From Its Glittering Get-Go

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqCxOWYbHVA

.

If it had been up to me to conjure up –

decide – what body to devise to harbor

all the vast unprecedented strange

capacities of human mind the Cosmos

soon apparently would find it urgent

to incarnate and experimentally bestow

upon the blind and blundering morass

.

of squirming, leaping, flying, digging,

swimming, stomping, climbing, slinking,

fighting, stinking, frightened animals below,

I’d have worked assiduously to make

possible an apparatus which gave almost

no thought to the practicalities of living

on this fecund messily resistant planet:

.

this body would be beautiful with only

bare allowance for the need to eat

or fuck or defecate, defend or move

with any useful purpose on the Earth:

its remarkable potential for creation

would require it from birth to vault

into the realm of vision and through

.

dire ingenuity unparalleled so far

in the production of the sentient being,

make provision from the platform

of aesthetics for invention: take elegant

quick care of the inevitably tedious

necessities it had to heed to keep alive,

so that its thrust could be transcendence.

.

From the start, its heart would hold

the art of its ascendance: with one

lavishly insistent principle to which it

would and must entrust its destiny:

to manifest what it was here to breed:

a ravishment, a lovely uselessness, what

it was from its glittering get-go: de trop.

.

. 

Circumspect, with Reason

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azNWJIxriY4

.

Someone asks you how you are,

and how your weekend was.

You’re not sure how you’d put

just what you did or what you do,

or rather what your system does

when it is given what it asks for:

.

those unimaginable masks and tasks –

symbolic actualizations – revelation

of which would seem almost to be

psychic treason.  You’re circumspect,

with reason. There are subtleties

that season your experience, nuances

.

that cannot be explained, whose

unconstrained varieties of existential

introspection that enliven your

insatiably delectably hot predilection

for impermanence – investigating

limits of the firmament you thought

.

you had begun to understand the last

time you pursued this line of inquiry –

but left you knowing you required

rewiring the console through which

you could exercise your agency –

amassing better data from which

.

you’d be able to effect at last

the transmutation into ultimate

refinement of the essence of your

being. Hard to make that into chat.

“Is there anybody special? Anyone

you’re seeing?” they will proffer

.

with a naughty wink. Let them think

what they will think. Right now

you’re seeing them – wondering if

they’d be cushiony to sit on if you

reconfigured them into a chair.

Might be time again to dare.

.

.

The Thing with Real Messiahs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moHWRbSRyY8

.

If love were the solution, Stewart’s yellow pet Mithra-polos would

be its best purveyor; no other being could have undergone

the burning zap of the electrostatic radiance with which

.

Mithra-polos had had forever to contend; his beloved

steward Stewart had exactly one aim in his life, which

was to mount a war against the rest of everything. Except

.

Mithra-polos, who would not go away. Stewart knew the surname

of Mitropoulos – Dmitri with that appellation was conductor

of The New York Philharmonic right up to when Leonard Bernstein

.

took the reins and thunder and the light away from him:

but mostly Stewart liked Mitropoulos because he led his

orchestras not with baton but with his hands. Otherwise

.

the name had meaning for its Zoroastrian suggestiveness: hence

his having re-configured it to showcase Mithras: the God

for centuries who’d given Christianity a run: Stewart was

.

quite sure that Mithras would conduct his forces with his hands,

not with a wand, like that pretender Jesus would have done. But

Mithra-polos cared not at all about his steward’s mystical

.

peculiarities. It was his lot to love his steward Stewart and he did.

And does. Mithra-polos had even come to love the buzz of

Stewart’s enmity. And Stewart loved Mithra-polos because

.

it turns out, everyone must love what love is at least once

before they die. Did you know that was a rule? Mithra knew,

and knows. Having come back in the form of yellow pet, he knows

.

he is the real Messiah. Though no one else can know. That’s

the thing with real Messiahs. One never knows they’re here.

What then is the use of them? Who said they had to have a use?

.

.

Maybe That’s the Deal

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSrBDYQlxF8

.

