Your Batch of Loves

Taking stock, you want to make a rhyme of it –

as if to beat some lilting time to it
would give it sense: perhaps it does:
for when you contemplate your batch of loves

and set them side by side before they wriggle off
to lose themselves in an embarrassed cough –
too fragile, too complex, and probably too small
to matter, really, very much at all –

the fact that you can make the first appear to swing
in assonance with who you were in Spring –
and you can make the second dance to devil’s trills –
invoke a potent whiff of his dark thrills –

and you can draw a slow dirge from the third –
to let your aching loneliness be heard –
and you can render beats like punches to the head
to that drug-addled fourth love, and instead

of splaying out your chaos, find the pith
of how you managed to go on, and plead the fifth
was really just a wrestling mat for sex,
and be-bop smartly through the vexing rest –

may now allow a chiming meter to amend
and bend the heart more softly, thus to lend
a tender meaning and remembrance to the voices
you now sound to comprehend your choices.



.

Prescient Dot

Mostly in the visible colors

of light, somewhat

in the infrared, oracles remit

fragmented news.

X-rays, gamma-rays,

radio waves, shreds

of postcards from

the looming ante-room:

the pantry wherein

Time created Past.

Do the math. Detect

the sentient squall, whose

radiating hues besiege

the parabolic surfaces of all.

Peer through telescopes,

rotate domes, rise above

the ozone and pursue

a spatial resolution

of the prescient dot.

No, not that dot! The one

behind the moon, just

to the left of me. Calculate

the tenth-of-one-percent of it

that is your destiny.

.

Your Part

Split phrases – frightful tricks –

that wield delusions of an inner sight:

speciously oblique. Reconfigure all your
arbitrary blasted bits (enjambments

meant to make them look uniquely “deep”)
back to all the prosy paragraphs they

clearly came from: ha! – as if you could let
meaning seep into the thing through

dazed manipulation, lazy laissez-faire:
inertia in the guise of daring: lasered from

some underground you found by merely
typing ‘til your fingers hurt. Your zingers?

Scraps: concatenated dust and easy dirt.
Sins and egoisms in the name of “art.”

There: you did your part.

You stung the heart. 

.

Amass, Amass!

I used to be Display – but now

I am a Crucible where every day

I melt my Being till it’s irreducible.

All I had before was bling. I wore

a regal ring designed to show I was

the king of what I was the king of.

I could play and fight and write

and sing: I wore diplomas for my

shirts and diapers: lashes wiped

my window eyes, sweeping clean

each surface of each pupil to regard

my shiny world in duple. But now

I've lost my every scruple – that is

to say, I can't recall whatever way

I thought I had to navigate the day.

Now my selves take turns relaxing

on their shelves and leave

whatever’s left of me to be and do.

What does it do? Sits on its ass

and dreams of what it next can

effortlessly count on to amass.

.

That Most Extraordinary Miracle

They haven’t come out yet when I’ve known why.

I know my task: absently to coax them into being.

This appears to be enough to get them fleeing

from my hand into some other land whose business

they seem instantly to understand more than I do.

My task is not to ask or to pursue. And so I watch

their panoply without a single particle of certainty

and finally it’s fine. I long ago not only learned

to know that nothing, least of all these creatures,

could remotely be construed as mine – now I love

the utter irresponsibility of having absolutely nothing

more to do than to inveigle them into their birth.

Let them conquer their own Earth. But sometimes,

something like a warm relation climbs into my heart

when two are born and meet and are enthralled.

I don’t believe this has to do with having midwifed

them into some more successful “art,” at least on

my part, than would normally befall them. But when

an indeterminately gendered bearded humanoid

made an encounter with a long-limbed short-necked

bird cartoon – when I watched them look into each 

other’s eyes, saw both soon realize they didn't have 

to be alone – that they had seen (and somehow not 

been thrown by seeing) that extraordinary miracle:

an Other – and when I understood that they were

there not least because I was – perhaps I got
a glimmer of what it may be to be a mother.

.

Peter Pan and Tinker Bell in Hell

“And so, one must soon understand to take, if not

on faith,” says Peter Pan the Grown-Up Man,” then

on innumerable instances of qualitative evidence, that

there are realms of what, through other more subjectively,

sophisticatedly attuned and therefore profitably sensitive

recalibration, do turn out to be discernments which amount

to practicable crucial information on ephemera which with

a subtle but important weight bear down upon what to dislike

or like – data, if you’d rather – which emphatically will drive

the killing spike into the heart of that great blight of fake

vampiric smarts within whose scope assessments of more

esoterically aesthetic testaments and objects, casts of mind,

dimensional approaches among other traits, effects

and contributions (à la carte) which broach those questions

only recognized inside the wide and deep precincts of what

one calls ‘the arts’ – dreamed-of or materially realized –

whose sizes, sighs and cries not only can’t be registered

or understood but sensed at all in their entirety or parts.”

(A scent like tiny coalescing farts

balloons into the room,

as light as Tinker Bell once was,

but with a nasty buzz.)

