Tuesday, May 31, 2016

And lo!


You searched in your coffers of colors
for glamour and sheen –
and what should emerge but the genial
marriage of purple and green!

And lo! – it’s a full-bearded man
who is beckoning you to be wed.
And right now you can’t think of whom
you would rather say yes to instead.










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Monday, May 30, 2016

Game Change


The whole game changed.
Light exchanged its secrets in the dark –
the sky was now a jaundiced gray –

no one you had heard explain it all before
could come up with the barest thing to say.
The enterprise was fucked: a muddy wreck:

devoid of luck. Then you looked up,
around, astounded. There was
beauty in the muck.









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Saturday, May 28, 2016

Bald Evidence


It may be that hairy men
enjoy some subtle yet distinct
advantages the rest of us do not.

Although it may not have to do
with the direct effects on them
of all the hair they’ve got.

But rather that they live as
the deliciously indelicate
reminder of our provenance –

not to say evince bald evidence
of our befurred mammalian
ancient melting pot.

They are what we were.
That can cause
an atavistically erotic stir.





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Friday, May 27, 2016

Unsieved


Some talent and capacity for calm, contentment and the enterprise
of intimacy – amid the roving current of a dangerous desire
to know, a curiosity that can’t not redirect the flow, a needful pulse
whose aim may mainly be to underscore its own raw hunger
and identity: this may be the soul unsieved – the life well-lived.








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Thursday, May 26, 2016

Too Many Hearts


Friends treat friends sometimes as means
to ends, instead of presences with
whom one wants to be.

Abandoning their souls to every random
essence in each other ought to be
their sweetest revelry.

But friends are rare: too many hearts
cannot believe another
heart is there.








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Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Awkward


Today was awkward:
all but squawked toward

equanimity to throw it
off its game. Took great

pleasure in the tameness
of its lameness: hadn’t

any worry or self-scrutiny
as it befuddled down

the drain. Draped its
limbs this way and that –

all fat upon our butts
and arms and backs –

willy nilly leaky boat –
silly sneaky billy goat.





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Tuesday, May 24, 2016

What Conversation Can Be Like


Today they traded all the sordid facts
they knew about whoever they’d encountered

since they last had traded all the sordid facts
they knew about whoever they’d encountered,

thereby demonstrating this:
conversation can be just like piss.










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Monday, May 23, 2016

The Guy on the Right


I feel like the guy on the right.
You’ve told me you’ve felt
like the guy on the right, often, too.

But I never imagined the guy
on the left could be you.











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Reunited


Could it happen?
Yes it could!
Reunited
and it feels so good.










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Steam-rolled


Fact and fiction,
is and seems
delusively
steam-roll
his dreams.









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Sunday, May 22, 2016

Chock-a-Block


He guarded his large cardboard box
(chock-a-block with locks and socks)
whose contents he kept secret.
Though one day he would leak it.










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Saturday, May 21, 2016

At Sixty-Five


Today two presences,
voluminously robed,
arrived inside me
to announce
that they had probed
the thing I am

and now had come
to rid my hard-drive
of its logjam (common,
they explained,
when one attained
the age of sixty-five):

thereby unmasking me
from me so I might see
the single answer
to the largest question
I had not known
I was asking.

 “There’s one thing
that can save,”
they said, their tone
appropriately grave.
“Be brave – go out
and badly misbehave.”





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This Sea, This Air, This Blue


He woke to find the dawn devoted to the color blue.
Striding, riding, gliding into the intriguing scheme
of its embracing hue, into the waking dream
that he was flying, swimming through alluring shades
of air and sea into new points-of-view, he wondered
at his suddenness of certainty – as if the soft insistence
of Existence had contrived to bring the thing to be:
“This sea, this air, this blue is me.”










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Thursday, May 19, 2016

What Could Be News


What could be news?
That he morphed incessantly
into varieties of unexampled
shapes and hues
was not the news.

Changelessness consisted and consists
and will consist in restlessly exchanging
views for views for views
for yet more views.
Were there lessons to be learned

from the collective aperçu
of these impressions?
He could think of two
he might reveal to you.
But he wasn’t sure he wanted to.






