It Happens

 

He fell in love

with a tree today.
There isn’t anything
more to say.













.

Your Ectoplasm

 

Sometimes your ectoplasm
spasms
and escapes

and drapes itself

across your lap.
It can’t go far –

at least while you’re alive –

but you will
find that when it’s out of you,

you can’t contrive

to take a nap. Ectoplasm
causes naps

which it then feeds on.

Godspeed, then:
may you quickly reunite!  

Chances are,

you will.
Neither

of you likes it

when you can’t nod
off. Too much damned light.





.

Deal

 

I’ll sit on a bit of you

if you’ll sit on a bit of me
and we two get to do it
in sweet perpetuity.















.

Perhaps a Coma in a Bed

 

 

The hail and deluge of detail,

those swarming seas of expertise,
those so-called passions that conceive –

Basta! Take your leave.

You’ve had it with spectacular disparity.
You'd like some undisputed clarity –

the last word in Serene.

Perhaps a coma in a bed.
You wouldn’t rule out dead.












.

And So’s Your Old Man

The surface spitefully

ignites – hot with potential.
That’s its goal.

But while it’s frightfully

delightfully essential,
so’s your soul.











.

The Poetic Impulse

Oblique and so direct

that it erects
the phallus
in the pen
and in the poem's flesh –

so fresh

that it cannot remember
what it is supposed to think –
it cannot stop itself –
it clocks itself,

then sinks

into a rampant timelessness
through whose one tiny
aperture a picture blooms
into the mind –

a precious

find – what is the word
for it? inflated floating
beach toy, tire
round the middle,

under which

an ancient
impressionistic memory
as vivid as it is abstract
extracts six

orange-colored fish

against an azure blue –
and somehow you entirely
are in it and are absent
from it all at once.

You are a dunce

who can’t explain
a single thing.
And yet you
sing.






.

Now, When June Cavorts, Cajoles

Arrhythmic silly dancing –

clomping, clunky feet!
We don’t advance

into the heat all neat

and sorted through.
But wonders do construe us:

now, when June cavorts,

cajoles – induces blue
and gold – and juices

sighs from us in strange

voluptuous July as it arrives
to form the fleet seducing

center of the season.

Nothing much occurs
for any reason. We meet

and greet and prance

about in our pajama pants:
inordinate, replete.










.

Our Conglomerate Sin

 

I’m a writer

who
draws

and a drawer

who
writes

and we both

bow
the violin.
 
That’s our
conglomerate
sin.











.

Love You to Bits



 

None of it fits
when you love me
to bits.

Sucks out my breath

when you love me
to death.

You say you
could eat
me up.

Don't
eat me
up.











.

Everywhere

 

Crawling up in disrepair,

falling – calling! – from the sky,
aliens are everywhere:
you are one, and so am I.













.

More Room

 

Everything contains
the human face
and form and frame
for us: the taut

anthropomorphic

force which enters
every thought
is an inevitable bloom.

Sometimes it seems

the human psychic
apparatus ought
to have more room.










.

My Father’s Child

 

My father’s child
was not beguiled
by paucity.

He liked excess.

He liked the mess
that bled and sped

in wild illusions

bred from his
enumerating head

like coiled snakes

in lapidary curves
of the Baroque.

My father’s child

could not not choke
at falsity. Whatever

wasn’t dream

could not be true.
My father’s child

was not like you,

or me. My father’s
child had mystery

and has it still.

Sometimes I feel
his spill – his

history inside my

curling mind.
Quite something

to wake up

bestride a predawn
hour to find.






.

On the Eve of the Longest Day

 

Light is the progenitor of dark –
the vast contrasting blast
from which the spasms
from which we erupt embark.

You fell in love with night

six months ago and you will fall
in love with night again
six months from now, but now

you feel the ardor of the Star

you call the Sun. New gods
have won:  revise your vow. Strip
naked in the brightness. Bow.









.

Poultry and Their Ova

 

The multitudes knelt down to beg:
“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

“Poultry and their ova,” the Grand Poobah replied,

“inhabit bird eternity: maternity implied.
“Sequence is illusion: simultaneous, untied.”

“But who began the ride?”

The Great Divine One sighed.












.

Ménage-à-quatre

A large translucent yellow sentience

and two hovering amenities
arrived, spent, from a netherworld today –

oh, there are more than one, and some

demand a surfeit of essence which,
exacted from the center of you,
can quite do you in – and, in the case
of these exhausted escapees, quite did.

