Incarnate Life

Incarnate life subsumes us in the dangerous –

the body feels, reacts, discerns – soon learns

that nothing doesn’t have a consequence

which isn’t deeply steeped in sorrow. We borrow

what we can from promises of hope, yet always

have again to cope with matter – not the fleeting

spatter of the spirit – of the soul we’re told

is what created us, and made us whole.

It’s hard for flesh to keep this notion fresh.







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Today’s Maxim

Despair sets an agenda –

so do rage and hope:

palliations meant to ease us into

thinking we’ve alternatives

to groping blind.

Let’s change this cast of mind.

Instead of cleaving to

a sunny outcome, moping into

the morose, or getting furious,

let’s be curious.








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Body Language

Your muscles, limbs and torso think, and speak –

mercilessly delicate and unapologetic,

they regale, declare – gesturally fostering

opinions past the brink of the acceptable: too

possible to be believed; articulations far beyond

the tolerably bright: they weaken me – deceive:

I cannot fight their lexicons and libraries –

conjunctions: glinting, slick – soft juncture of the lips –

tight linen skin – swift prepositions: flicking wrist,

translucent blink – the diction of a pinkness like

a mist when fingers snap me out of stasis, script

the air – the gilding care with which they lavish

purely fleshly points: the tender awkward syntax

of the shoulders – jointed to arcane vocabularies

in the slender spine – in shy subordination

to the sweet inclining theme of you, the wash

of wafting clauses in the dream of you: completely

there – beyond all reach. You ruin speech.





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Next Time, Honeys

Today they wobbled bare-assed out upon a rope

in hopes I might permit them all to cope

in their collective bumbling way

to get through their perplexing day

and into lurid night.

The scruffily egregious sight

of them was sometimes more than I could stand:

I very nearly used the thick eraser by my hand

to whisk their naked raggedness into oblivion.

But so intent were they on living on

according to their wanton plan,

I thought, oh well, I’d try to be the sort of man

who this time might decide to let them.
But next time, honeys, I will get them.

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Inside Info

Every day’s a gift.

A bundle with a shift –

or shifty eye –

sometimes a peanut butter pie –

sometimes a little guy

as fat as you are curious

why he is not more furious

at his obesity –

the least that he

might do

is tell you who

or what

or when

or where.

But that’s the sort of inside

info few gifts ever share.








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To Some Degree

Instead of wondering

what he is or what you are,

it seems to us by far

more interesting to wonder

about nothing whatsoever.

Somehow that severs us

into the rare: the air beyond

what’s putatively “you” or “me.”

Somehow we think that’s

how – to some degree –

we’ve gotten free.

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Nipples

Why do nipples make a ripple in the mind?

Nipples make the spirit dip and flip

and sip – tipple strange wine.














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Target

Today the world

resides in color.

It rides us like a target.

No telling how far away

we’ll get today.











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Almost Here

I’m almost here.

My soul is getting warm.

I think it’s clear

I’ll soon assume a form.












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Caught

Freedom!

No, we fought
the thought.

Now we're caught.

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Inimitable Meat

Be a constitutionally un-poetic treat.
Condense into the potent unadulterated
essence of your dumb inimitable meat.












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Some Demons

Trailing you like
unremembered sin,
some demons
know you out & in.











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3 Everythings - 3 Nevers

family photo re-imagined by Norman Shapiro

Let’s make the wild assumption
that we both know everything about
each other and we know we know we know.

Let’s go to all the edges we can see
or think of – stay at each for several blinks –
and then befuddle with a dash to other brinks:

don’t miss that odd ironic darting eyebrow –
or the faintly rushing pink suffusing cheek
of having been precisely caught precisely

where we hoped we might be caught –
that lightning glance that takes in all –
that glorious ebullient fantasy you grab at

like a golden apple – just before the fall.
And honey, there’ll be falls to put Niagara
out of joint. The point for us, my sweetness,

is to bargain everything against the certainty
that we are wrong about – well, everything
we long for. But never mind: let’s take

too much and risk the whole, and keep
each other hopping, never stop for longer
than an accident of rhyme. Let’s wrestle

with the terror in the gut that says we got
the whole thing backwards and we never
will be satisfied with one last time.

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shibboleths

Caught

Freedom!

No, we fought

the thought.
Now we're caught.

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Leaf Lust

After innumerable intimate acquaintances with trees,

the bare particulars of which (fret not) we’ll spare you,

he now sports branchlike femurs, mandibles and knees,

exposing them in ways we’d never dare to.












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For Lonely Beasties

If you’re a beastie

and you’re lonely

and you’re yearning for a boost,

why not give a homeless clown

a roost?








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My Sly-Eyed Horticulturist

Some potted plants

can be coerced

to push out flowers

in suits and pants

or conjure unsuspecting

blooms in dresses.

Or so my sly-eyed

horticulturist

confesses.










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When You’re Looking Back

When you’re looking back,

you sometimes look ahead.

Some of it will follow you:

not all of it is dead.












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How I Look Inside

Today I hadn’t time to do

a single thing besides sit full astride

the thunder of my wonder.

I’m moving in a week.

You wonder how I look inside?

Here’s a peek.









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Looking In Their Eyes

The reflex is to dance

for the magician and his boy.

But looking in their eyes

you aren’t sure you’re seeing joy.











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Oracle

The Oracle now morphed into an old bipedal stance –

so different from the dance of leaping sparks within whose

crackles it could dwell the day before. But with what

it now knew it must foretell, it couldn’t be those anymore.

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Tourists

Tourists took a tour today:

five were shy and small;

one was confident and tall:

large, in charge, he told

his quintet not to fret –

that no catastrophe

was likely to beset them.

He talked about a slew

of other things as well

but we forget them.









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Today We’ll See

Let blunt brute force meet subtlety.

What will they join to be?
Today we’ll see.

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You, Galore

With all rapacity - audacity -

you strive to open up capacity

for more. Be you, galore.

.

Ray

Lucy

Paige

Nan & Stan

Consuelo

Linc

Florence

Bruce

All, and All

They’re waiting for you every day.

Strange you’ve not yet come their way –

or so they say in whispers to each other –

intimately (brother, as they are, to brother)

wondering when you will see

that they are your Eternity’s fraternity –

the keepers of your rise, your fall –

your openings to All, and All.











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Beyond Your Otherwise’s, Therefore’s, Or’s and But’s

Beyond your Otherwise’s, Therefore’s,

Or’s and But’s abuts a lexicon so strange

that when you first encounter it, its symbols

mount your lips and range into your mouth like

army ants, implant their pincers in your tongue

and shoot their serum up your nose into your brain

and all you know from then on is the sometimes

gentle, sometimes raging rain of glimmering

bewilderment. You smell the spirit in the letter.

Sometimes it makes your poems better.









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