Last Dance

Faint, eroded, near-erased –
soon to be no more:
take it by its tiny waist
and waltz it ‘round the floor.

.

Slide

A
little
quip – a
bit of slick
perusal, quick
catch!: too dark
to make much out –
but there is always this
interiorly strange conundrum
stuff to whip, regale and fluff you
into something that might just erupt
enough: sufficiently to blast a little freedom
in and up and through your winter heart. Slide down
the slope, my dear: I’ll meet you at its nether part. Today
we’ll close our eyes and belly whop onto the frozen Universe for art.

.

Brutal Graces

Winter sun seems set
on blinding you
a little earlier today –
no way to stop the slow
revolving angle

of the global axis’ sway
away from that sweet
darkest solstice day
eight days ago – when
night was emperor.

A brutal glare too eagerly
cuts air: blares squarely
through the window glass –
zaps, slips between
the semi-shielding wooden

slats and you have just
as little power to survive it
as you’d have in space –
which come to think of it,
you are already in.

Not the first or last time
you will have to face
what brutal graces bring.
Inexplicability: synonymous
with everything.

.

I’m Dreaming Lately I Will Fall in Love

Perhaps it’s more than I should ask
of each day – to distill a drop,
if not of essence,

then at least of a reduction
of the brew from which I might expect
some prescience:

something with a touch less cloud –
a clarifying view: as when
a yawn induces tearing

in the eyes: a dawn, a gentle shock,
a slight surprise.
Perhaps it’s too much to surmise

that training my attention
on the spanned eternity
between the sunset and sunrise

might prod a benefit beyond
its entertainment: perhaps it’s too much
to imagine I might see the heart

beneath what’s guising it.
I’m dreaming lately I will fall in love.
I’d like to dream that I will rise to it.

.

Choosing Sides

I think,
when you pay attention,
you find

the brink of a divide:
half
of whose chasm

blasts about the orgasm
and the thunder
of the wonder;

half
bleats
a bleak blunt is-ness –

the solution to whose
business
incontrovertibly

suggests
a sweet releasing
death.

I wonder if you
choose sides,
every breath.

.

2 Short Poems That Have Something To Do With The Holidays

1

Enjoy!

End joy.

2

Slow silver whale of yearning –
welling up through space –
reflected – shimmer burning –
in everybody’s face.

.

Cool Solace

We fret and worry, scurry – guilt! – feel misbegotten –
importunately fear we’re indefensible –

but fortunately no one’s indispensable.
When we’re gone, the thing – and we – will be forgotten.

.

Sort of Thing You Have to Do Alone

Through the forest
of the city’s un-bought
Christmas trees
I forge my way: quiet –
on the private venture

and adventure
of discovering what
Christmas eve
and Christmas day
and night might be

if I bequeath them
utterly to every other
member of New York’s
constituency – that is,
everyone but me.

Cool late moonless
Winter Emperor
of Afternoon now glows:
as if he knows
an intimacy no one

merely human knows.
Tonight perhaps I’ll get
a peek behind his throne.
Sort of thing you
have to do alone.

.

If She Were Here

Some prevailing wind –
a weather system you were in –
continual expenditure
of energy in one direction –
as if sped ahead along
the blank containing banks
of some eruptive river which,
invisible yet irresistible,

refused not to enlist you
in its insurrection: not unlikely
as the narrative, the story
you would fashion
of your past. It plausibly
suggests why nothing lasts:
too fleet and indiscriminate:
though maybe faulty in its

implication of a unity:
as if one thing advanced
more than another. You think
about your mother, born
on Christmas Eve. Pushing
off the isthmus of her death,
you’d had to leave so many
harbors: out to find

new marvels of a rich autonomy –
which surely ached, still aches
to grow. But strange,
the way things go,
always pushing off the banks
into another river. If she
were here, you wonder
what you’d have to give her.

.

