Utter Grand Complicity

Waiting at the threshold in the fog: peering
through the tiny cracks of log – split
roughly into boards that form the door that
you’re outside of: catching scent of rare meat
roasting and the sweat of bodies making love –
your soul takes in the glow – a red and gold –
a flame – as if whatever you were looking at
were cut and flooding gentle light instead
of blood: you sense that everything’s

a body but cannot quite make it yours:
you crouch there trembling by the bolted
entryway: so ordinary – grey and brown
soft wood, this weathered pine – and none of it
you’d think to say was “mine” – and yet
that feast of meat and flesh and flame inside
that you can smell and sense has an intensity
so troublingly familiar that you can’t mistake it:
beyond this psychic fence that somebody

erected is the recipe you seek: the spirit is
the body and the combination makes you
weak: ah, that’s the trouble: what you can’t
quite hear or speak: the rumbling necessity
of diving in and never coming back: it feels
like an embrace of an unfathomable lack: but
there it is, the rest of you, your orchestrated
self – the final dare – an utter grand
complicity with an extraordinary elsewhere.


.

As a Storm Darkens the Sky Over Tompkins Square Park

First of all, of course, it’s beautiful:
like looking out at England. But note
effects, and causes – how it pauses
then lets go: regard the simple physics
of the thing: a tension builds within
a cloud until the sky ejaculates
and claps and rings. You snap a finger
at a crystal glass: it pings – you rinse
a bowl and put it on the drainer by the sink

to dry: evaporation, gravity can be relied on
to exert their forces with an efficacy
that does not surprise – in fact,
will reassure you that the Universe
is quite the right-sized enterprise
that you’ve been taught to realize as
testable – each day you wrest a breath
from lung and air and dare to move
an arm to lift a hand to press a key

and then another key and then another
to produce transliterating symbols –
inky strings implying sounds denoting
meaning – which in what you’ve
come to hope is shared reality
are leaning towards expression
of what you want most to shout: a general
alarm attesting to the rash absurdity
of anything at all. Drop an apple: it will fall.

But understanding how a dropping
apple happens – and how the notion of it
ever came to any human brain – and why
and what a human brain is – cannot
not appall. As if the whole array was
normal! You want to find the agency
of change, which is to say the thing
that brought the thing about. Somehow,
somewhere, there is no doubt.


.

'Gay Pride' Weekend in New York 2008

Confluence of mind with New York City weather
tethers both to pilings in a psychic bay: today you sway
between sharp shower-spatters breaking from
the bursting late-June clouds – tapping chaos on
the air conditioner – and memories of smoky fog
and drunken air when you – at twenty-six or -seven –
stumbling on the piers – the far west village –

Christopher and West Streets – weren’t quite all there:
sweating for a quart or two of sex or vodka or some
other drug you hadn’t met yet but which surely would
transport you somewhere more intensely vibrant
than you’d managed to create so far: you wonder
if the bar you found then – funky, dark, demonic,
near the river – left its ghosts along the posts of your

invisible foray into that psychic bay that confluences
of your mind create with New York City weather now:
blithering and aching for a touch, a fuck, a pow –
a sucking-up to something utter and un-tethered:
something free and swelling and too irresistibly
alluring to exist. There is no shortcut to the prize, but
there’s no long way either: take a breather, sweetheart,

listen to New York imbibe this fine deliciousness –
and let it take a lick of you – now happily inside and cool
and grateful you’re the kind of fool who’s found out
how to soothe himself, but – Lord knows – hadn’t
then. Let that boy walk sodden through the pouring
rain toward his bodily delights until he finds them,
as he will – as you do, thirty long years later, still.


.

A Constituted Privacy

“The highest luxury of all, the supremely expensive thing, is constituted privacy….”
Henry James, The American Scene

