Next Question on the Quiz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYVrmBZu-aA

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Is everybody doing what they want to?

No matter if they hate it? Is everybody’s life

a fish-line they each aim, after they bait it,

at the ideal of the single pair of living open

lips they know will crave it? – a hunt few

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others anywhere would care to contemplate

much less pursue? Do I desire to join with

or to tear away the flesh that binds my

business inextricably to you? Stringent as

our delicacies are to have their way or perish,

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still they manage somehow to requite us,

dismember inhibitions into requisitions that

delight us to remember, and will cherish.

Next question on the quiz: is truth hilarious?

Take out that chart you’ve just been graphing

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on the topic, if you would. The one that arcs

in red up to the peak you’ve named “No Good.”

What hearts don’t die from laughing? Aren’t

you laughing, funny honey, now? Let me lick

that laugh as long as breathing will allow.

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Whatever thing you are, I won’t be missing it.

Just try to stop my tongue from kissing it.

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You Get to Lick the Bowl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmObzpXozRU

Like stations of the cross, some intimate relations  

can remand their partners to accomplish solemn

duties: readily enough, at first, ostensibly proceeding

ritually, as they seem to be, to heeding sources of such

beauties as account for why one or the other finds

a knee or elbow, curve of ass or heft of lurid

apprehensions in the shadowy morass of each’s secretive

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intentions so robust. Gentility must bow to lust; lust

must bow to every alien reaction it will find as it pervades,

invades and otherwise attempts to get its business “laid”

in all the tempting centers of intensities it’s sensed

are beckoning to it to have its way – but now turn out

to be less invitation than defense: a stay against

the terrible predation that awaits if they’re so much

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as breathed upon: much less assessed as lewd. Brewed

from the equivalent of acidosis of a fear of loneliness

and loss so great that it becomes a love of both, the only

troth that lust can pledge is to itself, which leads it to

encroach upon the nucleus of intimacy to induce

immediate production of a psychic mucous whose thick

slippery assault on every surface of the mind and heart

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and skin begets a quite remarkably immediate resistance,

out and in, to any notion of embracing, tasting, kissing,

smelling, or in any way adjacently abiding flesh. Sex

attains the poverty of death. Lust begets disgust begets

entanglement too meshed to do a thing with but despair of.

What, now, will you take care of? Surely not this strange

newfangled disingenuous shenanigan called love.

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Ha! Did I make you quake a tiny touch, my turtle dove?

April fools! If two months late. (Let’s not be hampered

by a date.) We don’t mean a word of this. Love is always

bliss and kisses. Love is always lovely butter cream,

waiting to be spread upon a cake, lavished like

a dream upon your body, heart and soul. Come here!

Let’s make some now. You get to lick the bowl.

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When You Wake Up Angry

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When you wake up angry, what do you do?

Start ripping the cosmos apart?

Tear it to shreds that will never reconstitute

into the least usability? Burn up the chart

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that sets out the location of everything

you had once loved, valued, cherished?

Make plans to make everything living wish

it wasn’t here? – then see that it perished?

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When I wake up angry, I draw.

Eventually I declaw.

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Style is Sound

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BON7gfF997g

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Style is sound.

When you find it,

you’ve been found.

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Presence has a meter

and a melody inimitably

tied to form, your form.

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The deaf can hear it best.

They notate lyrical

vibrations in a special clef

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which locates and records

the differences in silences

the hearing know as “rests” –

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far more exquisitely aligned

with mind than sounds

the hearing can discern

which churn up from

a far less intricately

nuanced source.

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Hearing has its

pleasures too,

of course.

But sound itself

is self. Your

sound is you.

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Guy plays Bach

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdpkxF5xi60

Motley Postulates

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https://youtu.be/st42AWTUlDQ

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Gradients of radiating lines of influence. Collisions

and collusions of profusions of geometries.

A frieze of such mathematical equations as can tease

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themselves into believing they can feel and float

on breezes, and be put to music, made to dance,

enjoined to conjure up conditions of romance,

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thereby financing the imagination with a currency

sufficient to convince it of its chance to change

its substance of abstraction into matter, into

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reproducing flesh, into something with autonomy

equivalent to what we sort out of a mesh of prostituted

possibilities – theories we pay like whores to make us

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think we’re more than odd and random bubbles in

a mind – to blink and pop, perceive that what we find

is what we’ve yearned so badly to believe there is: a God.

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Is nothing not a question? Is everything an answer?

Do we have feet that blister on the stony path?

Is there a path? Or are we motley postulates of math?