Castitooshigations

Let’s try to take the measured earthbound view:
evince the sort of body-laden equilibrium
that might just make a fine fit animal of you:
pick through the front-lines
of your consciousness
to find the bits that proffer unsymbolic thinking:

“should I stuff an egg or kick a football?” –
something that prevents the sinking
and the bluffing puffery of involuted
self-examinations, with their proto-sicknesses
and folderol and castitooshigations:
which, besides which, get thick in the way

of sex and piss and food and drink and sleep
and all the other excretory, incretory bodily
sensations, functions, blinkingly
unconscious celebrations of the flesh,
than which there are no better ways
of living pleasurably. Keep it fresh:

activate a confluence of motor
instincts – scrap that nuanced
questionably “fascinating” introspective mesh.
Be a constitutionally un-poetic treat. Condense
into the potent unadulterated essence
of your dumb inimitable meat.

.

Given

The given of this sunset’s well of light –
the unconsidered gift of it –
the glowing harbinger of solstice night

before it comes to spread its length
and breadth and depth beneath,
above, abreast of us: the eerie locus

of a peace which weaves a freezing
meteorological indifference into our warm
mammalian sensate lives: the way some

sensibility now strives to say what’s
happening: the quiet is immense
and almost musical: as if it were

an anthem to a balanced tension
in the Universe so perfectly conceived
and carried out that there is nothing

possible to disbelieve: all is true. The sky
is spiraling away from blue. The aim
of everything is answered by the view.

.

Solstice Sleep: A Rehearsal

Sweet excursion
of a winter-heavy sleep:
yesterday I took a nap so deep,
and underwent the sleek coercion

of a voyage to a dream so far away,
that coming up again seemed wrong.
Until I once again began to long
for more of the complete array

and knew I could not stay –
and so began another climb to an incursion
in and to another version
of a winter-heavy waking day.

Someday, I guess, there’ll be a fatal crack
in consciousness’ capacities
to re-invoke the known veracities –
and bring me back.

.

What I Expect We Will Be Left With

Perhaps it’s possible
to reach another stage.
Every moment asks

that we engage.
Not that you can’t boldly
light a pagan candle

in the cold, scold the dark
or host the solstice –
strain poetic symbols

from the story of a strange
imaginary baby in the night.
But what I expect we will

be left with on December 25th
is what we knew back on
September, June and April 9th.

The endless wonder of this
infinite and grand eternal
momentary life.

.

Full Up

A bulldog
walks two
other bulldogs
down the street.

They all look
like they’ve
had enough
to eat.

.

Your To-Do List for Today

Be a mystic and a carpenter.
That would please us.
Secretly out-Jesus Jesus.

Let sense be common
and eternal and voluptuous –
without infernally disrupting us.

Sing a metered rhyme:
wanton as an August breeze –
wounding as a February freeze.

Purport to tell a lie:
cover it in mud and sod –
pray to it as if it were your god.

.

This, or That

On the basis
of precious

little data,
we think

up worlds,
pro rata.

Our eyes
see upside

down.
We figure

from a guess
what’s round

or flat.
Amazing what

we make of this,
or that.

.

The Drawing Came First

A rippling underneath –
a symmetry of neural network –
coalescing of a shape in chaos –
chaos which is never chaos –
circling, looping, swooping
into, out of, over and below
a strange complex insistent flow
in which the nature of all meaning
seems to wink –
you grab at it in outline:

in a blink
it slips away
but leaves a residue
which speaks to you:
tells you to go off again into the cloud
in whose amorphousness
a pod of porpoises allows
you just a fleeting view
of form: a phallus
or a palace –

the fractal lure of sex,
a vexed perplexity
which just as soon
as you’ve accepted it
resumes pursuit
of a geometry
beneath
the whole
damned
thing.

A man could sing.

.

K.O.

The
curvature

of space and time
as it aligns with the sweet

pulling crime of your specific gravity
is too excruciating to

expostulate
about.

You
freakin’
knock me out.

.

This Soft Shadowed Being

for Andy

There is a grandeur and a gladness
to this liquid afternoon, this covert light,
this pearled translucent weather –
a strange aggrandizement of blessings
in the rain, its backdrop alabaster air –
near colorlessness – which obtains today
between Manhattan street trees’ dormant

branches: sky is quietly announcing something
large and private. December afternoon cannot
not praise the coming night: an envelope
of darkness has embraced the whole,
and we are never not in starlight –
and I hear the tap of drops outside
and I am in such golden warmth and stillness

in this room: a nearly cataleptic trance:
to move at all would be to injure an essential
stance: the pause between the steps of some
god’s dance: a hush, a glance, a savoring:
I know no way to translate this soft shadowed
being into language, but ever-pressing
nearly-winter sky demands I try.

