The Instrument

You fiddle, croon
and swoon
the tune away –
imagining it’s up
to you to do.

The instrument’s
a thing you
think you play,
but actually it’s
playing you.







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Sunset

Sunset's like
an orange
fat man swinging
naked in the park

while a gray cat thinks
whatever gray cats
think at the onset
of the dark.








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Influence

Influence’s nature is to influence. Its confluence

of inferences courses in exactly like a tide

which sits astride you like a savior: Neptune
on a wave, encompassing the slew of you,

disseminating through – inseminating porous
surfaces to breed new inward constellations
of itself. It knows just how to manage
who you think you are so that you feel you’re

spinning round a star whose organizing gravity
has finally begun to make Existence tractable.
Then, having spun, you wane with it like mist –
its stains refrain, retract. This is its remaining fact.






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Crossing Her Legs

To drape one
off the other’s knee

so it drops –
lazy – vertically –

which presses
two expectant thighs

together into
tight surprise –

such thrilling
public privacy!:

sitting is by far
what she

enjoys above
all other arts

that conjugate
the lower parts.





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Un Peu de Folie

Comme c'est intéressant!

Nous sommes toujours
après ou avant.

translation:

http://translate.google.com/#fr|en|Un%20Peu%20de%20Folie%0A%0AComme%20c'est%20int%C3%A9ressant!%20%0ANous%20sommes%20toujours%20%0Aapr%C3%A8s%20ou%20avant.%0A

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To Pet It

Sometimes you see
a thing and want
to pet it.

It seems to have
to happen so
you let it.

You hope
you won’t
regret it.







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The Art of Exhaustion

To sink adroitly into it –
to part with conscious sentience
as completely as you can –
must surely offer

some illuminating chance
to gain at least
a glance –
a glimpse –

a tiny understanding –
of the lure
of what you’ll
blink at

in the darkness
of the final dive.
To think in that abyss –
be that exhausted and alive!

What might you
uncover
and bring back –
if you revive?





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He and He and He

Wherever he goes
go his alter-egos –
faltering and halting –
colorfully unprepared
for almost everywhere –

despite the care
they take to cover all
his bases. Too many
faces in the race
pretending to be one.

It isn’t any fun. He’s
singularly plural, caught
in intramural intrigue
with himself: out and in
and out of any league.

Mightily fatigued –
he and he and he
go on and on and on.
They sway a lot.
They weigh a lot.






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Art

The climate’s never good.
Little can survive.
Mating season lasts a blink.
Flicks of it contrive

to send a blip of spirit
through unavailing waves.
Privately
each craves

to be amphibious.
Few succeed.
But just today two bits of it
began to breathe! And breed.






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God

One daily task,
which he meets admirably,
is to populate the world.

He puffs his pipe
to summon up and breed
into and through its swirled

grey tendril-fumes
another bloom of progeny –
another panoply unfurled

into the void –
which doesn’t last. But part
of it will soon have squirreled

back to the heart
of things and feed the blast
inside his pipe bowl: cloak

blank space again
to stoke, evoke in floating ash
another Word Made Smoke.





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A Face

A face conveys
more light
than can be borne:

hovers – sways –
takes flight –

too torn

by what is luring it
to care much
where it’s been –

delights, incites:
to dare the soul
to sin –







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Pink and Blue

Pink intentions
sensually snuggle up
against each other

while long bands
of gluey blue anxieties
traverse their surface –

pursuing permutations
of joined purpose:
to allow the former

to align eternally;
permit the latter
to adhere infernally.

Blue-and-pink:
a linked endeavor.
Never sever.






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Unconscionably Far

Can’t get off so easy.
Behavior’s made you queasy.
Went the whole nine yards:
what you’ve become regards
itself as a mistake.

No break.
What’s done, you’ve done.

Not fun.

But contemplate:
beyond the obvious, investigate
the interest in your own excess –
find in it the strange success
of having been somewhere.
Dumb dare,

the thing you followed.
God knows what you swallowed.
Gone unconscionably far.

But here you are.





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Or, Perhaps, Prepare Yourself

Observed by anyone
who doesn’t share it,
nostalgia’s like an aging

lifeguard on the beach,
spray-can-tan, past his
prime, past the season,

past all reason bent on
bending time back to when
he was that grand youthful

man who ran things.
Easy to dismiss when
you don’t care; harder

when you catch yourself
intransigently kissing
bits of your own past.