Imagination scrabbles like a silken pampered mouse –
an elegantly ribboned rodent – riding on a tomcat’s back –
meticulously seeking out the savory and sweet in constituted
privacy: the tender bits – subtly flavored artifacts –
recalling secret acts of bravery and valorous retreat,
and the superfluous: Castilian olives, Sabra pickles, German
cookies – morsels for the grown-up, tending to the darker
richer poles of the aesthetic palate: less the light-leafed
salad than the galantine-de-veau: stuffed and roasted
in a seasoned glow, a loaded dense absorption of too many
influences to be itemized: prizing grunts and thuds of boxing

on the television in the background: tenth round of the first
Castillo and Corrales bout which is the sort of rout of fist
and sweat and blood and love that leaves your world the richer
for its outrage: swiftly turn the page to Joni Mitchell –
singing to a seagull, ministering to her mountain-Michael,
filigree of high soprano like thin rivulets spun off Corrales’
and Castillo’s chests and faces: now the blessed rest
of what the interim requires: disembodied choirs of Fauré –
his requiem, a cool and graceful sensual embrace
of everything the mouse has tasted or will taste: all in this
oddly layered place which inwardly and outwardly is home:

this paradox of stillness and the always-followed urge
to roam: to be another thing entirely than one had been –
and yet the strange apotheosis of whatever always was and is:
offering a mix of what amasses in the bin – beatifying sin –
weighing down the walls between the outer and the in:
letting all disparities consort and make a whole: dreaming,
waking into unsuspected harmonies that make a food –
and fuel – the little mouse can lick up from the bowl:
a constituted privacy occurring once and in eternity:
the strange digestibility of specificities that make you up
today and always in the summer glimmer of an interim.

.

Works at the Skateboard Store

East Eleventh Street, between First Avenue and A:
watch the twenty-four-point-seven year-old tattooed
skinny dude rock faintly back-and-forth on haunches –
crablike on the sidewalk: shaved skull: decorated
limbs – skin etched over with a dark blue crimson

black and purple spidery exactitude: rippling inkily
like far-off dreams: his too-large pupils gaze inside
himself somewhere at skateboard triumphs – dazed,
unfazed by scenes so vivid they’re no longer in the past –
those vastly inexplicably delicious loops through air

as if the body on the board were not quite there: as if
an idea’d come to living being minus all the heavy
lassitude of flesh. He pushes up – much older than
the fourteen-year-old kiddies in the skateboard store
behind him – ancient, really, when compared to their

fresh pinknesses: oh, he knows sex and sweat
and blood and fighting: and the drag of paying rent.
These kids might just as well be biting on their baby
bottle nursing nipples (nipples! – damn: her! – only girl
who’d ever left him dry and spent). He’s the aging god

of skinny dudes who would do anything to fly, and he’s
my hero too – to see him speeding through a life like
some tattoo shot out of someone’s rifle of a tattoo needle:
cuts into my heart like scars. Twenty-four-point-seven-
year-old tattooed skinny dude makes me see stars.


.

Limerick for Woden's-day*

Peculiarly stumped as we are
spinning millions of miles from a star
we're perhaps at our best
when we give it a rest –
just accept: to exist is bizarre.

Letting nothing escape but one fact
which cannot be much softened by tact –
that we haven't a clue
why we're here, or why you
or why I haven’t totally cracked –

we persist nonetheless in pursuing
our passionate wants: in so doing
we conjure up love
like a dove-smitten dove
or a cow who enjoys her own mooing:

and although there’s no start and no end
to these reeling perplexities: send
us a bit of a verse
and we’ll use it to curse
the great dark for a time, and suspend

disbelief for a little while more
and imagine that we can explore
and discover some truth
‘til the Universe (ruth-
less!) indifferently shows us the door.

= = = =

*Wednesday (Woden's-day) is named after Woden/Wotan (Odin):
Father and ruler of the gods and mortals; god of war, learning,
poetry and the dead



.

The "That" That "That" May Be

Accommodating to a habitat is never
quite a case of sucking up
dismissively: “okay,
that’s that.”

The “that” that “that” may be
turns out to harbor in its
precincts bee hives
of complexity:

internecine and unconscious
dreamed activities which
work in tandem
to beleaguer,

tease, delight across a landscape
often most abundantly
experienced at night:
for instance, sturdy

though I feel when I drop off
to sleep at nearly nine,
I wake invariably
at three-thirty

to bestow upon my digs the startled
understanding that I’m
here and do not
quite yet grasp

the near and far and is-ness of
the place: as if to wake
up in this pre-dawn
space were to

begin to colonize the moon anew.
One never moves, one
must suppose, too
soon to learn

to see more richly where peculiarly
one chances in the throw
of existential dice
to grow instead

of atrophy. No generative choice,
perhaps, but to investigate
the “that” that “that”
may be.


.