.

Someone Said You Understood

Someone said
you understood.
I wonder, in that case,
if I should blunder in
with the assumption
that you’ll grasp
the cower

in my eyes.
If you understand,
it can’t be a surprise.
I’d like to stand
here staring,
pouring out the whole
incontinent inchoate

continent of me,
while you,
as someone said
you do, foresee
the likely outcome.
I might be overcome
with tears.

I wonder at
the amplitude
of fears.
But someone said
you understood.
My, that would
be good.

.

Another Reason

Quiet – warm – respectful –
companionable guise –

a slight anarchic glint
in his amoral eyes

suggests a revolution
of manageable size:

begets another reason
to find all love unwise.

.

Code

In this opal well of light and shade
from which December afternoon is made –
in its grand volume and complexity –
its dance of dust in angled sun from which
I must avert my glance – before its solar
cataract combusts and overruns my eye –
in this incursion of the sky into the room –

this incarnation yet again of some felt bloom –
some sense of sometime – when? –
faint grasp of past, beyond my own –
in this attenuated flow and tone –
this proof of time’s illusion – this rhymed
allusion to a dimly recollected home –
not this one, no, and not in London, no –

but fluidly partaking of the source
of each, as if an ocean of some distant
century had now begun to lap its gentle
waves upon a beach – to draw Baroque
striated swerves and geometric curves
in sand with broken bits of shell –
some code informs me all is deeply well.

.

Elsewhere, I Guess

Playing too close to the edge –
I’m praying a quatrain pops out of the hedge
on the lawn of my untended poetic garden today:
I’ve been elsewhere, I guess.

Though I’ve stayed pretty much at the same
old address, I have left to the last squeaking moment
the task of reporting I ask of myself –
the work I require of assembling desires, aversions

and whiffs of the sweat of whatever just blessed me
or cursed me. My verses desert me.
Like lovers who lie on divans, unattended,
they’re done with excuses and couldn’t care less

whether I stumble in to caress them – undressed.
My nakedness isn’t a draw anymore. I try to implore;
they’re unspeakably bored and depressed.
I’ve been elsewhere, I guess.

.

I Like Milk

The utterly reliable completeness with which refrigerated milk fulfills
whatever yearning my mouth, soul and psyche regularly bring to it
recalls the barest glint and whiff, vestigial trace, the almost utterly
forgotten grace not of my childhood so much as of the source of
something farther, farther – so much farther back than human
intercourse of any kind; beyond all genesis of Mind: where
had a sentient spirit somehow come to be, and thought

to seek to find it – the rebounding echo of the vast and
pounding first primordial Lack to which the Big Bang
rushed with its attractions – might have offered all
at once its absolution of an answer to all vexing
existential fears. That, perhaps, begins to say,
convey some fraction of the bliss with which,
through years, I’ve turned to the experience

of this entirely efficient counteraction to the
visceral somatic memory of that first dire
abyss. Whatever factions of experience
have since ensued – whatever cyclic
eons in which energy and matter
have become unglued,
construed

or
mis-
construed –
there can
have
been
no

greater
satisfaction in
one bit of it – no
sweeter glory – than
what is hinted at, implied

inside the story I can tell about
the way a gallon of refrigerated milk,
sipped through the night, so incrementally
provides its perfect and divine delight, through its
suggestive pearl-white flow of potable sweet liquid silk.

.

Achtung!

Attention must be paid –
but when it is,
look out
for all the wayward

and waylaid
forgotten
misbegotten dark
inscrutabilities

that will, my darling,
seize you,
needle, wheedle
through and undermine

your every
last assumption
and presumptive
point of view.

.

3:54 p.m., December 6, 2009, Manhattan

Here it is again,
slinking toward
the solstice:
that unearthly light –

angled as if
hungry for a fight
with something larger,
fiercer, more remote,

more full of mystery
than you or I
could ever be.
You cannot look

too long at it –
not that it will even
slightly mind you.
But it will blind you.

.

That Light

There is, we think, a chance, at least,
of something like a magic feast
awaiting you tonight.

