Some Embryonic Thoughts

Some embryonic thoughts crouch
overgrown and hirsute, bundled in a fragile
egg sac in the mind, befuddled, huddled
in that furry bind already shorn of hope
if not of hair that they will ever find
the unimpeded air: too wrapped already
in too many erring bands of over-qualifying

strands to ever know the frank sensation
of the soft embrace of atmosphere on more
than just a swatch of unencumbered
hand or foot or face. No wonder they look
so forlorn – watching as so many other
naked fresh assertive hunches take
their place in bunches to be born.

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The Trinity of Me

That there were three of us
became apparent
all too soon: at first a sort
of existential burp
produced a swooning eely
flying yellow lavender-
delineated whoosh whose
curiosity about the rest

of what emerged –
a surging head-winged
red-and-orange humanoid
transfixed by a voluptuously
greenish-bluish sleek
amphibian – is what
enlivened to extravagance
my bright abrupt eruptive

understanding that I was,
at least, split into three:
and that there might indeed
somewhere (so far in secrecy)
be many more of me:
spinning in a waltz into
an endless loopy spree.
Surely this revolving

trifurcated multi-colored “me”
was something we
would soon awaken from:
a dreamy altered state
of passing temporality:
but I am still its trio, dancing
round and round with brio –
apparently eternally.

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She’s Okay With That

She doesn’t wonder,
though she sees you do,
how she could represent
the current state of soul
in you: she rather likes it
in her lightweight pen,
an airy circularly meshed

container she can fill with
the prodigious quantity
of her not inconsiderable
acumen: un-used, held in,
and therefore plumping
out her form like fat.
But she’s okay with that.

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Everything At Once

Thick precipitation flicks and sticks and tricks, festoons
the day today: hops – dances deftly all along whatever liminality
keeps it what weather pundits call a “wintry mix”: alluringly
unknowable, it plops and shoots and splinters into undecided

hybrid quizzes: jagged lusty daughters, sons of ice and snow
and slush and other unexampled forms of nearly frozen water:
cold as a calamity outside! – though looks as beautiful as
a kaleidoscope clip-cutting metamorphic shards: now into naked

creatures prancing through the branches: lady’s on the top,
man on the bottom, gazing at you through the freeze, adhering
to the brick of New York City with which they have clear
particular affinity: you’re honored to be in their nude and graceful

dangerous vicinity: remaining, with them, neither solid, gas
nor liquid; nap, and dream that February’s having sex
while God plays baseball – watch! the batter swings and bunts!

As usual, the Universe is daring to be everything at once.

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Thoughts Today

Thoughts today come like a fractured kiddy story –
issuing as if from some balloon-shaped silly hat
plugged on a silly head be-sprouting eight lit
multicolored light bulbs scribbled over with eight
random silly ooh’s and ah’s and smiles and frowns

attesting to the random ups and curves and downs
and any of whatever else makes up the rounds
to which a waking dream will swerve: speeding
from the senseless to the twee with rude irregularity
though hinting, maybe (count those bulbs again),

at meanings of the numerology of eight – or (add
the head and hat) of ten. However, when one does
the math, one finds oneself still wet and drowning
in a bubble bath of light bulbs on a hat, and scribbles
that quite clearly don’t add up to either this or that.

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Not If, But When

The prestidigitating god of change in February
seems so oddly out of whack: so many lame
impracticalities beset this mostly mum unfunny

joker, it’s a wonder Winter ever goes or Spring
comes back: innumerable embryonic fingers
and a slew of booted toes all twiddle, prod and tap

to no avail that we can see; the constancy
with which he seems to do quite nothing interesting
at all is, it is true, not helped by his appalling taste

in hue and shirts and pants and hats: random bits
of thisses, that’s – stretches, dots and stripes
of purple, blue and orange, pink and green and red

be-whirl into a splay before our blinking eyes
which will have bled into a dreary gray before we’ve
had a moment to surmise his questionable prize.

Otherwise he sits – perhaps a touch less clown
than Pharaoh – steadily looks forward, almost Zen.
And somehow tells us Spring’s not if, but when.

