Wednesday, January 31, 2018

When You Got It


Varieties of you can so befuddle and befutz
the whole of – is it you? – that awkward fraught
mélange of alien conditions for exactly none
of which you’ve found a single explanation, felt
a helpful intuition or were able even farcically
to give a silly definition that might make you laugh.

It’s tedious to care about what’s you, or isn’t,
if the fizz of seeing, being, smelling, feeling
and the rest are at or near the best of their distracting
powers (no need to do it then!): but when the toxic
showers of your mental weather storm at you
and drive the least belief in cosmic order out of you,

who knows what pours down on you then?
Or what sprouts up from you like fungus?
For example when that far-from-wondrous
sorry-looking fellow popped up from your knee –
that busybody who before would sway between
your ankle or your balls, which in the former case

would trip you up and make you fall and in the latter
cause an ache so awful it would give you palsy,
make you shake and tremble like a square of lemon
jello in an earthquake, wreck your psychic landscape
so that what had at the moment seemed in you
(whatever “you” could mean) most urgently to need

some praise had now entirely escaped your memory,
and you’d no reason you could think of to go on.
And there it was again, this spawn of the unnameable,
not speaking, merely gazing at you, as if grazing
on you like an ass eats grass (do asses eat grasses?),
in this case merely sniffing it and finding it and you

about as palatable as the other kind of ass. But by this
time you’d have become a mountain of new shapes –
and wondrously begun again to think of fun.
Not having fun but being it. And you remembered
what in you had called out urgently for praise.
Then you forgot it. That was when you got it.


Monday, January 29, 2018

Flirting with the Mother of Us All


Exigencies of existence breed despair –
which makes you care beyond your bounds about
what you can't bear about what you must care
beyond your bounds about: betrayal, sickness, death –
.
existential loneliness. They say there’s no redress.
But that’s somebody’s under-educated guess,
fallaciously repeated in the press. Time to flirt
with the Mother of us All. So I gave Ma Nature a call.
.
Took her to a dance last night. Tossed her in the air
(she’d cooed “you wouldn’t dare!”) – caught her
when she tumbled down and hugged her like a bear,
kissed her hard and round and round we spun.
.
Whispered to her one-on-one:
"Do us up a favor, Mama
Nature, would-ya, hon?
Make it all a lot more fun."

.
.

Sunday, January 28, 2018

Les Résultats de l'Examen Finale


Le bon dieu que j'entends je dois adorer m'avait dit
dans un autre message ennuyeux aujourd'hui
que La Création (un cousin de dieu) devait nous dire ceci:
comme toujours, tu sais tout: c’est à toi, le grand prix;
et moi, une fois de plus, je n'ai rien appris.

Au ciel, ne rien savoir ne prédisait pas un futur
on peut imaginer. Mais on n’est pas sûr
qu’on en a besoin. Si le coeur n’est pas pur,
c’est dommage. Je serai infiniment plus heureux
dans n’importe quel monde qui n’a pas de "bon dieu".

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

Results of the Final Examination

The “good god” I hear I must worship informed me
in another annoying message today
that Creation (a cousin of god) had to tell us this:
you, as usual, know all: the grand prize is yours;
and I, as usual, learned nothing.

In heaven, knowing nothing doesn’t predict a future
one can imagine. But we’re not sure
that we need it. If the heart isn’t pure,
too bad. I’ll be infinitely happier
in any world that doesn’t have a “good god.”



.

