Coco Chanel Said It Was So

It’s nice to have a man
around a hat –
to take him out
of everything but that –

to burst his narcissistic
little bubble –
to put him where
he can’t cause any trouble.

Coco Chanel
said it was so:
Mettez vos hommes
dans vos chapeaux.






.

Certain Serpents

Certain serpents –
be sure! – are best met and addressed,
as it were, perpendicularly.

C’est à dit:
do not walk up, abrupt,
and confront them straight-backed
with the palpable proofs of their lack:

let your spine be an offhand surprise,
not a prod to attack,
not occasion for something
they’re likely
to find they despise.

Praise them for all of their morphing
amorphous and multiple
unending sizes.

Careful (with all of those esses)
that you do not spit on them.
Then, if you ask very nicely, they may
let you sit on them.






.

Apprentices

Depression takes apprentices
who pay a hefty fee
to learn the arcane nuances
of clinical ennui –

so they can sneak them into you
with assiduity –
as well as slip a complex few
obliquely into me.







.

Blinking Child of Chromaticity

In the realm where colors roam –
effect investigative introductions
to each other, rest inside an outline, or more
subtly overlap – to capture light – to find
another home for off-off-white: in this bright
crucible wherein innumerable hues become
the muses and the mentors of unprecedented
pinks and tans and blues: in this arresting
mine of brilliant ores, this sea of glories –
weave of interleaving shades –

sometimes a mutant breathing bit of stuff
pervades the corner of a bloom of fire-red
or tulip-yellow: and abruptly heaves out of infinity
a random unsuspecting fellow. He sits there
naked in a rainbow he cannot begin
to fathom, dazed that there is such
a game with such a claim on him – amazed
he is its thinking progeny – a golden
and beholden scrap of datum – blinking child
of chromaticity. That blinking child is me.






.

Bearing Creatures to Their Fate

Bearing creatures
to their fate
affords an opportunity

to witness
how they wait for it.
Humming

dum-de-dum some
ride along as if
they’re on the way

to brunch.
Let’s hang out
with that bunch.






.

2 Pan-Elucidations

Personification May Not be the Solution



Exasperated’s beef with Calm ran thus:
“You’re boring as a bus.
I’m thrilling as a bomb.”
Calm nodded with his usual aplomb.

“Never mind that,” he replied.
“We’ve both just been personified.”
“I’d rather you were dead,”
Exasperated said.

+

2:30 a.m.



Perversity as overlay
on a convention
always works.

Subjecting something
to spasmodic jerks
through any means at all,

however evidently artificial,
pan-elucidates the vast
organic mute reality

behind all prettiness:
the gall which undermines –
and peels

the scaffolding away –
reveals
whatever skews

itself into
a structure
in its vulnerable

disarray.
Inoculate yourself
with that today.




.

Existential Jerky

Art, and Thanksgiving

The thing about a manifesto
is, it’s blind. Because
it joneses to believe  
in single-mindedness,

it does – in that buzzed way
compulsive sex erupts
into a specious All – grunting
to its blunt inevitable fall:

done when
it's no fun:
foregone:
a yawn.

And there you’ll be anon:
the spawn of something
you can’t recollect.
But heck: I’ll stay,

seduce you anyway.
I’ll bang your drum
and strum your heart strings
like a hooker. I’ll be

the looker you’ve been
looking for, cooking zesty
definitions. What is art
and what is not? Here’s

what’s not. Whatever thinks
it is what it’s describing.
Whatever doesn’t know
it has complete autonomy

from its creator. (See you
later alligator.) Whatever
buys its own PR.
Whatever’s not bizarre.

Eschew the turkey.
Chew some existential jerky.
Presto!
Manifesto.




.

Two Searches for Something Else

1

The ghost of my grandmother dreams
of betting at the track –

and sipping out
of stenciled crystal
hypothermia-inducing
icy, gleaming ryes-and-sodas –

to help her

plan –
and cope –

deflect –
and dare.