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The Grandest February

Late winter vagaries of gray – assonant gradations
through the octaves, black to white – the dove-soft
warm enchanting way you, through them, with them,

guess, today, what may be form or empty space –
molded and eroded by the welcome
and involuntary floods of your imaginings –

a drenching sense of curves and shadows
which appear to scribe and sculpt
a harmony, more like the swells

of an illumination from a sourceless light
than anything that could be tended by
vocabulary: yet you write. You almost recollect

the soft eruption of a consciousness
that comes – just as your barber (tenderly
administering your new buzz cut) –

proud new father! – said, today, was coming
to his infant son – just three months old:
tracking sights and sounds – following Existence

with his eyes – everything a bright bewildering surprise.
Not to notice things is an unpardonable sin.
This is the grandest February there has ever been.

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Outlined in Black

Outlined in black – pink, purple, blue –
nothing is implied by white, and most of her
is white, and here you are inveigling
her nonentity into relationship with you –

angelically, perhaps, she’s singing – or she’s
crying – or she’s yelling at the emptiness –
from emptiness: a silence swelling

over, out of, into nothing. You’ve left out all

her stuffing. And yet she has a kind of crack
and class – a smack of something slightly sweet
and crisp and well-behaved: the sort of muse
who, once she’s slaved her way into

your heart and mind, might find a way
to help you contemplate your final act – and art –

your Phoenixhood – aroused state of being
arising like that famed and fabulous bird,

reborn from the ashes of all earlier lives.
Something like this gapes and flutters, strives
in you – silent, beseeching, a void, cartoon view –
outlined in black – pink, purple, blue.

.

Now You Know

Naked and misshapen
and attracted to the color blue,
your spirit’s bumbled out today

to offer its inimitable brew –
decided to afford you

an abrupt unprecedented view
of its ungainly innocence – and tiny ass
and endless thighs and shins and calves.
It has a fetishistic thing, you’ll see,

for sapphires, but
let’s let that pass.

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Oh, Sweet Defense!

Oh, sweet defense! – you splendid, endless root! –
as tough as any tuber in the ground – but full
of firm concern – proprietary grip – a kind of kindness –
looking out for us with burning certainty,
an absoluteness so complete it breeds the luxury

of absentmindedness: what is there, with you around,
to worry over, think about, remember? How sweetly
thick you are! Protecting like a vast protuberance
of scar. You preach the safety of your stasis.
And how we cling, each to the other, on that basis!

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Your Funhouse Mirror Heart

Balance is as balance will
insist upon itself:
though you may think it looks bizarre,
it thinks it’s something else.

So if the right grows twice as large –
and left has shrunk to half –
allow your funhouse mirror heart
to love the thing and laugh.

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Today he drew a portrait of his pain.

Synthetic architecture – six connecting rods
implied inside a fat and bending tube of round
stiff pore-less vinyl flesh, revealing only at those
junctures where a curve had had to be assayed:

each sway and swerve, each change in route of which
exacts a brute resistant flush: abrupt insistent blush –
and stain – of pink, touched with a rabid yellow.
Suggests the sort of inward strain which were it

outside of this thick insensible un-breathing form
would bellow. Violently silent, here. Unseen within,
a queer dark airless spin holds all the Universe
at bay. He goes through every day this way.

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Pianississimo

Flakes of February snow
know

they’re midway through another winter’s show –
seasonally understanding soon their species has to go.

Glow
is tinged with woe –

precipitation promulgates a poignancy:
but something rises in it, some soft subtle buoyancy:

as if all strictures set by time
were in this February clime

released, to set us free –
and what we thought was history

were able to come back.
What once was lack

would magically refill –
and rapturously rupture: spill

voluptuously over
into all the recollected clover –

all the wild summer wood –
of childhood:

remember when:
and there it would all be again.

Listen to midwinter snow.
Pianississimo.

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New York: February Hush

Some unseen being seethes –
you feel it stir the air –
perceptibly, it breathes –
emerges from its lair –

becomes the haunted daylight –
this soft and layered glow! –
and city skies grow gray-white –
summoning the snow –

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On Waking From a Dream of Conversing with Several Emerald Maggots

There may be certain thick somatic slow-downs in the hibernation
we unconsciously each deeply undergo in winter, but imagination
never sleeps or goes away –
it leaps, grows creepy, flows into the sway

of day- and night-dreams onto bright-lit secret psychic stages –
rages
hard against all lesser instincts and conventional parameters:
sinks and disinters –

beyond the range
of everything we’d ever breezily dismissed as strange –
the most unnerving plays and ways it can to grasp the hugely odd –
as if it thought that doing so might offer shocking evidence of God.