Friday, January 26, 2018

Restive Septets Ponder Consciousness


Alter consciousness? Don’t falter at that altar:
absolutely! yes!  What is consciousness but
alteration? Affixing sense to fix this existential
mess? What else is success? It moves, ergo it is.
Not to prove intention, sentience, teleological
truth or solemn thought. It’s an onslaught, whose
glamour can’t be caught by grammar, though
it can disturb, reverberate like verbs, though
not like love: smellier verbs like fertilize – though
not to realize the grandeur of creation – but
to carry out a mission of predation – sate
its hunger for more toward and untoward
impulses to lick and chew and macerate into
a gluey stew that it can use to fertilize itself.
Catastrophe of any kind is also tasty, as it roughs
up all it belts, eviscerates and tosses into salad –
cowardice is more than valid as an acrid salad
sauce, dissolving off the flaccid fat of lust. Filter
all the middle distances we gaze into by reflex
through a fog into a drink to bring us to a brink
that consciousness can’t yet suss out: doubtless
why it thirsts for it so badly that it’s often all it
thinks about. Alteration undermines the status quo,
though isn’t it the status quo? Not to say it tediously
turns in on itself reiterating surface play. Solipsism
lacks allure: no traction strong enough to make
us cease, be still and stay. What are sense
and nonsense, anyway? A collective of infinitives!
To move, ingest, egest, to jest! – to blink at more
and more – test this festive alphabetic travesty –
assess its restive squiggles in the sand like these –
imagining they’re royal sonnets to show off like
precious bling, conjured by divinities expensively.
But every god is a static thing, and every king
is a pea. Consciousness has majesty.


.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

Like Life


Like Life,
the purpose
of Art is to make
Mistakes, and then
to Fix Them. Anyway,
that was what Art was told
by Former President
Nixon.




.

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Night Can Be An Ache (youtubed)

 



Night Can Be An Ache
.
Night can be an ache.
In sinuses, and knees, the cramping in your leg.
But surely no ache here: not in this phantasm lake
around which on a diamond day your dream had just
begun: you sat in velvet grass and strummed guitar
and sang upon its comfortable shore to an audience
of one: your reflection in the water.
High baritone notes in good order:
.
“When I first saw your gallery,
I liked the ones of ladies…”
.
Your head held her long-vanished flight
of soprano, probing piano, too strange
a condition of beauty to think of for long.
.
Plucking single notes of basic chords on your guitar,
D minor and G major, all were kindergarten Joni Mitchell:
by that point in the song’s alchemy, she’d conjured
harmonies already having intimate relations with the thin
edge of the stratosphere; picking resonances in it like
plucking pizzicati on a violin.
.
Your reflection on the surface of the lake dispersed
first into sparks, mosaic bits of atmosphere floated
half a second, then shot downward as if instantly become
lead pellets blasted out of a gun, but aimed at the bottom;
the bottom was a destiny. The water was a beryl red:
looked like blood newly bled, but more translucent.
What “you” were you who saw this?
.
“You” were at the bottom looking at your re-configured
face and head, crimson in the half-lit liquid, shaped into
a yowl. Whatever this thing was, it wasn’t singing now. If this
was you, you were dead. If whatever said these words to you
were you, you weren’t anything you knew. You couldn’t
even say that you’d been here, much less were gone.
.
Not a thing need be remembered.
So you forgot, and went on.
.
.

Night Can Be An Ache


Night can be an ache.
In sinuses, and knees, the cramping in your leg.
But surely no ache here: not in this phantasm lake
around which on a diamond day your dream had just
begun: you sat in velvet grass and strummed guitar
and sang upon its comfortable shore to an audience
of one: your reflection in the water.
High baritone notes in good order:
.
“When I first saw your gallery,
I liked the ones of ladies…”
.
Your head held her long-vanished flight
of soprano, probing piano, too strange
a condition of beauty to think of for long.
.
Plucking single notes of basic chords on your guitar,
D minor and G major, all were kindergarten Joni Mitchell:
by that point in the song’s alchemy, she’d conjured
harmonies already having intimate relations with the thin
edge of the stratosphere; picking resonances in it like
plucking pizzicati on a violin.
.
Your reflection on the surface of the lake dispersed
first into sparks, mosaic bits of atmosphere floated
half a second, then shot downward as if instantly become
lead pellets blasted out of a gun, but aimed at the bottom;
the bottom was a destiny. The water was a beryl red:
looked like blood newly bled, but more translucent.
What “you” were you who saw this?
.
“You” were at the bottom looking at your re-configured
face and head, crimson in the half-lit liquid, shaped into
a yowl. Whatever this thing was, it wasn’t singing now. If this
was you, you were dead. If whatever said these words to you
were you, you weren’t anything you knew. You couldn’t
even say that you’d been here, much less gone.
.
Not a thing need be remembered.
So you forgot, and went on.



