Sitting, Aging

Today intention carries out what
it intends: swarms of semi-sentience
take a singular collective form: to indicate
that everything must have a shape,
suggest a symmetry, including me –

despite the gaping lack of meaning
February, coming back, appears
again to promise on its eve. I’m sitting,
aging: shocked at being slim – skinnier
than I have been in years – in thermal top

and overlying purple t-shirt, black
Joe Boxer underwear and white irregular
Fourteenth Street socks: when – out
of my unprepossessing actual
and metaphoric sleeve – arrives another

couple of regenerating presences,
as pleased, apparently, as they can be
that they are here. I find them queer,
but so am I. I am particularly left
bewildered by the yellow onion guy.





.

When We Revert to Ectoplasm

When we revert

to ectoplasm,
might you find

the wherewithal
to come around
and chat?

I’d hate to face
the harrowing
great vastness

of eternity
without a bit
of that.






.

Tight

Set a wooden face against the white of your bewilderment –

carve and varnish hardness – force its shell
against meticulous incursions of the hell

inside: the fearful spill – lament –

fermenting out of sight.
Spout the party line.
All is fine.
Tight.








,

Why the World Did Not Turn Gray Today

This afternoon my pink and blue

and yellow muses fled to find
some respite in whatever realm
supports such colorful sorties.

(They invited me, but
owing to the incompatibilities
between dimensionalities,
I could not come.)

They’d had enough
of giving birth to orange,
green and purple and the rest
of all the tertiary tints therefrom

to want to shun
the whole damned tedious array.
But just when they believed
they’d got away

great blobs and slews
of apricot and peacock hues
they’d spawned came on –
and they began to feel dismay.

Parents love their children,
and they knew they’d
have to go back home
with them and smile and coo

and propagate anew:
in other words, to stay.
That’s why the world
did not turn gray today.





.

Oh, to Find a Willing Fellow

Wish he’d morph

and torque
and billow

into poplar,
maple, willow! –

resonate
between
your legs –

while his ears
turn into pegs!

Oh, to find
a willing
fellow

you could play on
like a cello!







.

Fluid Moment

Let’s grow

our hair

down to
our asses –

dye it brash
varieties

of yellow-green,
aquamarine –

flow and mingle
like sea-grasses,

swim and sway –
be a fluid

moment
in a bay.  






.

Until It Screams

Squeeze the dream

until it screams:
force it
to come true.

Everything must
turn to pink,
so you’re
no longer blue.









.

Only Density Will Do

It comes in layers and persists as cloud –
meteorologically teeming in a crowd
of apperceptions and emotional humidity:

faint prods of mild agenda – softly pressing
influence the way a body swells: expands
a chest to heave a breath, and leaves it,

less to leave it than to breathe again:
imperceptibly precipitating consciousness –
a venture into mist – something briefly

larger than existed just before this silent
pour of an identity – this deluge of a refuge
into thinking you are you. Its bits become

your point-of-view: thoughts personifying:
reappearing, disappearing, morphing
into something new. Only density will do.






.

Wet

Wet from the sea 

of an epiphany – 

colors are too bright! – 

too much white!











.

Her Heart

I lost a friend today.

She didn’t die.

She called her heart away.

I don’t know why.

.

Night

Finally!

The facts.
Night is subterfuge
and parallax.

It billows round you
until dawn –
thrilled that you
have nothing on.







.

The Holy Cardinal of January

Every sin is pardonable

to the Holy Cardinal of January.
Blessings make him wary:
he has no truck with Jesus:

he believes us perfectly
redeemed just as we are –
the random lone
detritus of a star –

frozen ova sown from some
exploding supernova very far
away. Prone to sway
and swoon at scarlet –

wed to shades of harlot red –
he doesn’t like when
it’s assumed that winter’s only
right when it has bled

to white; it’s never quite
convinced him; crimson’s
at the center of the hues he’d
choose, and does –

bears witness to resistance –  
proclaims the blood’s insistence.
Otherwise he wouldn’t think
of making bold:

he hides inside, enfolded
in the heart: hopes
you’ll know he’s there
despite the cold.




.

We Think I’ll Do It

Today three large

undifferentiated masses
of myself lay on their asses
in a comfortable pile.

They hadn’t bothered
to assume a hue – beyond
a partial offhand  dip or two
into a lazy beige.

In their dispassionate
complete release of style –
suspending all expenditure
of energy – they blandly

beckoned to the rest of me,
respectively, to see
if possibly I might
not want to have what

they were doing turn,
collectively, into my destiny.
To think we mightn’t
ever have to do another

thing at all had most
of me in mild thrall.
We elected to pursue it.
We think I’ll do it.







.

Foxy Bunny in a Tree

Assertively ambiguous,
equivocally equivocal,
congruently incongruous,
concretely metaphysical:

inequable equality!
Loudly unemphatic
serious frivolity –
mousily dogmatic.

Resolvedly irresolute,
irrelevantly relevant,
ambivalently absolute
uncelebrating celebrant!

Foxy bunny in a tree:
and a lotta bull.
Oxymoronically
ontological.






.

What They’ll Say at Heaven’s Gate

Welcome

honey.

Poke
and jive it.

What’s

so funny?

Joke
is private.







.

Extreme Love Poem

When the brutal blade
of New York City winter light abates –
abrades into the frigid darkness
of another January night –

there is no greater odd assemblage
of affectionate companionship
than that whose spell ignites
my heart in my Manhattan home:

the heat is generously on
and in the shadows
lavender creates a kind but
burdened-looking 1890s maiden aunt –

perhaps a murderer – who holds
a small pink-hooded being
in her arms – who gazes back
into her eyes as if to keep the embers

and surprise of seeing deeply
warm and lit, alive.
I live in the penumbral essences
of this ingloriously glorious strange

city’s history – whose blistering
exorbitances send sweet mitigations
of its ghosts to host me
through my moment

as I spin my own sins through
its tales: cruel winter in Manhattan –
to a man who loves Manhattan
as extremely as I do – avails.



