Your Pertinent Impertinences

Sometimes to rev your engine up,

an unforeseen enthusiast
will glide out of the psyche –
try to kick your butt: erupt
into a fundamentalist faith healer –

do a hands-on touchy-
feely zeal-y thing
to gloomy aspects
of your personality which cling
to stasis – do not want to move.

Full of zing and on a providential basis
he will prove they’ve lost their way
by singing deedledees
and spindaloos and waddlelays
to deities which, like all gods,

lack provenance but woo with lots
of entertaining hoop-de-doo.
Today your pertinent impertinences
hear him crying it,
but they’re not buying it.







.

Oh Well. (Oh Hell.)

Recollections harbor

ardor and affection
for each other just
when they are threatened
with defection.
The mind does not appear
to want to die.

Espying in its eye
the whole trajectory
of life you’ve lived
derives from the propinquity
of imminent extinction:
sieved into the final lie
you’ll know:

that you will stay alive
if you surrender
the immediate and total
memory of everything:
recapturing the flow.
Oh well. (Oh hell.)
You go.







.

Honeymoon on the Styx

On the Styx –

hit or miss –
alluvial lips
kiss –

hiss –
as preface
to this:

the abyss
of connubial bliss.








.

Something to Find

Strange to feel

lost in thought
with a friend –

wondering
if you’re in trance
with each other –

or if you are,
each of you,
wandering

far from the start
and the end
of your separate

peregrinations.
The latter
is probably true –

and yet you
do not mind.
You both

have got
something
to find.








.

Consoling

Consoling isn’t easy.

Softening unpalatable fact
can make you queasy.
Warmly, sweetly wielding tact

in face of your forlorn
companion’s certainty of doom –
for which he’s borne
inarguable evidence into the room

of your attempts at reassurance –
likely will not work.
His understandable abhorrence
of the optimistic jerk

and spasm of your reflex
to insist that it will be all right
is almost guaranteed to hex
you both into a sleepless night.

It may not matter what you talk about.
Presence helps the heart rebound.
That can have a little clout.
Just stick around.








.

Voluptuous Catastrophe

Today’s the day

to put a reckless necklace on
and fecklessly assay
the wreckage. It may well be

voluptuous catastrophe –
this questionable gift
that, pestering, insists on giving,
this thing you’ve made of living.

But worry not.
Scurry not
into the fretfulness of snits.
Rejoice! Your necklace fits.








.

Just a Touch of Not Too Much

Strange, the stuff

you conjure up
from just a touch
of not too much:

as if you cannot bear
the brush of your unknowing:
tearing into any evidential
glimmer you can find

to reassure yourself
will reassure your mind:
accosting it with glowing blurs
of comprehensibility

which you’ve made up:
which you’ve laid up
like strawberry
preserves: palatable

proofs that you can point to
you can swallow –
eat and like – a treat.
It’s not a bad way,

probably, to counteract
the vertigo, savoring
illusions of a moral
verticality that puts the lie

to incongruity: all that’s
wavering and leaning.
You’re damned
if you’ve no meaning.







.

Your Curlicued Accoutrements

Today your curlicued

accoutrements fall easily
into their sweetest
unconsidered form:
to bloom  and sway the way
you always hope they will –

a warm, insouciant
and charming spill
which makes you know –
because through chance
you now inhabit it –
a bit, a glow, of grace.

You also know, somehow,
whatever later takes
its place will not erase
its deep effect. Today
its light – and life –
deserve, invite respect.







.

Growing Hair

What had ruined her?

What she had forgotten –
or what she never knew?
Some constitutional inadequacy

which had caused her to construe
her utterly unasked-for being
as an apparatus solely
built to grow unruly hair?

Was this her holy enterprise?
She was good at growing hair.
You couldn’t say it wasn’t there,
falling in her eyes,

covering her fat.
One day she’d climb
Mount Ararat.
Make her mark.