.

My Pencils Get Way Out of Hand


My pencils get way out of hand. They squiggle their
bounty licentiously into crass wannabe art nouveau
swells – enough that they ought for a time to be banned,
and remanded to moderate hells: say, some carbon
equivalent of going down on one’s knees to scrub tiles
in latrines. But there aren’t equivalents, really; unless it’s
what pipe smokers do in a pinch when they run out of pipe
cleaners: push a slim pencil by fractions of inches right into
the flue of a briar, distinctly as if it were scraping the soot
and the tar and the ash of a fire off brick in a hearth.
But I don’t smoke pipes. And, gripes about how they
transgress notwithstanding, I’m secretly thrilled that they
not only don’t make a mess but go mad for kaleidogram
symmetries: that they joyously leap into all opportunities
to create unity they then divide into pleasing geometry,
set up in balanced asides. Ergo, I grant them immunity
de la plupart des anciennes lois. They’re free to cause riots
of silly buffoonery now with impunity. As long as their play
offers symmetry not one whit less than Versailles. As long
as when I come upon them I cannot not sigh an “Oh My!”
.

.

Sunday, January 21, 2018

Mademoiselle Esmeralda LaPitch

top drawing is the current preferred one, bottom kaleidogram which Facebook informs me got posted a year ago today is what gave whatever writes the poem over here the idea for it. but they both, dare I suggest, have something to recommend them for their task.  Attitood,  as one likes to call it.



Uncle Fran and Aunt Dan
(no one’s sure who is which)
tend to over-protect (says Luanne,
hired hand) Mademoiselle Esmeralda LaPitch.
Esmeralda has lodged with them ever since
mater Clotilde said she just couldn't cope
with Ez-Mel, who Clotilde finds egregiously
plain and demonstrably more than a bit of a dope. 
Clotilde was sufficiently vexed that she
no longer slept; rage had burned her eyes dry.
While Ex-Mel slept fine, mater Clo's crooked spine
crumpled further atwist at the sight of the girl who would lie
so complacently snug in her bed (that dreary cliché of a bug 
in a rug!), as the dull little brain like a drip down a drain
of her daughter dreamed stupidly on.
‘I could slaughter her,' Clo hissed, as steam of the pain
.
of the lust to annihilate soon began feeling too great to resist,
and even Clotilde knew that this wouldn't do.
(She'd surely get caught.) So she’d taken the only recourse
she could take (why only? we haven't a clue):
she flew overnight to Peru. We’ve forgotten why Uncle
and Aunt Fran and Dan are so driven to shelter their ‘niece’
(though she isn't a niece, nor related at all): 
Fran and Dan had decided that this seemed the least 
they could do for that little LaPitch of a lass
who, when asked when her mom left if mom left a gap, she
replies, though she isn't sure why, "'Bet your ass!"
If she said any more she is sure she'd get sappy.
So maybe this ending is not not unhappy.
Or ought we to say it is not not not happy?
Negatives double and triple so easily!
Perhaps these intend that the ending end queasily.
.



.

Friday, January 19, 2018

Solo


Having had enough of the demeaning weight
of lack, the stuff in you now regularly lumbers
back and up, struts out, abruptly grabs you,
drags you through another night’s unfathomably
pretty filigree of mystic lightning-vivid darkness.
What you’re made to see and feel and do up-end
you into unimaginable heights. On pain of being
blocked from ever coming back you’re told –
by whom? a genderlessly gentle voice inside,
residing where there hadn’t once been room in you –
you cannot praise, describe, in any way convey
to anyone the nature of the sights, their shocks,
their undermining gorgeousness, their weird allure.
It’s private and it’s yours. No one else can know.
No one else could know. Your essence is a solo.




.

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Cups and Dreams



Dreams are schemes
but not that you dream up.
.
Think of that, tomorrow, when you wake up
and you look into your empty coffee cup.
.
If it is a coffee cup. You may be its dream.
Cups are never what they seem.
.
Nothing’s ever what it seems.
But it’s often what it dreams.






