The Larger Part of Him

The downs, the lifts, the burdens, gifts –
dark passions he regrets –
how interesting it might turn out
to care for them like pets.

Species from his secret zoo
allowed a bit of air –
the chance to sniff a whiff of here
and taste a tang of there –

might lend a tantalizing zing
to consciousness: a boost –
and give the larger part of him
a place, at last, to roost.

.

Goodnight Gracie

Find a scrap
and lisp
a whisper to it:
blither pap
and fill the gap:

blubber, bray,
inveigh,
and spray
a little spittle.
Pray.

.

Snake Head

You hadn’t ought to do this much –
lust for the limbic system’s touch –
pump out its thick hormonal rain –
allow its blunt reptilian brain

to scribble down its grunts and squeaks,
as ink turns blood red, dribbles, reeks
(forget nuanced poetic swill),
while fantasizing: fuck and kill.

.

Color Theory

Creeping, spying, turning back,
colors grump, connive their way –
navigating white and black,
purposefully shunning gray.

.

June Moon

Tonight the moon deserves
to rhyme with June:
your courtesan and hostess,

her tastes honed by the solstice,
she rashly, lavishly casts
all her grace and glow from cloud

to ground, her gentle giant appetites
unbound: a catholicity
of receptivity absorbs the sky

around her – everywhere her
treasure draws your eye:
there isn’t anything she wouldn’t do

for pleasure: she’d have you rue
whatever you won’t dare:
there is no grander measure

of a summer fare than she: look up
at her voluptuous pearled
transience and see.

.

The Deal

What is every moment
but a baptism by storm?
Fracturing the form
at least a little,
capturing what’s warm
and blasting it with cold –

bare and bold and terrible:
mining for the gold
of Soul, and finding it,
if only to appear
in unremembered dreams.
What is every moment

but a vast indifferent scheme
that makes you feel? –
thereby to co-create,
however inadvertently,
the real? That seems
to be the deal.

.

Discovering the Other

I’m what's True.
What are you?

.

What I Require

Hail the Goddess of the Jeweled and Dangling!
Tiptoe up her sloping iridescent shoulders
till she’s wrangled you into her coterie:

schooled you into knowing grace
inordinately steeped in lunacy
is quite the only way to go,
only thing to do and be.

Dawdle in her slew
of bling and see.

Then come
back and
talk to
me.

.

Another Way to Grieve

Memory is like a bas relief, incised –
idealized – coolly softened by
the passage of your past innumerable
lives: most too entirely forgotten
to be anything but foggy metaphor

for “heart”: soft erosion is what crafts
its lore, and art: long implosion
of whatever once was fashion makes,
creates its enigmatic style: passion
mutates: remnants of it while away

the endless afternoon. There’s a boon,
a beauty here you feel so intimately
that you almost cannot bear it. Dare it
to come back. Ha. It cannot leave.
Maybe it’s another way to grieve.

.

Exquisite Legacies

She sits, upright, aristocratic, prim –
and yet a touch Bohemian – skin faintly blue,
whilst airily dismissing you –
she’s heard it all before,

she longs for some long-gone great tide of mind:
some grandeur with which she can faintly
recollect she once was satisfied.
She swears to – wears – exquisite legacies with pride:

thinks she smells the spell of Ottoline Morrell,
breathes a subtle sigh for the Contesse de Noailles
and bids us pray, with Nadia Boulanger,
she’ll someday find that worthy protégé –

at least a hint of something that won’t bore.
She guards the door –
she is the one whom I implore
to like my little art.

She’d like to stop my every start.
She hasn’t any heart.
But that’s okay.
I do it anyway.

.

Cloud-Trees

In my psyche's garden grows a fluffed proliferating
pair of cloud-trees – siphoning the cream of dreams
into unending lightly obfuscating nearly weightless

blossoms – breathy schemes of pretty, puffed
uncertainties which lavish wafting qualifying clauses
through whatever clarities you think you ought

to make about effects and causes: little “I’m-not-sure’s”
to season and befog the putative pure cures
you’d otherwise convince me you’ve produced:

inducing blinking eyes of soft incomprehension where,
without my cloudlets’ intervention, you might once
have trapped me into brusquely nodding yes or no.

But now I fall back in a sweet blest flow of vast
parentheses of maybe, so-to-speak, and as-it-were:
a purr of openness – a blur, dissociative bliss whose

kiss is barely loud enough to register: forgiving
to the brink of senselessness: a lulling cloud allowed
to shroud all edge and joint. At last you have no point.

.

Woebegone Polygon

Triangles’ suffering is acute.
Their angles do not beckon in pursuit –

their sharp excruciating edges
too reliably wedge wedges

into intimacy: try being nice
and they will slice.

