Mother of the Other

Malleably mild:
part bunny-rabbit-puppy,
plush toy, cartoon child –
all make an iconography

of ache – seek safety
through the vulnerable
mute appeal of “cute” –
which masks a vast

far more acute enigma;
the Mother of the Other –
the repertoire of alter-egos
that comprise your

specious unity – what
strikes you in this one
resides, entire, in the eyes:
their indecipherable focus.

No locus for a thought:
no thought to find.
There is no way
to know its mind.

.

The Way a Table Can

He wonders if
he wouldn’t rather
be a table than a man.

Some foursquare
solid piece of immobility
that unambiguously
makes a stand.

The way a table can.

.

Blatantly Unknowable

Achieving mental pixel density
with all the rash intensity
of an hallucination, the vision
won’t allow a single explanation.

Riven by the inarticulable sight –
driven to sit back and watch
the whole benighted brash
shenanigan incite another

inexplicable trajectory to billow
and unfold – you weigh what seem
to be your leading two alternatives:
one shy, one bold. Either

wait for it to go away; or pray
for it to stay. You might just like
to learn to live with something
blatantly unknowable today.

.

The Blubbered Year

Strange how, only days away from May,
the year’s already fat and swaying –
lumbering along not even halfway to its end,
already balancing and bending under all

the garish evidence and influence of its
accruing life: massively suspending every
lipid bit of an increasing bulk – a hulk
compacted out of four months of ennui

and love and lust and strife. Spring’s already
thick with it; Summer promises to be
insuperably slick with it – so heavy, hot
and wet with annum it-ness one must wonder

if the thing will ever shed into the fitness
which a Fall decrees. And yet the blubbered
year insists that it will wobble forward – up to,
through and past its last inevitable freeze.

.

Rehearse

Expect
more freedom

than you can
command –

and less
redress.

Expect supply
to lose relation

to demand.
Rehearse

the last
aloneness.

.

Getting What She Wanted

New York City’s Spring, today,
could not decide what truth to play:
the Marschallin from “Rosencavalier,”
a woman bravely setting free her youth? –
or Marie Antoinette in any of the many

narcissistic pets and fits of pique in her
career when things did not proceed
according to her plan. The rainy stealth
and ambiguity of ripening that April undergoes
have surely just a bit to do with something

like the craving for a younger man, or lolling
petulantly out of boredom with great wealth:
in fact, reflected quite precisely what
the city’s Spring already had proposed
should constitute the throes of this

apparently withholding moment of unfolding:
she was getting what she wanted. But, ah,
her formless grayness needed spice.
So New York City’s Spring decided
that it would be nice to kneel and lean

upon an ornate chair, half luminescent
opera, half history’s dark air, adorned
in greenish-blue, pretending to gaze
listlessly beyond her at the rainy April view,
which might well have included you.

.

Quite Swell

Today we think
that we shall be
so brilliantly
red-purple and so
malleably naked –

loosely and peculiarly
designed from
spine and thigh
and nose to abdomen
and pectoral and penis –

that if we decided
to emerge instead
of Venus on a half-shell,
we’d occasion celebration
of a new mythology:

conflating cloudy
heaven with alluring hell –
and all would be
unprecedentedly
quite swell.

.

Nocturnal Submission

Surely, now (oh God, you’re tired) –
your sleepy mind will be inspired
to find you some gemütlichkeit –
invest it in your dreams, tonight,

to summon innocent vignettes
that mix your sweetest tête-à-têtes
up into harmless entertainment.
So now explain the bent

and charmless zapping zoo
of aliens it’s brought you to –
in purple shirt, black overalls.
Whatever scripts this shit has balls.

.

Poem in a Thunder Storm

Plant yourself
right next to me,
Complexity.

Zap from branch to root
and back again –
don’t try for Zen.

Feel free to spike
the punch.
I’ve got a hunch

we’re meant
to be together.
Screw the weather.

.

What to Pin to Your Lapel

Ann Miller, Jimmy Cagney, Judy Garland –
and an aging contract player no one
seems to know (mustachioed) – decided

to burst forth today for you: to blossom
in a petaled retinue out of the filmic mist
to offer golden era blessings and a pep-talk,

too: put on a show! Arbitrary mix of movie
creatures, yes, but nonetheless with purpose:
exhorting you to surface from the shadows

and exert your quirky version of charisma
on the Universe’s soundstage. Fresh page!
Write a script – and play the leading

parts with all your many hearts. (Give
the contract player stuff to do as well.)
Pin their good-luck Hollywood to your lapel.



.