Absence ergo Presence! ‘Does this mean,’

Absence asked: ‘that I created Presence?

Apparently.’ Though he can’t perceive

himself, still Absence can’t conceive himself

without an opposite. Maybe that’s the deal.

Maybe something only comes from nothing.

.

Absence then would be its god! He had

these thoughts while sipping Absinthe.

Under its iconic sway, Absence wondered

hungrily what might comprise the size

and content of the rest of his relational array.

Wouldn’t everything existent be his kin?

.

What about Enthusiasm, that peculiarity so

very alien to him? Absence guessed by

contrast it had kinship with Dispassion. Why

not make a visit to Dispassion to discover

what it knew about the family? In an instant

Absence did so: sleekly slid himself beside

.

Dispassion, and calmly asked it if it ever

had begotten an Enthusiasm? Dispassion

didn’t answer. Either it was so dispassionate

it couldn’t raise the energy to think why it

should care, or hadn’t any clue that Absence,

being Absence, even had been there. Then,

.

as if on cue, Dispassion took the opportunity

to spew, ergo construe for Absence its first

view of giving birth to its abstractions: two

spasms shook Dispassion’s core which under-

took to serve up a galore of two Enthusiasms!

It fell to Absence then to welcome them:

.

‘Hooray! You made my day.’ But there’d

be no reply. And what would be the sense

in Absence bidding them goodbye? An oddity

begins to dawn. If God were Absence,

Absence, God – they’d never have been here.

You couldn’t even say that they were gone.

.

.

I Remember Joe As Well

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18KKkCZU0Zc

.

an outgrowth of previous poem & drawing Sextember: this is the same drawing but very much more worked on and over, finished; and the poem was completely unexpected. But then everything is, isn't it. (vid 'explains' - it's maybe a good one to imbibe, one of my better vid outings.)

.

.

Since neither you nor I remember – therefore

can’t retain the barest sensory recall – of nearly

fifty years ago, yet sit here with each other anyway

for reasons we don’t know – unfathomable but not silly

or ridiculous – since now we are the phantoms of each

other’s tossed experience, not of then but now,

somehow the light surrounding us attains to shadowed

tints and rinses of another life, neither yours nor mine

.

nor ours – but a life we are invited to investigate –

as if we both had made a date to do it: a life that will

requite vicariously anyway: precariously too, I’ll bet.

And yet. I think I feel requited. No. I spoke, I always

speak, too soon. My life has lain, my life is lying fallow,

plain and plainly fed with little. Rhymes with spittle.

Have you ever used your tongue to kiss? Oh, I’m sorry,

that’s amiss as well. I’m plainly under someone’s spell.

.

Maybe it’s the life we haven’t looked at yet. The light

surrounding us attains to the organic rich fluidity

of body stains like blood and semen, urine and saliva,

sweat, pus and feces, bile maybe too, but there I go again,

disgusting you, and speaking of the Great Untoward.

Let’s go forward. Yes, I know, I rhyme the easy rhymes.

They’re never clever. Time and Grime and I’m

the last beginning that was possible. Did you play softball

.

when you were a boy? I never knew exactly what an inning

was. I lied, though, no, I didn’t never use my tongue

to kiss. I used my tongue to kiss your lips, then slipped it in,

then slid it south. You seemed to welcome it, then punched

me in the mouth. I loved the taste of my own blood,

its history would have you in it. You welcomed it, you know.

Tell me your name, Steven. What? Your name is Joe?

Yes, well, I remember Joe as well.

.

.

Regina and Rex Rated R (Part 2 of Salve Regina…)

.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_gfcrqNhjc

.

Rex with Vagina,

Regina with Pecs that

She Flexes had vexed their

flushed followers flashing too

much of their flesh to the public,

yet not enough neck, to neck!

.

