it which almost by accident suggests its elegant verticality and its exquisite carving as the wonderful marriage of bold height and constrained delicacy it is. If you’re lucky you can do a swift visual poem of it. But I don’t know who’s equal to the task of doing more. Sure ain’t me.
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But oh, Mr Sullivan! I don’t know when I’ve felt more grateful to an architect than I do to you for giving New York this wonderful gift.

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Miss Pan-o’-Plea

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You followed and swallowed

the panoply. Put infinitively,

both the ‘be’ and the ‘to’

of ‘to be’ comprise you.