Look: see the makings of it here –
your day’s imaginings appear –
inviting: take a bite! –

that is, when what you call “asleep”
becomes your state of mind. A deep
experience of sight –

more inward than the one you know –
will then begin its lyric flow –
regaling you: while bright

live warm ingredients prepare
themselves into a gleaming fare
whose redolent delight

will fill you past your brim and spill
into the yawning dawn: until
you’ve fallen from its height –

and find that you are here again,
amassing life and musing when
you might get back that light.

.

The Work

The Work takes notice of you
only insofar as you affect it –
health and mood must hit sufficient pitch
for it to go about the enterprise of dealing
with its germinating itch: although
you do not have to be awake for it:
it sorts through your unconscious
waverings, your somnolent

half-hollow dreams for what might be
its best negotiable schemes – retrieving
this or that exacting insight, pulsing color,
scent, arousal to effect theatrical
espousal of regret or celebration,
confession of defeat or prideful
hot assertion: it investigates all traces
of the grace of your erotic yearnings –

any dregs of desolate desertion –
assiduously burrowing, inquisitive
about your latest least exertion and how
useful any of its consequences –:
how it kisses, kicks the heart –
might prove to the creation – wielding,
molding – of a gratifying art.
Chilling how unwilling it appears

to care about your happiness:
(all that, to it, is sentimental sappiness):
but it does care more than you know
that you find ways to counteract
all tendency to stop and foster
everything it takes to make you go.
It hopes you’ll get the hint.
You are its only instrument.

.

Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire

Break – beat – batter

the egg of your heart,

for the sake of
the habit of art.

.

The Day After London

Some distillation of experience
seems to have occurred
between my landing like a sack of concrete
and flying like a bird:

the vast amalgamated town –
condensing, purifying, trickles, falls:
where candle-lit John Donne
ruled pulpits at St. Dunstan’s and St. Paul’s:

the roiling skies above
the patient, slow-revolving London’s “Eye” –
the strange inviting Thames
beneath each London bridge: as if to die

there would be quite enough
to justify a life entirely endured:
Hampstead’s bracing heights –
the Strand’s slight swelling scribing line – insured

production of one strain –
thin vivid stream – of shimmer: quite a find:
despite a grinding jet-lag
my brain does not now seem at all to mind.

.

Face

Late November London blossoms:
roses – blowsy, falling, fallen;
pansies – brazen and surreal –
frozen-grins on mad-dog purple
Pekinese: amid all these and in this

northern light and in this cloud-
exhuming and -exuding vacillating
bright/dim bluster of a place emerges
an amalgam face: divided man –
half-fluid, -monolithic – rooting up

from rock and sea – erupts into
the loins and groin and crack
of his strong self-supplying mystery:
he is the London night: spreads
ruthlessly – alchemically fecund –

flowering in winter. I seek the deep
beat of his pulse: and trust that I might
find a way to catch, convey a bit of it –
a little – fractionally – here. A strange
magnificence is always near.

.

jottings to self (2nd day)

jottings to self (2nd day)

11/26/09

I think the whomp of time difference is affecting me – oddly – I’m tired at 9 a.m. (4 a.m. nyc time) despite having slept all through the night – 8 hours & more – my body isn’t buying the light. yesterday: Chelsea again for brkfst (stockpot), picked anglesea arms as dinner spot for tonight, deposited richard’s 20 pound note in hsbc, tubed to Leicester sq and walked over to Trafalgar square: deep dive into 15th thru 1900 british faces at nat’l portrait gallery (how interesting to me that the 16th century – largely the dutch/Flemish guys, Holbein et al – really captured our sense of the modern face almost before any other art quite captured what we think of as the modern mind: as if the visual arts are always at the vanguard) – walk down strand/aldwych to get tkt for endgame – pushed further down to st clement danes, royal courts of justice – saw endgame, quite marvelous, kept beckett as interesting as he can be by riding the line between despair & comedy with great exactitude – dark wonderful London, an hour of the nat’l gallery, very struck by rembrandt’s heads – mostly old people including a self-portrait in his last year (a room away from a young self-portrait) – gave me the idea that if I drew anything here it will probably be an amalgam face – an old man – I am coming slowly to think of London as a “he” – first city to evoke that for me – had a comparatively healthy (compared to the eng. brkfsts I’ve been subsisting on) light Italian meal, walked up to Leicester sq and happened to pass a quaker meeting building on st martin’s lane at 6:13 – 6:15 meeting about to start so I went in & sat down for 45 minutes in quiet. Two men spoke – one of them I found very attractive – Brit quakers all. It’s strange to me still to think that if you poked one of any one of them they’d involuntarily erupt in an English accent. Increases my sense of the place being irrevocably stained with itself – as surely every place is. But there is a completeness to it here for me that continually piques/interests. Tiny breaths of word choice – ice cream commercial (for ben & jerry’s!): “perfect for a night in.” A night in! My back hurts from the bed, I think: at any rate it did yesterday too & it made walking a stiff business at first until it unkinked, which it did completely, and which it will today too. British museum this morning, I think, and then a walking tour thru Kensington, then back here, perhaps, to start on that amalgam face & head, before Nigel Kelly & wife come to meet me & we proceed on our walk past QC’s beaufort street abode & to dinner at anglesea arms. I have no idea what or if I’ll ‘write’ – no poem occurs. I think life has entirely moved into the place poems used to be. One is living it, isn’t one.

