Thursday, October 31, 2013

Literary Critic, as Lover




A subtle probe – a sweet considered pose – softly
incrementally investigating motive – an assuaging
and engaging private glance -- a sense of immanent

romance which darkens into secrecy -- an inward
leaking fear, preternaturally near the source – all this,
of course, to wield his deep discourse – his field of art.

How proud he is to commandeer this steed! He’ll talk
around profound circumferences, indeed – tracing
tributaries of the heart to summon up their seeping

mysteries – make them bleed – detect the differences
between the random force and the involuntary blast --
attend to the remotest rhythms of a horse’s ass.








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The Gods are Gloating



Frail as a surmise,
your fragile eyes
a globular surprise,
you came back pale

and floating.
The gods are gloating.
They knew how boldly
you would grow.

They whispered,
winked, and nudged
each other:
“Told you so.”









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Sunday, October 20, 2013

Good-bye



from godbwye (1570s), itself a contraction of God be with ye (late 14c.)

We like to think of life
as episodes –
but episodes are magic
thinking, sinking:

done – foregone –
as quickly as begun.
The scheme
of narrative won’t hold.

Although hello
is nice to hear
and sadness may ensue
when you or I effect

to disappear
and say good-bye,
sequence is a dream,
my dear. All is here.








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Saturday, October 19, 2013

Confess To Me, Oh Broken Thing!


 
 
Unspoken and unsung --
unable, here, to speak or sing -- 
the thing that breaks now tastes,

and takes itself into, oblivion.
It can’t be fixed: there is no fix.
Whatever mix evoked it

into being long ago
cannot be re-invoked. We lost
its recipe. Confess to me,

oh broken thing, the secrets
of your past! All I seem to know
so far is nothing lasts.









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Friday, October 18, 2013

Sometimes You Aren’t Sure You Want to Visit Monuments


 
Sometimes you aren’t sure
you want to visit monuments.
You hear you should:

you’re told it would be good
for you, though less to see
them than to say you've gone  

to see them, you suspect.
You’ve got to read up on their
history, and load up on respect.

You’d rather things be fun.
Can monuments be fun?
Perhaps this might be one.











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Thursday, October 17, 2013

Temporary Dislocation of the Head


 
Not everybody understands
that temporary dislocation
of the head expands

the heart, relieves the pressure
on varieties of glands,
and can free up the speculative

curiosity of hands,
released from all those blunt
prefrontal cortical demands.












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Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Destiny’s Physics


 
Balance will insist upon itself –
ruthlessly it varies to produce
what will conduce to the dispersal
of exactly equal weight. What had

once come early now comes late.
What was once revealed will now
be hidden. It doesn’t seem to matter
who is riding, who is ridden.










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Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Higgs Particles


 
At first you felt enraged –
engaged in some incensed excursion
in and to and through the depths of you

whose genesis
you sensed like distant seismic breaths
arising from some dumb unruly beast --

the least last bit of you was under
its control – until the sense began
to roll and weave and interleave

like vines between the lines
and other colors bred from
the incursive red and bled

beneath the skin
of an unprecedented sentiment –
a rich presentiment:

the presentation
of a wholly different feeling:
now appealing

to new torrents of the soul.
You are Higgs particles: currents
of a multi-verse: oceans in a bowl.










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Monday, October 14, 2013

Calm Clowns


 
There may be bearing up
but that alone
won’t do the trick.

Nor will money.

There is no cheering up:
no shtick is really funny.
Depression doesn’t want
a clown around.
Clowns make you wary.

Clowns are volatile and scary.

Except when clowns
are calm. Calm clowns
are a balm.









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Sunday, October 13, 2013

Mix and Match



Chromosomally, we are
a random handful:
toss of traits,

propensities
and tendencies
which conjure up

our destinies –
a kind of je ne sais
exactly what we’ll be

except that somehow
it proceeds from
an array of DNA.

But aren’t we a treat
when it comes down
to serving up what’s

on the tray! Unconsciously
attending to genetic duty,
how we pick and patch

and trick and catch
and mix and match
it into beauty!









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Saturday, October 12, 2013

Marriages are Strange


 
Encompassing, as they must do,
the range of all the unexamined
and unexpurgated and unfathomed

shames and yearnings and bewilderments
of two frail creatures pledging their fidelity
to they know not quite what,

marriages are strange.
Biology commands them.
But no one understands them.













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Friday, October 11, 2013

Coming Back


 
You thought you’d be late.
But there is no “late.”
Just come through the gate.
They’re happy to wait.













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Monday, October 7, 2013

Sometimes You Aren’t Welcome


 
Sometimes
you aren’t
welcome.

You aren’t even
in the queue.

Blooming into view
comes some
quite other coup

of an ado
from you.

There isn’t
room
for more.

The open door
has shut.

And has
turned
to but.

Oh well.
So what.







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Sunday, October 6, 2013

Emergence


 
An emergence
just emerged
from yet another
new emergency
in my dream's sea --

then sank back down
into its liquid urgency
to join the others.
All revenants
are brothers.












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Saturday, October 5, 2013

Secondary Sexual Characteristics


 
Secondary sexual characteristics,
by the time you’re thirty-five,
may tend defensively to flare
and bare and flash and jive
and dare to “speak” about themselves

when they begin to sense the prospect
of becoming weak and turning tertiary.
Aging is an estuary: fresh encounters
salt. Nobody’s fault
but God’s, if there’s a God.

So if you feel at odds,
and find you’re stripping down a lot
and flaunting it, that may be why.
Unless you’ve always done it,
and you simply aren’t shy.












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Friday, October 4, 2013

So That’s What Happened.


 
Conversation’s long.
Nothing’s ever said.
Something’s oddly wrong.
Everybody’s dead.













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Thursday, October 3, 2013

Asleep


 
Is influence malignant
or benign?
Does it ally with chance
or with design?

Do you have
to know?
What do you have
to know?

But oh! -- you find
the current!
Sometimes you find
the current.












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Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Anonymous Sex


 
He sat there, naked on a bench --
off his rocker
where he’d spent his silence yesterday –
seeking soothing swaying rhythms
none of which, he knew, today
would stay
the tumult or allay
his sense that everything inanimate
and animate now held a grudge
against his skin’s existence.

He knew exactly what had happened.
Yesterday God had fellated him
and drained his juice
and baited him and rained a sluice
of quantum-busybody
vitriol which poisoned
all and left him here, on some now
God-forsaken sphere
where silence was the only hope.
He’d try to cope.










.

if there is enlightenment

 

If there is enlightenment,
we think it often blasts
from blue to yellow
thru some random
sad beleaguered fellow.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Infinite Transgression


 
The mind's an infinite transgression --
commuting joy as easily
into depression as eruptive lusts.

While outwardly exhibiting a show
of comme il faut and should’s and must’s,
it secretly entrusts itself to nothing –

as the stuffing of the life it putatively
seeks to spice and mold disperses
in the breeze like droplets

in a bad cold’s sneeze. It conjures
easy rhymes like these to cover  
virulence – cheap handkerchiefs

all full of holes. It has no goals.
And yet the delicacy it can lend
a face transgresses into grace.









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