The Thing You Ride Your Life In

Serviceably jerry-built,
the thing you ride your life in –
lawn mower-motor-powered

wood-slat shed-cum-bed
on wheels adorned with two
huge blue and yellow feathers,

large green pillow and small
scraps of faded red fringed
velvet – manages with some

small dignified aplomb
to bump its way along
whatever path your feeble

grasp of math can calculate
for it and you. You haven’t
crashed it yet. But something

odd beyond your go-cart tugs –
more now than it normally does.
Felt invisibilities arrive,

confound and skew. Lately
you’ve been wondering
what you are driving through.

.

Strangely Faithful Constancy

Thought – arterially
offered from the heart –
proffered with intention
by the eyes – will bring
a blush, surprise
and grace to any face;

conversation can
command the boniest
of hands to gesture
with an unaccustomed
loveliness; the inarticulable
inward mess that used

to seethe ungovernably
may now suddenly
begin to breathe and loom
into the wholly human –
groping through whatever
reach of speech is possible

to beckon to, and find,
the strangely faithful
constancy of words

allowed to meet and take

a walk. The beauty
there can be in talk!

.

It Again

It wonders –
as what wouldn’t? –
why you regularly
shut the lid on it.

All it wants
to be is there.
Maybe let it
sit out in the air.

.

Whatever Comes of This

Today you are
an intricately solid
mass of chiseled
granite men, achieving
every necessary
bend upon which

sitting on each
other must depend:
insensate, stoic
and immobile,
as impermeably tough
as the idea of rock.

Today you’ll
weather any shock.
Today exactly nothing
is a mist. Today
you’ll be whatever
comes of this.

.

Paradigm of Glow

Two vagrant twists –
wrapping over there
and here – somehow

exonerate themselves
from charges
of asymmetry:

so forceful is the pull
of shape –
irreproducible identity.

Skin the singular
sweet fruit
and pop it into

your inimitable mouth
and taste it, sense its
paradigm of glow.

You’re an unforgettable
peeled grape to me,
you know.



.

Adieu, Mes Petits Chéris!

Poor abandoned talents! –
sighing in a daze –
fresh-cut crocuses
dying in a vase.

.

Seasoning

Profligacy!
Seasoning the flesh of me –
eruptive – with a sting:
seductive, playing Spring.

Flouncing ‘round all topless, pink
and butter-yellow: subtle stink
disseminating sex.
Blasts of pollen vex.

.

Absolution, Almost

Quadrilineal compartments –
separated by uncorresponding walls –
fall to you today as gratifying
metaphors for thought.
Today you’ve bought the structure
with its lovely starts and stops:

the geometric architecture
of beginnings and their ends.
Today there are no bends of ambiguity
at all. Temperament informs itself
exactly what it wants and feels
and thinks. Tonight it eats and drinks

with all the absolution certainty
can grant: a sturdy plant –
corrective to all vaporously
enigmatic dolor. That is, of course,
if one ignores the inexplicably
ubiquitously glowing color.

.

The Whole Fruit Bowl

You used to favor certain seasons – falling for
the powerful delusion that each year described
self-evident gradations of a plenitude and emptiness –
inarguable, surely, that it waned and waxed –
and there were therefore perfectly good reasons
not to like, or like, the light or dark, or brown or green,

or cold or hot. But you relaxed. All strike you now
as equal necessary dancing vagaries of procreation:
continuous and endless involutions in the alternately
loose/tight evolution of the fight and flight of life.
All of which suggests, to you, a new and lurid fruit:
a mango/pear/pineapple/citron/eggplant/peach

whose shape, chromatic range and species-reach

invoke the bursting Summer in its oranges and golds;
the poignant Autumn in its purple-browny molds; greeny-
yellow fringes of the Spring; tinges of the Winter:
chilly bluish vapors splintering against the florid skin.
Every moment is the goal – the whole fruit bowl.

.

Träumerei

I was an ergonomically
sophisticated rocking chair –
you were a writing table
with a built-in two-bulbed light.

I dreamed we dreamed we both
became the furniture in someone’s
small apartment late last night.

I rocked, and you lit up your spine
as we both waited for someone
to take a load off on my lap,
contrive a sonnet on your flat
and patient back, but no one came.

Persisting in our strange
intractable positions
we’d begun to run the risk
of turning permanently lame.

And then we heard a key
turn in a lock, followed by
a faint hiccup. Then we woke up.

.

How I Want To Go

Float in bubbles,
globules, globes
of loose translucence
nobody can name.

This may not be
quite the fame
you had in mind, but oh! –
it’s lovely, isn’t it?

If you took
a whizz in it,
nobody
would know.

Another golden
stream would
simply flow
into the glow.

At the end,
this is how
I want
to go.

.

The Thing You Are

Something inside presses out –
doubt makes way for a somatic
certainty: some funkily persistent
lump too long suppressed:

the megalomania of the flesh
insists you notice it is always
center stage: pleads with you
to feel it, scrawl it in your blood

and sweat – bring body to
the poem on the page. Persisting
in the folly of convincing you
you’re really here, muscle, skin

and pelt decide they must be felt.
To hell with fear. A blundering
emergence: sensuality survives.
The thing you are arrives.