2

My Host of Poetical Schemes
is threatening attack –

tipping his ballistic
juicy pencil
like a hypodermic:
Excise redeeming codas!

He yelps.                     

Abandon
hope!  

Reject
despair!




.

We Suck at Seduction

We’ve taken
instruction.
But we suck
at seduction.

We drop our hints
like bowling balls –
heavy, stupid:
all fall down

the wrong part
of the lane,
causing only mild pain.
If only we were wild!

That’s what undercuts.
We lack the stuff
that threatens.
Nothing beckons.

We catch a whiff
of sweat – of skin –
of sex – of sin –
of crotch –

disarming secrecies! –
that don’t proceed
from us.
It’s hard to watch.

It’s hard to cope
when you’re not hot.
If we had hope! –
but we do not.




.

There’s No Place like No Place for the Holidays

Sometimes we’ll convene
to fuss and bull –
imagining the unforeseen –
to work out if it’s possible

to morph into more mutant forms –
release, for instance, our reliance
on the uninspiring norms
which keep us trapped in human science:

musing, more concisely,
if – sixth sense? –
we might requite precisely
our sharp yearning for a difference –

unmet for far too long a while –
to find a way, perhaps, to disappear –
effect with an unprecedented style
dimensional existence past what’s known as “here.”

The holidays perforce
will soon erupt.
You’ll understand, of course:
we won't show up.





.

Art Explains Itself

When I ejaculate and spray –
or pray –
my hands become your child –
wild –

carnally arcane investigator –
transmutator –
at the helm –
cracking towards the primal realm –







.

Can’t Help It

Today, en masse,
a quartet, duo, trio
of them came, intent
on making love to moi.

They leered – seductive
with eruptive brio:
seems I’m loaded
with je ne sais quoi.







.

This Strange Clown Inside

Here you are again –
your doodling and you.
You can’t remember when
you haven’t noodled like this to construe

the least attempt at a summation:
ah! – the conscientious absence
of the conscious mind! Predation
of another kind breaks down the fence

between whatever activates a vision
and whatever jots it down.
Amazing: the precision
which proceeds from this strange clown

inside who evidently runs the show.
Funny how he has to make it rhyme
to make it glow.
Anyway, at least, again, this time.






.

A Private Morning Moment with the Green Man

In the early morning light whose shade and tint
of chartreuse, jade and mint and celadon insinuate
themselves into the scents of his abundant verdure

(newly mown):  a mix of flora and testosterone –
a blast of grassy Spring, a hint of skunkweed funk –  
Daphne thinks he’s quite a hunk – before

he recommits himself to his green archetypal creed
and undergoes the swift experience of turning back
into his mossy leafy vine-y mobile signature man-tree –

though after he drinks yet another cauldron of green tea –
he sits and contemplates the role he is assigned
and finds it interesting that human beings need

so many symbols of the “pagan” – whatever pagan
possibly could mean. (He figured largely in the tarot
cards of Nancy Reagan.) It’s obscene, he thinks,

before he blinks and plink! – another thirsting bud
bursts up from some fast-thatching swatch.
Well, soon I shall be overgrown – tomorrow,

once again, new-mown, he muses – philosophically
scratching his deciduous assiduously sprouting crotch.
Then (so to speak) he “leaves” – resumes his watch.




.

Preternaturally Present

We’re fine with everything today, we think –
we’re feeling preternaturally present:
the dissonance which had us at the brink
has now become a plethorably pleasant

mystery.
We're feeling downright sister-y.
No mother of a brother
of a lover of a mother

has it over us.
As richly odorous
and unctuous as brie:
you, and you, and you, and me.

It’s nice to press our flesh together
in this prescient purple weather:
take a random nap
upon a random lap –

thereby to understand –
espy –
not much beyond the adjectivally sweet grand
experience of your, and your, and your, and my.





.