Twenty-One

Sex with him was like performing
a science experiment on a fresh-made
god – testing the reactions of a body
newly sprung in youth to
the requirements and truth –

blunt implications – of a breathless
blooming physical maturity:
the soft and tender insecurity
of boyhood mixed with
the importunate insistence

of the nascent reigning phallus
(Alexander storms the palace
of the crotch!). One watches – tests –
one’s own reactions, too: partaking just
as much as one can stand not only

of the glory of his infant manhood but
the recollection of the story
of one’s own: as if the long
dismemberment of history had
for this moment coalesced again

and found one in the pink one knew
when one was one-plus-two-times-ten,
instead of nearly three-times-twenty.
Hard not to feel whomped
stupid by such plenty.


.

Queen Anne in the Maple Leaves

Flat, slipping, shifting, veined-and-point-edged
sheets of green – breezing in the June-lush branches –
sheaves of maple leaves outside my New York City

window – seen beyond a Queen Anne doll

and slats of wooden screen – plant-life nestling

against itself – so insouciantly smoothly, drifting

softly and just sentiently: at least I’d like to think so:

find some commonality in sense of touch between
these vegetable tissues’ skin and mine: their
covered sap and my dark biologically guarded heart.
Today I was to play as if I were on some deserted
Caribbean island: sunning in the gloriously
inner-lit environs of my secret palace with no more
to fashion out of my imagination than my passion,

whim or appetite decreed. But virtually every friend
who writhes in a considerable stress, distress
or need has phoned me, one by one, as if to seek
a dispensation from reality. Perhaps I ought to send
them to my window sill, to Queen Anne in her
royal bower, flowering iconically: her stance like hope.
She doesn’t look as if she’d grope for answers.

.

Take the Violin

Every thing and thought and creature's wiser than I am.
Take the violin, for instance. Surely knows much
more than I do. No violence is wrought, as far as
I can tell, wherever what gives beauty to it dwells –
somewhere within its strings and wood. But when
I perform on it I’m full of stings and unexamined must

and should and couldn’t-if-I-tried. The violin to me
is like an adolescent bride that I would rather be
deep-fried than have to wed. I seem to want to saw
through it until the gift is dead. Idiot: here's Mozart, Bach!
I ought to praise the skies and my unfathomable luck
that I can prise and pick it up and make it, in a manner,

sing. I wonder if I’ll ever help the thing and me take
wing. Or so I dither on the phone to my friend Donna
who is evidently holding her enormous cat Cee-Gee
upon her chest quite near the little holes through
which one sends one’s sounds. Cee-Gee’s purring
like a lioness. The wiser creature's happiness abounds.



.

Taking Henry to the Mat

Meet the challenge
of the Jamesian
expostulation: chop
a random sentence
of his off and think
how you might end

the eloquence yourself.
See what literary tricks
you’ve up on your shelf,
or in your mental till –
your sensibility-and-
wisdom bank. Start with:

“It appears to be
a fundamental rule
of human nature, lying
lower than the plummet
of analysis will drop, that….”
Fill in the blank.


.

Honeydiddabunchafun

If, as is your wont,
you want to punt
the football back again
into the middle of the hot
and sunny lot – to field

an unsuspected reciprocity –
a catch and throw –
that yields connection:
forward pass – received,
believed, and interleaved

with random blasts
of passion – the Universe
would like to partner
you today. Strip down
and let it have its way.

(Time, my honeydidda-
bunchafun, to play.)


.

That Badly Aching Someone

You want to tell him you’ll do anything –
frustration from fatigue (and the reverse) –
but you’ve exactly as much currency

in small change in your psyche’s purse
as you will need yourself: you cannot
spare a dime of it. The crime of it?

Perhaps there’s none. Someone’s aching
badly and his days have turned to night –
at least as far as your self-evidently

feeble sight can make it out – there’s
nothing for it but to gather up your
meddling soul and take it out and back

to where it knows, at least a little, what
to do. That badly aching someone may
have need of something, but it isn’t you.


.

A Quote and a Poem

“Every choice made, be it picking a ‘forbidden fruit’ or leaving the light on,
can portend cumulative catastrophe for generations. I must live by this
existential truth.” Donna Boguslav

Let the summer
be sufficient, yes:

but oh – how you miss
darkness’ solace!

You long for its
envelopment to come

back – color you,
pick up your hand.

Here’s what you look
forward to about

the summer solstice:
after it, the days

grow shorter, and
the nights expand.



.

Moving Day (Vision, on the Sidewalk...)

