As If

Sometimes a face pops up
from nowhere – as if
to tell you that contentment
can be had at any price.

I say “as if” because
one always has to guess what
any face expresses.

Not that faces aren't precise.






.

Finding We Are Here

Finding we are here,
though not through any agency
we are aware we had exerted –

existentially deserted,
as it were –

why stir?

Too many curvilinearly
arbitrary possibilities
abound.

We’re thinking
we’ll just lie
around.






.

A Little Pull

There’s evidently
always room
for more.

Apparently
the mind’s menagerie
is never full.

But what decides
what gets to barrel
through the door?

Sometimes
I wish I had
a little pull.






.

How We Could Get Along

Massage my head.
Seduce it like a cello –
induce somatic music

in the hair and skin
and bone of it. Cajole
a sweet vibrato from

the chaos and the drone
of it. Console it like
it mattered more

than anyone could
say. We could get
along that way.







.

Sociology!

Epicene
epiphanies!

Specious
exegeses!

Windy words
exalting

the foregone!
Hoo-ha!

Kinda turns
me on.






.

The Musing Mind

The musing mind is never dark –
although it’s sometimes parked in dim
translucence – whose crème fraiche

palette soothes the eyes – the sort
from which an archetypal harlot’s hues
arise – which may then conjure up

the brick-pink Ghost of All Election Days
to Come – from which may well ensue
that gray-blue bold Walt Whitman Wind –

whose sum may fold the whole into another
spin – and spread – of luscious influence
than which there is no better butter

for the bread of thought. Rich but rarely
fraught – chaos in a cloud of cream.
More useful, really, than a dream.






.

Celadon

Days are glazed
in celadon –
impossible
to carve.

They have to eat 
their hours up.
Otherwise,
they’d starve.




.

Audition

Today I'll sit down
and personify
innumerable sighs

and innuendos:
screen a batch
of shades

of meaning –
leaning on them
until one evinces

some congruity:
lights a match to –
burns an edge on –

ambiguity.





.

Red Bull

Everybody
covets
energy –

sure
that it
will save.

But energy
is just
as wont

to rage
as to
behave.






.

Just Because It Wants You

Just because it wants you,
should you want it back?
Enchanting, being wanted –

it can fill a lack. Its beckoning
is existentially correct:
summoning your quantum

stuff to reconvene with its –
to bring both constellations
of your spritzing fritzing bits

into alignment – combining,
as you whirl and curl around,
into a single breathless aperçu.

You’re made up of what
it’s made up of: deathless
quark and gluon stew: through,

below, above you. Why pick
this or that – and not
the other – to make love to?





.

Beauty Tips

One oughtn’t overdo accessories.
A simple ribbon hanging down
or tying up the hair,
particularly when you’ve

not much there,
can prettily distract the eye –
insure the odd “oh my!”
from passersby.

Wake up your makeup:
delight with charcoal blushes
against white (looks best
against a yellow light).

Draw a line
along
each eyebrow:
black, and not too fine.

As for
clothes,
dispense
with those.

But be a little reckless:
wear a necklace –
maybe two. Once again,
don’t overdo.

You want the barest
tasteful beckoning
to prompt your inner Appaloosa
to pop out – and gallop through.




.

Oh,

Oh,
you did things all day –
you got a legal paper notarized –
paid a bill – exchanged a shirt

that wasn't large enough
for one that was – maneuvered
with not inconsiderable skill
into and out of sexual excitement –

ate a pound of grapes:
none of which is of much interest now.
You go through everything.
You know how.

All you feel is strange.
Survey the range.
Inarticulably queer.
You suppose you're – here.

.

Shostakovich, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Me

Shostakovich, Brahms,
Tchaikovsky evidently
wish beyond the grave

that I would play the violin
less gravely. When I bowed
their notes to them today,

they chided me: Scrap all
the urgency, they said,
don’t dread the music: sing.

To miss the delicacy –
to miss the innocence –
is to miss everything.





.

Cantilevering

Bewildered though I might
sometimes have been
at cantilevering
into the spin

of the colossally
conglomerate
catastrophe
of me:

the secret?
Shhhh –
damn!
What a spree.






.

Beguiled

Calm
and guileless
gaze –

curious –
mild –

warm, slow
invocation:

parent –
poet –

artist –
child –

beguiled
by form:
procreation.







.

Sometimes You Have to Hang Your Head Down Low

Sometimes you have to hang your head down low
to contemplate the Great Beyond –
assume the half–supine position of a jilted gigolo
miffed that he can’t transact a bond

for which he might derive a hefty payment.
From down around your crotch
your point-of-view can often find a way (lent
by daemonic sentinels on watch

to keep you on the qui vive when you’ve stumbled
through your awkward and inevitable life –
so that you have a chance, by getting humbled)
to see the blunt hilarity of strife.

Whatever this may have to do with you,
or what may possibly come after,
or if you cry because Existence seems askew,
at least you’ll cry from helpless laughter.





.

