Friday, September 30, 2016

To Miss the Mystery


To miss the mystery – neither notice
nor much care about each human
being’s strange inimitable history –
was surely, I once thought, to miss

the only thing that mattered. To think
what scattered on the surface was
the whole event:  that was reason
to repent – to numb the miracle of being

human in the gloom of existential gray:
as if what filled a day were merely
planetary habits: dumb proclivities
of reproducing rabbits. All manure.

But I’m not sure.
Maybe letting go
of spiritual hubris
is the cure.

Imagining the cure for yearning for ‘real’
meaning means uncovering the only
seemingly unseen may mean we’re more
in love with our imaginations than we are

with seeing. The spiritual archaeology
of sifting through what patently appears
for what is merely the apparent absence
of what’s really here: that may be to miss

the whole. There is no soul. Everything
is visible and indivisible. Nothing’s hidden.
Maybe spiritual archaeology should be
forgiven for its folly – if not forbidden.

But I’m not sure.
Maybe if we seek
the Soul we’ll
find the cure.

Thursday, September 29, 2016

For Bob, on his Birthday



Today is my brother Bob's birthday. He died March 1989. (I was with him.) Anyway, this morning, right before waking up, I had a dream that he and I were on the second floor of some house looking out a closed window at a backyard; it was night – dark – he was dressed in some colorful Hawaiian type baggy swim trunk thing, I was in black – and we saw what seemed to be reflections of ourselves in the backyard, dressed the same way, in the same “poses,” and he said, "look Guy, we're down there!" And I said, no we're not, that's just some weird reflection from the glass in the window. But as I said this some old gray bearded man walked up & started engaging our “reflections” in conversation. And my brother said, "see? we are down there."



I guess this makes me think we're everywhere. Including Bob, now. And my mom & dad. And every other human soul in the history of human souls.
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[pic - from left: my brother, my mother, me]


I wrote this back in 2008. Except for the last thing about how we're everywhere. That I wrote just now.

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What We Don’t Hear About at All


You know what we don’t hear about at all? The fun that Eve
and Adam had – no, not before their so-called “fall” (which
largely was a bore): more after they adjusted to it. True, it took
adjustment – for example, when they sampled their first shame
at being naked – till the feints and coy come-hither’s with which
wearing clothes acquainted them outdistanced any joy
in unclothed life they could recall: they learned the arts of being

“bad;” to find the lust they felt, the guilt they had, delicious;
the swell of body parts pernicious underneath a soft thin cling
of covering, now woven only for allure: the hot complexities of sex –
the lure transgression was – to do what any lover does when he
or she can’t bear another disingenuous resistance – to tear away
the cloth, to end up tossed and bare upon the floor: to feel
the jealous sting that lovers bring to the unwieldy thing a zealous

passion is: that to adore the flesh is often to abhor it – and to shut
the door on peace of mind, yet open it to riches they had no idea
in Eden they could find – whose each fresh danger was the point –
was what anointed their new complicated lives – which flourished,
if unnervingly, in contemplation – nourished any sense that what
they’d once called “Soul” at last might know it could behold
the cosmos in the heart that it was part of, and be whole.




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Wednesday, September 28, 2016

My Brother Bob's Birthday


After I was done with “Place-Holders” (September 28’s Enterprise) I was still hungry to draw - not just draw, but throw myself into something more ambitious - having, as usual, no idea what that would be.

It turned out to be this drawing. A few minutes ago when I finished it, looked at the time and saw that September 28 had turned into September 29, I realized something about what probably was prodding me - September 29 was/is my brother Bob's birthday. (He died in 1989 of AIDS.) One clue about why these faces are as beatifically smiling as they directed me to make them became clear: they were wishing Bob a happy birthday.