.

39 Rosary Gardens, London SW7, out the back window

(jottings to myself)

9:10 a.m. or so

Have no idea what writing will come. I am too deep in the middle of a sleep-deprived recall - on Kings Rd @ the 'stockpot' - slavic-women-run 'simple' restaurant where I just wolfed down a complete English brkfst -- too much -- too fast. Walking in a mostly but not entirely awake semi-stupor - but oddly (as in a dream) sure-footed -- out of Gloucester Road tube into instantly almost shockingly familiar London. I can't get over how many 'things' - car dealership, restaurants, food shops - haven't changed - some (like the 'star of india,' my first indian restaurant good heavens - down the road from my first gay bar) not since 1971. Can't get into my room at Aston's yet (which won't have a balcony but somehow I look forward to its cocoon, esp. today) until noon. Meanwhile: Neville Terrace, Onslow Gardens - South Ken turning into Chelsea - as excruciatingly pretty & settled as ever - after this I'll walk to the Thos. More church and the river - Cheyney Ct. and Henry James. Cool/warm damp pleasant not rainy, exactly as overcast as my dream of it. Then S-L-O-W-L-Y will track back up towards South Ken & dip a bit into the V&A. But I will need to lie down somewhere soon. Rush-hour tube train ride from Heathrow absolutely SILENT. Forgot how quiet Londoners are en (that kind of) masse. Actually surprised to see a lot of "English" (stereotypically so - blond, pale, appealingly pasty) people in London -- wasn't expecting it. It really is stamped with itself, this place. Walking down Old Church Street, past what had been the Eden House Hotel Richard & I stayed at 25 years or so ago -- it's astonishingly THERE, in situ. Flowers sold on the corner, just as back then.

================

3-ish

in my room now. They 'upgraded' me to a double room because they couldn't get me a balcony room ("they" - a pretty blonde girl who happened to be at the desk) - and I like it. Brit TV on whilst I napped -- now need to struggle back up & out & make a sort of more waking mark on the place, shake myself into gaping, stimulate myself into stark fatigue again, so I can sleep tonight (which will be easy to do -- shake myself into gaping anyway) --

this after that dip into a harrowingly over-gorgeous V&A -- god, it's one thing to see all that English self-glorification at the Met, but whoa - HERE - again -- well, talk about The Thing Itself. Compulsively endless. Really almost frightening -- this after a long moment spent in an entirely empty St. Lukes (on Sydney Street; I know it from an AA meeting I went to in its prodigious back last time I was here: morning meeting - will probably go to it tomorrow, not least just to be in that building again) in Chelsea - one of the first gothic revival (1824) churches in London -- golden Bath stone fucking cathedral of a place -- nothing in the USA built in the 1820s is anywhere near as grand: again: the empire insisting on itself almost offhandedly -- just because it could - but (because of the 1820s) with grace. Dickens got married there I think. Oh, I know this is just 'stuff' -- but it's all in some sort of swoony marvelous almost slightly scary dream: not least a product of my physical state. But I really am loving it. Took a phone-photo of the swatch of 'garden' - presumably the one after which Rosary Gardens is named - out my window. here it is.

much to come, but/and am gladly staying to my determination simply to "be" here. I forgot I hae a little kitchenette in this place -- will go out & get little overly fussy british snacks & stuff.

