Sunday, June 26, 2016

Place For It


Arrived in picked-at snags and wicked spatters –
rags and tatters born of haste and waste
and all the other traits that make for taste –
and not a little ad hoc grace and wit.
This surely is the place for it.









.

Saturday, June 25, 2016

Sometimes the Task



Sometimes the task
is not to lose the mask
but find a mask to wear -
so as not to have to bare
what you must bear.









.

Friday, June 24, 2016

Three Faces


With a solicitude whose grace became apparent
by their evident belief that in a glance
I would be able to advance
a brief but sensitive appraisal of the fine array
of nuanced features they had brought me to display,

three faces just arose to offer their vicissitudes today.
They couldn’t stay: there were too many other eyes
to heed, to feed – to gauge, assuage – the rage
of some of whose intemperate uncertainties
they might be able to allay.








.

Thursday, June 23, 2016

The Creaturehood


Two creatures left
the Creaturehood today.

They’d had enough
of never having any say
in what got done with them.

No one was having
any fun with them!

So now they’re gone.
(Damned Creaturehood,
of course, goes on.)








.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Blue Lady


Ah, the uses to which her inscribing hand is put!
They scour her from head to foot.
The schemes Blue Lady manifests all day and night,
the dreams she looses from her inner sight
and writes and draws without a pause:
what flames do they ignite?
What sweet devotions do they host?
What are the endlessly created notions of a ghost?








.

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Let’s Praise the Eyes





Let’s praise the eyes –
how they assess and test the size of everything –
note every riffling feather on that wing –
see how the muscles in his throat permit that man to sing.

Let’s praise them more.
Let’s praise their range of strange capacities
to tease, to fool, to school you, make you breathe
a different atmosphere than you had breathed before.

Let’s praise how wide and wise they’d let us be
if we would let our eyes beget
and re-beget the world into the thing it is:
a fresh surprise. Let’s praise – let’s raise – our eyes.







.

Monday, June 20, 2016

Hadda Be There


He thinks it’s funny,
she doesn’t.
Ya hadda be there
and she wasn’t.










.

Florid Orange


 
We didn't want her to at first,
but then no longer fought her.
Florid Orange wants to swim!
You'll find her in the water.










.

Sunday, June 19, 2016

I Can’t Help It


I can’t help it if I’m
absolutely beautiful.
I didn’t ask for all
the attributes I’ve got.

Homage paid to me
is never merely dutiful.
People strain for words
to praise me, not

believing what they see.
I am coming humbly
to accept that what
they see is me.








.

Saturday, June 18, 2016

Your Quadruped and You


Through boredom, 
death or yearning 
for another start –

though it relieve 
or break 
your heart –

one day your 
quadruped and you
will have to part.











.

Thursday, June 16, 2016

Figure in the Fantasy


The figure
in the fantasy
grows hazy –

rudely, negligently lazy –
will not keep the shape
that made you gape –

lets the ardor leak –
leaves the penis
weak –

and otherwise
abandons you
to randomness –

probably to be
bereft
at what is left.

What is left?
What has left?
Something’s left.




.

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Rebecca and Her Sister Ann


Except for heads and faces and a hidden small assortment of their
private parts, Rebecca and her sister Ann are made of hair.
They’d like to tell you why but they don’t dare.













.

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

In the Wake of Senseless Slaughter


In the wake of senseless slaughter
Soul feels like it’s wading waist-deep
into toxic water, breathing viral air,

yet striving, striding bare through it, 
to dare through sudden death's despair
and strife to clear another place for life.








.

Monday, June 13, 2016

Prototype


Today we are a prototype –
an unexampled species –
beyond the reach of ease,
efficiency or efficacious use –

a loose brigade of presence
and of shape: designed
for gaping at. We rather
like the blatant fact of us:

this fuss, this thing we are.
Like bright light captured
in a jar, shaken up to make
a jam. We am we am we am.







.

Sunday, June 12, 2016

A Central Part of You


Darting mostly out
of view

is what
a central part of you

wants most
to do.









.

Saturday, June 11, 2016

O Blessèd Opposite!


Surely (at least when we got up this morning we were sure)
a rare duality we could rely on – as dependable as light and dark,
or lose and find – providing all the polished metal of an armature

of meaning into which we now relievedly might park our bootless
anxious systems of response – the breath and strife of “mind” –
was life and death. O blessèd opposite! One was not the other;

ergo each suggested what the other had to be. But suddenly,
from nowhere we could see, we heard – as raucous as the caw
of dawn-awakened birds: “life and death are only words.”









.

Thursday, June 9, 2016

On Saturdays


On Saturdays Luanne sequestered herself
in a gilded étagère – she packed
herself into this standing art nouveau affair

as if she were a rare array of bibelots
and chinaware. We don’t know why
she liked it there.










.

Equanimity


Equanimity insisted on itself today.
It didn’t care how many
disparate anomalies got in its way.











.