Bums Are Good

Soon the vast indifference of New York

will blast its last voluptuous extremity –
at least that I can stand this afternoon:

it’s not that I’m at its command
as much as I can’t ever not be
in the harrowing expanse of its calamity –

to watch it caring not a whit – to be inside
the heart of it – though I am only human
and madness is a shoo-in while another

ravaged would-be rock star slams
her damned vindictive sexual guitar
across the street to dare to try to bust up

Tompkins Square with exegeses on despair.
She’s currently apparently deciding if tonight’s
the night that she will spill me, kill me, will me

to become a bum  instead of a conundrum.
But bums are good: I’ll be two –
each with a kindred kick-ass hair-do.







.

It Costs

Soft eruptions:

innumerable views –
loose – confused –

diffuse unrest:
where is right
or left?

Even hands lack
unconsidered
understandings.

It costs to find
you’ve lost
your mind.










.

Inimitably Imitably Me

Some of my thoughts

experiment with flight –
others feel more comfortable
grounded – out of sight:

but strange – however strange
the range of them may be,
they all remain
inimitably imitably me.












.

She Doesn’t Look Too Bad

Constructed from available supplies,

the substance and configuration of her eyes
and other facially appropriate accoutrements

proceed as if they’ve heeded
wise and guiding hands –
not the rash expanse of chance

with all its vast improbabilities.
But look what it’s achieved.
She doesn’t look too bad.

Which makes her glad
that she’s believed
in astronomically unlikely possibilities.








.

This Schadenfreude Taste

Passing sadness

drenches
like a sudden
narcissistic summer –

languorously hot –
defeating time –
repeating I’m
a nonsense rhyme –

a silly thick
molasses poignancy
with fuck-all left to do:
arguably thus

to misconstrue
whatever’s holding me,
ostensibly to reassure:
even if it’s luckless you.

Pleasurable, though –
this schadenfreude taste:
this dense consistency –
to think it might just be

the most persuasive
flavor I have had
or could be having
of eternity.







,

Each Least Fleeting Mood

If each least fleeting mood

revealed itself on us in hues,

would we regard the news

as welcome, tedious or rude?













.

Avatars

Human thought breeds avatars to do its work above

from where they’re stowed below –
emerging with a shove and jerk and tremble

out of their benign and assonant unblinking
semi-conscious bloat to activate, assemble
and invoke delaying tactics to waylay the active mind –

blabbering syllabic grunt and hiss, not unlike this:
to vent, foment procrastination, nervous doubt:
the exigent bewilderments of ever-new attempts

to ferret out another pretense of another strategy to fix
the chaos of your vast innumerable warring wants.
There is efficiency in feeling like a dunce –

of having not a clue what you should do.
It keeps you for a while at least from screwing up.
Fortunately, endless avatars are always queuing up.







.

Soirée Sinistre

One sometimes lands in company

about whom one feels doubt.

Enough to make one jumpily

regret that one went out.

.

Talk, and its Discontents

Subtle consternation –

resisting – holding back –
rebuttal – conversation
persisting in a lack.

Other species kill
or sleep or eat or fuck.
Human beings spill
and creep: deplete their luck.











.

Reprieve I’d Sell My Soul For

Manhattan! –

pernicious extremist –

erupting so
stylishly –

lubricious
indifferent behemoth!

Today you
smile at me.










.

Redemption

The cabal

who attack

the banal?

They’re back.

.

How They Do It

It’s the agreement that you notice – not its terms:

the bond in the entente – inordinate accord –
the public fascination taken in each other: the comfort

it affords: how it assimilates the dissonance:
faint tremors of the imminence of inharmonic chords:
cracked and nearly silent – sibilant – determinedly

unacknowledged. Tidal flows of generous intention
lend them tolerable strategy – tending to their
adequacy, not their doubt. They work it out.









.

Sentiences

Gesture – pointed and ambiguous –

disjointed existentially just at the confluence
of evidence where meaning should reside –
well, let that slide. Sentiences reach out,

or so it seems at first, but peer into their
searching eyes more deeply: and surmise,
perhaps, that what they’re looking at or for to
has something very indistinct to do with you.








.

That’s All

Troubled by innumerable omens –

what at any rate we took to be
the hints and harbingers
of an uneasy fate –

we walked into Manhattan’s
middle June attempting to attune
our indistinctnesses
to perpendicularities

of East Eleventh Street
and Second Avenue.
This didn’t take us very far.
We saw ourselves reflected

in the window of a Chinese
restaurant and thought:
How interesting we are!
Distracted by this view of us,

the two of us forgot
whatever we were
trying to recall.
That’s all.






.

Self Portrait 2

Clear your throat

and do a Rembrandt.

(Ahem.)

Can’t.

.

Like Me

Unpredictable disturbances

assert themselves –

exert themselves

in the unpalatable business
of perverting every sense
of the exquisite fitness of a thing

to which he’d thought to bring a merely
reasonable expectation of what it surely
ought to be –

now all is an inconstancy –

whose Golden Avatar
arrives to soothe – to smooth –
to show him benefits of unexpected flow.

All that he can say is No.
And so
the Golden Avatar decides to go –

to leave him irredeemably,
if merely metaphorically,
at sea. Like me.







