Sunday, March 31, 2013

I Start Like Anybody Else


 
I bought a seasonable flower
and it turned into a face.
Blooming human ambiguity,
it commandeered my space.

This now happens
all the time to me.
In fact it may turn out
to be the only constancy

I know in my experience
of un-exonerated being.
I mean, I start like
anybody else in seeing

petals, leaves
and stem –
but just as soon
as I have breathed ahem

it’s grown a brow and nose
and ears and chin and eyes.
Frankly it’s no longer
a surprise.








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Saturday, March 30, 2013

Warm Enough


 
Here we go a-voyaging
a-voyaging a-voyaging
Here we go a-voyaging
oh let us find a boat.

Ah, but
my-oh-
my-oh-
me.

There isn’t any bay
or lake or pond
or fjord or sound
or sea!

All there is, is air.
Though warm
enough so that
we do not care

to
wear
a
coat.

So
let’s

just

float.









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Friday, March 29, 2013

Not One



 
It’s hard to cultivate
a sonorously
sanguine
point-of-view

when not one head
of yours is thinking
what it wants
the others to.












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Thursday, March 28, 2013

The Clairvoyant and his Friend




They thought they’d get along with one another and they did –
as soon, that is, as The Clairvoyant rid himself of one
obnoxious trait – predicting without cease The Other’s daily fate.

“Oh, I know what you’ll do today at two, you’ll screw up yet
another apple-tripe-and-carrot stew, so that at three, you’ll have
galumphed into an anomie so indescribably a bore that finally

at four, you will contrive a plan, to carry out at five, to fix, at six,
the sort of culinary heaven you might bake for me at seven,
an extravagant brioche-and-sausage plate on which, at eight,

you would announce that we, at nine, would dine, until at ten,
when the brioche showed no propensity to leaven, you’d
conspire at eleven to attempt to delve into the mysteries

of several secret pantry shelves for something we might eat
at twelve, the conjuring of which would, by the stroke of one,
however, not be done.” The Other offered up a poignant sigh.

“Will you also tell me when I’ll die?” “Don’t make me cry,”
the wizard of presentiment replied to his sweet friend. Which
marked the moment his unwelcome prophesies came to an end.









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Wednesday, March 27, 2013

What Some Call This


 
Gods make untoward
importunings in the night.
In indigo and wine-red light,
the fine delight of a caress may
metamorphose into strangling,
then maneuver back
to wrangling through

the warming embers
and the pitch-black shadowed
murmurings of unexampled
love, to which, below, within,
above, the only possible
response is crying.
Some call this dying.











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Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Waiting in the Dark


 
Strangenesses
rampage

all through
the range of us:

waiting
in the dark,

ready
to embark.

Nothing’s
dangerous.











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Monday, March 25, 2013

Why Spring Is Late This Year


Spring is late this year
because the gods
in charge of bringing it
don’t feel like getting up
and doing anything.

So if you’ve planned
for crocus hocus pocus 
or to tiptoe through
the tulips soon, I'd let it
go. Just so you know.












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Sunday, March 24, 2013

To Train You, and to Keep You Sane


To train you,
and to keep you sane,
those sentient aspects
of you which contain

your ecstasy concoct a sort
of lulling psychic serum
to inject into your vein
of Soul, the theorem
 
for which might be
worked out as follows:
that if you are the famished
thing which swallows

everything
it can,
but learns to be
a quiet man,

so nobody
will know,
your spirit can perceive
and freelybreathe and glow

in an unseen
eternity.

No rhyme
for that.








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Saturday, March 23, 2013

Jar Heads


They say we can’t be
what we’re not.
But that still leaves us
in a spot.

How to get at
all the rest?
Is their adage
meant to suggest

it’s just like
opening a jar –
uncovering
the stuff we are?











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Friday, March 22, 2013

Most of Us


 
Strange how
most of us advance –
dancing naked
in a trance.















.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Literally Laterally Littoral


 
Literally laterally littoral,
I am a fish who only ever
swims along your shore.
Every time I see you I want more.













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Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Existential Sticky Buns


We’re not sure, but it may be
nobody goes away.
Perceptions spill into and play

with the imagination as they
always do and we construe
and make each other up

the way we’ve always done:
at whim and will. Arguably
here or no, in fact we never go –

always larger than our sums:
ephemeral amalgams –
existential sticky buns.

Spinning in infinity’s vicinities,
we’re always on the spot.
Hard to see sometimes,

but when was any of us not?
No one’s dead or gone.
Someone’s had us on.










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Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Identities


Identities can be a pain.
You pick one up
and put it on
and take it off again.

Sometimes you try on
three at once, though
that produces strain.
It feels a little vain.












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Monday, March 18, 2013

The Thing that Sniffs Out Spring


Sing to the thing
that sniffs out
Spring –

whiffs the lift
that brings the curtain
down on pall and gloom –

and hauls
the backdrop up
for bloom.











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Sunday, March 17, 2013

The Shocking and the New


How our higher primate 
brains all strain
to understand

and countermand
the shocking
and the new! –

when nothing's
really shocking
and the new is merely

more of sheer eternity.
We are a queer
fraternity.









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Saturday, March 16, 2013

Morphday


 
Though it may elicit gasping
or a gape or two,
today we think we’ll take
another shape or two.