Henry’s Back

In the eternal purgatory of his night
wherein his soul experiences yearning
so intensely it may burst abruptly into sight –
in those strange moments of the burning

of his ardor to disperse at last the steam
that otherwise impedes achieving
form – manifestation of the dream –
in that sweet chance of finally relieving

the unbearable condition of his being –
he will sometimes pop upon your knee –
and while you can’t believe you’re seeing
him all winged and plump and naked, he

will whisper – ah! exquisite consonantal spit! –
his unmistakable locutions. Henry James
is back, revealing every last salacious bit
of the explicit truth, naming names.





.

A Muddled and Befuddled One-Eyed Wyatt Earp

And since there isn’t any time

past the illusion of it which proceeds

from those intransigently skewed

conditions which insist configurations

of whatever constitutes electrons

and their inexplicably dark contexts

must disperse out in an infinite

and quickening entropic spread 

as fleet discrete ‘events’ from some

just fathomable big bang cosmic burp,

it’s easy to imagine you’re the lone

foregone equivalent in some unknown

dimension of a muddled and befuddled

one-eyed Wyatt Earp, parched

and gasping in a blood-red desert,

fantasizing what imbibable quintessence

there might ever once have been,

or might yet be, a man could slurp.

.

That Finger Thing

Michelangelo may have been onto
something with that finger thing:
forces of Creation all collecting

to comprise collectively
a fine, divine, divining hand
to linger and to bring

another finger into its grand
fellowship of every swimming, standing,
worming, squirming, flying and reclining

bit of breathing creature – all the rest
of the menagerie the Universe
withholds, enfolds to feature –

and to spew
out like confetti. Ferlinghetti
touched a digit to the digits

of a Corso and a Ginsberg and a Kerouac –
now a Kettelhack
is visited by two escapees from his zoo:

a colorfully striped quasi-homo sapiens
who either entertains a little yellow fellow
whom he wants

to interview,
or has been summoned
by the little yellow fellow hoping

it might hear a quasi-human spew.
Who makes whom?
Big Bangs boom.





.

Lord Knows

Each new thought

comes perpendicular

to its most recent
predecessor: crossing

at right angles,
after and before –

weaving burgeoning new
meshes like fish nets,

they quickly cover your
perceptive apparatus

from its ceiling
to its floor.

You might have wished
for something different.

Lord knows you’d never
ask for more.





.

The Frightened Psyche’s Ill-Disguised Psych Ward

Locked up
and immobilized
inside the frightened Psyche’s
ill-disguised

psych ward,
Imagination plays along
while surreptitiously
imagining a bomb –

a face-ball
so replete with coded
insurrection
and imploded

incrementally
upwelling rage
behind
a parti-colored cage

adorned with variously
glazed expressions –
so apparently the picture
of benign impressions –

that the Psyche cannot
know Imagination will
before long
violently kill

and leave the whole thing
shredded, bloody, chopped.
Vision isn’t pretty
when it’s stopped.




.

Give It Up

You never know
whom you will meet.
By every measure
it’s a treat to make
acquaintances –

a treasure to encounter
bits and squirts of human
bounty – stir its cauldron's
living spices –
sip from its forgiving

vices – maybe sit awhile
with someone on
an eggplant-colored-
couch and flirt
with minty delicacy –

vouch in flinty silence
to determine who it is
you’re with and what
it’s all about – then
give it up in all the senses

of that phrase you’ve
got the courage not
to doubt. Surrendering
to anyone and anything
is everything.






.

Existential Itch

 

Secret skin.

Intolerable level.

Try to keep it in.

Scratch it like the devil.

Do they know it’s there?

Maybe they can see it.

You don’t care.

They don’t have to be it.

.

The Thing, Today, That I Forgot About

Today I’m almost sure
I saw and caught
a speeding fragment

of the blasted paradigm
of human thought: something
burned my palm as it shot

through my skin to find my heart
to lodge like ice within it –
crystalline, impermeable –

yet impermanent: I barely
felt it melt into the flood of me –
so imperceptibly that it became

the thing, today, that I forgot
about. Tonight, now,
I suspect I recollect it

but I can’t be certain. I wonder
if it’s germinating somewhere
in my psychic dirt and grows

and sprouts as some
dark seed of doubt.
Or maybe I just peed it out.




