Wounded and Extraordinary

All of us are wounded and extraordinary –
carried to our fates
as if by serviceable beasts  

who mostly can be counted on to tend us:
conscientious porters sweeping, turning on
the lights, generally putting things to rights.

Unsuspecting days and unexamined nights

become our fare until, perhaps responding
to some small involuntary dare,

we disappear – no longer
here or there: replaced by space.
It isn’t terrible that we don’t leave a trace.









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I Took a Dive Last Night

I took a dive last night

with the intent to decode sleep –
and hadn’t gotten deep before

two emanations rose to greet me –
evidently glad that something
from the waking world had come

to enter theirs – awake.
I was so delighted I began
to quake and turn into

an emanation too,
which they dismembered.
I wonder how I’ll be remembered.







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Promiscuous as Air

 

Some think it obeys strict laws –

but happiness doesn't care.

Unhooked to any cause,

it’s as promiscuous as air.

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Hell

Hell is full

of reasonable
conversation.

Plausible
persuasion.

Earnest
arguments
that matter.

Chatter.










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In a Plume of Evening Blue

In a plume

of evening blue,
three masks escaped,
last night, from you.

Divining other purposes,
they crept adeptly,
while you slept,
off your thin surfaces.

Entwining as they
billowed from your
pillowed head, they
hoped for a baroque

epiphany beyond
what they could
muster up on top
of you in bed.

Awake, you feel
more naked.
It’s harder
now to fake it.







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Looks Like My Love For You

It sprouted out of me today –

looks like my love for you.

Perhaps it came to me to say

that I made that up, too.












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Plus I Have to Pee

They sit there

night and day.
They want
a yea or nay.

I don’t know
what to say.
I wish they’d
go away.










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Your Loves

They’ve swarmed up –

warmed up like a take-out meal
you ordered yesterday but didn’t eat –

congealing, intermingled, tepid – sour-sweet –
probably, by now, a trifle toxic –
but redolent with a mélange of flavors

you can only get
when savory room-temperature ingredients
are left to set and melt into themselves.

Your loves have risen from their shelves
as if they want you to resume them –
to consume them.








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These Odds

Here they come

again –
ambiguously
Zen –

barging through
the door:
these odds, against
and for.











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That There is Somebody You Never Knew About

That there is somebody you never knew about

is not surprising: how much of every New York City
day is lived because it can be lived anonymously?

I am besotted – ignominiously bidden by a hidden
presence to retreat with it into the covert brightness
of Manhattan light – which might as well be night.









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August Rainstorm, Manhattan

Clouds of ghosts,

shrouds
revolve:

lugubrious
precipitating
hosts –

creatures
weakening
the sun’s resolve –

deviously leaking –
meteorologically
speaking.









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If There are Prizes to be Vied For

The sweetest closeness

foams into dissociation –
roams into a daydream –

an untethered scheme
in which the untied aspects
of a mind diffuse more

widely than they might
have done if intimacy with
another mind had not undone

them. If there are prizes
to be vied for, this may be
how we’ll have won them.







.

You, Redux

Every morning you emerge

as if the greater part of you
had had to be imagined new.
It’s true, a malleable
substance with your smell

and hue most probably survives
the night: amorphous impulses,
proclivities and certain kinds
of reflex sight and fear
are probably in gear: you have

a sense, perhaps, of being
something you’d call “here.”
But then you’ve got to go
about the business of inhabiting
the clay, and forming something

that’s at least remotely equal
to encountering “today.” You do
what you can do. Strange
to feel you have so little say.
You seem to happen anyway.







.

Perhaps Eternity

Perhaps Eternity is one late sweet

encapsulating August afternoon wherein
your creatures pile around you
in the room – affectionate, preoccupied –

attending to the slap of skateboards
whapping concrete in the park across
the street, the muted shout of rowdy
sixteen-year-old boys igniting impulse

into warm hormonal war, while soft
cross-ventilating breezes toss, commune
through windows in your darkening
East Village flat. Perhaps Eternity is that.








