The Querying Glance

Attention must be paid –

but the querying
glance is expensive.
Answers are worrying.

Questions hoarded
mutely in the eyes
go far beyond what’s
ever possible, or wise.

Be wary of whoever
seems to want to chat.
They always want
much more than that.









.

The Apparition Fear

The Apparition

Fear
appears.
Seems queer.

It either
is afraid
of something
it can’t see,

or I can’t see.
Neither case
is interesting
to me.








.

Psycho Therapy

She’s nothing if not practical –

indeed, among her several premises
the most inarguable is that
if you want to save your sanity
you’d better learn how better to behave.

She’s happy to point out
the myriad absurdities
with which you cram your psychic cave –
and if she claims to offer therapy at all
it surely must at heart be cognitive:

revealing all the fixes faulty thinking
gets you into: sinking you into despair –
therefrom to summon up new strategies, 
with her, to live your life – in her intensive
care. But ah, she’s got you there.

Quivering in revelations not entirely
your own, you’re prone, she knows,
to other more mysterious
investigations – to be pursued
with one immensely secret aim:

to underscore that this is her,
not your, mind-fucking game. You’re

a brand new burning bush! –

and she’s the one who grew it.

Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.

.

Harold Often Takes a Nap Upon the Toilet

Many dreams are curious

to find out if it’s true
that you are dreaming them,
or they are dreaming you.








.

We Sense It Had To Do With Blue

A chromosomally unprecedented daffodil

burst through the earth this early Spring
to bring the visual suggestion of a poet –
with an azure aperture through its corona –

an inexplicability which clearly warranted
inspection. To gaze into the blue amid
the blazing yellow hue surrounding the intensity
of some unfathomed predilection in the shaped

projection of the artist’s face did not
extend itself, or lend itself, or in the least
propend itself into a revelation. Its preternatural
ribonucleic mix appeared quixotically

to coalesce into some ever-fresh determination
to achieve an aim for which we could not then
and cannot now produce a name. And yet,
when, with a gulp, we watched it rot abruptly

into pulp, we felt a residue of strangely
clinging shame – as if we’d missed a crucial
floral moral. We sense it had to do with blue.
It may, as well, have had to do with you.







.

Truancy

As close as they may seem to be to one another

every brother in the trio has a highly isolated
secret life. In public their triumvirate’s prevailed

despite the silent gales which separately assail
them: seek to breach the barriers of their inviolate
interiors – risking terrifying strife. One would like

to be a pornographic prison warden’s wife. The other
has a craving for – well, we had better not say more.
The last has privately amassed a vast erotic store

of Rastafarian folklore. These are just the easy things.
More queasy things might be divulged. The really
shameful sweetnesses which each indulges solo

in his room loom like the shadows of unfathomable
doom – or would, applying measures more than likely
held by you and me. Their sin: committing truancy:

abandoning the seamless fluency of the expected.
All that really interests is rejected. Unexpressed,
their hearts abate. Perhaps we can relate.






.

Yet Here He Was

He never knew a moment

when he wasn’t conjuring a fantasy
of some extravagant impossibility –

some project to extinguish
all that made him so intolerably singular.
The internal psychological regalia

he’d co-opted to pretend that he
was male was doomed, of course, to fail.
He lacked all trace of genitalia.

He lacked, in fact, a single clue
about his place in his infernally
capacious Universe.

He’d sooner curse the whole
than to embrace one tiny aspect
of the horror of his soul.

Everything was sorrowfully wrong:
eternal proof of his exclusion.
Nothing didn’t long for an inclusion.

All was empty buzz.
Yet here he was.
God’s navel fuzz.






.

The Being’s Mien

Persistence is the key.

When introduced to somebody
whose physiognomy

is too distracting to ignore –
don’t redden while attempting to address the floor.
Peer into the being’s mien as if you wanted more –

because, my dear, you do.
Do not pretend you don’t desire a further view.
They’ll know it isn’t true.








.

Media Gap

They don’t seem a departure

from my daily enterprise.
They’ve stumbled from
the same menagerie whose

swarming permutations
have produced innumerable
kindred creatures whose
evolving features I’ve

affectionately come to prize.
They look me in the eyes –
entire in their Irony and nuance:
phenomena I recognize.

Neither restive nor belligerent –
they do not look unwise. But
they’ve not one damned thing
to say. Guess I’ll go away.






.

Everybody’s Smiling

We know you’d like an explanation,

darling, but there isn’t one.
Or if there is, it more than likely isn’t fun.

As far as we can ascertain,
not one iota of a reason we’ve inferred
will manage in the least to entertain.

We find no prologue, plot or dénouement –
and, God knows, no finale.
The business is banal. We

cannot tell you what you see
is what you'll get. Try
to bet it will be, and you’ll lose.

That, at any rate, amounts
to most of what
we’d offer as our views –

except of course for one phenomenon
we find beguiling. Everybody,
unaccountably, is smiling.






.

Once More, With Feeling

Well, look

at that!

You’re
back

in yet
another

embryonic
sac.








.

Home

Today I spoke

with someone’s
mother. Everyone is
someone’s mother,

brother, sister, father,
child – exacting through
the circuits of biology
a wild inevitable ride

of expectation
born of yearning:
love will be returned.
And here we’re

sitting, chatting, feeling
spurned. I’d say
let’s grab the Cosmos
by the tits and suckle it

until it fits – which

it already does.
Home is air.
We’re there.






.

Feels Like

 

Feels

like
someone’s

sitting
on
your head.

You wish
it felt
like

something
else
instead.







.

Beastly Bored

Sitting In the full

fat middle
of the miracle
of being,

you don’t know
what to do.
How can this
be true?

Existence is,
at its minutest
least,
its own reward.