Living in the wide fat lap
of this great premise –
that no human sin or notion
or velleity can be immune
to the illuminating parsing
of a poem – you cast
the shadows of a strained
and scattered angst upon

the waters of this verse,
as if to nurse them either
into comprehension
or – more warmly, softly –
down into the reassurance
that there’s nothing wrong
about your wavering
around the foggy intersections

of the faintest light of hope
and its excruciating plight
against a hopelessness:
which is, obliquely, to suggest
some sense of densely packed –
as if in bubble wrap –
fraught apprehension as you
sip iced coffee in a Starbuck’s –

your piano, several blocks
away, may not be making
optimally efficacious way down
many flights of stairs under
the care of four alarmingly
slim boys to whom its transit
was entrusted. (Vision:
on the sidewalk, busted.)


.

Cardboard, Marble, Glitter

Mostly glittered green and blue,
though with small shocks
of gold and crimson, too –
a little decorated Christmas cardboard
peacock sits across from you,
its jointed legs unnaturally
sticking outward from
its blessedly insentient knees

upon a stolen chunk of stained
and veiny marble that you took
from some dark sinister back crevice
of an ancient Roman bath
carved in the rocky shoreline
of Sperlonga – halfway to Napoli
from Roma: oh, the longest years
and shortest breaths

have passed since you were
in that vast Italian cove
in the Tyrrhenian Sea –
emperor Tiberius’ deliciously illicit
pleasure garden of a place –
its ghosts still howling from
the brutally incessant gratifying
of his sadomasochistic tastes:

now, sitting on a fragment
of its face, is this ridiculous
adornment; cardboard, marble,
glitter in a powerfully inane embrace:
imagination will go very far
to soothe itself – yours, Tiberius’
and this delirious indifferent peacock.
Infinitely runnable, this race.

.

If Her Heart

If her heart
had moral order
like a map –

if the architecture
of its temple
could be seen

in some clear
vista on a hill –
if the ambience

of its proclivities,
adherences,
magnetic pulls,

antipathies
and deepest
yearnings could

be heard as
fugal harmonies –
if its symmetry

and music were
a body, warm,
and sweating

scent – perhaps,
for once,
she thought,

she wouldn’t worry
what it did
or where it went.


.

Sunday in the Park with Ingmar

If Sweden mixed it up with New Orleans
they might have conjured something like
the lurid stark peculiar sultry means
of sweating this Manhattan day appears
to want to foist upon itself: it is the weather’s
vast tumescent gray indifference that appeals:
seals you flat against the city’s spine.

Adjudge as strangely pretty, or malign –
decipher in its broken varied line the trembling
poking charcoal of a Rembrandt or the seismic
needle-charting of the bare preliminary
random rumbles of a geologically shifting
fault: see it as assault or invitation: free
your apprehensiveness enough to render

an embrace: hug this muggy place so full
of needless splay and funk: this junket
to the promise of oblivion: its humidly erupting
stews: if Bergman played the blues, you’d find
him here, dug up from earth, reeking
of unholy birth – bundled, dark, and brooding
at the bar. Sunday in the park with Ingmar.


.

A German boy, Mattias --

freshly minted from Berlin –
here in New York City for three days –
just stopped me in the street
as if he’d bloomed out from

the humid June of Greenwich Village –
walked me back to my apartment –
was so full of questions about
east and west and north and south;

and left me so arrested by
his gentle youth, soft mouth, brown
tousled hair and burnt sienna eyes
alive with aching interest – one

forbade oneself from anything
untoward: the boy was forward
but so free of artifice one chose
abeyance over the conveyance

of one’s not-so-gentle lust –
and its inevitable drain. Sometimes
the best that one can do
with beauty is to bless it, and refrain.


.

Meno Mosso *

You rode the wave today
and soared into a balance –
you found a way to pray
as if no challenge
were more quizzical
than any working
of the muscularly physical –
arms and shoulders jerking

up and setting down
each load of matter
through the air to ground:
one small shatter
of a Christmas ball –
imperfect lift to heaven –
a likely sort of fall
to heed at fifty-seven –

but oh, the ocean swelled
and you were there for it –
you swam, dived, dwelled
in some rare air in it –
amphibiously graced –
you breathed through gill
and lung, and raced
to join and sunder, spill

and fill a newer sea
than you had any notion
you could ever learn to be –
this wide conflated ocean
of your past and present:
oh, ten hours hence,
how strange and not unpleasant –
full of some odd sense –

you feel – some yapping dog
of sex still goads –
but pat him on his head, and hog
your peace: your loads
have been unloaded: listen
to a new concerto grosso
whose fluidic glisten
softly bids you: meno mosso.