Because it never quite accomplishes this end,
we’re just bewildered by its catalogue of hiss and toot and bend,
implausibilities and mumbled also-ran’s –
the not-quite-there’s that turn a woman or a man’s

experience of consciousness into a vast and sticky mess –
miserably failing every self-imposed forced folly of a test –
promising illumination in its blast and blurt and quiver
that quite clearly it cannot deliver.

But ah, the Caravaggio dramatic light
and shadow on the sight
of all those eloquent green-jeweled bugs!
One sighs, and shrugs.

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My Parts of Speech and Me

Today New York’s decided
I should take varieties of rides:
ignited by this itemizing poem –

followed by a shot up through
her bowels in the subway
to the upper west side cat I tend –

upended by the wending
of a happily determined
Greenwich Village way

to breakfast with a friend –
beyond which lies the prospect
of attending dress rehearsal

of an opera up at Juilliard.
You’ll pardon this no-nonsense
stark array of plans ticked off

like entries on a shopping list
but maybe welcome my
(at last) blunt un-ironic use of “I.”

Feel free (though only for today)
to put an equals sign between
my parts of speech and me.

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Didn’t I

Somewhere in the rubble of what’s left of memory,
sleek pieces of your presence tried to coalesce
this afternoon: repair – revert to form from
utter evanescence – make you whole again.

But all that could arise that once aroused could not
assume more than a shoddy simulacrum
of your body and your essence and whatever else
it was that tied me to the pole – lashed me to the mast

like brash Odysseus so he would not jump in
to join the Sirens and their Song: give them his soul.
Ah, but I jumped in, didn’t I. The rope was loose,
and I’m a dope. I didn’t die. I wonder why.

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The Hang of It

Not just the nose but consciousness
is dripping wet: it’s soaked up all
it can today – though finds no sway

of sense: no sensitivity distills
a congruent display, a singular extract –
instead: continuous soft gibberish:

a constant spatter of the disparate:
the hums, perhaps, of ghostly cosmic
gamma rays, unceasing echoes

of the nemesis of genesis: which
holds the secrets of beginnings, ends
in an eternally imponderable ecstasy:

sometimes you think you feel
and hear and taste – and even can
articulate – the haunting bang of it.

(Or maybe it’s your head cold.) Oh,
to say one irrefutably illuminating thing!
You can’t quite get the hang of it.

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Blanknesses

The snow is a perfectionist –
insists on replicating

intricately endless blankets
of itself – as if to broadcast

the reentry of an ancient
white confectionary wealth.

You huddle, quilted – warm,
indoors – head cold-sick,

pleasurably watching, feeling
blanknesses grow thick.

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A Kindred Kickass Inexplicability

for Jesse

Plants and I don’t get along, but Jesse gave me one
and somehow it’s surviving, even thriving: boosting from
its pot all muscular and thick and strong and broodingly alive,
ejaculating new tough glossy sprouts: each rude remorseless
baby leaf’s a thief: steals space, thrusts up and out,

insists on its existence – crudely barrels into just the sort
of business one imagines god was all about when he or it
or they or she had the audacity to wrangle matter out of energy.
Enigmatic magic, growth: wherein lies, how does it find, its lift?
Poems are a kindred kickass inexplicability, illicit gift.

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Tough Stuff to Discuss

I live and dream and write amid white noise –
murmuring TV and radio – mild blats
and burps of city life: an equipoise arises
from its woven hiss and chaos: which foments
the strangest choices – and rejoices in
the sharpest ambiguities that I can find: a balance
and a grind which turn whatever I am thinking

into an obliquity of fickle angles: forming
toothless snakes emitting bubbles, plus
solutions to varieties of other troubles – shattering
kaleidoscopically within and out and back
into the spinning thing that is my mind.
Though by the time I’ve done with any little
morsel of it, it’s become its own peculiar being:

pursues its opportunities beyond whatever
I may see, or have been seeing, which allegedly
effected its creation. Its pesky little egoistic “I”
will soon have sped its way away from “we” –
and any other obligation: it and we and I are
enigmatic history. Tough stuff to discuss.