Rex né Regina, Regina née Rex

had their neck therefore aptly

inflected suggestively: teasing

out shadows that spiced the effects

of their having beribboned their crotch

and a tit just a bit, so their body more

.

modestly might fit a flick with an R,

not a X – although they were soon more

than sure with no less an allure than

they’d had when they’d been very bad,

judging now, anyway, by the forest

of tented up trousers and WOWZA’s

.

brought forth in the loud horny crowd,

which they found quite as easy

to rouse as they did doing sleazy.

Being good could raise wood, as it

should! And it would.

.

.

Salve Regina! Ave Rex! Ave Omni Genus!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcZU6k_cqVQ

.

Who’s that fairy god with breasts?

Or fairy goddess with a beard?

Weird. Is he hiding a vagina?

Has she tucked a penis

of prodigious size somewhere

tight between her thighs?

.

What yearning’s burning in

that crotch? Whose gender

bender would you rather watch,

whom would you prefer?

A him who can’t be catalogued,

a brand new kind of her?

.

So far the Mystery’s ignored.

No one knows yet when you

climb on it, it flies. Its tender

sword is out of sight. But that’s

all right. Doesn’t care. The dare’s

still there. Its hard-on never dies.

.

Salve Regina! Ave Rex! Ave Omnis

Genus (with or without penis)!

Render unto Sex whatever gender

it elects to find delectable, buck

ass bare or in disguise – what it

is and ever shall be: a surprise.

.

.

Sextember

.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ-06UKthKA

.

Back when we were hippie angels,

and too many men resembled Christ,

(the white one with a beard) when we faked

that we were comfortable being naked with

each other – do you recall the nights that

filled that 1969 September in Vermont

.

in which you came to me to come with me,

stripped and took my clothes off too, held me

and enlisted me to hold you and to kiss you

while you cried and we decided not to speak

of it, despite how many times the light

went out when you returned another night

. 

and then another and another, vexed

and tender, coming, going, coming, coming,

rendering the month I adolescently renamed

Sextember the only month before or since

that matters in my life? Do you remember

that bright anguished lie? Neither do I.

.
.

Whatever Always Wrongly Steals the Heart

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYXOnlMJy_Q

.

Let’s bare our imperfections and asymmetries

and take them on a rowdy roustabout and gaudy

promenade today. Exalt their faults: exhort

the lot of them en masse to say, to explicate,

.

expatiate upon, and otherwise convey without

apology the etiology of the mistakes they will not

argue that each makes, why they’re completely

accurately held to be bizarre (because they are):

.

what’s induced the wart that grows upon the nose,

disease that rots the petals off the startled daisy.

Then audition them for a revival of “Girl Crazy.”

Let ‘em fret about who gets the Ethel Merman role,

.

the one who’ll make us gape, the star, the apogee,

the single essence equally assembled from ungodly

talent and unbridled art, whatever always wrongly

steals the heart. Make the loser take that part.

.

The Thing

.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuARb0osn0c

.

How do we account for it or her?

All she had to do was stick her nose

outside for the inevitable to occur.

All sentient beings noticed and arose,

.

became her entourage, adoring

but respectful of her patent need

for space – their hushed imploring

faces silently adhering to a creed

.

belonging to a faith they’d breathed

in from her like a sacred atmospheric

breeze – which lent new life that seethed

as if into the primal stage of stratospheric

.

orgasm that sex with god or goddess

is proposed on evidence to be. But what

exactly was she doing to effect this 

deluge of response? Was she shut

.

or open to the importuning eyes 

that could not not embrace her, whole?

Was her ineluctable divinity, disguise? -

or a blessèd incarnation of the Soul? -

.

or the divisive dissonant deception 

so inherent in her unplumbed mystery

that human psyches lacked perception

to investigate the sordid history

.

of this phenomenon of demi-god

whose virtue they began to disbelieve -

this fake, now a likely demon of the sod

not the celestial ether: how could she relieve

.

their existential agony, assuage 

their ache to be released? She’d spilled her

falsity herself : tainted blood! So in a rage -

deserved? we cannot know - they killed her.

.

Where or what we wonder is the moral?

What are we here or there for?

(Oh, make it soar all vast and choral!)

You’re the thing that you prepare for.

.

.

