Do You Do What You Do

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

.

Their bodies are strangely configured, these beings

impaled by two rackets which seem to suggest they

would like to be thought of as two tennis players.

They cannot be said to be carrying them, except

as a body may “carry” a spear piercing layers of it

.

in the side, somehow not falling down in the throes

of demise one expects at the end for a creature who

dies, or sensibly ought to be dying. Surrounded by

bubbles and vertical strands, they seem to lack

hands, though they stand on assortments of feet.

.

My markers and pens commandeer every day what

comes out on each new page of paper. I probably

sound like I’m lying, or that my already small mind

has turned into a vapor when all I can think to report

about how I come up with them is that I sit down

and draw. I’m bored with repeating I do not intend

.

what I can’t not agree nonetheless that I do. (This

riposte long ago became coy and too-too.) But do you?

Know why you do what you do? How do you fathom

what “real” is? I’d love to have spread down in red

on a scroll rolled out boldly in front of the eyes

in my head simple words that reveal what the deal is.

.

Premises of a Religion that Never Caught On

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYRUtSwIeG8

.

The purpose of Existence is to drag

as many colors, shapes and other

business in as you can leave behind,

and then to face the dark without them,

.

blind. To like this, you must be the kind

that likes things, not the kind that doesn’t.

Your eyes must never cry. But really not

to fret: dry or wet, the question eyes will

.

neither have to ask nor answer is what

vision is, or could be for, or was, or wasn’t,

could have been, or might eventually be.

“What you see, although you’re blind,”

.

you’ll hear from something that identifies

itself as Mind-of-God, “is me.” While

your heart is beating, what you feel about

this may indeed be of some academic

.

interest to somebody else somewhere,

perhaps, but it’s unlikely you will meet

him. If you sightlessly perceive him passing

by, though, and he smells delicious, go

.

ahead and grab and eat him with impunity.

Mind-of-God approves of any form

of eating. At least until your heart stops

beating. (Life is meaningless if fleeting.)

.

When will that occur? (In passing, whom

you might to decide to eat, of course,

may not be him, but her.) When will you

be gone? Everybody leaves at dawn.

.

Episcopal Priest

.

(for my brother Bob Kettelhack, Episcopal priest,

who died of AIDS 30 years ago, March 27, 1989)

.

https://youtu.be/E5FT2g1J2Ww

.

An almost pleasurable heaviness –
faint ache – neuralgia: soft – dissociated
from emotion: disparate, dispersed and widely
unrelated notions floating aimlessly
.

and far away – as if in some near-empty
ocean various unbidden unrelated
species of sea creatures dimly
make each other’s shadows out
.

beyond the tug and push of a translucent
gray salinity – just visibly enough
to raise a tiny doubt that they might not
be so intractably alone: and yet not
.

terribly excited at the thought: there’s
nothing fraught in this wide stillness –
nothing urgent or intense, untoward:
a lack of any sense of moving backward,
.

forward, up or down: a kind of round
existence in which nothing needed much –
or anything at all. Episcopal priest –
my brother felt, and answered to, a call –
.

and just before he met his fall, he conjured up
a Christ with whom the only possible
experience was ardor – wild untamed desire –
utter longing for immersion. In my brother’s
.

version, God was something so in love with us
that we could not imagine the obsession –
could not know just how inordinately,
inextricably that flow caressed, contained our
.

every little tic and throe. My brother left
the living thirty years ago. Perhaps
my rambling foray now through this uncertain
not unpleasant shroud of cool translucent
.

afternoon is giving, through the flip side
of my brother’s passion, something
prescient. Through its absence,
we know presence.

It’s Time.

https://youtu.be/eygpwMuyWQ0

.

Time to write a poem that does not erupt in couplets,

is neither here nor there nor anywhere that ever was,

.

nor will occur, nor ever could have anything to do

with him or them or me or her, or (heaven spare us!) you.

.

Time to write a poem as if poems were a shoe. Time to

to write a poem that won’t speak or sing or whimper,

mutter, stutter, crow or croon about the moon, or suffer

any rude collusion with the ears, as if it were the music of

.

the spheres – that won’t allay nor banish fears nor have

the least intention to become a solipsistic metaphor of

.

so-called “heart” to make it break apart inside a trope,

or force it into the somatic undesirable reality, of tears.

.

It’s time to do away with commas setting up faux-mystical

pretentious clauses like the one you just saw separate

.

“reality” from “of”. It’s time to write a poem that has zilch

to do with “love”. It’s time to scrub ironic quote marks off

.

of everything. It’s time to write a poem that cannot, ergo

will not, insist it is a poem. That’ll show ‘em. Show whom?

.

you ask. Listing that’s a tedious task. Anyway, you know

already. The seven hundred sixteen poet chums of

.

your Aunt Betty. The Huns who rule poetic schools

like anatreptic ghouls, the ones that school noetic fools.

.