'poems'? maybe this is a proto-one. drawings? we shall see.

Like Any Life, and London-Town

You pack – and pare – repack –
and something rare and wondrous
whacks your psychic seat:
the neat unutterably sleek swift
kick of recognition that the packing
and the paring actually do bespeak

exactly where and what and how
you now have learned to live:
excess off the shelf – sifted through
the sieve. You know more surely
what you have to give: yourself –
all shorn and unadorned. Ascend

the ramp into the plane and look:
miracles abound! And something
else astounds. Your narrative’s
alive and walking round. Like
any life, and London-town, you
cannot speed it up or slow it down.

.

A Possible Sufficiency

Such passion in resentment! –
such kick in vitriol! –
perversely sweet contentment
in swallowing it all

and spitting back vituperative
blasts of sharp retorts –
who cares about recuperative
peace?; to storm the forts

of huffy egotism,
pretentious wannabe’s,
while savoring the schism
that brings them to their knees,

comprises such proficiency
in viciousness: a state
of possible sufficiency
to muffle your self-hate.

.

Zeitgeist Hair

Sweaty twenty-something
punk meets art nouveau –
in and out of a transgressive bed –

the site of the enactment
of erotically perverse proclivities
better left unsaid;

but wait: the artful mussed-and-wild
bespeaks, as well, the child,
rubbing puffy eyes –

up from a nap –
reluctantly pulled off
a warm and musky lap;

and there’s the beast one sees
(one hopes, sans fleas),
nuzzling, grizzled, fuzzy,

disingenuously unconcerned
with its rough fur,
abruptly teased;

and most of all
the scary imminence of childhood’s
fall: invoking sexy adolescent mess

whose ruse of randomness
consists in the deployment
of a mousse.

Voluptuously,
slyly
loose.

.

Sleep, Recently

Sleep, recently,
has been like
scrabbling in a cave –

grabbing at the waists
and swatting asses
of small misbehaving

demons – scrawny
gremlins, proto-ogres –
stealing when I can

into a murky corner
to inhale its heavy mist –
to lose resistant bits

of consciousness –
until I’m kicked again into
a shallower cognition

by some final squiggling
green-eyed sprite –
whose tiny

sharp repeating bite
informs me
I am done with night.

.

On Hearing That Someone You Knew Died

Some gallantry is what you’d dare
to hope for first –
here or there, no matter where –
that it might bear
the gently bursting air –
the generosity – of something
graciously alert – concerned –

though with enough
cool distance to insure
whatever prepossessing breath –
detachment – wisdom – were
required to assess the larger view.
A mild availability and receptivity
and firm consistency,

you’d hope, might so comprise
the tone – that of the sort
of softly reassuring sighing lullaby
you’d want to overhear
a mother sing to some already
sleeping child – that it would quiet
every tremble, trepidation

at the prospect of the wild
and savage truer nature of what you,
alas, at last, are sure
we have to face instead.
There may be Paradise
for an Eternal Life –
but there’s no heaven for the dead.

.

Wouldn’t Want to Scare You

Fortunate you aren’t told much
at the outset what you’ll have to do
to re-construe yourself into a viability –

the craft you’ll have to master to produce
an instrument as true to your peculiar
spangled depths and curves and paths

and hints – angles, tints and traits –
as you can make from tools you’ll also
have to make. Surely a mistake to tell you

too much of the fortitude and disrepute
and aptitude for bearing next to
an intolerable incapacity to get it right

that you will need to cultivate to fight
your way to any kind of equanimity:
the keen-aged surgically precise

necessities of knife and tincture, blade
and hook that you will need to cook
and slice and splice and spice a life.

Better not elucidate the rife inevitably
killing fates that lurk ahead to dare
you. Wouldn’t want to scare you.

.

Deep in Daylight

It’s as if – now

that you know
just where
the wormhole
to the cavern is

for sleep –
your mind
cannot now
not go back there –
deep in daylight:

it’s as if to breathe
that rare infinitude
of air is now
your one
imaginable prayer –

for whose
sweet invocation
you must
kneel down
wide-eyed –

waking, breaking
through the inner
night to its
extinguishing
illuminating light.

Here’s the sphere:
to have it
all ways:
be both there
and here.