Some Smarter Thing’s Problem

.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m2QciOj4OE

.

I once wondered why dreams

rarely blundered into my

night’s somnolent view.

.

Now I see they arrive in the day!

They’re in the drawings I draw.

They’re not in my poems:

.

poetry drives, by my lights,

into being: it endlessly aims

at our seeing its sense.

.

But drawings and dreams

are more bumbling and dense

and far dumber than poems.

.

They’re a who-knows-what

running amok. Some Power

That Was at the drawing board

long ago let them come in:

allowed unavowed, unavowable

sins (if they’re sins) to kick

.

pencil and pen around

paper to be what a dream is:

opaque, overwrought,

.

a mistake. Some, without

protest, reside in the crow’s

nest right outside my window,

.

where sometimes I lob them,

to make them not mine but

some smarter thing’s problem.

.

.

More July Mornings Than Not

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxzcOPW2aV4

More July

mornings

than not

.

arrive with certainty and grace.

When a July morning is enjoined

to encase itself in the oppressive

heat of a midsummer day, it loses

.

grace

but not

certainty.

.

Brutal obliviousness is a strength –

an eruptive card in Nature’s pack,

and ineluctably shows up many

more times than once.

.

Nature

neither holds

nor is swayed

.

by the card for too long, but seems

to like to keep it long enough

to trouble. Troubling foments

visionary imagination.

.

So,

all in

all,

.

gain edges out loss. Awareness

becomes at once preternaturally

wide and focused. A wild card

of improbability always awaits it.

.

Its

fear

takes on

.

the bristle of excitement. ‘Trouble’

adds interest and beauty. Ergo grace

returns even to hot July, sometimes.

Grace has a sense of duty.

.

.

Ad Hoc Perfection

.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_c1BZdLvP0
.

Perfection easily achieves itself:

it happens everywhere. You’ve

only to discern its terms to catch it

sending out another rare array

.

of light and shadow to becalm

another compositionally edgy

contretemps, effect a new détente

to lend a deft insouciant aplomb

.

to a banana peel or Snickers candy

wrapper, prematurely fallen leaves,

a standpipe bolted as if wedded to

a metal-banded bouquet casket (both

in harmonies of soft red) which hosts

the ghosts of flowers. Perfection never

cowers, knows no terror as it blithely

rids itself of any chance of error

.

in the service of incarnating the fleet

complete ideal. It illimitably follows

its inimitable laws: then gently,

briefly pauses to apprise us

.

it is time to seal the deal with

stunned ingenuous applause –

before, as all ad hoc perfection

does when it is dying, it withdraws.

.

Premise, Upshot, Corollary. (Hang On for the Ride.)

PREMISE

 UPSHOT

 COROLLARY

Premise: Writing writes writing.

Upshot: There's no such thing as a writer.

Corollary: There may be no such thing as a self either.

=========================
(okay, so, this is something I just poured out on a thread in a poetry forum where I post my stuff to a gorgeously smart and funny and accomplished young poet-man who seems to like the greater part of my stuff and whose stuff I very clearly like and who, by my lights, which do not incline to what I understand is other people's common sense, pretty much always responds to a poem as if a poet had written it - in the case of the one under scrutiny here, that would be a Guy Kettelhack. But as I trundle on, not just through poetry, but through everything, I just can't see that connection anymore. .
Anyway, chew on the indigestible edges of this expostulation if you feel like it (they'll at least exercise jaw muscles), and/or kick it in its virtual butt and "try to go on", as Quentin Crisp was fond of saying (say, on difficult occasions like his birthday, which was the same day as Christmas) "as if nothing unpleasant were happening."
.
I'm sticking in some kaleidograms of my humanoids because, oh I don't know, that seemed like the thing to do.) Here goes:

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

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

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>< 

IN SOME WAYS, dare I say what I think about one of my own poems (I generally daren't because I simply don't know anything about them while they're happening and after they're done; that's not being coy, I really don't) is that any poem that comes out of me, but especially one which sounds like a manifesto, like this one, http://guykettelhack.blogspot.com/…/…/toomany-questions.html is shouting that it is writing itself: the "I" in it (as in the work of Miss Dickinson to whom I can't not run for guidance and cover when I use the first person) has truly nothing important to do with "Guy," the "I" I'm not quite idiot enough to deny as I wield strategy in the Real World, is a provisional construct, useful, say, when you have to show your photo ID to someone to get something or get in somewhere: then I'm fine being Guy Blake Kettelhack, do with "me" what you will. But a poem utterly completely writes itself. The moment the cyber finger touches cyberspace to form words for it, it's taken the reins completely, makes all the decisions, becomes outrageous or perverse or bland or funny in ways that, apart presumably from drawing from the lexicon of verbal toys I can't not provide it (to which it responds also by finding words not IN that lexicon). It has nothing past the superficial to do with the rest of the me tagging along because it happens to know how to type. 

.
So you see, for example, 'my' (putative Guy Blake Kettelhack's) insistence in this poem on "getting an answer" is fundamentally detached in any of the ways that count from the Guy who shows his photo ID to get into NYU to give a talk on Quentin Crisp (which I did for a Duke U. prof friend of mine who a couple weeks ago brought his Dukies to New York to freak 'em out, as part of which mission he had me talk to them about whatever it was I talked about) or who signs that name on a credit card bill or whatever else one does publicly as oneself - so far from the 'poet' or the 'artist' or the 'violinist' or the sexual shenanigannist that when the poet/artist/violinist/sexter is doing his thing he is conscious of having no identity resembling the signature signer. The writing does not (in any writing) reveal "Guy's" opinions. Partly for the simplest of reasons: I have none that I know of, except, maybe, I don't like lima beans or eating animal organs which dispense excreta. I have no beliefs or ideologies other than the ones I've come stamped with by my culture and the subtle trickery of English grammar, which because adjectives almost always come before a noun, and the subject takes a predicate and you don't dangle prepositions and you keep your verb tenses straight make you think in a certain linear way that somebody Chinese would regard as bizarre and childish. In other words, there is no me.
.
That's not to say that I don't become inflamed at what might be seen sometimes equally as aesthetic as moral assault or injury ("truth is beauty" such as we each name it) but I never make what I think would be the mistake of signing on to a homogenized smoothed out 'unity' of a statement which purports to speak for me, because when I read it, it never really does. I have responses not opinions. If to someone else's eye they describe a temperament or a series of what turn out to be predictable proclivities (I really never like lima beans) then so be it. But there are immediacies to me, not the substance of codicils. (By the way, I'm not bragging here. I don't think this is the right or noble way to be. Indeed I imagine I may appalled more than a few of you. It just appears to be what I can't not be.)
.

So how do I talk about what allegedly is 'my' poem because the words of it came thru Guy's body? I talk about it as if I hadn't written it. Because in the way that matters, I haven't. 
.
Writing is never bald confession to me. It may appear to be arterial or hormonal or spinal, as made of you as your flesh, bone and blood. But even when it seems as if that's what it always is, and maybe by some measure should always seem to be, it can only have been even a little "true" in the way we may want it to be for the exact breath of a moment it took form. Mostly what I'm saying is, what may in the moment flood completely out of what I fleetingly regard as a wellspring of 'me,' as soon as it finds expression, diction, syntax it separates itself from the amorphous sea it came from and crawls out like an arthropod to live its autonomous life. I may feel a sort of familiarity when I see it, but otherwise it's as different from 'me' as anything which isn't immediate and going on right now in me will be two seconds after I've expressed it. Maybe this sounds perverse, but it comes as close as I'm able right now to come to delineating the lineaments of 'self' as it sieves itself through language to pretend it's who wrote it. Writing is never the writer. The writer is never the writing.
.
But the thing that juices me up most from what you wrote [the poet/gentleman to whom the heart of what you just read was aimed on our poetry forum] with such liberal verve is: "it's our party dammit!" Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. That's the ticket to get you on the soul train.

.

.