.

The Next Day

Grief will
sometimes dress
in party colors,
wear a silly mask.

Tries to look
like happiness.
Can’t achieve
the task.

.

Rhyme & Reason

I can’t tell if you’re looking
or you’re thinking.

Something’s always cooking
in you – blinking,
going on.

Doesn't seem like dawn.

.

Now, For You

Now, for you, a sudden
odd companionship –
with its affectionate
and subtle grip –
this poignant bliss you feel
embracing, petting,
nudging and caressing you

in fluid liminality –
a rambling ghost
that coasts along
your brow, ears, eyes and lips –
a sweetness, after all,
which slips you out, away,
so you can stand to be

right here: a current
in the air: you needn’t
fear or fret. Today you took
an elderly and weakly
wobbling cat out to the vet.
His caterwauling
in the carrier reducing

to a mew quite broke
the heart in you.
But now, you hear,
they’ve given him a bath,
and feline penicillin,
intravenous fluid,
and you’ll pick him up

before too long and bring him
home – he probably
won’t last. Ah! – that
is what this fairy flit is doing –
rubbing with soft urgency
against your cheek –
just like a cat.

.

Existential Spittle

The ghost-y thing
appears and peers
at me as if to see
what I will make of it.
Or more complacently,
it may not care. Maybe
all it wants to be is there.

And there – and here –
it is. Squirming round
irrelevant rug fragments
like a bit of fear left
over from a family repast:
an Easter dinner, maybe:
something following a fast.

Perhaps it wonders where
Lent went. I got a glimpse
today of where I used
to live when I was little.
A picture of the living room
my mother would,
for Easter, have addressed

with daffodils. I taste
an unaccountable remorse:
a bit of existential spittle.
Perhaps the squiggle
in the carpet fragments
came to grant me
an acquittal.

.

Special Effects

3-D glasses frame and bloat and supersede –
make a flat screen flame and float and shoot and bleed –
conjure, through frail plastic, scenes that flabbergast:
allow computer graphics an immeasurable license
to tart up and preen; erupt into sharp simulacra –

never quite as haunting as a plain organic human dream –
but which, for startled moments, can infuse imagination
with a sudden shocking surreality: apply the sort of paint job
frightened women of a certain age will sometimes use
as guise. Sadness lies in our contaminated eyes.

.

I Confess

Sensually and suggestively beguiles –
hinting at gratuitous heraldic ormolu
and other swelling self-indulgent wiles:
buried in them, still, the Englishman’s
baroque: Charles the Second’s era’s style:

Palladian geometry so choked with
savage curves you’ve got to swoon
a little at each swerve (Westminster Abbey’s
funerary monuments' ornately muscled
thighs: sighs and hidden hard-ons).

It’s darkly English, yes – this sinful-
seeming secrecy of an aesthetic inquiry
requires me to relish to the point of fetish
lapidary symmetries, looping over
into concave, convex sharply angled

cranny, nook and hole: invoking through
the mineral and animal and vegetable,
something like a heedless human soul.
In privacy my idle hand will turn to piracy:
command a purple pencil and demand

to swing into and on the inward body’s
ropes to squeeze each gland to cultivate
a flooding, damned and grand
hormonal intricately pulsing pressing
mess. I crave voluptuous excess.



.

No Longer Here

New York’s preliminary Spring creeps
tenuously out in very early April – as if sure

that spreading its soft lacework too precipitously
in the sudden wake of winter’s shadowed
shape will kill it. And so it sifts, alights and sits

bare, in a faint outline of pink and blue
and green: pale pastel at seventy degrees,
untrusting, sure this warmth is premature.

Its presence quietly calls glory from a distance –
but doesn’t last more than a whispered day or two –
before it’s flooded by preliminary Summer.

Perhaps it knows it never needed to feel fear.
But we can’t ask. It’s no longer here.

.

Half an Orchid, Half a Doe-Eyed Cobra

You didn’t think when you set out
that you’d set out to be your own odd
single species of uncertainty, but now,
here, these innumerable crazed and sober
eons of a living moment later, you’re

inimitable: half an orchid, half a doe-eyed
cobra: so in thrall to such a complex mix
of chromosomal and chromatic
cues and hues you ought to be on
someone’s nightly news – a creature

carnival bent on the public demonstration
of evolving random balance –
the epigenetic outcome of what varied
inner and external atmospheric enterprises,
good and ill, will choose when they’re

not looking, thinking, or care much about
the outcome. Evidently this is what is meant
to be, and though the doe-eyed cobra
orchid may be quirk and jerk, no one
can say you haven’t found your work.

.