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Quand je serai dans le Marais

It seems beyond all reason

but there’ll soon arrive a day –
August twenty-sixth –
quand je serai dans le Marais –

medieval Paris enclave
wherein convents and hôtels
all mixed aristocratically
to breed their arcane spells.

Last night I dreamed as I sat there
to nurse a café cup,
I saw, converging in its steam,
four ghosts of nuns erupt.

I don’t know why – though I confess
I was a trifle shaken.
I thought to ask – but quickly fled
instead, then, to awaken.








,

Faint Bewilderments, Late Summer

Faint bewilderments

accost you in late summer –
softly split you into two:
one complacently continues
to enjoy the view,
a prospect which the other

is too nervous to pursue –
haunted by forebodings
for which none of what the sun
voluptuously does can offer solace:
some strong stream of doubt –
an incrementally increasing

August steam will out –  
some subtly staining, dangerous,
inevitable sweat – some threat
of fate will surely turn the season’s
bright illuminated loves into
new species of attenuated hate.

You hold your selves
in fear and reassurance
through the night –
benign with the malign –
waking to discover neither
one of you was right.








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Life

Maybe you are

what it wanted you to be.

Evidence supports

the possibility.













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Three’s a Crowd

Calamities

arrive in threes –
as trinities –

as trifurcated panoplies
of paradox. The keys
and locks to these

are hid as secrecies –
like absentees
all named Godot.

Oh, all the woe
in every unavailing trio!
Split it up and go.









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Care To Keep It Up?

What a tease!

Encountering your colors
and your odd geometries –

imagining that locking eyes with you
will mitigate the rude surprise of you –
distract us from discovering

we’re not the least the same.
Care to keep it up?
I’m game.











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Inured

Selves as adamantly intricate and hard

as randomly eroded blocks of rock –

intrinsically resistant – peremptorily scarred –

beyond the reach of influence or shock.

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It’s Hard to be as Beautiful as Me

It’s hard to be as beautiful as me –

as rapturously
interesting as Kierkegaard and brie –
as subtle and ignoble as the whole taxonomy
of Soul, in all its swift perversity.

I’d ask you and your grandmother to tea –
but oh, I know how hard it is to be
around a grand phenomenality
as rapturously
interesting and beautiful as me.









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Small and Blue

I feel small

and blue.

One of us sleeps
through the night.

So far it’s
always you.









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The Saturated Month

Manhattan takes the heat for –

bears the brunt of – losing light;
its heavy sun descends significantly
earlier than city night had grown

accustomed to in June – more sigh
than in July; though some odd
poignant tenderness revs up
enormous warmth in compensation –

in relation to the high anticipation
felt in blood and bone unconsciously
that everything is coming to
an end again – or to the bend

upon the bend upon the rendering
of rhythmic change: there is no logic
in the reason of a season: merely
repetition of the strange. Today

we won’t turn on the air conditioner:
we’ll hug each other, rub each
other till we’re stuporously hotter
than we ought to be, in sweet defeat,

and sleepy – deeply in another
cadenced pause – so many in the year! –
to cause us to be just as near
as we can stand to August.






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I Thought You Knew

The spirit

of the universe
is blue.

You look
surprised!
I thought you knew.









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What Friends You Have

Swimming in the thick Manhattan chowder
of an early August Union Square –
with its smug muggy lunchtime air
of knowing – but not saying anything –

you wondered what you’d have to bring

to anyone to say today. Every time
you talked it came out mystic squawk:
ephemeral and rude: vague and impolite.

You tried, for instance, to explain why “Art”
is such a fright; why friendship as abstraction
has no meaning: themes all billowing
and leaning toward each other like entangling

webs of dangling spiders: nothing
with articulable specificity. But you would
justify existence in a chat. What friends
you have, to stick around for that.

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