Discover Noah’s ark.
Maybe Noah had her lover
hidden down below:
the animal companion

who would warm her blood
and shield her from the flood.
This seemed apropos.
What had ruined her?

What she had forgone?
Or what she’d swallowed
to excess? Success was rare.
Her success was hair.







.

Now Look What We’re Seeing

Faces start appearing

like corrosion
on our knuckles,
palms and bracelets –

just when we had
thought we had erased
each graceless trace of them –
and each of us had finally

begun to have become
an unimpeded being!
Now look what
we’re seeing.









.

Magnificent Indifference

Magnificent indifference
flirts with the inert –

subverts it into cosmos –
blurts a grand expulsion –:

blasting hydrogen
and helium into the spiel
of us, and New York City,
on a rush hour bus –

whose harrowing exactitudes
and beauties of amoral strife
reflect, exactly everywhere,
experience of life:

scraped of every sentimental

sense – always only ever
hovering above
a precipice.

You know no closer
way to fathom genesis:
its strange audacity –
its grope.

Dispassionately unattached,
magnificent indifference
begins to look
like hope.






.

Sing a Pretty Song

Neurosis is a fiction:

a therapeutic hoax.

Existential friction
is inevitable, folks.

Everybody chokes
and cracks and blows

a fuse or two.
Nobody knows

more than you.
It’s normal to think

something’s wrong.
Sing a pretty song

to anybody
who hangs on.








.

What One Had To Do With You

Propagating

an existence
isn’t any summertime
excursion to the zoo.

Not when one must
tie a thing in knots
before one can
convince it

to come through.
That is what
one had to do
with you.







.

Twisted Pixies

Today was too

ridiculously rich

to tolerate.
We tried to shut it

down and start it
up again and almost

managed to succeed.
But its meticulously

fixed and wily
trickeries would not

cooperate.
Its twisted pixies

trundled in again
to breed.

They quickly mucked
what we’d done up

and made it squeal.
As usual, we had

to suck it up
and deal.






.

Asteroid

Conglomerated mass – a humanoidal

asteroid of rash emotional catastrophe –
eventually can be counted on to smash
into your fragile crust and kill off every

dinosaur of trust that used to feed  
in the oasis of your young and needy
Eden. Large species of affectional regard
become extinct before you’re able even

to begin to think what happened to your
heart’s intemperately vast capacity
to splurge. If you’re lucky, little frightened
spiritual ferrets will emerge and start

to populate the world with other little
frightened spiritual ferrets. Something
might evolve from them to set you free –
incrementally. But there’s no guarantee.







.

Not a Bad Way to Begin a Morning

The thing, we think, to do with puzzles

is to nuzzle them affectionately,
wake them up at dawn while nobody

has anything much on – kiss their little lips
and let them know whatever slips
between you will be reconnoitered with

in privacy. Soon whatever you had
thought the point was to pursue will lose
its primacy and be replaced by something

like a clue – gently, without warning,
stretching its accoutrements, and yawning.
Not a bad way to begin a morning.






.

What I’d Call a ‘Myself’

First Person slips off the shelf.

Keeps missing whatever I’d call a ‘myself.’

Second might do,
through its sneaky ambiguous ‘you.’

‘One’ has a sort of a Jamesian tone,
but it sits rather too much aloofly alone.

Personal pronouns keep missing the bus:
they only report what purports to be ‘us.’

So I tried to look ‘I’ in the eye.
I drew what I saw in the mirror. Oh my.

Something looks back from the page.
Quiet, polite – but in covert outrage.









.

And Yet They Didn’t Really Quarrel

Reunions with old friends

sometimes expend the soul
more than anticipated;

notions of what had precipitated
closeness soon devolve

into the dreams of an involvement
in which recollected schemes
of intimacy – themes of which

have haunted every separate
member more inimitably

than the rest can fathom – break

apart into the isolated atoms
of confabulated memory.