*less movement

Seriously Sunlit

Don’t force the bud?
As if you could.
But funny how you think you can.
Lately you’ve been Superman.

You’ve rallied round an inner voice –
you’re not sure that you had the choice:
this June move’s got you galvanized –
and as you’ve slowly realized

a vision, skimmed it from the foam
of dreams, and made it home –
and barreled down the avenues
with bags and carts of books and shoes

and as you’ve felt testosterone
rage through you like a grand cyclone –
reclaimed your manhood yet again
in ways – well, you remember when

a couple times before
you felt a kindred inner war
with both sides winning –
revolutionary – spinning

light retakes on sin: denuding
darknesses of their deluding
sillinesses – made a joke
of every surreptitious poke

and innuendo: well, today
a seriously sunlit life has got its way
and chosen you to live it.
You get it, and you give it.


.

On Hauling Two Big Bags of Kitchen Stuff Home from Bed, Bath & Beyond

Strange to care
so much
about these

thick intricacies –
mercantile details –
undergo

this heavy
lugging – foggily
appraising quality

and wondering
if spending
what you spent

was wise
and why it isn’t
possible to get

away from
rules like gravity
and social

expectations –
if, that is, there
weren’t some

alternative
to this material
existence and its

patent city-wide
resistance to
the idea simply

breathing is enough.
Strange
to care so much

about your stuff.
But you suppose
it’s like a potter

caring about clay.
There isn’t any
other way.


.

Pursuit of the Peach

Everything’s so delicately balanced –
and yet hauling heavy bags
of trash down seven flights of stairs
in ninety-something weather’s

partly what I had to do today
to keep my play aloft and swaying –
damn, I love the heat. Everyone
complains about it: I think it’s a treat.

Moving to a new apartment in it
makes you feel that after all you might
have found the beat: you know
that you exist. Though there’s a twist.

Sweat and danger give the heart
a hiss and fizz – but wholeness is
a peach which will not grow and ripen,
plop into your hand on cue because

you’ve sweated for it and it is your due.
Sorting through the paper bundles
of my family today I scraped away
at memories which tore at psychic

skin. I still can’t haul the photographic
stash of them and throw it in a bin.
I guess that I am no less routed
by a grim catastrophe that seems

to loom behind the sweltering
enormity of life than anybody else
I meet. Everything’s so delicately
balanced. God, I love the heat.


.

The Big Snapple

Snapple’s gone and done it now –
produced a “Go Bananas” potion
which, when mixed with Snapple “Peach,”

permits such orgiastic breaching blasts of an alternative
to ninety-nine ferocious Fahrenheit degrees
of global warming in Manhattan

(baking sidewalk –
baking air –
making psyches sizzle in its seize and glare –

that is, until a bare sip from a glass of Snapple peach/banana bliss
befell me and my city seven minutes, more or less, ago:
and turned us passionately wacko) –

it’s become the proof
of my contention that all life is sex –
no matter that a vast majority

do not progress
much past
its sly

preliminary wink.
To start to get the rest of it,
I would suggest this drink.


.

Momentary Pact

Be provisional – pragmatic – do
enough to move ahead a bit: to slip
a little through the slit – invite a touch
more light to cradle and bestow – allow

the thing to show – be caught –
shoot out, up from its shelf – permit
a slight sharp glimpse – before it sidles
quickly back deep to the shadowed part,

the darkest cavern of itself – and minces,
cringing, hinging there to private
tiny tugs-of-war between the drugging lure
of emptiness and an unconscionably

ravenous desire for more; never mind:
remain alert, and bind whatever
drifting ends you find as they come loose:
keep it all from flapping madly like

a frightened goose, shedding feathers
everywhere, losing every dare: reassure
and soothe it into sleekness: feel
its trembling and chaotic heart: cup it

in your hand: love it like a dove:
let it snooze, remand its worry to
its dreams, and start the struggle over
in the morning, squeezing “is” from “seems.”

When everybody in your family dies,
do you become them? Am I my mother,
father, brother? I think I’m moving far more
than from one apartment to another.


.

