You Think You Love Her?

Grim frigid outpost

of the broken tiles

and pitted steel

and concrete of the bald

inhuman efficacy of New York:

the structure – soulless –

of a subway platform –

predicating winter as

the antidote to sentiment –

New York as unfeeling creature,

barren rocky moon:

no room for, interest in

the loneliness of your affections.

New York is defection

from all softness, warmth today –

its cold and brutal business

soon comes clear:

to spawn another year.

You think you love her?

Love her here.

.

Sex & Violins

Sound byte – epigram – punch-line – quip – tactics

to distract me from a necessary trip – each poem

that I've written in the past few days is full of nervous

party tricks: attempts to waylay me from listening

to one damned note that plays inside my head

relentlessly: bowed open G string – oh, the violin’s

audacity! – Pandora’s box to me: every time I touch it

something odd and terrifying wriggles up and out

of my unconscious sea: jolts of memory compete,

contrast – shame and ego – summon up my past.

No accounting for the reasons – though they're surely

legion: took it up when I was nine – still developing

a spine – stumbled on vibrato onanistically at puberty –

promulgating uses of my left hand surely not expected

by a music faculty: chiefly pretext for my terror at

the opening of doors to some unfathomable realm

to which I couldn't grasp that I had access: what

‘success’ means, I don't know – in or out of playing

fiddle. My bow would like to diddle – lengthen,

stiffen – me: my violin wants sex. Music is complex.

.

Pencil People Meet D. H. Lawrence

My Pencil People asked me if the ghost
of David Herbert Lawrence might consider
joining them for pencil tea in their menagerie.

What could Mr. Lawrence do but happily agree? 
There was a sigh in his reply: "No one but they
in all these years have cared to contact me."

("Dared" is what my pencil people thought
they'd heard - an apter word that
had occurred as well to me.)

.

Careful, Buddy

Today’s the day for saying no.

Or rather, shoveling your no-no’s

like a pile of snow and packing

them in igloo blocks into a poem

so they don’t so baldly show.

(Careful, buddy.)

Have you noticed? People

are extravagantly delicious.

Sometimes the only thing to do

with one is lick it like a lollipop

then leave it on a non-stick

surface so that when it wants

to make a break, it can.

Forgive my ambiguity.

“It” means man.

(Careful, buddy.)

Here’s what I don’t understand.

Why put up a front?

Why don’t we do what we want?

Next time I snap my fingers

you will cheerfully appear.

Or, hell, crawl like a cowed dog –

fearfully near. Next time

I’ll be the boss. You’ll be the whim

I simmer to a fine soft foam –

or I give a toss. Wrestle in

the rain and loam until we’re

muddy. Won’t stop until some

blood is spilled, or love is milled.

(Careful, buddy: this

could get you killed.)


.

Yea, and Nay

Some critters

don’t wanna be ridden.

Other critters

gonna ride ‘em anyway.

Some believe we should be

damned and forbidden.

Others think we are

pretty okay.

Who should be given

our yea or nay?

I forget.

Think I knew, yesterday.

.

What You’ve Always Wanted You Have Found

Lightning flicks – a humming glimmer of midsummer –

dusk, as if dusk were a kind of musk, a scent, perfume –

more smelled than seen – the kind of trick the mind

plays when it conjures up from who-knows-what

an apparition of the dreamed-for – oh, the passionately

schemed-for!: sudden deluge of belief which surely,

psychically, you've rushed to pour as refuge and relief –

the momentary certainty that what you've always wanted

you have found. This is when the dusk becomes a sound –

a Mendelssohn slow movement from a string quartet:

rapturous and slightly odd – grace notes captured from

a minor god – brings senses just precisely to the juncture –

sweet intoxicating point – where they imagine they

have punctured through to something like a breathing,

jointed whole: a truth: a soul with corporeal muscle,

bone: companionable tone: voluptuous, ethereal – that

smell of dusk again: finally a habitable zone! Write

a book and fall in love, and in the framing of that miracle,

experience a joining of your disparate centralities –

below, above: dichotomies release and cease, and

you've the first sense in your life of an illumined peace.

