Emancipation Proclamation

 

Bring on
the incursions!
Violate the gray!
Let floods and shards
of strangenesses

exonerate the day:

redeem its
possibilities:
play and tease
and pray.









.

Family Portraits, for Example

 

Our relations are implied

less by the sides we seem to take overtly
than by faint suggestions of a tainted
purpose just beneath the surface –
hidden – pressing up against the hide –

bidden by a flick of brow

or by a sigh – a sort of glide into gestation
which if we do not attend to it –
which most of us, forgivably, do not –
we’ll miss, and thereby miss the whole.

Family portraits for example are particularly

strange: oh, what a swollen range
of unexample they can be! For instance,
this – of me, and them. All that I can
think to say about it is ahem.










.

Knot

 

I have a single

theme
and interest:

one knot

I would
undo:

how out

of this
unfathomable

wordlessness

proceeded
you.









.

How To Get Along

 

Let listening reveal –

let seeing seal the pact.
Let politesse anneal
it into serviceable tact.














.

Ach!

 

Ach! – another metaphoric

prospect dawning:
as you dream yourself

into a mercilessly sunny

morning – sinking,
sitting naked, facing yet

another uninvited untoward

aspect of your psyche –
thinking, “Crikey! Where

did this one come from?”

But there you were and are
my dear, extravagant

conundrum bringing up

the rear, encumbering
another weird insoluble

new year. We’d like

to tell you what to do
about it but we’ve no idea.








.

Today, Lose Track

 

Today, internally array yourself

as if you were immortal – as if
you had been granted access
to the portal through which

everything is possible. Today,

exchange philosophy for being.
Trade experience for seeing.
Today, lose track. Sit back.











.

My Banana-Colored Friends

 

I can’t find

the beginnings

and I cannot

find the ends

of my Banana-

Colored Friends.

Disbelief with them

suspends.

They’re simply

always there,

ubiquitous

as air.










.

In Its Christmas Form

 

Sometimes Winter

shows a softer face –
for instance, in its
Christmas form –

dressed up in white –

with an affectionate
suggestion of embrace –
inviting us to find ways

to keep warm –

that is, to keep some
distance from it.
Perhaps that’s grace.










.

Open, Close Your Eyes

 

Embrace ambiguous surmise:

open, close your eyes.

Vision never leaves the soul –

no matter that it never

grasps things whole –

regardless if we all

agree on what we see –

or if, more privately, we don’t.

Questions will remain:

answers won’t.









.

Body Heat

 

Body heat is nice,

especially on winter nights
when ice seems likely
outside in Manhattan’s
permeable parks and streets,
heartbeats, concrete and brick.

Inside, sweet thickness

from your warmth prevails
against the brittle frailties
of the slickly subtle
slide to death that a sufficiency
of freeze can bring to breath.

Of course you needn’t wrap

yourself into a crew of three
or two. You may prefer
to roll into a single bundle
made of quilted you.
That’s lovely, too.








.

But Somehow You Decide

 

Strange, the charge – the larger thrust –

the feeling that you must – the yen to thrive –
the urge to  amplify all senses you’re alive –

strange when they don’t come. Reassurance

shuts you up, and – dumb and deaf to it –
and left to the conundrum of your inanition –

your ambition seems to be less to establish

some new basis to arrive more widely
into consciousness than to retreat to stasis.

Pep talks sound like parakeets. All the sweets

Enthusiasm eats taste bitter in your mouth.
Hope goes south. You sigh. You can’t

say you feel better. But somehow you decide

you don’t feel worse. Perhaps that signals
something like the lifting of a curse.










.

The Things We Think We See

 

You may imagine you are looking up,

but you are only ever looking out.
There is no “up” except in some relation
to the gravity that pulls you “down.”
No direction doesn’t turn you ‘round –

or isn’t rife with doubt. Oh, ostensible

commencements, ends and angles
of the things we think we see! We’re
never not examining infinity. Even when
you’re looking straight ahead at me.












.

What We Lean On

 

We lean on
what we lean on
for as long
as it will hold us.

The wonder is,

it holds us
for so long.

Can’t be

all wrong.











.

The Strongest Bright Experience We Have of Life

 

We like to sit and muse

about December as it lengthens
darkness – coaxes it into
its deepest farthest longest flight.
The strongest bright experience

we have of life derives

from our surrender to the sight
of the pellucid transmutation
of the light into December’s
mystical embrace of night.











.

When You Look into the Darkness

 

When you look into the Darkness,

Darkness looks right back.

Perhaps the animal should

not investigate the trap.

Consult what’s on

your lap.











.

On Trying to Tell Anybody Anything

 

No one reaction serves:

two faces verge

into the private view preserved

in silence by the inner eye –

perhaps intending to supply
another soft injunction:

surrendering into a subtle
inexplicability again.

Who knows what faces think?

Questions drink hypotheses,

erect conclusions – bend

and slip – collectively collapse.

Imagination swerves.

No one reaction serves.









.

