What One Might Just as Well Call “Soul”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybnA7MPoRkc

.

Depict it! Thunder with significance – you nervous

sparrow on a picket fence – you fifty-minute silence

in a glacial psychoanalytic session: justify that

facial tic – that tiny stutter of expression: what’s that

.

half-lit smile, that artificial glossy guile – part stiff,

part sad: you get that from your dad? Nail that

damning rhyme that plagues you all the time: kick it

in the assonance. Don't take any sass from your

.

first memory of crying, diapered, in the grass: pass

it on like Kleenex to that crazed black man who’s

cursing his synapses – spitting his Tourettes out in

the subway – leather cabbie cap on backwards:

.

looks good, doesn't he? Wasn't he the scary fucker

coming after you in last night’s dream – the one

at whom you tried to scream but couldn't? Wouldn't he

look fine reclining next to you in bed, about to nuzzle

.

sleepily into your armpit with his sweet warm head?

You'd watch him take a dip – lick your needless

nipple, feel the ripple through what one might just

as well call “soul.” You would give that to him whole.

.

.

What Does New York City Teach You (answer to a Quora question)

What does New York City teach you?

Guy Kettelhack, lives in New York City (1975-present)  (answer to a Quora question)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm4yn3xLswc

To me that’s like asking what, in all its dimensions, does your own mind teach you? Oddly, with its legendary bounty of distractions (though, pertinently, no more or less bountiful than the distractions in your own mind), New York can, for some people, become the occasion of discovering a greater sense of calm than they’ve known anywhere else.

Anyway it’s done that for me. And I think the reason it has is that it reflects every aspect of thought, feeling or fantasy in my own mind: nothing I’ve ever felt or wondered about hasn’t met with an answering response from some resource in New York (people, concerts, museums, chance absorption of an overheard voice or something scribbled on a wall) that precisely fits it.

The best examples of this may be too private to share. A sexual fantasy you grew up thinking sentenced you to complete aloneness turns out to be the basis of a number of thriving groups in New York. Your fascination with particular edible grasses or types of salami or translating Ancient Greek or barely known Indian sauces or arcane branches of folk music or cutting edge neurological research into schizophrenia will find itself passionately reflected in human company to be found here. New York is like your ‘id’ - Freud’s hypothetical unconscious furnace of drives which feeds everything you are. These drives seek release in whatever forms they are wittingly or unwittingly provided: they’ve no moral interest in the outcome, though the rest of the selective you may. But it is New York’s immoderate capacity to fund you with every imaginable response (often amounting to solution) to every imaginable desire or curiosity you bring to it that is its real glory.

New York has taught me how profoundly ‘place’ can merge with, and therefore suggest to me, ‘who I am.’ That the same can be said of Thoreau and his Walden doesn’t vitiate or erase the impact of this discovery, it enlarges our understanding that the ‘particulars’ of place potentially have meanings to anyone receptive to them. The universe (as infinite in rural New Hampshire as it is in Manhattan) reflects us; we reflect it - if we’re temperamentally aligned with the angles of its transmission. And New York’s got the angles for me.

In short, we’re never lost - or anyway perhaps never need be. The profound calm thismakes possible can be explained simply. You feel heard, corroborated, embraced by a ‘condition’ which tells you you’re where you belong. It’s my experience that this (arguably greatest) human anguish of feeling lost can, in and by New York, be answered and assuaged. Existentially, and with as much crème fraiche on top as you can handle.

.

Why I'm Writing This Letter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8shN8gYYc8

.

What had once been Fantasia afflicts me with dullish aphasia:

can’t speed through the hatch and be free anymore:

can’t locate the latch and the key anymore. The flow is shut off;

the show is cut off: I’ve rammed to the end of my cranial meat;

.

must defer to a sense beyond sense that entreats me to trust

the grand slam. As usual, no one's at bat. I'm tired of that.

Mammalian perceptions, revealed as a sham. (I am that I am.

So what.) So last night I stole into the Met where I met a small

.

Pharaoh whom I also stole to take home and to talk to. But I kept

saying things for which he didn't care, pompous ass with his nose

in the air. So I fashioned him into a chair. And everything's

suddenly better. That's why I'm writing this letter.