.

Avant le Deluge

Your dinosaur refrigerator
is unplugged; begins
its slow defrosting melt.

Proportionately you are melting too:
deliquescing – beckoning the flood
you’ve sucked up and subjected

over eons to a freeze: blood and breath:
the mud, ice, barnacles
of psyche seize and weigh you down –

drop in dollops toward a death:
the slew of fluid-y accoutrements
that life applies and now

is slowly wiping off: agglomerated
imprimaturs: been here, done that,
don’t know much, however.

Given all one’s stamps and proofs

of purchase and endeavor
(peeling off as one

defrosts), one plausibly

might have expected not
to feel so lost.

.

The Fine Slew of Askew

He straddles all with supine grace –
this fairy lying on a thread –
nonchalant – upending space –
as lightly as if spreading bread

with jalapeno peppers:
“OW!” he hears beyond the scrim
of his anointed fairy slippers –
unconcerned which her or him

he’s just exasperated.
Soon it will be me or you
he’ll toxify – leave macerated
in his fine Slew of Askew.

.

The Single Law

In intimate recurrent epochs
of bloom and decay,
you ride your body’s pyrotechnics,
blood-warm pump and sway:

you rot a bit – resuscitate –
and lumber on, bemused –
you sweat and eat and defecate:
no instinct is refused.

Coin your maxims as you can –
philosophies all fool.
The single law of woman, man:
biology will rule.

.

Cold Rain, November Afternoon

It’s less the heart of darkness
than a darkness in the heart:

unfathomably pregnable –
impregnably apart.























.

There Are Times

There are times when he thinks
he’s survived all the brinks,
navigated the edges,
climbed back from the ledges,

discovered that he
had the power to flee,
and back off from the crude,
to a sweet quietude –

to gaze out at the sky
with an unwary eye,
and look down at his toes
in unruffled repose.

And then there are times
when absolutely nothing goddamned rhymes
and right now he’s not in the mood to tell you about them.

.

On It Not Being November 23rd Yet

The prospect is its own reward
(they say) – but I deny
the wait, as my wide eyes look toward
the evening I defy

the odds and fly to London: “then”?
As vivid and as clear
as “now”! – as “there” appends to “when”
and meshes into “here.”

Like a burst of wild confetti,
time refuses to align –
pushes, muscular and sweaty,
back: upends the old design –

balking at the thought that Future
has to happen last –
perfectly content to suture
Present to the Past;

miss me while I’m here, my pup –
greet me when I’m gone:
I’m in London! Bottom’s up! –
gone to bed at dawn.

.

Two Notes to the Great Beyond

1

Forgive me Father
for I have binged
on your recuperative
ministrations.
Forgive me Mother
for I must peel
off every swaddling
cloth with which
you sought to heal me.

Forgive me, sweet
Infinity, for I have
gorged on every
root and route
I find that you
have forged. Forgive
my spiny wonder,
shiny fun from this,
your tiny son.


2

So a man walks up to a stranger
on West 72nd Street and asks him:
“Have you ever been to California?”
“No,” the stranger says.

“Well,” the man continues,
“from what you’ve heard of it,
you think I should go?”

“Sure,” the stranger says.

So the man buys a plane ticket
and leaves that very day.

And everything turns out
the way it would have anyway.

.

This Gift

Who imagined this would play?
Soft grace note to the day –

so skillfully performed –
no doubt it is November, warmed –

it doesn’t make believe it’s Spring
or any other untoward thing –

it’s dark at four, tree leaves are yellow –
soon to breed the dead brown mellow

mulch that Winter always wrings from Fall –
it isn’t May or June at all –

but feel the full balm of its 68 degrees –
enough to bring you to your knees:

this honeyed magic little lift –
this gift.

.

3:33

Here you are again, as faithful
to the muse as you can be.
You’ve taken off your shoes –
(ahh!) – review, anew, the calculable

constancy of speed three-thirty-three’s
November light pursues to plummet
into night. It’s gotten harder
to bend over to untie those shoes,

by the way. It’s gotten harder
to remain awake throughout the day.
But there’s that happy lunatic –
on cue – who shoos you on another

loopy ride – careening on this
quatrain to his crazy holy land inside.
He won’t abide your “but.”
He could give a you-know-what.

.