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Wednesday, May 18, 2016

The Salient Fact


Their blisters were the salient fact.
The ladies weren’t good at dance routines:
they always seemed to fumble forward
when they ought to have been gliding back.

But they were bound to keep on trying
by what might as well have been a solemn
pact: whatever had provided the decree
that they must always be a Sister Act.









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If Maybe, Softly


Today we’ll conjure up
a quantity of faint
amorphous sapphire blue –
and see if maybe, softly,

that might break
and dissipate the barriers,
and wake us up,
and take us through.












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Monday, May 16, 2016

Most of Whom I Hang Out With


They say that you know people from
the company they keep.
But most of whom I hang out with
I meet when I’m asleep.











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Another Cosmic Expectation


This morning Cosmos sneezed
a spout of quantum spasms out  –
left it so egregiously undone,
unmoored and unamassed –
that not a quark or lepton in it
knew its ankle from its ass.

Cosmos watched it splat into
a nano-corner of a nano-quadrant
of a negligible pocket in the outskirts
of a random quasar and sat back
to watch. Cosmos loved to see what
happened to this sort of splotch.

But oh! The splotch’s slivers quivered
instantly into a sweet harmonic spray
of unexpected colors, ordered
by availing stain-glassed borders
which teased up a range of pleasing
unexampled form! Which then began

to warm into the swift production
of two heads and faces – calm and blithe.
The writhe of it had managed to acquire
graces! Its balance was inscrutable,
immutable – a fact with tact. Another
cosmic expectation cracked.





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Saturday, May 14, 2016

Pleased and Teased and Seized


Suddenly you stop what you are doing
and you think with an inarguable certainty
that everything including you will one day
vanish in a blink like an exploding star.

Then you resume what you are doing,
unsurprised somehow how pleased
and teased and seized by this you are.











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Friday, May 13, 2016

Dame Agnes


Dame Agnes went ‘round
with her cat in her hat.

The cat quite enjoyed
where he sat.

That's all we've got
about that.








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Thursday, May 12, 2016

Seems To Be A Law


Everything is an incursion –
every outside presence is the mother
of the idea of the Other: an occasion
for enlightenment, anxiety and awe.
That seems to be a law.









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Eye to Eye





Let's see to eye.
Then when we can't
stand it anymore,
we'll say goodbye.





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Existential Spittle


Squiggling in your laundry pile!
Existential spittle!
Oh well, let it stay a while.
You only mind a little.









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Wednesday, May 11, 2016

What Floats the Boat


Today I saw the reason
in the heart of everything.

The lying down and getting up,
the dying and awakening,

the on and off, all glimmering
like fireflies, despondency

at dawn. I heard God cough
and clear his throat. And there

was what the secret was:
what floats the boat.








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Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Shadow – Upper Right



Of the shadow – upper right –
they’re bluntly unaware.
They think they’re in a place-less white:
sweet nowhere of blank air.

Nothing in their random flight
invites me to go there.
Such endless deeply inward sight
would fill me with despair.









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Monday, May 9, 2016

The Best Precautionary Measure


The Best Precautionary Measure

What’s the best precautionary
measure she could think of?

She closed her eyes and sighed;
when they opened they were wide –

as if they’d seen a treat.
She’d barely missed a beat.

“The best precautionary measure,”
she replied, “is surely pleasure.

Pleasure is the treasure.”
From what she’d carried in that day,

her fruit de printemps roast poulet,
tout fraiche! (her word, as ‘twere,

made flesh) – not only had she had
her say: she’d cooked it.







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Sunday, May 8, 2016

A Remarkable Economy of Means


She was made with a remarkable
economy of means.
Part of her was chair,
and parts were head and torso, hands
and feet and knees.
She lived amenably on pinto beans
and frozen peas.










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Saturday, May 7, 2016

Existential Pragmatism


This morning when he sat down at the table to consider
the absorbing question of what confiture to choose

to spread upon his whole wheat toast he heard,
or thought he heard, the softest plaintive sigh behind him:

and turned round to see a ghost. The ghost seemed more
surprised than he. But he accepted everything: he was

the devotee of existential pragmatism: things are what they are
and what they have to be. So he resumed his pondering –

this time about the strangely vexing possibility that coffee
might not be for him, today, as much a treat as tea.






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