There will surely be a poem (me being me) I'll write tomorrow (or later on today) to be this drawing's companion - well, I say surely because that is my ingrained custom, but to leave this only with the title that instantly seemed right to me may be enough. It's simply what I've said what today was:

My Brother Bob's Birthday

Place-Holders




























Hypotheses? Place-holders. This:
those seemingly inarguably accurate
and weightless shots that scheme
to capture bliss, do catch a little grace, 

then fall through space like boulders
in an avalanche, or fade to mist. Root
leads to tree and branch which holds
a fruit which if not plucked to eat, will drop

to rot – but eat or not, will rot. Conjectures
breed from every seed and sometimes
bloom – then bleed to death (the destiny
of every thought and breath): clearing

room for cunning new hypotheses –
perhaps, in fact, my little buttercup
(if fact there'll ever be), to wait for God
or you or me to sneeze another up.







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That Severed Humanoid and his Blue Blobbabule


That Severed Humanoid
and his blue blobbabule!
He'll forever rule my heart
with his every single
severed part -- and his art,
What a job, what a jewel!












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Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Perhaps One Day


He doesn’t know how much he’s loved,
albeit ectoplasmically.
His amatory gain and game was lust,
which gratified orgasmically

but ceased now much to interest him.
He often dreams he’s in a realm
of roseate amorphousness
which never doesn’t overwhelm

the heart he doesn’t think he has.
Still, something tugs. He is embraced,
meanwhile, though he can’t see or feel it,
by a big blue phantom who had traced

an errant tendril of this young man’s spirit
which had somehow floated out and up
beyond the atmosphere to lure
the phantom down – to the abrupt

decision that the point of its existence
was to love this loner like a son.
We wish we could report a happy ending.
Perhaps one day there will be one.






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Monday, September 26, 2016

With You, My Dear


Memorable conversation
between friends depends 
less on affectionate beginnings 
and extraordinary ends

than on what lends some sense
that something’s spinning 
in the soul. With you, my dear,
I always come out whole.








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Sunday, September 25, 2016

Art’s Destiny


All Art wanted in this life was to obtain a little boat,
get away from all the din, make it cozy as a tub
within whose sweetly quiet confines he could float.

Art dreamed of drifting out in it on perfect summer
afternoons. Crowds at beaches, raucous barbecues,
drunken groping in the dunes? For Art, a total bummer.

So in the glory of an August day, to flee cacophony,
Art pushed his boat away into the bay toward calm.
Before a storm is what the calm turned out to be.

A hurricane with killing winds – deafeningly thunderous –
horrifically ripped both the boat and Art apart. Now Art,
to whom we once looked up, is somewhere under us.







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Doodlebambo

Explication of the Unexplicatable



Saturday, September 24, 2016

Something You Arrive At


The deepest happiness is private –
you hear it in the gentle groan
a sleepy dog makes when

she knows she’s safe at home.
It’s something you arrive at,
and can only feel, alone.










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Friday, September 23, 2016

Marry Me, Hot Stuff


A marriage of heaven and hell would be swell:
to vent your unspeakable lust (and to tell!) –
then promptly to pay all your taxes as well;
to cast an odiferous spell, then to quell
the indelible smell, whose effects you’d dispel!

If I had to get married to hell, or the other,
and wasn’t compelled to reveal it to Mother –
I’d ask, if I had one, the pertinent lover:
“Which one would you marry?” & I bet he’d mutter:
“Oh, one is as bad or as good as another.”

“And how!” (Smart stud! I would have to allow.)
“Isn’t that what every marriage is now!”
Then to he who had size and was wise I’d avow,
while recalling our last hypersexual wow!
“Marry me, hot stuff. Be ‘I’ to my ‘thou.’ ”








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Thursday, September 22, 2016

As Soon as You Know You Exist


As soon as you know you exist,
you’ll take Existence’ dare
to demonstrate how interesting
it is to be as rare

as our respective sentiences
inimitably prove
to be. Illimitably, senses
prod us to remove

the terror of their loss: empty,
they refill again, to spill
again – peremptory
temptations to despair – until

at last you get the point of points –
that Soul entirely accepts
we’re all the cosmos that anoints
its objects into subjects

into objects: leaks
the particles and waves of truth.
it always is the clue it seeks,
it always is the sleuth.