“What’s that smell?”

asks Tinker Bell

(who, now heavy with the weight

of twenty-seven faerie ladies,

hadn’t yet divined they

were in Hades):

“Smells like Hell.”

.

A Solitary Family of Happiness

Happy is the child of hap – a hapless happenstance

engendered in the lap of luck. Fluctuating weather

of the soul that spins the thing of you and keeps

it in the bowl. Your luck is always good.

You’ve never not been happy.

Always good? you bray – stupefied too many ways,

you say, remotely to convey the full array of fact

that proves I’m full of crap. Never not been

happy? Always in a state of bliss?

Kiss my abyss.

To me it’s merely this. I imagine I’ve a choice: a voice

in granting all irregularities to coexist – peculiarities

to feed and interbreed. Which of course they

always and already do. I permit the fiction

to get underway that I have agency

in the maneuvering of me – soon to see to my abject

delight I don’t. And oh, the gorgeous fleet release

in knowing that I can’t and won’t be able

to direct a thing. Since things don’t

need direction or a pep-talk-

patting-on-the-back (nor penises instruction in erection,

come to that), inevitably awkwardly assembled

as they are by what the cosmic dice begat,

I’ve never not exactly been what I will

always be: a this and that.

Which hap’ly I acknowledge as the child I have fathered/

mothered/sired/suckled into hapless happenstance.

Randomly a wild desperado, mild model

of finesse and sappy mess. I am

a solitary family of happiness.

.

He’d Named His Hairdo Ruth

Few dare to praise his hair.

It isn’t that he doesn’t care.

He cares, it can be said,

more than a little that nobody

gives a jot or tittle for the effort

and the art it took him

to construct the sneaky part

he’s combed into the back –

to raise a certain curtain

on a metaphor for splitting hairs

in service of – alas, alack! –

perverse misreadings of

the Cosmic Law. His hair

is a defense against this heresy:

a headlong vault into awakening

whatever passersby might be

induced to notice its implied

assault on immorality:

on the gestalt the current

zeitgeist thinks is truth.

He’d named his hairdo Ruth.

.

Being Him

Wants to wreck things.

Rip pictures off the wall.

Kick out the windows. 

Run screaming down the hall

that everyone’s an asshole

and should fuck himself

and die. He’s not sure why.

Psychologically he knows

you want to decimate externals

when what’s kicking butt

are the infernally internal

prisons of the mind. Vision

dims to darkness: everything’s

not fine. Today he’s filled up

to the brim with being him.

.

New York Moment

For Franck Danican

The moment you step into this city

you belong to it. You transubstantiate

from body into moment.

You are a New York Moment.

Franck arrived five years ago from Paris,

though only lately saw my creatures

in the Facebook Forest

and decided he felt one with them. Franck

knows Art the way they do: they are it.

They’ve walked the plank

and fallen into it and have become it.

Franck said he’d like to be my model:

maybe hold my violin and strum it.

I said I never work from models

but okay. And so he spent a good part of the day

bestowing what he is, while wryly undergoing

being looked at by an awkward cuss.

I made such a fuss.

I forgot how pencils worked.

I forgot what drawing was.

But then I handed him my violin and watched him

win by doing what does to play his part.

He turned that into art.

And then he turned me into art as well.

For the New York Moments

we perforce will always be,

this, of course,

was swell.

.

How Are You?

You mean: how have I come to be? –

to manifest this momentary me?

What a brilliant suggestion implied

in the question! – to proffer a ‘how’ to

an ‘are’ and a ‘you’ – conjugate a ‘to be’

into that which would seek to illuminate ‘me’

not through ‘why,’ ‘what’ or ‘where’ –

but in surely that most efficacious, pragmatic

of queries: the one with the best chance

of meeting and then superseding one’s

most existentially troublesome worries,

and truly arriving at now: a ‘how!’ Best word

in the world! My spirit ingests it and spins:

having swirled, it and I ache to offer

a whole lovely wow of an answer to you.

But we haven’t a clue.

.

Attempt Another Tack

Your friend and you

ran out of words again.

Said all the what and when

and where and who.

Attempt another tack.

Wind it down to slow.

Spotify a soft adagio.

Rub his back.

.

Unforeseen Abilities of Easter Eggs

Owing, one was forced to have presumed,

to some odd fluke in quantum probabilities,

four Easter eggs watched

as their constitutional proclivities

gave way to unforeseen abilities

they’d seemed to have acquired

to effect a transmutation from the ovoid

to the anthropoidal: from painted shells

around egg whites and yolks,

they’d now become four highly

colored folks. They had a human being

party! – sat around and told each other

egg jokes. But egg jokes soon get old.

Easter night turned flat and cold.

What happened after that, we weren’t told.

.

O Mister Eptitude, Where Hast Thou Gone?

Ungainly yellow edgy indecisive Mister Linearity,

his awkward too-long arms in an inept embrace

around, as if attempting to protect, the blunt

amorphous softy Mister Tenderness in front of him,

makes at least a show of wielding both as tenable

together: symbolically contrasting soft pink feeling

with the steely forward clear decision-making mind.