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That Day

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2YjqVb0vwY
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Walking last night past a city bodega around about nine

I was dazed at the sight of a long, cheerful customer line

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wrapped around its street corner. Couldn’t fathom or gauge

what these sweet friendly people of every persuasion and age

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were all waiting to buy. What were the lures, the engagements?

"What's up?" I asked. "Oh God! The flower arrangements!"

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A Mexican florist had managed to spew this miraculous rout

of inventively beautiful blooms. Why? (Oh Guy.) I figured it out -

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and needlessly shouted to all in the queue: "Aha! Mothers' Day!"

They did not cry "Yay!" in reply, but sparkled on cue at the way

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I at last had come to. (My mom, her two boys and her spouse

had convened for five decades endowing the Kettelhack house

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with their versions of how most Americans choose to take part

in the requisite holidays. But Mother's Day: that day had heart.)

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Reading Belles Lettres in Front of Infinity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKM7qmKu6Ik

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Okay, let’s opine for the sake of opining
we each have an incontrovertible soul.
Why do we picture it soulless, refining

itself into purity, like a divine crystal bowl

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from which no mortal lips will have sipped,

much less guzzled until they were drunk from

what life was created to slip them: get ripped

by the cracks of the whips and the funk from

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the actual – not strain to contain the invisible

putative Essence of our raison-d’être, 
as if that were factual? Where has our risible
Regent vamoosed to? Reading belles lettres
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in front of Infinity, hoping at last for response?

Surrounded by all of his glazed-over ghosts

(what happened to cool, where was the Fonz?)

to which He, She, They, It were the hosts?

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I’d rather eat stuffing

from chairs made of rat hair

than spend an Eternity bluffing

I hadn’t a place in my mind for despair.

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My brokennesses make me whole.

Can’t think of one I would want to perfect.

If mysteriously I encounter A Soul

I shall counsel it seriously to defect.

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Sinister Mulligan Stew

“Man suffers only because he takes seriously

what the gods made for fun.” – Alan Watts.

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“Time spent with cats is never wasted.”

– Sigmund Freud

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Why do we love to administer into each others purview

what we claim to be incontrovertible evidence

we have amassed from our deepest most intimately

undergone undertakings that prove every motive,

including those mean silent buggers about whose existence

we hadn’t a clue (that is, Dr. Freud, until we met you)

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inventively steaming up toxically harrowing mixes

of Sinister Mulligan Stew we’re force-fed from the outset,

against which we have no defense, so fastidiously

and insidiously is it hell-bent on vengeance, replenishing

all of the menaced and menacing slew of effects

that have passed both in public and private as “you.”

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I’ll tell you why: it’s fun.

Fun is what we can’t not have.

Preferably lots.

(“Doctor Freud? Mr. Watts.”)

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What’s the best way to take on a conundrum? Divinities

flare when you dare to come up with new methods

to scare that they wouldn’t dare, or when you aren’t scared

when They traumatize. But you learn their trick, how

to catalyze anyone near – ignite what incites their worst fear

(and in private excites them) – whatever thing threatens

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what you call “the best of me”: that thing you learn is a joke,

not a destiny. Sob becomes laugh. No other parts in the heart

of the Spirit’s Anatomy get this job done, not by half.

Alan Watts measured and weighed up the sum of what

Makes this Methuselah run: having a shit load of fun.

How many of you knew that too?

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Seven bazillion and one?

You saw it coming: None.

Come, overjoyed! - to the void!

(“Alan Watts? Sigmund Freud.”).

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The Terrible Artist

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OI28GwjS1U

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It seemed to me noble: one ought to impart

to the terrible artist he’d no taste for art.

I’d come to believe I could do him a service

as sure as I was that, of course, he’d be nervous

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observing me tear down the walls of the fortress

he’d hidden behind, falsely thinking his portraits

were trenchantly sensitive, witty and fine,

and which proved him an elegant master of line

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who avoided the pretty in favor of factual,

scraping off surfaces, finding the actual.

One faintly admired an offhand facility,

but how could one bear the clichés his ability

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lazily dropped like a rabbit drops pellets:

relying on mindless reflexes that zealots

whose brains had abstained from all thinking

adduced to be grand. His dreck left you sinking.

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I cleverly knew the best way to begin

to unravel him out of the terrible sin

of his patent refusal remotely to see

how he’d failed, was to have him draw me.

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He was done in an hour. The thing horrifies.

It’s entirely made of unspeakable lies.

No trace of my face. But I doubt I’ll survive it.

Look how it dies. Not a thing can revive it.

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Poem Problem

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBaEipy3mpc

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The problem with a poem

which the Universe finds queer

is that it thinks it has to end.

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There’s no end here.

But poems have to end, you say.

Or else they’d have you

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by the throat both night and day!

But come to think of it,

you think, they do that anyway.

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