One evokes the many, many
beers they drank with cheer,

the recollection of which brings
the second man to tears;
the third assumes all three

were hopelessly in love
with someone whom the other two

cannot recall at all. Now they are
a nudist and a Buddhist
and an owner of a shopping mall.

And yet they didn’t really quarrel.
There isn’t any moral.





.

Actionable Cause

Noon spreads its butter:

midday starlight pours.

Center
and circumference
are yours.

Lure another blood-warm
sentient being to your breast.

Look around.
Intricately tender madness
and epiphany abound –

unexpected, gentle
cadences resound.

Pause.
Foment this gladness
into actionable cause.






.

Manufacturing a Clue

Striking,

what your eye
can be persuaded to construe –

animating
chaos –
manufacturing a clue

to something
reassuring
that might have to do with you.









.

Ecstasy Comes When the Rhymes Break Down

Honey Bunny’s waiting.

She thinks you’re the one.
While you sit there debating,
she’s fantasizing fun

that you can't even dream of.
Risk it.










.

Family Bush

Only four to start.

Three of us are gone.
Less a family tree
than family bush.

Gave me all their art.
Left me in the dawn.
Now it's up to me.
(Gentle push.)









.

They

They wait for you to speak.

You’ve no answer.
Bewildered and too weak
to play whatever fancy dancer

you are sure they wish you were,
you wonder at their purpose.
Their impatient faces stir
beneath the surface.









.

Cold May Morning

Sometimes it is cold

in Spring. That’s the thing
about the metamorphosis

from winter’s dormant kernel
to May’s vernal waking up:
breaking up, it splinters

into unexpectedness:
you cannot second-guess its
requisite conditions:

left with expectations born
of wistfulness, you hold onto
the cherished recollected

notions of another dawn,
another May – balmy
scented gentle day.

But this May morning’s gone
another way. It’s changed
the form. It isn’t warm.







.

That Fragile Sense of Certainty

Let your spirits

run the show.

Open up your apertures –
and undergo
their sweet and rash arrival –

dangerously liable
though they be
to blast into catastrophe:

to jeopardize survival
of that fragile sense
of certainty.

Bear their burden of release.

Do not look for peace.

Do not look for anything.

Let them bring
contagious strife –
outrageous life.






.

The Deepest Happiness

The deepest happiness

is private –

sent up from the center 

of a groan:

something you can only

feel alone.

.

Stolen Glances

Stolen glances improvise –

troubled looks surmise –

apprise

the size 

of what’s behind the eyes.

.

Epiphany Hypothesis

Waking up to bright white light

and stretching as if stretching might
ameliorate strange effects of night –

pulsing and misshapen
not with pain but from the strain
of having been somewhere

you couldn’t have imagined: this,
at least, is one hypothesis for why
the pageant of you utterly is changed –

your smell, your shape,
your thoughts, your size; for why
you aren’t anything you recognize.








.

The Deepest Secret

Subjection to inspection by Authority – the IRS, a doctor,

or a boss – exhausts: before it breeds an angry ingenuity:

revs up the urge to circumvent and undermine: to thwart
investigation of your private code – protect the mother lode

of your enigma – wreck whatever fine coercive strategy may lie
behind the mission to conceal their prime ostensible agenda:

to reveal the false or true in you. You will do what you
must do to skew this reprehensible pursuit: you’re furious.

And yet the deepest secret is:
you’re not entirely not thrilled
somebody’s curious.







,

Some Call it Dead

Life requires hosting parties. Be gracious

at the start and at the end of them.
Dressing up from cranium to hem,

condemn no circumstance, make no excuse.
Wear your pretty garments loose.
Say what must be said. Once your guests

have fled, go gratefully to bed.
Know that one day you’ll be someone,
something, somewhere else entirely instead.







.

Give It Room

Burgeoning

and verdant –

verging into purple –

royal harbingers
in May of lavish June
are looming

into bloom:
something very near
intolerable

promises to gratify
you viscerally –
give it room.







.