Monday, December 31, 2012

Emancipation Proclamation

 


Bring on
the incursions!
Violate the gray!
Let floods and shards
of strangenesses

exonerate the day:
redeem its
possibilities:
play and tease
and pray.









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Sunday, December 30, 2012

Family Portraits, for Example



 


Our relations are implied
less by the sides we seem to take overtly
than by faint suggestions of a tainted
purpose just beneath the surface –
hidden – pressing up against the hide –

bidden by a flick of brow
or by a sigh – a sort of glide into gestation
which if we do not attend to it –
which most of us, forgivably, do not –
we’ll miss, and thereby miss the whole.

Family portraits for example are particularly
strange: oh, what a swollen range
of unexample they can be! For instance,
this – of me, and them. All that I can
think to say about it is ahem.










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Saturday, December 29, 2012

Knot

 


I have a single
theme
and interest:

one knot
I would
undo:

how out
of this
unfathomable

wordlessness
proceeded
you.









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Friday, December 28, 2012

How To Get Along


 


Let listening reveal –
let seeing seal the pact.
Let politesse anneal
it into serviceable tact.














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Thursday, December 27, 2012

Ach!

 


Ach! – another metaphoric
prospect dawning:
as you dream yourself

into a mercilessly sunny
morning – sinking,
sitting naked, facing yet

another uninvited untoward
aspect of your psyche –
thinking, “Crikey! Where

did this one come from?”
But there you were and are
my dear, extravagant

conundrum bringing up
the rear, encumbering
another weird insoluble

new year. We’d like
to tell you what to do
about it but we’ve no idea.








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Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Today, Lose Track

 


Today, internally array yourself
as if you were immortal – as if
you had been granted access
to the portal through which

everything is possible. Today,
exchange philosophy for being.
Trade experience for seeing.
Today, lose track. Sit back.











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Tuesday, December 25, 2012

My Banana-Colored Friends

 


I can’t find
the beginnings

and I cannot
find the ends

of my Banana-
Colored Friends.

Disbelief with them
suspends.

They’re simply
always there,

ubiquitous
as air.










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Monday, December 24, 2012

In Its Christmas Form

 


Sometimes Winter
shows a softer face –
for instance, in its
Christmas form –

dressed up in white –
with an affectionate
suggestion of embrace –
inviting us to find ways

to keep warm –
that is, to keep some
distance from it.
Perhaps that’s grace.










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Sunday, December 23, 2012

Open, Close Your Eyes

 


Embrace ambiguous surmise:
open, close your eyes.

Vision never leaves the soul –
no matter that it never

grasps things whole –
regardless if we all

agree on what we see –
or if, more privately, we don’t.

Questions will remain:
answers won’t.









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Saturday, December 22, 2012

Body Heat


 


Body heat is nice,
especially on winter nights
when ice seems likely
outside in Manhattan’s
permeable parks and streets,
heartbeats, concrete and brick.

Inside, sweet thickness
from your warmth prevails
against the brittle frailties
of the slickly subtle
slide to death that a sufficiency
of freeze can bring to breath.

Of course you needn’t wrap
yourself into a crew of three
or two. You may prefer
to roll into a single bundle
made of quilted you.
That’s lovely, too.








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Friday, December 21, 2012

But Somehow You Decide

 


Strange, the charge – the larger thrust –
the feeling that you must – the yen to thrive –
the urge to  amplify all senses you’re alive –

strange when they don’t come. Reassurance
shuts you up, and – dumb and deaf to it –
and left to the conundrum of your inanition –

your ambition seems to be less to establish
some new basis to arrive more widely
into consciousness than to retreat to stasis.

Pep talks sound like parakeets. All the sweets
Enthusiasm eats taste bitter in your mouth.
Hope goes south. You sigh. You can’t

say you feel better. But somehow you decide
you don’t feel worse. Perhaps that signals
something like the lifting of a curse.










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Thursday, December 20, 2012

The Things We Think We See

 


You may imagine you are looking up,
but you are only ever looking out.
There is no “up” except in some relation
to the gravity that pulls you “down.”
No direction doesn’t turn you ‘round –

or isn’t rife with doubt. Oh, ostensible
commencements, ends and angles
of the things we think we see! We’re
never not examining infinity. Even when
you’re looking straight ahead at me.












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Wednesday, December 19, 2012

What We Lean On

 


We lean on
what we lean on
for as long
as it will hold us.

The wonder is,
it holds us
for so long.

Can’t be
all wrong.











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Tuesday, December 18, 2012

The Strongest Bright Experience We Have of Life

 


We like to sit and muse
about December as it lengthens
darkness – coaxes it into
its deepest farthest longest flight.
The strongest bright experience

we have of life derives
from our surrender to the sight
of the pellucid transmutation
of the light into December’s
mystical embrace of night.











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Monday, December 17, 2012

When You Look into the Darkness

 


When you look into the Darkness,
Darkness looks right back.

Perhaps the animal should
not investigate the trap.

Consult what’s on
your lap.











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On Trying to Tell Anybody Anything

 


No one reaction serves:
two faces verge

into the private view preserved
in silence by the inner eye –

perhaps intending to supply
another soft injunction:

surrendering into a subtle
inexplicability again.

Who knows what faces think?
Questions drink hypotheses,

erect conclusions – bend
and slip – collectively collapse.

Imagination swerves.
No one reaction serves.









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Thursday, December 13, 2012

Lucky Kid


To know that you’re extruded
from the dead collective head
of long ago –  squeezing from its
strained inevitable flow – a loaded
dense and threaded mesh –

the flesh of aching throes
of antecedent others: fathers,
mothers, and their fathers, mothers –
and their unknown lovers:
and to know that this odd

confluence of influence is all
you’ve ever had and all you’ve got:
well, somehow, now, this clot
of an allotment seems like
an agglomerated pot of which,

because your loins have not
contributed more human clay to it,
you are the lid (you're on the spot!).
Does this mean you’ve won?
Is it all done? Lucky kid.









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Wednesday, December 12, 2012

How To




 




 
Make – dare –

live it.

Take care,

and give it.















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Tuesday, December 11, 2012

What To Do All Day?


What to do all day? –
you wonder in a way
a tree would never wonder
what it ought to do today.

Not that that’s an answer.

Wisdom would decree –
so says your elbow to your knee –
that Being has already manifested
quite incontrovertibly –

without a fancy dancer.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
.

Upon Returning Home to It


O Christmas tree
Awaiting me –
Such living, giving constancy!
How could I have abandoned thee?

I plead your pardon, plaintively –
Applaud your staunch fidelity:
O how your brave heart fights on!
I pledge to keep your lights on.











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Thursday, December 6, 2012

Snootful

 


Today Imagination
propagates
its poltergeistal
protoplasm in a vast
exasperating spasm

of an utter disregard
for anything it thinks
you might
find fruitful. Today
it is a snootful.










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Wednesday, December 5, 2012

The Brunt of It

 


Find essence –
squeeze it through

an existential cheesecloth
till it glows with its least

sullied being –
till it feeds all unimpededly

on everything in front of it.
Bear the brunt of it.

Be utterly available.
Become the unassailable.

The loss of strife
may drive you mad.

But oh, the life
you will have had!










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Tuesday, December 4, 2012

The Meaning of December


 


Who knows? The Earth may quake.
So bake a birthday cake.
Dress it with transgressive elbows

leaning in its blue enticing icing.
The meaning of December
is dismemberment. Remember how

you were a week ago, November?
Lovely, losing all that light!
There will be less of it tonight.










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Monday, December 3, 2012

Sometimes Some Gods

 


Sometimes some gods emerge
into the morning with their
untoward limbs extended toward
the unexampled application
of the unexampled urge to think up

and to sing new hymns – to which
they hope to lend some unexpected
sense of a nobility that hasn’t
anything to do with them: in fact,
portends quite something other than

their own divine egocentricity –
in fine, sometimes some gods
experience humility! How oddly
ominous! We doubt that that will
ever happen, though, to us.







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Sunday, December 2, 2012

Having Stripped to Pinkest Nakedness

 


The condition
of his having stripped
to pinkest nakedness

to bare his theories, projections,
admonitions and prescriptions
in the service of explaining

to Existence what it ought
to do and be
did not, at last, much render him

assistance. Existence gave
his thoughts a toss.
Our loss.










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Saturday, December 1, 2012

The Jellyfish that Come in Dreams


 

 

Freud says reveries are wishes

and unconscious schemes:

apparently conditions that biology

esteems. Still, strange! –

the jellyfish that come in dreams.















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