Naked Hairy Wary Thing

Naked hairy wary thing
can’t alter your behavior:
fated to be sensuously vexed –
perplexed at how to be your savior –

it knows to nose around
and test for warm dark interest –
to find and trace the scent
of any rumbling ardor in the flesh –

but cannot tell you
what to do about it.
It knows no metaphor, analogy:
what runs like blood throughout it

is its simple understanding
that you physically exist –
and that whatever this might offer
you’re determined to resist.







,

Some Friends, Remembered

Faded masks of faces –
hung with colored ribbons
whose encoded meanings
you’ve forgotten –

the spent fragility of every
moment vanishes as soon
as had: misbegotten memory
attempts to save it. And yet

you keep it, as you find
you must: pooling from
its dust some entity,
at least, of an identity.






.

My Problem With Your Hat

The platitudinously flat
Expostulations of your hat
Produce in me a deep despair.
Find something else to wear.










.

Today, At Least

Today you
generated
gaseous blue
despair: along

with an inspection
crew who seemed
much less to care
about the sadness

than to see how
close it might be
to enthralling you
to madness.

Craziness is rough:
it seeks to break
the thing that
makes it. But

consciousness
is tough.
Today, at least,
it takes it.





.

A Point Past Which

Skeptical – perversely
disingenuous:
oh yes, you’ve motives
you don’t understand –

your sense of which might
benefit from strenuous,
sly, psychoanalytic
sleight-of-hand.

But surely there’s
a point
past which the cause
cannot be won.

And wrenching
yourself out of joint
just isn’t
any fun.

Not that you
have ever
been a fan
of fun.






.

Pinkness

Pinkness should

be large,

and is –

and have a nipple in it,
and full lips,

and does.

That’s how pinkness
will forever be,

and always was.

.

The Five of Me

The five of me convene again:
affectionate – quiescent
in each other’s arms –

sequestered in our quiet
quintessential quintet’s
quorum – and quixotic charms –

exactly where we hoped
we might one day contrive
the opportunity to stay.

So why do we each feel
distracted – and bewildered –
and so very far away?





.

Social Species

As if the secret had got out

that everybody dies,

social species seem to offer
comfort when they can

to others of their number
who emit penumbral sighs.

Shadowed cries:
mortal ends.

Strange, the existential
influence of friends.






.

The Word-God

Attempting to track back
through secret stages
towards the genesis

of thought, we seem now
to have caught up
with the Word-God

who we’ve heard emits
from his great maw
occasional syntactical

tidbits of law. Beneath,
two hairless naked slaves
reach up – bravely

waiting for the fellow
to bequeath another
sentient salivary plop –

hoping for a hot wet
syllable to drop, or simile
to fall: praying maybe

this time it will lend them
some small sense
of anything at all.





.

Dum-de-Dum

That the treatment to which they subscribe
requires the meditative repetition
of their silent promise to imbibe
their lives as one great seamless coalition –

that their friendship should entail this price:
a unity beyond the ken of others'
human bonds: which lets divisions splice
as if into one heart (a perfect mother's) –

that their clothing now coordinates –
imbues the room with single-minded hues –
and that the felt effect subordinates
all difference to a whisper – isn’t news.

Yes, life unites for them into a plum!
Dum-de-dum. No wonder they look glum.





.

Make Your Mark

Doodle: make your mark – drop spots and blots upon a page –
extend a friendly palpable calm invitation to engage
the forces through, around, above and under you
to raise the canopy, disclose the fullest panoply of what they do –

and suddenly you don’t feel stuck at all, you’re open as can be,
some lovely luck of inner daylight streams, enables you to see –
good heavens, like you’ve never seen before –
some unsuspected luminously optically open door

exacts capacities for light: burns off all pretense of disguise
until what you’d imagined was your mind becomes two eyes:
two ineluctable appurtenances drawn to brightness –
to the blunt exclusion of all other sense: a vivid tightness

of appeal and focus – tunnels of vision, you might say –
which makes you rather hope to find, in future, some new way
to beckon to – beyond your last defensive pose, reflexive fear –
a kindred new experience of manifesting Nose, or maybe Ear:

to hear and smell with similarly ardent and engulfing purpose –
to explore more sensual realities that lie beneath the surface –
thereby address the Universe with gratitude and deference –
while taking notes on everything, of course, for future reference.





.

San Francisco

Perspective! –
all the shapes
it makes you take –

unconscious
perturbations quake,
subvert your ardent arguments:

a foot grows large, or tiny –
eyes go foggy, whiny, winking
blue and pink – each blink

another sabotage:
the point, the point –
oh, what’s the point?

Its joints crack badly,
sadly, gladly, madly –
wan inanities of rhyme

again, profanities
of time, perennial
lugubrious

protuberances
all proclaiming lust
for nothing much

beyond a touch
of not-quite-venerable,
none-too-memorable

sin. I’ve
just come in a spin
from San Francisco

and I don’t know
where I’ve
been.



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