That fat thing sat there like a quid pro quo

for which there wasn’t any answer.
The others glanced above, below
and to and fro and, as was usual
for them, awaited yet a new inevitable fate.

We made a great

ménage-à-quatre.
Unforeseen blind date.









.

Burps

 

Today you woke and felt a certain delicacy of presentiment –

an indistinct prefiguring – an adumbration of velleity
becoming something longer, stronger – until what had begun
as whim had turned to steel. Intricately large vocabulary

in you whirled and wielded you into a reeling spiel:

then suddenly your words became usurped by burps: your
gut rebelled against the verbal glut. By now you’ve calmed
and come around. You thought you’d try to write it down.











.

Payoff

 

Bloated ghosts
like jello babies
coast through memories,

revoking any certainties

your recollections
ever had a basis.

Points erase their cases –

achieve a floating stasis.

Not a curse.

Could be worse.










.

A Theory of Mind

 

How dare you think I’m you!
After all I’ve done
to make it clear
that to appear
with all your filaments askew
the only possible prognosis
is catastrophe.

You’ll never last

with me.
But there you squat, you blot –
you vast assortment of insidious
proclivities aligned with hell –
imagining that you’ve
the barest chance to dwell

in my vicinity

in all your lurid lunacy
with cavalier impunity –
you dirty word
made flesh,
you flesh made lie!
Well, just you try.









.

Past the Size of Dreaming

 

It’s past the size of dreaming. Nature wants stuff

To vie strange forms with fancy...

(Cleopatra, Antony & Cleopatra, act 5, sc 2)

----------------------

It’s the amorphousness that gets you first.

Too thick to slake your thirst for flow –
when suddenly it gets a glow on,

puts a show on, starts to undergo

that alchemy again, when Juliet waits
on her balcony for Romeo who turns into

Marc Antony who burns into a god –

deriving from the same old sod as you and me.
There is no reckoning for what will be.

Let’s bloop up from the mud – regroup
and course with untoward colors in our blood –
vast eyes gleaming, past the size of dreaming.

.

The Morning News

 

Last night two dream schemes

took brisk walks through your capacities
and in their breezy tinted wake you woke
to choke on remnants of their gassy pastel hues
which, after you recovered from your cough,

you understood comprised the morning news

they wished you to breathe in. Off
the axis of your consciousness,
you realized you’d been strung along.
The story you’d believed was you was wrong.












.

When Someone Wants to Leave You

 

Don’t say no.

Don’t damn the flow.
You’ll wreck the show.
Just let him go.














.

The Sleeping Part

 

Gently hold the sleeping part –

make sure it doesn’t wake –
descend into its deepest heart
where give makes love to take.













.

Menu Change

 

Our salmon mousse
and avocado dip
have given us
the slip.

They’ve changed

their venue.
They’re now no longer
on the menu.

They left

their bowls.
They each
grew souls.

They did it

on a hunch.
They’d had it,
being lunch.










.

On Sapphire Days

 

It’s pleasant hanging

out bare-assed
with friends
on sapphire days –

affectionately

putting up
with all their
little ways.












.

Most Remain Intact

 

There are many kinds of innocence.
Their loss? Small need to fear it.
Most remain intact.

Though some expunged by sins against

the heart do leave the spirit
irremediably cracked.












.

A Thing Like That

 

Sensitively monumental! –
the thing that breathes
and stands and greets –
disarms and renders angry

seizures into amicable

rhythms in the blood –
that argues flood into
a reasonable flow – extracts

the dense collective sense

of random heads and turns it
into tremolo – an ornament
of tune – moon-threnody –

a melody that orbits

in voluptuous extravagance
erasing dread. Build a thing
like that around the dead.











.

We’d Like to Say…

 

Sometimes

what holds us up
does not quite hold us up –
and we mean us –

not merely him or her or them or you or me:

we are an awfully heavy panoply,
too likely to hang on to sameness
even when it clearly bears

the breaking, braking evidence

of lameness.
We’d like to say that we’ll get through no matter
what, but.










.

A Bet You Do Not Want to Hedge

 

Felt as pressure of a pulse –
faint convulsion of an incrementally

increasing stress of interest
in the glint wedged in the smallest

tightest bit of aperture
beneath the sharpest darkest edge –

you place a bet here
that you do not want to hedge –

to risk your life on random outcomes –
even when the doubt comes.










.