Beware what lasts, what
won’t stop lasting – or,
perhaps, prepare yourself

to be in love with it
until you die. Any moral
here would be a lie.






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The Dendrite and the White Blood Cell

Some have
a darting grace –
amenity – intensity;

some have
a globular immensity –
serenity: these fat

and slender shapes
that take a bit
of human face

and float and dive
and sin and swim
and reconnoiter in

this New York City
quiet sweet September
spin of gentle

mind today.
What happens

when the dendrite meets

the white blood cell?
Today they get
along quite well.





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Now That I’ve Got Your Attention!

I know
what you’re thinking.
Poor turtle.

But ha!
I have got
your attention!

That
was the biggest
hurdle.








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Senseless and Defenseless

Maybe rhymes
will ring some chimes –
decode some
un-decoded paradigms –

and tell you
what on earth to say
about exactly what
you did today.








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My Amalgam Love of Loves

So when amalgamated Mickey Rooney/Andy Hardy tries
to start a life he goes where anybody would – Manhattan –
to which amalgamated Judy Garland/Betsy Booth (who boldly
and alarmingly insists in 1941 on getting older) also goes,
as usual, as his gold-plated Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer conscience,
even though the girl was popping uppers to get through the ballyhoo
of switching yet again into another humble siren of a moralistic
fable. Rooney was no Gable, but as Andy Hardy he could fake

a nascent little man – and Judy Garland, well, was Judy Garland
aching for a musical: the grandest art exonerating her young
country’s early 1940s heart was hers – but everybody, Mickey

Rooney, Judy Garland, Andy Hardy, Betsy Booth were cutting their

and our collective tooth on the amalgam loves of youth, writ large
on silver screens – purported pork-and-beans of mental health:
the wealth I took to New York City when I came to start a life myself:
handsomer than I could dare to understand – simply due

to being just another average twenty-four year-old gay man –
I drew to my intrepid chest the first of many self-defining tests –
the best for last, which is the vast enchantment and investment
of my full if dimly recollected past, which waltzes with me like
the meteorologically misty cast of every Judy-Mickey movie:
proving, it would seem, that what it takes to love a human being
can’t be learned from anyone at all. But I’m in love with my
amalgam love of loves, and I will love them till we fall.






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The Relation You Create to Dream the World

Arising from the depths –
ascending in the rhythms
of their own repeating breaths –
quiet paroxysms

of another needy thirst
in your enrapt imagination –
yearning to be first
again in the relation

you create to dream the world.
Something to distract –
keep the mind unfurled –
until another mirror’s cracked

to let in rude varieties of light –
whose bright collective mission renders
color into bits, with its audacious bite
of mixed perturbing genders

bending to attain a unity
outrageously embracing its division:
joining with impunity
to make its blunt revision.

Dreams, however non grata,
must pull another plum – zing
another zing: they gotta,
after all, do something.






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Je regrette tout.

Tastes
in clothes,
in hairstyles

and in pets –
in lovers,
and in furniture:

regrets!







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Sometimes It Seems

Sometimes it seems you can’t depend on friends.
Sometimes the way they sit there in the lap of your
imagination looking at you in bewilderment collectively
upends, forever after, any guarantees of reassurance
from them you may once have thought you could expect.

Sometimes the only speck of thing you seem to seem
to them is alien, and all they seem is very strange to you.
Sometimes the only certainty appears to be your
isolated point of view. Sometimes it seems that everything
ends in betrayal –  that innocence inevitably will be

crushed; that no portrayal of companionship seems more
than sentimentally corrupt. Sometimes it seems the darkness
must erupt. Sometimes it seems there is no willing woman,
willing man. Sometimes it seems you can’t depend
on friends. Sometimes, of course, it seems you can.






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Just Saying

The one who yells at God prefers his chili with chorizo
and a double blast of jalapeno – yet enjoys post-prandially
mild conversation with the blandest bit of something afterwards:
perhaps a small vanilla custard with a slice or two of peach.
He used to play harmonica professionally; now he likes to teach.