First Forgive

First forgive the necessary
nerve it takes to speak,
and understand that
though it pique, provoke
or anger, it is human language:
bang and whimper,

too peculiarly engaged
in the impossibility of saying
what is meant, or knowing
anything beyond the echo
of its spent syllabic
ministrations – thin and static-y

as they will always be –
to offer much defense of what
or how or why it thinks
it’s making sense. Me, I’ll listen
for its melodies and beats.
And not expect repeats.


.

The Killing Knot

My old apartment sits there, hot,
half-stuffed and shot,
and not entirely moved out of,
like an abscess

or an ancient unattended woman.
I am not attending to her –
I will let the abscess
rot. For I am not

prepared
quite yet
to tie
the killing knot.

What is loss, exactly?
Something dies or fades away
or gets chopped off
but all the rest of us appropriate

its dregs and shreds and residues –
its measurablenesses –
shoes and dresses,
sex toys,

pots and pans,
and other flapping doodles
of unguarded man
and woman:

summer is icumen in
and you and I are going out.
and in.
and out.

and in.
Soon, like everybody else,
we’ll end up in the bin
for others to dig in.


.

On Eating a $5 Pad Thai Lunch on Avenue A in New York City at Noon in Humid Early June

The problem
is distraction.

The solution
is distraction!

(God, this
tastes good.)




.

Being That

Why does anyone take credit
for anything? Would you
congratulate a blackbird
for its left wing? We do what
we’re designed to do. Aptitudes
and moods, capacities
and varying degrees of energy

and inspiration and whatever else
accounts for the libidinizing
of Jane Austen’s mind into
a “Sense and Sensibility”
or the abstracting of a pink
behind into a boudoir pastel
by Degas may certainly

provide examples of the grander
mental residues and haptic
artifacts of creatures gratifying
what their instincts and peculiarities
beget, begat. But yesterday
I saw a fat white cat. What
a genius he was being that!

.

On Sitting at a Different Desk

A little like a child salivating at
the thought of buttered toast –
regarded by a one-eyed ogre slavering
and rubbing palms at this dark joyful
opportunity: oh! – how he loves
to roast and eat small children
salivating at the thought of buttered toast! –

regarded by a slice of buttered
toast permitted temporary sentience
and the doughy vague presentiment
surprising in its dim allure that its small
destiny might lead securely to
a little child’s hungry stomach,
first – to burst then in an ogre’s mouth:

then be encompassed by a verbal thirst
for the amalgamated three that
dangerously puts them in deliciously
ridiculous relationship to me: promising
what, with a tweak and jerk, might soon
turn into bright poetic quirk. I think
I’ve found a place to do my work.


.

Facing Tompkins Square Park

Ruthless systems generate new weather –
inside, out -- absorb each tiny atmospheric
influence and spin each confluence through
head and body – groin, especially,
and legs – which sometimes fill and beg
with lightning fire, thunder push – powered
high to run: or mush into a muddy done-ness:

dumped into a heavy dark humidity
and dreary warm occlusion of the will: inertia --
flump: but now it's light, inordinately clear:
I face two windows here which give
imagination access to a woods so full
of frilly green you couldn’t possibly imagine
this was yet another New York scene –

not an edifice in sight: just whispers now
and then of taxi engine. I am half between
where I have been and where I’ll be: that is
to say, I am precisely where I always am:
thriving in departing and arriving: moving
to a place where poems grow on every
tree. Just wait and watch. You’ll see.


see 'hare krishna tree' pic & article on the park beneath it:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://twi-ny.com/tspharekrishnatree.jpg&imgrefurl=http://twi-ny.com/twiny.8.17.05.html&h=324&w=432&sz=123&hl=en&start=25&sig2=tLXAfmY-9r5DQN6_Z4VFfQ&tbnid=OPTyxS0u7gQIGM:&tbnh=95&tbnw=126&ei=lVdESMy2HoWmpATHpa2cDw&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522tompkins%2Bsquare%2Bpark%2522%26start%3D20%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DN%26ie%3DUTF-8
.

Jabbering On While Preparing To Move

A “forever endeavor,”
one might almost say,
if one weren’t afraid
of implying this way

(in a rhyme so inane
that it freezes the mind
into numbing despair)
one could possibly grind

enigmatic Eternity
into a phrase –
that its sources, effects
and its means and its ways

could be trampled and shoved
and so brutally sandwiched
in something as lame
as that parcel of language:

but sound does have potency –
things could be worse
than Infinity burping
up nursery verse –

so let’s lilt to an end
and not worry if we
have no hope of an adequate
literacy.


.