+

Fast-forward through the decades: fumble with the lock

and key to your now long-familiar door: stumble into

your bright-lit imbroglio of glaring middle-day – too clear

to miss this boon of noon – blaring out an enterprise

you can't dismiss, this mission whose demands you've

taken up, this antidote to easy bliss: yes: hard to strain

from all this blinding light alternatives to that soft

long-gone musk-besotted night: there are no books to write,

no love that you could possibly requite: a different order

in your living heart obtains. Losses, and peculiar gains.

. 

The Ass I Want to Ride

Thing to know is, we’re not nouns, we’re verbs.

Nouns pretend. True, the word verb is a noun.

Well, words pretend. But don’t let’s let that get us

down. Cut some slack: language must reside

in the provisional. That’s not the ass I want to ride.

Here’s the ass I want to ride: a theory that can’t

abide the idea that what happens when a Big Bang

bangs has anything to do with Being or Existence.

What the Big Bang’s banging is reaction; better

put, reacting; better put, reacts-reacts-reacts.

Our Big Bang banged because some rank faux pas

occurred to spur what otherwise would have been

undisturbed perfection: needing no thing, no word,

noun or verb: the kind we’ve conjured up because

we bought appearances’ P.R. We think there’s stuff.

There is no stuff. There is relates. There is reacts.

What relates, reacts to what? Question of a petty

mind. The ass I’m here to ride won’t stop for what.

Stick ‘what’ up the butt of teleology. What we are

is going going never gone. No thing is. Is is is.

.

Advice, Guru?

“Consciousness is staccato, not fluent. We perceive in tiny packets

of information. Our attention is easily perforated. But we need the

world to seem fluent and intact, otherwise it would be unbearable…”

Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind, p. 216

=============

Familiar cliff: stay and twiddle

through the moss and weeds? –

or take a whiff, exhale and jump?

I'm a chump: my sentient mind

defeats me when (switch tropes)

I get into the ring – against the ropes –

unable to avoid the sting and

whomp of jabs and bludgeoning

of stimuli (try new conceit) for

which I have precisely as much

thirst as deserts have for rain

when they are driest; that’s to say

(in simile, surreally) I'm like

a hungry hummingbird who’s

just found tzimmes at a seder

whose sweet syrup he can sip –

makes nice with grandma –

plans to raid her pantry for the rest:

largesse and amplitude! –

what to sample, dude? Got my

invitation to the orgy! But I'm

already logy, stupid, ass-down

on the floor. Advice, guru?

(Change the metaphor.)

.

My Doggie

I like my doggie.

My doggie's name is Tim.
If I were a doggie I'd be just like him.

.

Phallic Symbol Search

Phallic symbol search.

One of those type people.

No interest in the church.

But sure does like the steeple.

.

The Words in You

Focusing cannot be done by focusing: if, that is,

by focusing you mean you’re furrowing your brow

to burrow down to concentrate upon a single point,

think hard, then harder; block the disobeying flow.

Good luck with bringing that off, Joe.

But neither will it come by letting go.

Unless you’re letting go of focusing. There’s

the locus of the barrier: the way you say the things

you say, the words in you. Say what you want to do.

.

Pencil People

I’ve noticed that the larger part of Pencil

People I have done in black on white

appear remarkably at ease: as if they use

their monochromatic sketchy ambiguities

for fun – far more to tease than please.

I’m rarely sure what any Pencil Person’s

looking at, though I remain quite certain

that it sees. They’re each a strangely

shadowed sort of being – favoring rash

scratches, blotches, traces whose faux pas

they sometimes think are graces – but

they don’t care if any graces get effaced.

The sourceless white around their floaty

charcoal threads and tangles by default

may seem like daylight, but Pencil People

are in fact determined denizens of night –

perversely though, not the night we know:

theirs has the glow of being blank, which they

appear to thank for its suggestion of the roll

of dice that will eventually spell their fate:

to be erased. Infinite Nonbeing is where

they’ve placed Paradise. And in one

blunt regard they’ve outraced us by far.

It’s said that life is carbon-based –

but not as much as Pencil People are.

.

They and You

Sometimes they get together

and they look out at the world

and believe they understand it.

They cultivate a sort of subtly

underhanded point-of-view

which makes them feel quite

confident that they have come

up with a far more existentially

sophisticated take on what

is “true” than you would ever

dare construe. You, however,

never seem to care, do you.