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Little Red House


Guy lives in
a little red house
in a little red house
lives Guy.
 
From its curtained
third floor windows
he regards
the trees and sky
 
and old grave stones nearby:
the cemetery dates to 1832:
an English poem of a view
on which Guy can rely.
 
But all of that's outside.
Inside he's guided by a rhyme
he loves to chant,
which sometimes makes him cry.
 
Guy lives in
a little red house,
in a little red house
lives Guy.





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Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Some Spiritual Guides Don’t Value Calm


Some spiritual guides don’t value calm. They prefer
unstructured settlements of strain and anxiousness –
which prod (no help from God) the unexamined life

to register – to feel – the awkward mess it can’t not be,
to understand the heart must harbor darkness, and attend
the echoes of the banshee wail between its beats,

to grasp the morbid insignificance of sweetly reasoned
argument,  with all its falsely noble testaments to peace.
Mainly, though, this spiritual guide foments, condenses

out of stress, alluring jeweled transgressive hues which
mix and flow across the top of his appurtenance of cranium –
to show how fraught vicinities of thought stain colors

of the night into the mind – into the aeronautical geometries
which grace the wing-like slices on this mentor’s bony
pate: and that the more beset by terrible upset this

spiritual paragon becomes, the more his winged
appurtenance of crown succumbs to the disruptive glows
of ruby, amethyst, black pearl – and if he is what whirls

around and follows you, it won’t be long before
he swallows you – and you acquire the vivid sense,
which few can claim, that hell and heaven are the same.





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Seven Paracosmic Days - What I Came to 'Say'


So. 

Despite my word bank, as today I have come to think of my stash of verbal capacities, such as it/they may be, from which I've liberally over most of the course of my incarnate sentient life, taken much of what's sucked up my energy, writing & talking & texting & typing it (i.e., deluding, entreating, defending, seducing, versifying, classifying, lying, belying, pontificating, proclaiming, qualifying, passively-aggressifying & grad level nonsensifying), lately it hasn't been words that corral me into meaning, it's been -

well, take a look below at the last seven days of my life in the form of the drawings I've done this past week. To present them chronologically, as I do here (earliest to latest), may make up some sort of narrative, but not one that has much or anything to do with what I can construe of my or their 'conscious intention' - and probably very little to do even with any poem attached to any of them (though my poems have been long lately). 

I'm starting not to believe in 'intention.' I think we are driven by something more strange than 'free will' or the lack of it. I think we are self-regulating systems, but not isolated from each other. This 'system' we're in, as I'm coming to experience it, is an infinite unity. And, like I keep saying the violin plays me not me it, this breathing paracosmic system we are and are in plays us. 

Drawing lately has felt like the closest I can get to the mechanics of that 'playing,' of that self-regulation which is beyond the grasp of what Alan Watts has called the 'sentry' conscious verbal mind, often mistaken for the whole mind - that part of us whose main mission is to scan the horizon for danger (developed probably when we were primates in savannahs looking out for lions). So when I say I am 'unconscious' of motive or intention in anything, I don't not welcome the possibility that I'm completely conscious, in fact an organ of this paracosmic system of complete consciousness, the route to a greater acquaintance with which, might be something like drawing - or what happens I play (play with) the violin. My sentry mind just isn't equipped (yet anyway) to know that.

These drawings are apparently a large part of what I've come to 'say,' to loot Quentin Crisp's word bank (there's so much in that, he'll never miss it) from his suggestion: "Say what you've come to say." I wouldn't mind a paracosmic Sherlock Holmes here, though. Parsing out the clues, and saying what I'm really up to. But that's my Sentry mind, not content with not knowing, refusing to believe that anything can't be articulated in any of the terms in his constitutionally defensive lexicon.

Can you tell that paracosmic is my current fave word? Paracosm's nice too, of course. But as you'll have seen from my descriptive excesses above, I prefer the adjectival form of almost anything. I can't say what it is, I can only say, dimly, what it's like.