It’s never bliss
to kiss:

ow!
Nobody knows how.

.

Wish it Well, I’d Say

What if Fate’s effeminate,
frail, rangy, quiet, shy?
What if it looks nervously,
unknowing, at the sky?

Perhaps it has a marionette
resembling itself
to play out little scripts it’s kept
all piled on a shelf –

attempts to sort out this and that,
to see what it might do
in cases of catastrophe
and other things to rue.

.

Flutters and Bleeds

If everything comes from catastrophe,
which the latest cosmology tells us it does –
we being the leftover buzz from a bang

that continues to muzzle all hope
for reprieve from disasters like asteroids,
bigotry, gamma rays, ice ages, hatred,

volcanoes, the meaningless spilling
of blood, earthquake, terror, flood, landslide
and greed – among other inevitabilities

caused by some chronic insentient
dispassionate blast of indifferent stuff –
if everything works on the premise

that nothing is ever enough – that we’re
simply what happens to matter abandoned
for millions of eons (it breeds) – electrical

spasms that pass for vitality randomly
spewing out seeds – no wonder
the heart in you flutters and bleeds.

.

My Premier Alchemist

I call upon my premier
alchemist again – and hope
he won’t be as disturbed
as he was when I last
implored him to attend
to the perturbing business

of appending lines to paper
with his plume-y magic
pen: again I watch him
tend to his abstruse
hypotheses and learned
certainties supposed

to govern how to coax
his colors into heeding him,
sensitively frowning,
gauging every stage – but
still he cannot keep the lines
from floating off the page.

.

Voluptuous Weather We’re Having

Translucent shimmer –
middle June –
seems familiar –
as if soon

a grand return
will tumble forth –
reversing course
to the lascivious

beginning of eternity:
forever-after
spinning, burning
into visions

like some godly hoax –
tricks up some
divine cad’s sleeve –
teasing out mirages

of an Adam
and an Eve –
making them
engage in blatant

public pokes –
naughty private jokes.
Assumptions pop,
and eyeballs fog:

she’s about to get on top
and ride him like a dog.

Gorgeous day.
A bit risqué.

.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

Somewhere in the weedy lyrical luxuriance
of my Sargasso Sea exists my sexuality –
which swims as if it were a nymphet,
even though I am a man: amphibiously,
ambidextrously and indiscriminately under,

up, around, between the deeps and shallows
of the span of my eternally self-justifying
consciousness: she gathers evidence
against and for whatever fluid metaphor
my maleness tries to conjure up to rouse itself –

reporting to some lobster judge who weighs
each con and pro – a lobster judge who
sometimes quite ferociously commands a NO!
Lord knows the very notion of a lobster claw
effectively lays down the law to my most

pertinent appurtenance, and I retreat,
in every sense, back to the prison fence
beyond which I assure you I behave. But when
he nods a YES!, a coalescence of his favorite
burbling Caribbean currents comes to bless:

my nymphet leaps in ecstasy, delivering
the news to an increasingly tumescent me,
and all is, for the moment, swell. (Hell, the truth:
now the nymphet turns into a virile youth,
with whom I – well, don’t ask, don’t tell.)

.

The Atoms Family

Sing a song
to the irrational.
Stage a Bacchanalia
in an unsuspecting zoo.

Try to do what I don't do.
Discover there is nothing
in the Universe that isn’t literally
you.

.

Bloodwork

Something came up

in the scan of the particulars
that promulgate your flow which doesn’t

seem quite yet to bode disaster but which more
than likely warrants further looking-after – first we thought
it was an ordinary worker-sort-of-cell but, magnified

to greater size and studied past the usual short
scrutiny we generally bring to ordinary
things, we found, within a tiny

protein shell, the figure
of a little plasma
man, in shorts,

apparently mid-stretch
after a nap, but possibly, according,
anyway, to seven of the experts in the sorts

of pertinent minute phenomena with which the rest of us
had far less microbiological experience, the little man had not
evinced a yawn, but, rather more insistently, a scream.

It might, of course, have been our laser beam.
But that’s as far, so far, as we can go.
We thought you’d want to know.

.

Disingenuously Disingenuously

Obsequiousness came around to schmooze with me today.
It oozed, “pray, may I do so?” first, and thanked me too vociferously
when I said it could – trembling with more dizzy glee at prospects
of attending me than one had thought it should. It claimed

the deepest interest in my answer to the query: “how are you?” –
eyed me with a great intensity when I replied; praised me for
my taste and wit and talent for “the true;” drew a sigh at every syllable

I uttered as if each had been the tenet of a holy creed, and oh! –
agreed, agreed, agreed. It squatted, beaming, wouldn’t go. I asked it
what it wanted. It said it didn’t know. Poor obsequiousness.
Pretty pass. Disingenuously disingenuously kissing ass.