.

When You Reflect on Anything

Slow serpents, eels and undulating whales prevail:
the treasures of a hungry movement through a moment
which in surfacing, descending, and resurfacing

put an infinity of lies to “journey”: everything is neither
here nor there, and there and here: dimensionally
everywhere, accounted for by various strange measures

whose m.o. we seem to be remanded to this incarnation
not to know: sentenced by authorities we sometimes get
a glimpse and hint of in late January early evening glow:

the prospect of more blurry flurries that will come and go,
and come again to sail and burrow into and beyond our
land-locked views – bemusing and inviting: “come on in,

the water’s fine!” – no matter if it’s solid miles-thick ice

or flows like rich dark wine, the kind through which a whale
voluptuously undulates her lovely lumbering behind.

The Universe is made of orgasms, my dear, front

and rear, and you’re a drop in its eternally ejaculating sea.

Remember that when you reflect on anything, including me.

.

Christianity’s Secret

The only takeaway I take from Christianity

is something so assiduously secreted, kept out

of sight, intently barred from any possibility of causing

what ecclesiastical authorities apparently had long ago

supposed would be the terrible traumatic repercussions

were the barest hint of it to be exposed, the slightest

trace of it observed, as if it were a lethal virus fated

to be cryogenically preserved; or evidence of life

on other planets, preternaturally iced. It’s simply this:

Everybody’s Christ.

Our mothers never told us since no angel ever came

to scare them silly with the news – that the infant

they awaited was a dilly. The only mothers (one

discovers) who intuitively knew were witches. Alas,

few witches are around, or can be found, and fewer still

have babies. But finally, I’ve had the breathless pleasure

of uniting with a treasure of a witch’s grown-up child

(the sex we had was wild!): and from this witch-begotten

being I now know that we and you and everybody else

are constitutively a part of an incomparable family.

We travel endlessly in search of any other witch’s child,

or someone who would like to be - to join us for the ride –

and in our indescribably wild fun. Perhaps you’re one.

Look into a mirror. Are you beautiful? Do you glow?

That’s how you know.

.

Operative Adverb

Tiredness is interesting. It seems to bring

your aptitudes into the purposeful

protection of inertia. There’s a blur

to the gestalt of this mild coming to a halt:

perhaps a run-through of the last act

when protection won’t have meaning

and the leaning tower of you won’t fall

so much as merely cease to be. “Merely”

is the operative adverb: a word to hold.

Merely a matter of form.

Once you were warm,

now you are cold.

.

Crème Céleste* & Arabella, the Jar Lid

Oh, Arabella! – I call you that, you know,

in homage to your lovely alabaster head –

such finely modeled rare translucent

pinkish tan and cream! – set above your

shoulders, elegantly wrapped in bronze,

delicately tooled – the sort of collar you’d

have worn as an adornment on a deep

blue dress on a perfect summer afternoon.

Oh! – know my heart is with you as you face

another hundred fifty years ahead as what

you’re fated to remain: the lid upon a blue

ceramic jar of an emolument called Crème

Céleste – featuring, though fortunately

at your back where you can’t make it out,

too blunt, too common an accounting

of white wax and spermaceti and the rest

of what cannot suggest the barest breath

of your bless’d gracefulness. It is enough

that you should have to bear the sore indignity

of acting as a jar lid on this hard blue jar –

and yet you pull it off as if it were a minor

inconvenience in your otherwise exquisite life –

which though you are a jar lid – hasn’t kept

you from imagining what on a round enameled

peacock blue container of emolument might

one day magically attract the gentleman

for whom you wait and whom you’re sure now

waits for you to make you his beloved wife.

===== 

* It was during [the 1850s] Crème Céleste became popular, which was a mixture of white wax, spermaceti (from an organ inside sperm whale’s head), sweet almond oil, and rosewater. This facial paste had moisturising properties, but it also hid blemishes and provided a light smooth complexion. It developed into a common emollient and cosmetic remover, soon known as cold cream.

http://www.katetattersall.com/early-victorian-era-make-up/

Stranger Than She Seems

Whatever a classic beauty was, he’d have to say

she wasn’t. Whatever a well-bred lady does

he’s very sure she doesn’t: wouldn’t, couldn’t.