.

The Hive Inside


Do hearts pump love as well as blood?
And what of heads – supposed, by those
who pose dichotomies, are only they consigned 
to think? I think that in some secret nexus, head 
and heart contrive to bring us to another brink:

to be so linked, that to imagine one as different
from the other makes the axis in me shrink.
Today the hive of bees that breeds a better 
metaphor for me than Mind and Heart at war 
with one another seems communally more 

accurate a model of the way our psychic
elements appease: corralling all their “bees” 
to aid the widest vision soul can animate. Honey 
is their money, nourishment their currency! 
Let's surmise that that is how to feed, and show

how much we prize, the queen – who privately
awaits us one by one to come in to inseminate
her with our dreams. Let's imagine loving is 
at one with thinking – that the collaborative
ploys in us are what keep joy from sinking.




.

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Poetry’s the Only Thing to Do




Poetry’s the only thing to do (yes, my dear,
we are addressing you) when all life’s less-
than-palatable tinctures and extractions,
viscous fluids, semi-solid substances

and stubborn rocky indigestibilities bloop
through – and when those bum-de-bums
alchemically therefrom become a craft
that you can steer with some precision

toward at least a simulacrum of the shore
of the delicious mess of felt experience –
where we extract the meanings of what
melts into the prurience biology demands

of mind – to find what happens at the edge
of death, or sex, or rue (turn around again,
my dear, we aren’t through). Poetry’s
the only thing to do besides say toodle-oo.





.

Sunday, January 14, 2018

A Danger of My Enterprise


Hobbles in, all meek, forlorn
and weakly drawn,

face tainted with a faint pastel.
But I can make it well.

By the time I’m done with it,
it’s taken me to hell.






.

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

I Shall Try to Think of It in This New Way



The following florid prelude written in a style meant to do affectionate (if given the impossibility of reproducing it, inevitably ironic) homage to the late manner of Henry James — with which you may understandably not decide to put up for long — and in which I usually employ a liberal use (although not here, it’s only used once at the end) of the distanced and distancing pronoun "one" and the occasional interspersed gratuitous phrase française, all to throw up a wall of steam (the pretense of subtlety, nonetheless subtle) over a topic which in fact I find intrinsically threatening in some way I can’t explain -- introduces a visual tutorial I believe will make self-evident what I have only this moment found I must claim as certainty: that it is impossible to photograph close-ups of packed shiny black plastic garbage bags day or night, rain or shine, and not have each reveal itself as mesmerizingly inimitably beautiful. Their sculpted surfaces and implied landscapes (mountainous ravines, many of them!) may even edge out Sycamore trees as Existence’s most dependable source of beauty. 


How many other categories of potential esthetic wonder are ignored because we find their function too ubiquitously common (ergo boring) and/or uninspiring/distasteful to think of as anything but ‘there’? Look at these glories - qu’il me semble mes frères, mes semblables! - and consider the question.
I’m thinking of investigating asphalt up-close next, bringing to bear on the phenomenon of its startling diamond-cut black-jeweled tiny edged surfaces Quentin Crisp’s near dictum of implied suggestion which may profitably govern our approach to the experience of any aversion or reflex dismissal based on what amounts to bias: ‘I shall try to think of it in this new way.’ If you learn of my demise through the news that I’ve been run over by a New Jersey-plated car on a Manhattan street, this will probably be why. (Which I should count as a fine way to die.)
With regard to which (not my demise, but Quentin Crisp’s implied invitation “to think of it in this new way”): of the gratifying number of viewers who have kindly indicated their approval on Facebook (via the ever-serviceable LIKE & even a few red heart LOVEs) of another category of esthetic wonder I have recently not infrequently mined for what seem to me to be among the more striking kaleidograms Instagram’s layout function creates by robotic accident --


-- I’m curious what these kind viewers individually believe constitute the myriad small kaleidogrammed components they are looking at. I’ve inserted a quartet of these symmetrical baroque arrangements of pale gold translucence just above – samples of which you'll already have seen hovering over the beginning of this text, in geometric concert with the garbage bags’ dramatically shadowed shiny black beauties, and I invite you to guess the pale gold translucent components’ identity. 
.
One shan’t reveal if your surmise is right or wrong, however.
.
Oh, and I looked down into the texture of the asphalt surface of First Avenue as I walked upon it just now and was drawn to photograph a little square of it wet from crushed slush which I then kaleidogrammed thrice. Here are the parent (upper left quadrant) and its three children affixed to one another in a quartet. 