.

Taste Treat

Today the day’s as gay and bright

as carnivals.
We are not feeling gray and grim
and beaten.

It is as if a festive band
of cannibals
can’t wait to taste the treat we’ll be
when eaten.










.

Those Parts of Them that Cannot Stay

Those parts of them

that cannot stay – the way
the structure of her face
gave way: exquisitely
in place – bruised

in the bloody fall she took
a month before she died:
her inerasably black-eyed
and swollen flesh
the bane of mortuary art:

impossible to take
what life, not only death,
had wrenched apart
and put it back into
a simulacrum of a woman.

Somewhere in memory
the glimmering inimitable
and unsullied traces
of the presences
not only of my mother

but of every other absent
essence I have known
of human soul
hang strange – and soft –
aloft and whole.







.

Elle est une écrivaine.

 

Elle est

une écrivaine.

She uses people
for her pen.

Generally
men.








.

Nothing’s Safe from Faces

Nothing’s safe from faces.

Everything’s personified.
Progressions of expressions
of the human
bloom in forms

and ride through spaces –
Mother Nature, Father Time –
we don’t see anything
that doesn’t rhyme with us.
Perhaps we shouldn’t fuss.

"God’s a man."
What else could patriarchal
primates understand?
But some suggestion presses –
seems to lie beneath

familiar skin – morphology
that’s not tautology:
as if the answer isn’t in
the things we think it’s in.
There’s an allure to shape

and hue in which the human
image can’t entirely construe
itself, secure its being.
Nothing might be
what we’re seeing.





.

Let Us Now Consider Human Speech

Let us now consider human speech –

distinct, one must suppose, from that
of crows who evidently (so the crow
researcher’s record shows), have,

in their caws and quid-pro-quos, at least
an inkling of what everybody else is
crowing on about: they get the gist of what
each corvid undergoes: varieties of signal

fears and doubts, among inimitable
other woes and pieties in crow societies.
But what has that to do with human
speech? Oh dear. Beyond our reach.







.

The Colloquium

The colloquium convened –

and reconvened –
and reconvened –

hoping by a summary consensus
to have overseen – at last! – the formulation
of an adequate pronouncement –

sufficient to do justice
to the patent mess around them
they'd commingled to address –

but in defeat had to confess
that though they’d sorted out the more-and-less
of the declarative and the comparative –

today, alas, again,
would have to lack
a narrative.

Some found this – if in private
(asked, they wouldn’t tell) – sort of swell.
To others it was hell.





.

Reasonable People –

Reasonable

people –
doing normal

things –

seasoned
and enfeebled –
by the swarm
and stings –

of reasonable
people –
doing normal
things –






.

Like Any Fragile Creature

Thoughts have roots and veins.

Each takes pains
to prove why it’s essential.
Like any fragile creature,

each campaigns to be retained –
to be bricked into
an edifice of common sense –
or picked to ride astride

an ideology wherein it might
survive in sweet suspension
as unquestioned fact.
Like any fragile creature,

it will hide – and strive to stay
intact. Some do, some don’t.  
If you’re fortunate,
most won’t.






.

This Business

This business of feeling

unhappy – or glad –

shifts like what happened

at Marienbad –

.

Hum a Few Bars

Death comes up

sometimes
to listen

to the rest of what
is going on –
to hear

that glisten
of a whisper
of a Universe

hum a few bars,
strum a few stars.
Music of the Spheres

brings tears
even to
an abscessed thing.

Doesn’t
mean he
isn’t King.







.

Existentially Shy

That we’ve no idea
why we are here
did not prevent

our intimately
propagating
into three of us.

Should
we
repent?

Perhaps
this was
too free of us.







.

Indiscriminately Yearning Eyes

Some strangers look

at you like puppies –
and for moments can

persuade you through
their indiscriminately
yearning eyes that –

were you able, in this
instant, to reside inside
each other’s arms

and thighs – you would
receive the prize
of unimaginable love:

should, that is, push
ever come to shove.
Sometimes it does.







.

Sometimes it’s Good to Walk your Banshee Out

Sometimes it’s good to walk your banshee out
into a winter afternoon.
It isn’t realistic to imagine you can banish doubt
in banshees, but quite soon

the unforgiving and acutely glaring light
will often mute the worst
of his intolerable wailing. That it’s not night –
for which all banshees thirst –

perhaps distracts the banshee for a moment
from his reflex to complain
so unrestrainedly – to rile up, disturb, foment
so much excruciating pain

which feeds on late-night rain and wind.
Perhaps frigidity
and January-angled sun somehow rescind
despair’s futility

a bit in banshee consciousness.
Oh, he still brays and balks –
but seems a touch less of a mess
on daylight winter walks.






.

Same old, same old.

Another off-white lumpen Incongruity
stops by to drop more bits of its light ingenuity:
two ovoid plops of ambiguity

for you to slaver over:
two celestial plover
ova –

gelatinously tame and bold:
shameless and lubricious, uncontrolled,
deliciously pernicious. Same old, same old.







.

Who Belongs to Whom

I own the sentient bag – the brew –

the zig – the zag  – the jig –
the snag – the gig – the skew –

the zoom – the acquiescent bloom –
of you. You’re who; I’m whom.
No one else has room.








.