Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Next Question on the Quiz



.
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
.
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,
.
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
.
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.
.
Whatever thing you are, I won’t be missing it.
Just try to stop my tongue from kissing it.
.

Monday, May 28, 2018

You Get to Lick the Bowl





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
.
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
.
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
.
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.
.
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.
.
.

Saturday, May 26, 2018

When You Wake Up Angry



.
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
.
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?
.
When I wake up angry, I draw.
Eventually I declaw.
.




.

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Style is Sound



.
Style is sound.
When you find it,
you’ve been found.
.
Presence has a meter
and a melody inimitably
tied to form, your form.
.
The deaf can hear it best.
They notate lyrical
vibrations in a special clef
.
which locates and records
the differences in silences
the hearing know as “rests” –
.
far more exquisitely aligned
with mind than sounds
the hearing can discern

which churn up from
a far less intricately
nuanced source.
.
Hearing has its
pleasures too,
of course.

But sound itself
is self. Your
sound is you.
.
.
.
Guy plays Bach


Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Motley Postulates


.

.
Gradients of radiating lines of influence. Collisions
and collusions of profusions of geometries.
A frieze of such mathematical equations as can tease
.
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,
.
thereby financing the imagination with a currency
sufficient to convince it of its chance to change
its substance of abstraction into matter, into
.
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
.
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.
.
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?
.

Sunday, May 13, 2018

That Day


Walking last night past a city bodega around about nine
I was dazed at the sight of a long, cheerful customer line
.
wrapped around its street corner. Couldn’t fathom or gauge
what these sweet friendly people of every persuasion and age
.
were all waiting to buy. What were the lures, the engagements?
"What's up?" I asked. "Oh God! The flower arrangements!"
.
A Mexican florist had managed to spew this miraculous rout
of inventively beautiful blooms. Why? (Oh Guy.) I figured it out -
.
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
.
I at last had come to. (My mom, her two boys and her spouse
had convened for five decades endowing the Kettelhack house
.
with their versions of how most Americans choose to take part
in the requisite holidays. But Mother's Day: that day had heart.)
.
.
.

Thursday, May 10, 2018

Reading Belles Lettres in Front of Infinity



.
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
.
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
.
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
.
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?
.
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.
.
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.
.
.


Saturday, May 5, 2018

Sinister Mulligan Stew



“Man suffers only because he takes seriously
what the gods made for fun.” – Alan Watts.
.
“Time spent with cats is never wasted.”
– Sigmund Freud
.
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)
.
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.”
.
I’ll tell you why: it’s fun.
Fun is what we can’t not have.
Preferably lots.
(“Doctor Freud? Mr. Watts.”)
.
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
.
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?
.
Seven bazillion and one?
You saw it coming: None.
Come, overjoyed! - to the void!
(“Alan Watts? Sigmund Freud.”).

.
.


Wednesday, May 2, 2018

The Terrible Artist



.
.
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
.
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
.
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
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
.

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Poem Problem


.
.
The problem with a poem
which the Universe finds queer
is that it thinks it has to end.
.
There’s no end here.
But poems have to end, you say.
Or else they’d have you
.
by the throat both night and day!
But come to think of it,
you think, they do that anyway.
.
.