The one who doesn’t yell at God consorts in secret, sneaking,
late at night, into the dunes of an unnamed Long Island beach
with a vain and lovely Guatemalan hottie who, although he’s fat,
inspires him to sexually acrobatic excess – quite beyond belief.
When done, she smokes a cigarette, he eats corned beef.






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A Bit Against the Grain

It’s nice
to have a friend
to sit with in the rain –

who likes it
just as gray and wet
as you do.

A friend a bit
against the grain
perhaps – oh, not

just anyone
to bump into,
but someone who

regards the spectacle
of you as something
of a big to-do,

which is,
regarding him,
what you think too.







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What Mother Nature’s Daughter Muttered

Mother Nature knew as soon as she had sprung
the thing from its cocoon that she had conjured something
special: the sensitively prescient essence of a better sort
of a female homo sapiens caught in the body of a jellyfish,

whose bluish soft translucence took the languid shape
of baby shark: whose skin was porously amphibian –
breathed air as readily as water: as light as any lark must be
to take to flight: quite as strong and fluid and intelligent

as any daughter ought to be, if it should come to that,
and one day, Mother Nature knew, it would precisely come
to that, when it was time to loose her daughter’s graceful
species on the world to rule. But she would have to wait until

the place had lost its last ignoble bungling human fool –
for when that primate race had sped to what inevitably
seemed a mad careening towards its death. Mother Nature’s
daughter muttered: “Mom – don’t hold your breath.”






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Physical Bodies are Strange

Physical bodies are strange –
with their compulsive narrow range
of interests: as if the greatest good
were to be strong as wood: whose
systems of connected pivots,
funnels, dowels, poles, windows,
doors are engineered to coalesce

and commandeer us into eating,
fucking, sleeping, pissing, jumping,
hiding, fighting wars – and other
willed departures and arrivals –
collaterally beneficial to the ardently
adhered-to chores of flesh insisting
on its own survival – which we take

on faith is “ours” – if by identity
we mean somatic autonomic blunt
persistence: the cleaving to another
living moment bodies seek
to foment beyond all. Though
language, love and soul may go,
bodies will stay to run the show.





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Beware the Thought that Wears a Crown

Beware
the thought
that wears a crown –
weighted down
with its regalia
and penumbra:

shadows pooling
to accrue to jeweled
confusions –
misconstrued allusions:
onanistic metaphysics
of the mind

wont to find
the scattered glimmers
of authoritative-seeming
dreaming: shimmers
of great celebrations
of itself –

full of oily guidance –
sliding into trance –
the roiling obfuscating
dance of ersatz
hierophants.
Don't think thoughts.

Or if you do,
tickle them
until they skew
so wildly ridiculously
they’ve a chance
of being true.






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Thoughtful Eyes

Thoughtful eyes at rest arrest –
persuasively to testify to that
old saw that eyes comprise
the Universe examining itself.
When they are calm, a balm in us

seems possible and palpable:
smoothing, soothing: reassurance
easily bestowed, accepted as
the glow expected from so infinite
a unity. They never bore –

no tedium, unfeeling intervention:
such sight invites ascension:
interest thrives in a peculiar soft
intensity that won’t let up –
as if we might remain alive

forever and enjoy it. Subversive
sweetness toys with every blink:
the old view sinks, another rises –
and surprises: rearranges
and creates and woos: makes

a new you out of me,
a new me out of you.






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The Large Magnificence Who Answers Questions

The latest mewling insignificance who’s come to ask
The Large Magnificence Who Answers Questions
for some guidance isn’t getting through to any view –
therefrom, therein, thereto – he’s traveled so far to pursue.

He’s long been sitting in the grand man’s lap while
the grand man takes what would appear to be an endlessly
concatenated nap. Sometimes, between the links of inhaled,
exhaled breath, he seems as if he might be on the brink,

at last, of exposition – of a  vast premonitory tale
which would anticipate whatever worrying conundrum
the interrogator’s brought. Such promise of commencement
soon, alas, is caught in the reprisal of the next wave

of his sleep. The latest mewling insignificance despairs
of ever hearing more of anything besides a snore.
He’d hoped he could go deep. But soon he’d have to creep
away and put his queries wearily back on the shelf.

He’d have to work them out himself. And so he did, and as
he did, or rather just a moment afterwards, the Large
Magnificence began to wake, and whisper: “Good!
Another question’s gone away. Another break.”





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