Although from his position as thick cushion guarding

nervous Mr. Linearity’s exposed bare chest,

we find that the inert and blunted Mister Tenderness

seems less protected by his putative protector

than he’s shielding his protector with himself.

Senseless tenderness mixed with confused abstraction

won’t stay long upon Sir Logical Intention’s shelf.

So the blobby business each of us proceeds to pry

and cobble into usability by conjuring new archetypes

and fable-arts to lineate our Motives and their sharp

Component Parts – as characters in allegories saddled

with cute honorifics such as Sir and Mister - tries now

to provide a guide as helpful as John Bunyan’s tale, listing

animatedly what we should do effectively and morally

to bring about agreeable results. But no Pilgrim’s

Progress here. No single thing exults as clear solution;

no outcome doesn’t throw its complicated shadow.

We’re left with bad old Sirs and Misters, listing in

the sense of losing balance when they take the barest

step. We don’t find only Mister Linearity’s embrace

of Mister Tenderness inept. Nothing left is ept.

.

On Living Solo (a terza rima sonnet)

I wonder why I rarely feel alone.

My mind seems able to regale itself

Beyond connecting on the telephone

Or Internet; I rarely raid a shelf

For books to keep me occupied. TV

Can buffer, but for sustenance my Self

Depends upon its own resources to be

Happy in its now. Others tell me they

Require love and contact: liberty

To speak with others on demand. My way

May seem like isolation next to this –

But so far living solo lets me play

The games I need to play. What do I miss?

Perhaps one day I’ll know. But now it’s bliss.

.

Mickey, Judy and Guy

So when the amalgam of a Mickey Rooney/Andy Hardy tries 

to start a life he goes where anybody would – Manhattan – to which

the amalgam Judy Garland/Betsy Booth (who boldly and alarmingly

insists in 1941 on getting older) also goes, as always slated to be

the Mick’s gold-plated Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer conscience, even though

the girl was popping uppers to get through the ballyhoo of switching

yet again into another humble siren of a moralistic fable. Rooney

was no Gable, but as Andy Hardy he could fake a nascent little man –

and Judy Garland, well, was Judy Garland ever aching for a musical:

the most accomplished art the grandest movie studio imparted

to the country’s early 1940s heart belonged to her – but everybody,

Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Andy Hardy, Betsy Booth were cutting

their and our collective tooth on the amalgam loves of youth, writ

large on silver screens – purported pork-and-beans of mental health: 
the wealth I took to New York City when I came to start a life myself: 

handsomer than I could dare to understand – simply due to being

just another average twenty-four year-old gay man – I drew to my

intrepid chest the first of many self-defining tests – the best for last,

which is the vast enchantment and investment of my full if dimly

recollected past, which waltzes with me like the meteorologically misty

cast of every Judy-Mickey movie: proving, it would seem, that what

it takes to love a human being can’t be learned from anyone at all.

Yet here we are withal – Mickey, Judy and Guy (oh my!):

amalgam love of loves, always and forever in each other’s thrall.

.

Talk About Spicy Meatballs

http://guykettelhack.blogspot.com/2017/04/indra-on-lam.html

I occasionally highlight the more startling progeny of this de facto Kaleidogram Project to which as many of you know I seem to end up subjecting quite a number of photos and drawings. None have been more startling to me than these, proceeding from "Indra on the Lam".  http://guykettelhack.blogspot.com/2017/04/indra-on-lam.html  Talk about Spicy Meatballs. These juicies got sting. They've put my palette and palate in a state of holy fucko.

"Kaleidogram" (Kaleidoscope + Instagram) is my friend Reed Woodhouse's perfect word for what comes out when I run a pic through the Instagram Layout function app, which I employ to divide a single image into various mirror image permutations, with strange new symmetries the outcome. Lately the drawings of my creatures have been doing more than usually disarming and alarming turns on this dance floor: never more than with these 9 kids parthenogenetically conceived by my "Indra on the Lam" progenitor parent. Visuals: (above) that progenitor parent "Indra on the Lam" followed by the amassed nonet of its kaleidogram kids; and (below) solo turns taken by each of those kids.

The strange relation this creates between the putative 'artist' who catalyzes these unforeseeable peculiarities into being (that would be me) -- and the utter untrammeled dissociative freedom from their supposed 'creator' of the aliens who spew out of the deal -- brings me to all kinds of pause. Like, did I do this? Or did a fancy visual pixel-cutting deli counter slicer do it? As it is, I have a hard time claiming anything I draw or take a pic of as "my" work: I only ever feel I'm at that deli counter, weighing and arranging and dispensing something that comes somewhere other than me. (Not exactly that I'm a 'channel' - it's stranger than that.) But applying "my" to this work has never felt more tenuous a business than now, as I see these babies travel out through the unfathomable ozone to say hi. I'm not complaining: in a manner I suppose I'm exulting in it, although even that makes it sound like I had more to do with it than it feels like I did. But then I can exult in the sky or a thigh or a sigh and I didn't make any of those, did I? I hear Alan Watts laughing. "Actually, Mr. Kettelhack, yes, in a manner, you did."

In a manner.

Solo Turns: