What Ghosts Do

 

I’ve
no idea.

Do
you?













.

Qualitative Methodology

To summarize, we’ve had to say

we couldn’t find another way

to wed our bodies to our minds –

to see the modes in which each finds

conversion in adversity,

immersion in perversity –

without describing devious

behaviors of our tedious

component parts, from head to foot,

up with which we’ve had to put.










.

You’d Think You’d Find It

Why is it so hard to read a mind?

You’d think you’d find it in expression –
the tremor of obsession in a wary blink;

the glaze of an immobile stare –

the glare of a determined impassivity –
repression of some hot internal blare

of terror, rage or sexual fixation;

the heavy-lidded daze and slow predation
of ennui. So much should be obvious

in you and  me – strangenesses we fear,

plenitudes for which we long. Strange
we almost always get it wrong.









.

Dressed for Circuses and Stripped for Wrestling

In the inky black

of the Unconscious
they reside: a larger side –
and smaller side astride it:
dressed for circuses
and stripped for wrestling;

waiting to emerge

to train the brain to entertain
more untoward moments,
they contain those bits
of anarchy without
which you would

stand no chance

of gaining mastery
of the ineffable. They aren’t
terrible at effable, in fact:
you might decide
to call them back for that.









.

At Times, Of Course, Like This

 

You find that you like gray, some

days – how it achieves its say,
perceives the cool array, subtly

holding sway, managing in quiet

to convey its calm vicissitudes,
allegiances, proclivities – the ways

it beckons you to stay and take

a seat and listen. Rainy gray
that glistens is a treat – though

can, of course, entreat your tears

to reappear, invoking fears,
reopening despair, those cares

deriving from the countless

recollections of your catastrophic
loves and flitting broken trysts –

your endless undone lists. At times,

of course, like this, gray can
make you want to slit your wrists.








.

Posing for a Formal Portrait

Posing for a formal

portrait makes it seem
as if it isn’t only possible
but normal to be dressed

and pressed into a scheme

wherein some consequentially
defining meaning might be caught –
so that in some bedimmed posterity

when you are thought of,

if you’re thought of,  
something might be known,
by something shown: a swatch

of an incontrovertibility: that you’d

been seen, and could be seen again.
That might be nice.
Let’s get painted twice.








.

Another Unavailing Artist’s Manifesto

 

 

Think you caught my kink and quirk –

laid me bare?

The work is all that’s in the work.

I'm not there.













.

Contrive to Coincide

 

Resistance and dispassionate benignancy –

the two contrive to coincide.
The former crashes into its malignancy –
the latter hangs on for the ride.
















.

Looking In Your Eyes

What you long for

and belong to! –

the throng of you

must surely sing

the song I hear. Clear

sensibilities appear –

such strong sleek intuition

in my heart! – always near,

never far – ripe now to impart –

the closeness of its nuances

to art – the fullness of its plot:

you must be everything

I think you are. You

say you’re not.

.

Dancing Made a Difference

Dancing made a difference.

It was something we could do.

After sifting through the tease

and slew of inexcusabilities –

the undermining missions

of existence with its fissions

and its fusions and its shifts

and its resistances -- when we

emerged from its resurgences –

when we at last came to –

dancing made a difference.

It was something we could do.

.

If You Asked Me If

Milk of magnanimity

is not exactly

brimming In the cup.

My lease

on equanimity

is up.

If you asked me if

I’d had it,

I’d say, "yup."

.

Your Private Parts

Everything’s important.

There’s the rub.

Every impulse is a fraught

incursion in the club

of your convening multitudes

of thought

bent on becoming

a persuasive new agenda.

If I were you, I’d spend a

night away

from them: entirely alone.

Pretend the tinkle of the hotline

phone they’ll use to ring

inside inside inside your mind

is what a star

sounds like when it is burping.

Investigate your prospects

of usurping power.

Make love

to your private parts.

Don’t take a shower.

.

About As Much As We Can Bear

We’ll burgeon out of winter white.

Do homage to our nothingness.

Acknowledge that we know no system

of sustainable serenity and permanent

self-care – nor that we know as much

as what the difference is between

what you call here and I call there.

Strange the gladness this can lend.

About as much as we can bear.

.

Playtime in the Mind

There’s surely something else we can’t recall.

Despite the daytime dictates we’ve defined,

redeeming darkness till it’s lost its pall,

we’ve hit a wall. Back to playtime in the mind.

.

Random Love Doodles

An instant has as much to do

with time or you as time or you

have got to do with endlessness.

This is the sort of streaky mess

you’ll get from me when it gets cold

outside, and gray. Though we are

warm inside, and old, and good

for nothing in a sneaky way.

I love the stuffing out of you today.

.

Gentle Nexus

Expansively and malleably blue –

chances that the gentle nexus

of this faintly sorrowed

happiness will last are surely few.

.

Sublet

Sublet the dark apartment

of your heart.

Whatever takes it doesn’t

have to stay.

But let it play its little part.

.

Bigotries

Bigotries need slaves

to haul them ‘round.

Surely nobody who wasn’t

made to do it could be found

to lift one pound of them

from here to there.

And yet so many of us act

as if they’re light as air.

.

Something Possibly to Do with Art

You regularly leave things in the middle – diddle
on with this or that small section of the whole –
when, uncontrollably, another part cries out for you
to complicate the fold – and there you are again –

amassing disembodied limb and tint and mind and hue

and heart: something possibly to do with art: scattered
hints, perhaps tomorrow, with some luck, you might
just find instructive – if Imagination will resuscitate

its pluck, permit the blessing of some coalescence –

wait to bait you into the creation of another singing
thing. It’s the sort of random outcome some deep
yearnings have been not unknown to bring.











.

I Could Have Danced All Night

I could have
danced all night,

but had I

danced all night
with anyone
I might have liked –

oh, the fleshy mess
we would

have made!

You’d have to have
removed us
with a spade.











.

To Lighten Up the View

Nights are long and tedious.

Days are short and cold.
Aches and pains are treating us

as if we’d all grown old.

To lighten up the view,

let’s trade some tit for tat.
Don’t let the kitty sit on you.
Try sitting on the cat.

.

Jogging Naked Through Our Neighborhood

Jogging naked through

our neighborhood
before our neighbors
have arisen from their beds
may be sufficient
to arouse the feds – that is,

if some retired CIA man’s up

at three to take a pee
and looks out of his bathroom
window inadvertently –
half-dreaming still of some
horrific terrorist cabal loose

on a spree – and, thinking

they are you and me,
alerts the Government a.s.a.p.;
but otherwise let’s not
expect a fuss. Almost
nobody has ever noticed us.









.

Memorable Conversation Between Friends

Memorable conversation

between friends depends
less on affectionate beginnings
and extraordinary ends than

on what lends some sense

that something’s spinning
in the soul. With you, my dear,
I always come out whole.










.

Off the Wall

Let’s be off the wall:

drip slick –
lubricious druids! –

enjoy a viscous fall:

sip thick
suspicious fluids.













.

What You’ve Been Really Undergoing

Out of nothing you could

name that doesn’t seem
or feel like your habitual
amorphousness,

how strange, this morning,

to awaken to what you’ve
been really undergoing:
metamorphosis.










.

Waiting is Extremely Strange

Waiting is extremely strange.

It makes extraordinary use of the illusory.

The malleable range and tractability of time

appears to serve us, while we’re waiting,

like a sneaky slave: nickeling and diming us:

behaving as if nothing mattered but

our chock-a-block invention of the numbers

on a clock. Ticking seconds strive

and beckon – carrying the narrative

of exigent conditions: proclaiming

the perdition we shall pass into if we do not

pursue The True: predicated on the hope that if

the yearned-for thing occurs we all be all right.

But sometimes, while we’re waiting through

the night and day and night, the burrs

and feathers of another inner sight

may ferret us away. Time is then

forgotten – waiting, misbegotten.








.

You Again

Gelatinous

fatuous
fellow.

Half-man,

half-tangerine
jello.

Here you go

spewing your
spew again.

Telling me

what I should
do again.









.

January Is To Blame

January goads. It loads

the senses with itself,

not like July, with a supply

of redolence and ripeness,

but with its peculiar brand

of barren brightness –

an implicit icy invitation

which incites – ignites –

the inward thought,

a sentience wrought

from loss: of memory too

buried in the psychic

permafrost to matter

at the surface: but which

soon imbues the winter’s

darker blues and moonlit

hues of ivory and gray

with purpose – not intended,

or much understood. Tonight

I thought I smelled the ghost

of burning wood: a fireplace

I sat by when I was a child,

frightened and beguiled

by captured flame.

January is to blame.

.