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Friday, March 15, 2013

Be Like God


 
Be like God – be bold –
give void a form.
The joy in being cold
is getting warm.













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Thursday, March 14, 2013

The Appeal


Refusing the appeal –
confusing the familiar
with the real –

we miss who’s with us
or what’s going on
entirely:

desiring the fiery –
stranded in a fleeting
dream of flame.

What you’re seeing
doesn’t have
a name.









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Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Why We Do What We Do

 


What to do today to slay
the demons in the day?

Blood and clay –
mud and hay –

Mold some sentient
flesh from it –

Make it prescient –
fresh – and split

and fold it up like
dough again from

blood and clay –
mud and hay –

what to do today to slay
the demons in the way?










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Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Homunculi

 


They say there’s no homunculus
responsible for consciousness
in any single one of us –

no little guy inside
deciding anybody’s overriding separate
perception of the who or what or why –

and we agree with other observations
which amount to these that this construes
a reasonable point of view.

But surely it is true –
though oh!
it makes us sigh –

that what gives rise to warring senses
of what’s you and yours and me and my
comprises an unwitting babbling tribal bible

written and rewritten and redacted
and enacted in the lurid plural
by homunculi.









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Monday, March 11, 2013

Your Hangers-On

 





 
Go dancing
with your hangers-on
till dawn.

Après cela
go to an all-night boite
to eat

seared chunks of saumon
en brochette,
sliced beet with goat cheese

with the barest squeeze
of jalapeno juice.
From this, deduce

you’ve done
your duty
to their beauty.

Now stop.
Let the damned things
drop.








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Sunday, March 10, 2013

Feathered March

 


Feathered March
appears
equipped to fly,
but walks.

You hope
for tweety chirps
from it.
Instead it talks

too softly
to be heard.
Apparently
it’s not a bird.










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Saturday, March 9, 2013

Strange


 


Drop the curtain.
Sense the certain
pestilential
existential

acquiescence
of the essence
of the thing.
Do not sing.

Scurry
into worry.
Languish
in the anguish.

Repel.
Expel.
Decrease.
Release.

Strange,
this peace.







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Friday, March 8, 2013

Imaginary Friends


 


Imaginary friends
are very nice
to have around –

when you’re naked
and unwitting,
doing nothing,
sitting down.











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Thursday, March 7, 2013

What the Night is All About




 


In your floating yellow predawn dream,
your bed is evanescing into ghostly splotch
and something pastel green appears
to want to watch.  Another crack of late

night morning – one to two – breaks open
to uproot you – as if consciousness in sleep
were mostly proving more unwieldy than was
good for mental health. There must be wealth

in wanting to be wakened. Something’s
shakened, but it isn’t telling. Something
irrepressible: a fresh upwelling takes another
form and there you are again, still warm from

having been accosted, lost in almost pleasurable
doubt which, like a melon smashing, wakes up
into wet and ragged pieces – manifestly you –
wondering what the night is all about.









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Wednesday, March 6, 2013

The Romance of Bad Weather in New York



 


Weeks away from Spring, late afternoon is lighter
than it used to be: turns dusk as if the atmosphere
through which it has to suffer weren’t there –
the air, a brittle edge, a frigid slice of thinning Winter

cuts the skin – and suddenly I know this city
saves my life. Spirits in me softly climb and tumble –
seizing and releasing. The storm will soon arrive.
My city! – oh my city, oh my city! – is alive.









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Tuesday, March 5, 2013

All of This

 


for Catherine Synan Green

Aiming my investigative apparatus
at the voluble variety of you,
I find myself acquiring a picture
which entirely takes up my point of view:

that of seeing you not caught so much
as situated in the network of a spine
directing neurological behavior
and sensation in some vastly larger

glowing creature whom my irrepressible
imagination is suggesting is divine.
Something knowing gives a nod.
All of this is God.










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Monday, March 4, 2013

Beat

 


To try to find you in your fine defended privacy –
to touch and understand what overwhelms
in those most unreported realms –
to conjure up some access to the primacy

of what enrobes your soul in secret
and provides its impetus, its locomotion –
to chart the dark expanse of that great ocean –
come upon its meditative calm and peek at

something at its levitating center: sense the heat –
the endless deep research, the trenchant leads on
what I’d need to get at what your psyche feeds on –
has me beat.










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Sunday, March 3, 2013

Your Findings

 


Abandon your notions
of cause and effect
and express some affection
for who or whatever’s nearby.
Report on your findings.

Oh my.









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Saturday, March 2, 2013

In a Way

 


The apples you purchase
in March in New York at bodegas
relate to the apples you get in September

at fresh produce markets the way
certain yearnings for romance
relate to the last time you

can’t quite remember
that you were
in love.

In a way.

Push never quite
came to shove
today.










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Friday, March 1, 2013

This Thing That Sits and Talks at You


 


This thing that sits
and talks at you –
when will it stop?

You aren’t fond of stories.
The flop and splay of facts
arrayed as if

their manufactured tactics
all intrinsically
had interest doesn’t interest.

This thing that sits
and talks at you –
its infinitely intricate specifics!

You crave to be inoculated
by the serum of the flow
of what persists below.









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