Surely you
should celebrate!
Not be
beastly bored.







.

Prodding for the Prize

We confess it violates

our sense of fitness
to remark on what we
chanced today to witness

(normally we don’t intrude
on lewd activities pursued
by creatures in the nude –
at best, it’s rude):

but this odd couple’s
importuning and rebuttal –
all so awkward
and unsubtle! –

couldn’t not
distract our eyes.
Sex! Hexed, mindless, blind –
prodding for the prize.







.

Dolly

Dolly

seems to have
an inside track.

Clutch her
in a panic, she
won’t clutch you back.

She doesn’t need
the reassurance
you do.

Is it golly-
jolly-dolly
voodoo?

While
your brain’s
a fearful clatter,

Dolly hangs there
like it doesn’t
matter.






.

Last Mythic Hope

The alignments

he’s made
with Existence

will come
to his aid
at the end.

Death
will
bend.








.

Cat Bit His Hand

Puncture wounds

remand him to the prison
of attending to the grand
guignol demand of selfish

body parts: insisting
on existing in a grumpy
dissolute autonomy:
ready to go off and sulk

and cause the rest of his
half-conscious frame
indifferent pain:
take him to the portal

of the mortal. Now he’s
passing gas: a razzberry
fat splat of fart. Life
does not resemble art.

But feel the lurid
surge and tingle:
look at all that red.
Can’t call this dead.

.

Pete Wants Privacy

When in the zone,

and drinking
Peach Surprise

alone,

in pink
disguise,

Pete won’t atone.

Please shut
your prying eyes.







.

Why You’re Losing It

We thought we ought

to let you know
the several placidly

cooperative points-of-view

who’ve formed the main
constabulary functions
of sustaining
the consistency of you

have all begun to melt.
By now it’s something
you’ll have felt.








.

Enterprise

Strange, the art

he stumbled on today –

that brushed his heart –

and hushed it with dismay –

.

Troglodytic Nuns

Aspects of a dying season, dream or mind

amass around each other at the end:
troglodytic nuns who find, to leave behind,
one last expression of experience they might
extend to the conundrum coming after:

enduring echo of an enigmatic laughter –
alluring strangeness – proprietary graces
from their priory – seductive whiff of existential
estuary – swift demonstration of the basis
for the theory that they were necessary.






.

Sometimes in the Vast Magenta Night

Sometimes in the vast

magenta night
a light excitement

of columnar air arises,
wakes you up,
assumes a likeness

to the human
physiognomy sufficient
to permit you to imagine

you might like
to have a chat with it.
I’d say, go ahead, but if

(as sometimes
happens when
the air’s ill-bred),

you have a spat with it
instead, inhale it –
exhale it – until

it’s dead: and you are
safely able to go
back to bed.





.

Four Days to Daylight Savings Time

But there

you go again,
imagining you have

the least idea
what time is.

Just let it fizz.






.

The Oracle in Hand

+

The Oracle in hand had been remanded into service by dimensionally

zealous scholars, overseeing bureaucrats and activists who claimed

they had divined from their review of the Akashic Records

that the cosmic history therein was biased toward innumerable

inferences deriving from innumerable premises 

they did not hold. 

+

So, on authority they claimed was absolute, descending as they

claimed it did from fundamental existential laws of which all energy

and matter were the constituted product, they proceeded

to abduct the Oracle, coerce her into lecturing

the Universe about its vast egregious sin: in short, 

to make her scold. 

+

But he or she or it who tries to force an Oracle to speak

can never win. Perhaps we should be grateful

that we didn’t hear what, had she talked, 

she’d have foretold.

+

.

Now You’ve Gone and Done It

Oh dear.
Now you’ve gone

and done it.
Propagated progeny.

Allowed ontogeny
to recapitulate phylogeny.

Was that
entirely astute?

Oh well.
At least it’s cute.








.

The Season of Suicidal Chickens

Who asked

to be here?

Weeks away
from the infernal
vernal equinox –

fat Tuesday’s
spent: it came
and went.

Bewilderment
will not relent.

Gray mornings.
Ticking clocks.

Chickens
fantasize
about a fox.





.

Analysis of the Shebang

To effect analysis

of the shebang
round up the gang
and dress them up

for Mardi Gras
but tell them they

can’t go until they’ve

done their algebra.

“What algebra?”
they will complain.
“Exactly!”
you’ll explain.







.

Eye to Eye

Soul wants

to encounter you
eye to eye:

open up
your solipsism
to its psychic sky:

get about
the business
of replacing why

with what –
embracing and
not but.







.

Like the Brothers Karamazov, Only Different

Though they entirely lack rhythm,

three exasperating aspects
of your latest psychic schism
clomp around and dance and yell
until you think you’ll lose your mind.
Which is, of course, absurd
since they amount to all the mind
you currently can find – and they’re

not going anywhere. You think sweet
thoughts: perhaps they’ll sense you
care and they’ll stop being raucous.
But they keep up the ruckus.
“Don’t like it? Fuck us.”
It’s gone from worse to worst.
You think you’ll burst. And yet
you don’t. You guess you won’t.






.

This Intramural Sport of Thinking

Playing fast and loose –

cavorting with morphology –
is only part of it:
this intramural sport of thinking

in late afternoon.
while lying down,
attuned to dim late winter air –
gazing upward,

with your glasses off,
at rare myopic visions
which assume unconscious
light is naturally part of sight:

its mixtures and bold certainties –
its brave exposures –
curtains ripped wide open
on enfolding limbs and faces;

heads and fingers lingering
a moment – point to – hold –
new suppositions –
briefer in this ether

than the clunky calculations
you had labored over lately –
just this morning –
under rude fluorescent

lamps. Everything revamps:
regales. Color is outrageously
correct: until you get up,
and it pales.





.