Can Standpipes Talk?

TSNY Researchers Detect Underground
Communications Network

Good news for standpipes and the growing number
of New Yorkers who care about them. It turns out
that standpipes situated even as far as apart as this
green and this red one on 6th Avenue in Chelsea are
not doomed to what Dr. Sandra Malamute, president
Things Standpipe in New York (TSNY) and the city's
leading expert in their culture and behavior, calls
"situational loneliness." 

"Our research has recently determined," says Dr.
Malamute, "that standpipes continually send patterns
of a rapid series of water pressure pulses to each
other, just beneath the surface of the sidewalk, and
are therefore never not in communication." These
communication pulse patterns, "not unlike our morse 
code," says Malamute, "run like vast electrical networks 
throughout all the city's boroughs." 

How they managed this achievement is, like most 
of the rest of what we know about them, unexplained: 
"So far!" Malamute adds cheerfully.

For further information about TSNY, a volunteer 
organization of New Yorkers concerned about what 
their pamphlet "Standpipes: Who They Are, Who We 
Are & How You Can Help" describes as "the plight 
of this under-appreciated and much misunderstood 
plumbing apparatus subculture," contact Guy 
Kettelhack, public relations director of TSNY 
and their best known exponent, on Facebook,
where he perennially resides.

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

In God’s Mind


Today, at last, it had evolved from probably-a-good-idea
into inarguable law. He’d learned whenever he saw something
he knew others would find very odd, which lately it had often
fallen to his awed regard to witness like a prophesy, so stirringly

absurd it might have come from God, he knew he’d have to keep
his maw shut. No one will believe me, he explains, that I saw Thor
and his associates drop lightning bolts last Sunday from the astral
plane at midnight over Staten Island; nobody would heed me now

if I avowed I just espied a multi-colored self-impelled contraption
flapping just above Gowanus, south of the canal, from which
several voices, mostly baritone, in Brooklyn accents, could be heard
intoning hymns to Venus and Adonis. He’d been rebuffed enough

when he’d attempted to relay such miracles before: he’d need
no more admonishment to keep these secrets to himself: he’d
carefully inscribe, in code, his bold (and very likely God-derived)
illuminations in a private notebook he’d keep hidden on a shelf

no one would ever find.
It didn’t matter after all.
They’re in God’s mind.






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As If You Were a Prize


You know you had to have relied on them, your mom and dad –
though can’t recall much of it now. You dreamed last night
that you were crammed into a love seat with them, sitting
for a portrait: discomfiting because whenever you looked up

into their eyes, they didn’t look remotely like the mom and dad
you knew: they weren’t your parents’ shape and size nor had
their faces or panache: where were your father’s bushy eyebrows,
and extravagant moustache? Your mother’s elegant brown hair?

This simulacra pair of mom-and-dad belonged to who knows
whom: and yet, wedged next to them in that warm room, you
held hard to their forearms: and they affectionately kept you
in the middle, cozy on their laps and thighs, as if you were a prize –

quite the most important little human being ever born. Then you 
woke up, and wondered if to anyone that’s ever what you’d seemed 
or were. And though you didn't know that this would summon 
them, your dad and mom appeared like that – without a stir.

You kissed him, you kissed her.







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Sunday, September 18, 2016

Quintuplets In Service of Dropping a Hat for my Queen


Me and my queen –
betwixt and between,
surveying the scene,
whatever the cost
to the heart –

my heart (to be clear) –
not the Queen's.
Hers was lost to a peer
of the realm overwhelming
her, back in the 1750s
I'm told: before she lost

hold of her wits – long
before I got my tic:
stripping off at the drop
of a hat. (Though I often
put on the dropped hat.)

Queenie don't care about
that. Queenie don’t care
about squat. ‘So what?’
is what she only ever
decrees. But be bold:

play out the plot: go drop
a chapeau & I’ll strip
like a ho’ in a breeze.
That is, if it’s hot.
If it's cold, I will not.




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