.

.

A Little Secret Time for Happiness

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB4ttTl-Smo

.

For Kyree

.

Let’s take a little secret time
for happiness.
I’ve got abundantly more than
I’d need – Lord knows, not less –

.

to savor you, and you, well,

you don’t have to think about

a thing: just slide into each  

coiling ring of life’s meticulous

.

embrace: and close your eyes,

and let the sweet sopranos sing.

Permit the Entity that rests

within to oversee.

.
(That portion of it which you
may feel creamily attending
to each whirling inexplicability
of you is me.)

.

.

How I’d Define the Thing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKICw9SWhYA

.

It doesn't have to entertain or sing,

although it mustn't bore. It mustn't

not suffice, and mustn't not deposit

you into a state of wanting more.

It mustn't not delight and mustn't not

.

unnerve, and if it serves up double-

negatives, it mustn't not confuse

a little. Mustn't not be visceral as

spittle; mustn't not be fully mouthed;

mustn't not allow the possibility

.

of getting lost and feeling found.

Mustn't not amend an error; mustn't

not be this: the only way, today, that

you can find to say what you imagine

isn’t not your terror and your bliss.

.

.

The Word Made Text

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

.

Haphazard processes, creations idly stopped

just as they’d started forming, sometimes

saddled with accoutrements to whose

unfathomable use you can’t imagine

.

ever warming: this is the legacy you’re left.

This is what you have to think is you, bereft,

at first, of any notion of what could come next.

It strikes you that the obstacle, in fact, is “next” –

.

the word, the text, the problem is the word made

text which locks you into thinking anything you see

in it is true. No text knows you.

.

.

Whispered to a Face on the Subway

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g7K7m1sfNU

.

But you do have comrades, whom

you notice on the subway perhaps,

who may even be "friends" in some way,

who know the toughness and the tragedy

and (to me above all) the sense of loneness

that New York does, I agree, insist

we deal with, and if there is a triumph

to be had, it’s that we’ve managed to stay

here – and consists mostly in what we have

done to be able to stay here and - this

struck me as something very true in you –

to know that were we to have to leave

we would miss it inconsolably: to know

that we would never have anything

elsewhere like the lives we have here.

.

.

What Guy Turns Out to Be

.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxI6Cq6HTXM

.

Guy took the Orville Redenbacher guided

meditation first: consumed a whole

pack of the popcorn maven’s butter/salt

variety popped in the microwave –

whose sly subliminal suggestion,

.

(without question, Orville promised)

would transmute through his digestive

tract a vision of the thing Guy really was.

All Guy had to do was take a post-snack nap

while Orville did what Orville does.

.

Guy awoke to feel the crack and zap

of the recovery, in his imagination’s optic

depths, of the discovery – expressed

with an exquisite visual sonority:

as if delivered from the glory of an ancient

.

Greek Elysium – what Guy can now say

on the best authority he is: part tiny

jellyfish, part giant paramecium, part

jockstrap from a gym. That’s what Guy

turns out to be. Makes perfect sense to him.

.

.

Bifteck Saignant Avec Buerre Blanc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IApP4CDwokQ

.

Today what you don’t know

Is what you didn’t know and wouldn’t

Know and may not know you hadn’t

.

Known when you had thought

You’d known enough, but hadn’t

Learned the first thing you would

.

Need to know to know what you could

Say you knew about where you are now.

Yo! (whew!) Où es tu maintenant?

^^^^^^^^^^

Had you been under oath,

That is, if you had not been loath

To wed yourself by oath to vow

.

To tell the truth and nothing but the truth

Just now, you’d have to have resorted then

To vow in answer to the query ‘what words

.

Rhyme with now?’ (grâce à Dieu, pas

«maintenant») the only word that came

To you (came then to you, that is, not now)

.

^^^^^^^^^^

Was how. Apart from vow. And, oh yes, cow.

They said, “oh no! Not cow. Don’t even think

About the cow.” Too late, you’d thought it.

.

“You ought,” they said, “more strictly to have

fought it.” Damned vow. If only you could

Now say you forsook to take the vow!

.

But wait! You never took it.