.

Suitor

Suitor, standing in the dark
peering into light –
shadows dress a form in black
garb another white.

Half in love with easeful death,
half with trembling life –
wavering, he wonders whom
he’d prefer as wife.

.

Grunting, Hunted, Blunt

Abrupt voluptuous
collision and collusion –
rude synapses snap –

the rabid bloom
of you fills
all the habitable
room in me.

Grunting, hunted, blunt:
I am a thing to do with
what you want.

.

Face It Naked And See

The sun has intimate relations
with the wind – makes protestations
it cannot rescind – for which
it’s passionately held to task:
behind the sweetly smiling mask
of early June resides an opportunist
amatory mass of hungry air,

aroused by Universe-inducing heat
to treat the globe as if it weren’t there –
the Earth, the sun, the atmosphere
a spinning and illusory confection
seeming to praise light, and Spring –
but in its vast collective heart
a soft and dark and wanton thing.

.

That Sweet Tiny Tickle

Reflecting on the past
is surely more inspecting
what has jockeyed
for position in the present:

recollections you’ve decided
have to last. A secret blitz
of all your stewing pleasant
and unpleasant bits,

tides of which continually
bubble, turn and mix inside
your psyche’s scalding
cauldron – as strange and hot

as any witch’s pot of brew –
will always deftly conjure up
what you will always swear
was true: precisely just

the fraction of the memory
of that sweet tiny tickle
of a lover’s body hair
that your opinion of yourself

can bear. You are
the gullibility and glory
of the fullness of the story
that you need to hear

and tell and know. And so:
you think again – back
when – and bleed and fear
and swell and grow.

.

In the Boudoir of a Raindrop

Towering and glowering beyond
my New York City window, clouds
indwell with prospects of a deluge:

peering out at them, I blink –
and in the visual equivalent
of “plink,” a sudden catapulting blue

imbues my inner lid-screen:
forms a little boudoir made of shower,
shooting up in which a small

spermatozoic-seeming globe of head
atop a little curving water-thread
looks straight into my liquid eye:

flatly staring at me leaning towards it,
waiting for a meaning. It seems
to want to stay. It hasn’t gone away.

.

When New York Sweats

Dank blanket of a haziness descends –
suspends most urges to go on –
slow swarm of its warm lazy entropy

insinuates its amplitude into each rude
vicissitude of everybody’s heavy flesh.
Nothing will again be fresh. Manhattan

is a wet immobile lunk: disseminating
funk. Today the garb and attitude
of perfumed sleek transvestite whore

that humid hot New York once wore
is no more. “She’s” inveterately “he”
today. That’s why you smell that way.

.

Shapes Appear, With Faces

Shapes appear, with faces –
when my eyes close their blinds –
resume their rightful places –
break through whatever binds

them up in mere potential –
ignored through waking day –
kept from their grand torrential
investigative play.

What they’ve got to do with me
eludes me, save the sense
that something in their lunacy
requires the recompense

of my complete attention:
as if they’re asking: “Who
will give us rapt suspension
of disbelief but you?”

.

The Thing That Sees

The thing that sees
has no desire to please,
appease or tease,

cause pain or entertain
quite any other gain
besides what may obtain

through its eyes’ exercise.
Why it sometimes cries
is the surprise.

.

Perhaps To Win, A Bit

Linear and curving, swerving in upon themselves,
thin keening little pitches poke and thread like
needlefish into a tangling meshed cacophony:

uncomfortably layered, over-rich – caught between
dimensions of the craving for an assonance –
a lullaby of cadence – and the jagged bloody steely-

fisted lust for dissonance: a blunt affronted blast
attesting to the injury of being here at all. Exhausted
or distracted, this long storm of chords will

sometimes fall then into gentler and more palatable
form: thicken, warm, begin a ropily baroque
excursion into tonal ambiguity that finally relents

in an “amen.” Timbre, color, texture only creep in then:
perhaps to win, a bit, against the long foregoing
strife. Harmonies take years to shape a life.

.

The Thing It Brings

Yet another head floats by –
as if to dignify the resolute
irresolution it’s determined
to apply: to fly as if it knew
the only way to know were
to personify: portray, in air,
today, the subtle way intransigent

uncertainty persists in seasoning
each thought: it is not doubt,
this floating head: no, it embodies
some much softer dread –
a private caution, half-refusal, half-
demurral in the face of going on.
But it goes on: look, here it comes!

Something in it not quite numbs:
stirs behind its fixed expression:
covert alarm exerts a sort of charm –
an ambiguity which almost
comforts as it stings. There is
no understanding possible
without the thing it brings.

.