.

Rutabaga and Kohlrabi

One midnight long
before a single one
of us was born,
Rutabaga and Kohlrabi

fell asleep together
and awakened

into quasi-human form.

(Root vegetables

tend quite smoothly
to surrender
with serenity: they
rarely are alarmed.)

Rutabaga took
Kohlrabi into its thick
unaccustomed arms
to keep it warm.

They lived until
they died upon
a little rooty acre,
which they farmed.







.

You Aren't Losing Much

Tonight a corpulent conundrum will corrupt

all claim you may have thought you had to linearity –

disrupt your dreams with shamelessly eruptive schemes –

and rid you of the vanity of sanity. I wouldn’t worry.

You aren’t losing much. You’ll like his touch.










.

Nobody’s Related Here

Nobody’s related here

to anybody else.
Well, biologically we may
have clambered off
concatenations of some
ever-burgeoning
collective self, but once each

small inimitable singularity
jumps from that shelf –
well, here we are in tandem
only from the random
chance of bumping
into one another. Something
kindred – brother, mother,

lover – seems to hover –
maybe filter through: perhaps
an atavistic yearning to find
someone who can contrast
concepts of a “me”
with notions of a “you.”.
Expect complexities galore

when there are three –
which seems to happen
all too frequently.
God help us (which he never
does) if we should have to
deal with more. Welcome,
dears, to History.







.

Well, Shoot Me the Fuckaroo Down

“The Socratic method

was the first

unassailable

codification of relativism,”

he said, 

“ever after beheading

ostensible

proofs

of the absolute.”

“Well, shoot me

the fuckaroo down,”

I replied

with a frown

and he did 

and I died

and apparently now

I reside

on an opposite side.

.

The Mud-Brown Id

Two exhumations

from the mud-brown Id
exhibited themselves today

as if to say
the mud-brown Id
was going strong:

and if we thought
the mud-brown Id had gone
away, well, we were wrong.









.

Looking Down

Looking down, the fear

is that the magnitude
of making out the Sphere

will tax their fragile
certainties: that these
two golden sentries 

will miss something central
which, if missed, would
shoot a hiss through

our Existence – as if from
an angry sentient snake
intent on ruining the odds.

The problem was, there
were no gods to save
the day or night –

merely nervous guards
whose imperfections lent
inevitable risk to every

flight we might decide
to take. Existential flu
comes often in the wake

of what they haven’t seen:
we shake involuntarily –
a private psychic

earthquake for which
we can’t name a cause.
No one knows the laws.








.

Spring Roll

Two heads are said to be better than one,

but being two-faced robs the soul.
So how do I find some acceptable fun?
How do I get to be whole?

I know what I’ll do.
I’ll eat a spring roll.
I’ll cut it in two.









.

What I Wouldn’t Mind

I wouldn’t mind communion

that illumined someone else’s heart
sufficiently to make it seem
the necessary part of knowing
what we each had left to do.

And if it felt contextually, texturally,
sexually hot? Well, I would like that, too.

If only I were dropping hints
to something like a “you” I didn’t have
to dress up in quotation marks.

There isn’t anyone in view.








.

How Many Times?

a birthday poem for Donna, June 8, 2012

She uncovers undiscovered species every day.

She usually comes upon them when they’re sleeping –
such is her supernally strange gentleness they seldom wake –
except, sometimes, to take the measure of her face

the way a puppy does when it looks up a moment from a nap,
in a lap, and learns that absolutely nothing is a problem.
The sweet emolument of her investigation is sufficient
to assure unprecedented forms of life that they are safe:

and more, that they’ll enjoy her rapt unsentimental interest
in their fate – oh, not devoid of feeling – never that: so full
of caring for their frail existence that they know they’re
being seen because they matter. Let disguises scatter.

She is you. And I am always yet another sleeping species.
How many times have you delectably detected me?







.

Entre Nous

Not all best friends
are like me and you –
as pure as dew.

Some amount
to a cabal
of two.






.

A Home-Grown Ozymandias

Given the infinity of quantum
probability, it’s not unreasonable
to suppose that through erosion
of some substance on some planet
yet to be, you will be flatteringly
modeled into statuary.

Equivalents of desert wind could
carve your face into equivalents
of sandstone, as a home-grown
Ozymandias: all enigmatically
reformed – standing up to scrutiny –
maybe by a swarm

of poets pondering divinity. Unless
they’re not in the vicinity. But wait
another trillion years: something
will bring up the rear, and there
you’ll be, at last, before a throng.
We could be wrong.








.

To Be Advised

To be

advised

exactly
when

you
thought

that you
were done

that you
had not,

in fact,
begun

isn’t
fun.






.

All You Did Was

All you did was, you went to bed.

Was that the catastrophe?

It’s bad enough that you lost a head.

But how did you lose all three?

.

The Keepers of the Genesis of Form

The Keepers

of the Genesis of Form
devote Eternity
to making sure it’s warm.

Without their
soft solicitude,
each blasted cold
vicissitude

of chaos
would erase
all vestiges
of grace.








.

Suitable Prize

Oh, to nap

upon the lap
of someone
you find wise
and beautiful!

That prize
might be
suitable.









.