No wonder no one quite knows how to talk to us.

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My Astonished Stomach

The cold crisp roughage I just had for dinner – to which
my astonished stomach must be now attempting
to accustom itself – was a bright refreshing tasty interesting
alternative to creamy comfort food’s warm pap: no buttered
noodles here, no fat to pad the lap – but celery and salsa
and Bosc pear: the first to scoop the second and the third
to offer respite from the bite of spicy pepper with a bit of sweet:

its bare mélange snapped, crackled, popped a summer
moment into February: treated me to the forgotten fresh quick
bitten cold experience off just-cut edibility: propagatingly
alive. Winter wind assiduously laminates the city’s icy hive
outside – the night congeals; the freeze could kill. But, warm
inside, I’ve just enjoyed a gustatory chill. Soon, however,
acid reflux will commence, and I shall have to take a pill.

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Happiness

There is, strung randomly across
the barren edgy arms of winter trees in me,
the thinnest tattered linearity, a ragged
flapping sentience which absorbs the freeze

and buffeting of glaring heatless
February sun, soaks up the suffering in its red
silent screaming as it sets – witnesses
how this begets the onset of indifferent night:

there is in this deteriorating light,
and in this shredded silk thread’s vacillating –
alternately limp and tight – attention to it,
the profoundest gladness and delight.

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Thank God That’s Done

The ways you prodded, poked, provoked, cajoled and teased
your consciousness into varieties of loopy understandings
and succumbings: their peculiar brandings of the heart
and flesh and psyche, the rewiring of requiring,
the beguiling of the mind into the styling

of new aptitudes for squalor,
the propensity for pallor
and decrepitude – all

the relentlessly

repetitive

ineptitudes


of having


“fun” –

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Goop

It’s as if whatever’s inner
wants to have itself for dinner –
swallowing its sharp unease
like a mush of black-eyed peas

strained and thickened into soup –
overcooked, to make a goop
that blunts all color, texture, edge
which lately had it at the ledge

about to jump.

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For Your Safety

There is a jungle beast in me who climbs
and leaps and drapes his insolently lithe
and slinky body from the vines and branches
of his favorite secret jungle trees –

part leopard’s grace, part cunning ape –
he grows in deviousness and agility
and strength – becoming bolder in precise
proportion to my growing older: as I age

he prowls less patiently around my rib cage –
incrementally increasing his frustrated rage:
such dark ferocities glide out of his
hot heart that anyone who saw me walking

down an avenue who knew would call a cop.
Wise move on that observer’s part.
Who knows how long before, abruptly,
he erupts. I’d encourage you to lock us up.

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Large Significances

The axis of your consciousness alarms today:
dips deeply left – tremblingly revolves
around a hot loose buttery dark current

running through its wobbling diagonal –
randomly electrified with jolts of coruscating
bits and bolts and scraps and shimmery

sharp shards of memory in semi-visuals:
a bit of iridescent ear, a testicle, a lower lip,
a stretch of glossy hair – a sense in which

you’re here and there – not knowing or much
caring whether there or here is there or here:
a limbo in which, now, a cartoon chartreuse

day-glo bimbo juts her large significances at you
while a giant azure avatar grabs at her, plops
her on his pile of shoulders and goes off into

a black hole jar of marmalade – the hue
of whose jeweled orange bitter-sweetness
seems intently bent on symbolizing something

crucially abstract. The shell of who or what
you may have been or tried to be before you slept
exactly not at all last night has cracked.

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Watch Another Episode

Watch enough police procedurals on television
and the bland benignity of most of life begins to drip
away – to slip through apertures all lubricated with
a murdered human being’s blood: everything is DNA –

betrayed by every shred and bit and morsel in the flood
and splay and spectrum of the flesh: demons lurk

in semen: follicles are diabolical – and you will never spit

into the bathroom sink again without believing you are

somehow tendering your essence and identity to those
inevitably prying dour forensic snoopers – gorgeous
women, men who coolly primp, parade their sexy bodies
in Las Vegas or Miami or Manhattan’s lurid midnight

light entirely to apprehend such fetishistic secretive
degenerates as you. Take your cue: lock your door:
reassure yourself there won’t be any more: be strong.

But watch another episode and know you’re wrong.

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