She’s a scheme he summons now and then –

though often enough: every seventh dream or so.

She isn’t there to soften or be softened into

acquiescent pet – she’s there to test his mettle –

see what stuff he’s made of now. He’s told

his therapist about her – what the fix feels like

she puts him in – sharp mix of fear and lust –

a tug-of-war between their eyes, his fragile trust –

the prize of cheeks he wants to touch, lips to kiss,

tricks she plays. He weighs the silences his therapist

can be relied upon to wield: sure he sees

the dreamer’s psychic field of blood-red poppies

that the dreamer won’t confess he wants to pick,

but picks. The therapist has worked it out.

No psychoanalytic doubt about this dominatrix.

Perhaps. But not quite whom this dreamer dreams.

She’s stranger than she seems. If they were on

opposing baseball teams (as he occasionally dreams),

he the pitcher, she at bat: she’d bunt – to tease him,

see how much he wanted it, how clumsily he’d run

to it – to watch his awkward fall as he again

missed catching it. She’ll not deride, she will

affectionately laugh: invade him like a patch

of pleasurable rash. Oh, how he loves scratching it!

.

Including You

We needn't worry about aliens.

Nor ought we to resort

to sesquipedalian loquations

on equivocations we can spin

to prop up explanations

for the wisdom of relying on

the reflex to defend against

whom we regard as "those":

ergo by "nature" should oppose.

There's no plot to be exposed.

No malicious means or ends.

Aliens are literally made to be

our friends. We think we know

them not, but that’s a crock of rot.

Equivalently formed of gluons,

quarks and leptons, and the rest

of constitutive quantum stuff,

we and they systemically equate:

enough to state with certainty

that aliens are constitutionally

us. More than theoretically,

I know this to be true.

Think my tale absurdly tall,

but I can say as of today

(I’ve got my ways) I've met

them all. Including you.

You're one, too.

.

A Soft Entanglement

Somehow proceeding

malleably out of sight

of that tight brittle little

cage of fear which had

preceded and impeded it,

a soft entanglement

emerges easily now into

comfort. Stark form gives

way to something warmer,

darker, undulating into,

under and around itself:

a former ‘you’ slips

incrementally from its

containments to succumb

to the conditions of what

has become a latter ‘you,’

the folderol and subtle

business of existence

that you are. Its gentle

charms enrapture –

enwrap you in its arms.

.

Anywhere to Go

We don’t know why it didn’t wander off.

It hadn’t softened toward us since it had arrived –

whence we never knew – but harbored itself coolly,

glancing here or there at this or that or him or her,

occasionally where we were. We clearly hadn’t

caused the smallest stir. Then various components

on its surface of what we assumed was skin began

to glow. This turned out to mean that it would

speak to us, though very low.

“Is there anywhere to go?” We heard it

almost as if we had heard it in our heads, sleeping

in our beds. So deeply that it made us really wonder

if there were another place to go. We found ourselves

replying to it, “we don’t know.” And then we went

somewhere within we hadn’t been, which made us

slide down every slippery degree of yes into 
the singularity of no. We were aghast we had

to add, “but we don’t think so.”

.

Miracle Man

for Doug Melton

Miracles are tangible – they sprout

impossibility without a single doubt –

or the importunate desire to proclaim

or boast or flout what they’re about.

I know this now because my laptop,

which had crashed, has been restored

by the miraculous abilities amassed

by my computer guy who on the sly

I’m sure keeps planets turning in the sky –

that is, when he is not, through his

remote manipulations, altering the DNA

of apparatuses like mine, bringing them

to such unparalleled capacities for

fine performance laptops surely never

in their circuitry imagined could be had.

The very mention of his name –

Douglas Melton – melts the glowing

dawn of an enlightenment in the forlorn,

unclad, unknowing dark in me. What

else can I be but insubordinately glad?

.

Not Even You

Aerodynamically ill-advised

aberration in the skies

(by other better sorts despised),

awkwardness all undisguised,

poignant yearning in his eyes,

somehow flies.

Does life abound?

Has evidence been found?

Are we the only blip of it around?

The former has a hopeful sound.

But do not misconstrue

the “blip” side to be too

statistically unlikely to be true.

Nobody knows. Not even you.

.