So go ahead, think Cow – Bifteck

Saignant Avec Buerre Blanc! – and cook it.

^^^^^^^^^^^

.

Song of Sight

.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXimPNwbA9c

.

Our expectation that how what we see

is a priori everybody’s optical reality

begs us, when we discover we are wrong,

to ask the gods who wrote this song

.

why what appears to someone’s vision bright

to someone else’s seems devoid of light –

why shapes which seem to me more vague

than fog will clog your vision in a plague

.

of edgy scraps in painfully exact detail.

Sigh? Meet wail. How does this avail?

“We don’t write the song of sight,” the gods reply.

“You write it every night. Inside your eye.”

.

.

‘Bringer’

.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmuIfkiLWZ4

.

At first it seemed an awfully awkward sobriquet: his retinue

said he’d requested them to call him ‘Bringer.’ He specialized

in bringing you to brinks. He collected hangers-on – coaxing

in them the perspective that by hanging on and in they could

inspect whatever next and necessary dawn they’d need:

and they would always need another one of those. The brink

they brought me to was not a rift between the night and day,

.

or poetry and prose: the lift they taught was what it meant

to generate a breathing thought. Only then might proverbs once

again begin to reign, only then could Word approach the Flesh

to gird the cosmos with its latticed diction, syntax, joined ecstatic

differences: the gone, the here, the old, the new, now steamed

into a life-begetting stew, to swallow which would be what

a Communion symbolized, and was:  the sole soul food –

.

the stealth and wealth of soul, the art the heart imparted. I’ve

no idea, of course, if this is what they had intended to convey.

All I can say is by the time I put my pen away, they had departed.

I nearly said summarily. Assonant with verily. Capricious fizz,

this tic, this busy and delicious specious-seeming rhetoric.

Elegance is awkward. Is that what meaning is? An irrepressible

reflex, a spill of speech? Is that what they had come to teach?

.

.

.

Palace of Sleep

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sew27nkOQxw

.

What do we learn in the palace of sleep?

What happened there, really, to Alice?

And Dorothy Gale in Kansas and Oz?

And Dante when he went to hell?

.

Is it all biological spell? Dizziness,

bizziness, nothing but synaptic tap dance?

Nothing but absence of malice? But, really,

what happened to Alice? Or us when we

.

sleep and we dream and conceive

and forget how we yearn to return to

the uterus – Is it all to remind us we know

where to go when at last we must leave?

.

.

With Smucker’s Sweet Strawberry Jam

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBF-ceAVGcM
.

Can we have a thought without seeing it?

Is it more like a wind in the mind?

Can you know anything without being it?

Is it only ourselves that we find

.

when we look at whatever we see?

Is every iota inimitable?

Or is All indistinguishably

just the same – illimitably indivisible:

.

an infantile game where whole equals part?

Are we irrefutable unity?

Is anything breeding a soul or a heart?

Can we look into this with impunity?

.

Or will some oligarch at the scent of dissent

march in with a threat to exterminate flies

it can swat and get rid of – more likely attempt

to relieve us of hope: believe in his probable lies?

.

Bad dream? So what? Spoon up some ice cream

with Smucker’s sweet strawberry jam,

and even if Real is revealed as Fake Scheme,

let’s bake, carve and eat it like Ham.

.

.

Wreakin’ Havoc in the Atelier

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oQ3WovmpHo

.

When the writer who reads is the reader who writes,

you can’t count the nights that they’ll huddle like thieves

who pretend that they’re heart-to-heart bro’s while pick-

pocketing tricks from each other’s tight mix of discoveries,

.

careful to choose what they set up as mildly “offkey” small

moments that maybe the other one hadn’t quite gotten quite

right; all the while planning – with spiteful delight – to slip in

the same ploy the plot of the book under scrutiny used

.

to hook boy up to boy up to horse up to lady of no small

renown in a town not unlike the one one of them just had

suggested was, not to put too fine a point on it, grievously

wrong. The lies were meticulous, and quite ridiculous:

after all, reader-who-wrote and writer-who-read shared

the same body and slept in one bed. But when writer-who-

reads is reader-who-writes is writer-and-reader-who-draws –

well, get ready to watch that wreak havoc with everyone’s laws.

.

.