Lucky Kid

To know that you’re extruded
from the dead collective head
of long ago –  squeezing from its
strained inevitable flow – a loaded
dense and threaded mesh –

the flesh of aching throes

of antecedent others: fathers,
mothers, and their fathers, mothers –
and their unknown lovers:
and to know that this odd

confluence of influence is all

you’ve ever had and all you’ve got:
well, somehow, now, this clot
of an allotment seems like
an agglomerated pot of which,

because your loins have not

contributed more human clay to it,
you are the lid (you're on the spot!).
Does this mean you’ve won?
Is it all done? Lucky kid.









.

How To

 

 

Make – dare –

live it.

Take care,

and give it.

.

What To Do All Day?

What to do all day? –
you wonder in a way
a tree would never wonder
what it ought to do today.

Not that that’s an answer.

Wisdom would decree –

so says your elbow to your knee –
that Being has already manifested
quite incontrovertibly –

without a fancy dancer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

Upon Returning Home to It

O Christmas tree

Awaiting me –
Such living, giving constancy!
How could I have abandoned thee?

I plead your pardon, plaintively –

Applaud your staunch fidelity:
O how your brave heart fights on!
I pledge to keep your lights on.











.

Snootful

 

Today Imagination

propagates
its poltergeistal
protoplasm in a vast
exasperating spasm

of an utter disregard

for anything it thinks
you might
find fruitful. Today
it is a snootful.










.

The Brunt of It

 

Find essence –

squeeze it through

an existential cheesecloth
till it glows with its least

sullied being –

till it feeds all unimpededly

on everything in front of it.

Bear the brunt of it.

Be utterly available.

Become the unassailable.

The loss of strife

may drive you mad.

But oh, the life

you will have had!










.

The Meaning of December

 

Who knows? The Earth may quake.

So bake a birthday cake.
Dress it with transgressive elbows

leaning in its blue enticing icing.

The meaning of December
is dismemberment. Remember how

you were a week ago, November?

Lovely, losing all that light!
There will be less of it tonight.










.

Sometimes Some Gods

 

Sometimes some gods emerge

into the morning with their
untoward limbs extended toward
the unexampled application
of the unexampled urge to think up

and to sing new hymns – to which

they hope to lend some unexpected
sense of a nobility that hasn’t
anything to do with them: in fact,
portends quite something other than

their own divine egocentricity –

in fine, sometimes some gods
experience humility! How oddly
ominous! We doubt that that will
ever happen, though, to us.







.

Having Stripped to Pinkest Nakedness

 

The condition

of his having stripped
to pinkest nakedness

to bare his theories, projections,

admonitions and prescriptions
in the service of explaining

to Existence what it ought

to do and be
did not, at last, much render him

assistance. Existence gave

his thoughts a toss.
Our loss.










.

The Jellyfish that Come in Dreams

 

 

Freud says reveries are wishes

and unconscious schemes:

apparently conditions that biology

esteems. Still, strange! –

the jellyfish that come in dreams.

.

Do What It Will Do With You

 

Persuasion’s

yellow.

Likes to meet

a fellow.

Thinks it has

to bellow.

Skepticism’s

violet.

You can’t

beguile it.

But don’t

revile it.

Do what it

will do with you.

Take it in

and file it.











.

Conjunctions

 

 

Evening turns

to periwinkle blue,

and all your little household

crowds around the prospect of colluding

with the warmth and reciprocity of you,

and fall is falling

into winter’s spell,

and all is well.

.

Naked, Shaded in Gradated Greens

 

Naked, shaded in gradated greens –

unforeseen – a couple now convenes,
it seems, less for a conversation
than for unknown oddness: the relation

they appear to occupy to us

relies more on some strangely luminous
intention to distract with their insistent hue
than to communicate with me or you

through some syntactical vocabulary.
We therefore do not hold a very
sanguine feeling towards them, nor
can we imagine what their psychic torpor

or their rampant verdure signifies.

What is being offered to our eyes?
Something strange in all the glowing
signals some new way of knowing.








.

Secret Habits

 

The circumnavigation of your days

entails meticulous attention to the ways
details of what conduces to your ease
comport with one another: in the breeze

of every open-windowed dawn –
when you get out of bed with nothing on
and trundle toward the sweet sufficiencies
of your abode’s machinery's efficiencies

which, at a toggle switch or two,

will summon light and music, brew
your coffee, ready you for your ablutions
at the bathroom sink – you find solutions

to the daily challenge of existence:

drink in, with your java, the persistence
of pursuing what you’re craving most of all –
to tie new ribbons on the pretty little doll

that no one knows you’ve got.

Secret habits hit the spot.








.

The Lot of Us

 

 

Twenty-three from mommy,

twenty-three from dad.

 

What a mix of chromosomes

the lot of us has had.

.

Entanglement

 

 

Strange how intricately calming

entanglement can be –

as if it’s only in impenetrable mesh

that we can fathom being free.

.

Verve

 

Quentin Crisp says,

“Fashion is instead of style” –
but how to find your style?

Drop your guile.

Serve your verve.
Cultivate your nerve.












.

When We’re Through

 

I know what

let’s do.

You sit here

reading me.

I’ll sit here

reading you.

But let’s not

talk about it

when we’re

through.












.

Your Pastel World

 

Today you woke up powder pink
immersed in sapphire blue
impinged upon by two
lugubriously ghostly mint-green

and banana-yellow creatures:

features in a pastel world
you never bargained for.
But what is ever bargained for?












.