.

Surprise

You search around whatever’s left up
on the shelf for stuff to conjure up
a simulacrum of yourself but can’t.

You’d settle for a bit of living essence
to implant somewhere and maybe turn
into a friend. You learn there’s reason

to believe you can achieve that end.
You plunge your pen into your folderol,
and some of it – as you caress, cajole,

undress, or strike it – awakes and sighs.
You rub your eyes at the surprise:
it doesn’t have to look like you to like it.






.

Big, Beautiful and Blue

Over time one learns one rather
has to face the facts about oneself.
For instance, if one finds that one

is complicatedly, extravagantly
big and beautiful and blue, one may
be well and dutifully advised to take 

these traits off one’s dim psychic shelf
of sighs to see to what sweet happy
uses they might more availingly be put.

Big, Beautiful and Blue must surely,
head to foot, be True. If this remotely
sounds like you, here’s what to do.

Construe your bluenesses as newness:
strut about your world with pride.

Soon everything that matters will be

on your side. Be the next hot rare

must-see. Take this recipe in how
to be. Look where it got me.







..

Consanguineously Lapidary Lovers

Whatever quantum
oddities from which
our errant minds
have been contrived
arrived today
at an affectionate
consensus –

that each of us
should play
amanuensis
to the other: claim –
exalt! – our camaraderie –
as consanguineously
lapidary lovers!

It’s true our
colors do not
match and while
we think our species
overlap, we aren’t sure.
But this sweet bond
between us

is so pure –
so strangely
fabulous – we
simply have to say
how awfully glad
we are that you
imagined us.




.

Les Femmes de la Nuit

The one who
looks like
she is sneering

isn’t sneering –
she’s a trifle
hard of hearing 

and she finds
that when she
squinches up 

her nose
and cheeks
it seems to help 

her understand
the words another
person speaks 

a little better.
As for the others,
I’ve no clue. 

Though I suspect
if you decide
to introduce 

yourself they will,
with zeal,
reveal the spirit 

and the letter
of their separate
points-of-view.





.

He Wonders if He Wants to be in Love

The oddness of arousal –
pitched into espousals
of devotion! Unnerving notion.
Romance makes him unsteady. 

What’s the thing itself?
Does it always come with codas
that proclaim “or else”?
Strong – strange – bold – heady. 

He wonders if he wants to be in love.
He doesn’t know.
If love is all, as he’s been told,
is he not in the thing already?







.

When the Boy Looked Back

When the boy looked back,
he thought he saw a tear
in the fabric of the air
and was therefore not aware

that Existence was unraveling
in front of him. Strange
to have the whole thing bear
the brunt of him – then blow

into incomprehensible
shenanigans just when he got
a chance to see the flow. This
is how we’ll all feel when we go.






.

The Hang of It

You’ve somewhat mastered form –

you’ve managed to effect a biologically

operative infrastructure which sustains the frame

and keeps it warm. It’s true it’s hard to recollect

the references. There’s so much you don’t want
to keep in mind. Bipedalism rankles you,
for one thing – how you’d rather swing or flump
or puddle blindly into an amorphous lump

than muddle through maneuvering
the brittle sticks and joints and linchpins
of a hip or ankle, knee or toe! Oh,
to be the drape and flow of some plush cloth

instead of trapped inside a droopy wrap of skin:
you’d rather be a towel than a jowl.
Where do the arms begin? How do fingers
reach the wrist? Where’s the list? You forgot it.

(You got besotted with the charms of ears instead,
and put too many on.) Intricately wearying, adhering
to the vertebrae! – or working out the trick
of the discreet evacuation of compacted waste

without attracting looks. Those masses of cooked
wood paste they call books have not been any help.
And yet – you don’t entirely dislike the yelp,  
and yaw and bumble you’ve become.

Might one derive some useful art therefrom?
Bewildering, this endless roar and rumble!
Watch and wait: awake to the shebang of it.
Perhaps you’ll get the hang of it.



.