There’s no pretense in these subtleties.
.
.

Sunday, January 7, 2018

Purgatory’s Fiat


Whatever common parlance
may have been about the thing,

if common parlance
there had ever been,

I’d opine the best way
to warm up and to react

to Purgatory’s fiat to renew
the soul from ho-hum sin

would be to learn to do
what Judy Garland did to sing.




.

Friday, January 5, 2018

What Green Appears to Think


The Soul of Green prevails in Winter –
twining up in elegance: unseen by most,
perhaps, except in dreams, but still the soul
of everything. Spring is just as strong a thing
as Fall: Winter is to Summer what a bat is
to a ball: a sporting business all in all.

So why does Green seem sad today?
Intransigently frozen January can’t be what
disturbs it. January is its sibling: so are all
the other incremental phases of their seamless
cosmic unity. But Green appears to think
that it no longer can sustain it with impunity.

Something won’t go well this time around.
Something vital will be swept away, some
unsound illness will be found too virulent
for Green to bear. What could have the power
to destroy it? What force will have deployed it?
Green seems to think we can’t avoid it.



.

Thursday, January 4, 2018

Dissolution


Why do I insist on the inimitability of perception?
That the blue I see is not the blue you view?
Am I comforted by the illimitability of deception
proving nothing can be proven to be true?
.
I’ve just come back from walking through the snow.
I’d watched it coming down in what the wind blew
cinematically in squalls and drifts across my window:
persuasive evidence that what I saw was there. Few
.
moments can persuade like this: wherein I barely
think to ask if what I’m seeing has occurred.
In fact, belief in it grew absolute – how rarely
trust to that degree has breached my world! Word
.
no longer was a symbol: it was indistinguishable
from a palpable Reality: this “snow” was snow.
And so I walked into it in an un-extinguishable
light, both real and in my sight, to undergo
.
what I was sure would be the actual.
That I wouldn’t do what now I only do: refuse.
That to find what I had thought I sought, the factual,
would not have led to dissolution, or killed my muse.
.
When things are real
they tear apart
the heart. They steal
your art.

.


.

Wednesday, January 3, 2018

A Somehow Apt Thought for the Second Day in January (YouTubed)

 
Another bubbalobby that turned out to be very tasty in the mouth,
which is pretty much my only reason for ever wanting to read 
one of these aloud.
.
+*^+*^+*^+*^+*^+*^+*^+*^+*^+*^+*^
.
A Somehow Apt Thought for the Second Day in January
.
If the irreducible component, the sole begetting element from
which existence can proceed is consciousness without intention,
a sort of weather system sentient for no other reason than it can’t
.
not be aware (albeit with no Center to report to), I wonder if the most
persuasive evidence for this is in the human infant’s vacant-seeming
stare. There seems in newborn eyes a numbing, numbed surprise
.
at seeing so much form, where once had only been a dream of it,
an underlying scheme for it, the essential governing condition
called Potential, which is perfect only when it doesn’t come to be.
.
But it came to be the infant you and me and when it did I wonder if it
rid itself of beauties our incarnate eyes would cry to see: indeed,
that what we think is beautiful are after all Platonic shadows of what
.
had to be abandoned for existence to occur. We die as soon as
we are born and, prey to rude discoveries like “cold” and “warm,”
we find we’re at the mercy of the prison which becomes the price
.
to pay for incarnation, and marks the death of the divine, the rocky
continent to which we are remanded till the punishment of limits
ceases storming at us and we’re finally released from Form.
.