Furiously Overcome by Stars

https://youtu.be/yiWSoRYbjEk

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Explain this to me, would you, dear? –

how you, who breathe the atmosphere

I breathe, and witness day and night

and up and down and left and right

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with sight presumably not unlike what

my eyes take in, experience a glut

of swarming, loud, sensate hyperbole

where only silent absence seems to me

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to be, and otherwise imply the “real”

is so inordinate you can’t begin to feel

the groaning board of it. I’m in the dusk

in emptiness while you’re the brusque

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besieged eternal target of internal war.

Is it simply I see less, and you see more?

Who is yes and who is no? I am my scars.

You’re furiously overcome by stars.

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The Devil is a Magistrate, a Doge, a Chevalier

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https://youtu.be/4WIdwBGUvnI

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The devil is a magistrate devoted to Hell’s volupté –

asks (as any worthy god would do) to sink your

eye into his own; fall deep into the flaming iris,

feel its molten waterfall replenishing despairing

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vacancies of dwindling self: to take you past

incendiary agonies into unseemly bliss:

and pleasure's to be had in this grand gaze,

this kiss that's only deadly to the hope of ever

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seeing sunrise anymore. A loss? The Doge

of Darkness tells you No: implores you to take

in the cinnamon red rapture of his dying sun,

so very much more beautiful than any one

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of many dawns you'll never see again. The devil

is a chevalier of random causes, offering a panoply

of lethal choices: all of which exact a toll but none

of which much matter to the murdered soul.

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Necessary Slaughter

https://youtu.be/hOi0Rs72ZSY

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Picture this frail slender woman, pale and forty-five,

in fog of which she might be made, approaching
a familiar well in southern England, leaning bony
elbows on the rim and peering in. She's come to seek
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two prophesies: the first, a metaphor – imploring,
hoping for – some new dark fish to surface, another

looming scaly face, to catch the sight of, coming up.

She’ll dare to look down there again: to mine it for

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the alien eyes of what you’re not supposed to find

in wells – a divination that will offer her its spells,

hoping she will see whatever her arcane desires require,
according to the exigencies, needs and cries of her

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beseeching unpredictabilities, her fleet and fickle mind.
This is how her other children have come up: she's
learned to wait, alone, in privacy, alert and quiet

as a mouse, for any sign of life to stir. (Her latest
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evanescent infant she called "To the Lighthouse.")
She'll wait until the next one comes and if it doesn't,
she'll review the prospects of a second destiny:
not waiting for a fish but possibly becoming one.
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Among the many things that you can do with water
is approach it as if you were its abandoned daughter –
choose the option of effecting through its frigid depths

the next expected sacrifice, and necessary slaughter.

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New Theories of Ecstasy

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https://youtu.be/6ydFvapCca4

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My city’s life takes place not least in her embrace

of trees, her stony dirt the "arms" they seem content

to grow in. But I don’t much (as such) like Nature:

that is, as it’s ideally conceived of as a pristine space 

in which no human intervention ought to leave a trace.

I’d as soon say swallows’ nests are artificial as some

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say that glassy boxy buildings are. What is Nature 

but the product of detritus from a blasted star? 

Porno vendors, middle schools and K-marts 

all are natural. Snarkiness is too, and so’s a Cuisinart. 

All of that apart, my heart is nonetheless more 

swiftly lost to fallen leaves than to Manhattan stores:

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not because they come from trees, but because they 

are what Keats reminded us must always hold the truth.

They’re beautiful. Immutable and mutable. They crack

the whip of wonder quietly. Watching oak leaves 

float in city puddles easily relieves anxiety. Muddles

lessen at a glance. New theories of ecstasy advance.

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A Blighted Unnatural Tale - The Folly of Magda Golyta

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De85EDbwBrY
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The daunting attempt to induce DNA from no matter what beast
in the animal class of Chordata (the phylum of backbones) to seed
with the genes of a bloom in the phylum Magnoliaphyta a viable
creature packed, woven and sewn into some new collusion of un-
likely flower and primate, the first in the biota zone to meet Magna
Golyta’s grand goal, which she’d spawned in her winters in Vichy,
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wherein interspecies relationships haunted her dreams – vaunting
her schemes into science upon whose reliance she hoped to find
courage to muster the requisite force and intention she’d need
to become half of that strange amalgam herself. Genius source
that she was of devising a way to pack into her backbone the cells
of her prefrontal cortex to harbor her mind, she then purposefully
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undermined all of Nature to graft that to stem, leaves and roots
of an azure magnolia: in whose be-leafed body she’d finally know
homo sapiens sentience from inside the works of a flowering plant.
She’d longed for forever to grant the uniting of doctorly logic and art
in the service of wedding supposedly utterly alien phyla into one
miraculous unity which with impunity would marry Magda Golyta
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to lovely Magnolian bliss. How she did this I’d neither the smarts nor
the time to pursue. That she did this was true, and quite clear: regard
her form here in its awkward conglomerate outcome. She’d become
the unwitting recipient of unimaginable savage pain: human-being-
bones’ toxic reaction to chemicals that photosynthesis bred into
every last pore in the plant and the cells from her brain. Mercilessly

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photosynthesized into a tortured distress, no rain, only sun, and pain
that attending to feeding magnolias caused in the spine was beyond
any language she had to explain. I’m sure she is desperately trying
to hatch better strategies, maybe one which she’s certain if she had
had hands… But she doesn’t have hands so there’ll be no release nor
a fathomably single feasible way to attain it. And there isn’t a moral,
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like what Jonah learned in the whale. It’s merely a blighted unnatural
tale. Who knows, if she’d chosen a rose or some clover from Bali, this
might not have turned into Magda Golyta’s sad folly. But she did
what she did instead. And now both are dead. Photosynthesis,
though, carries on. That bugger will last till the leaves all die
and the Sun don’t dawn. By that time we all will be gone.

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The Secret of Your Allure

https://youtu.be/bMYutyAJsc0

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What is the secret of your allure?

Of that you’re egregiously sure.

It’s not any stranger

than subtly becoming a symbol of danger:

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intimately knowing how to trespass

without losing what some call your class

but what you know is how you secure

the preeminence of your allure:

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to play a role with extreme delight

that assuages, then tends to ignite

the supreme thing that fuels your game:

your eruptive voluptuous shame.

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Portrait of Artist as Rodent

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https://youtu.be/BuJvAaWJLPg

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That the markers, rethinking the portrait they drew,

(having made you too wide and too fat, muttered ew!

wideness and fatness in rats wouldn’t do!)

in the middle of trying their best to construe

the pure essence they sought to bring full into view,

decided to cut out the center of you,

and then sketch in that lady in back, lent no clue

what to make of this less than spectacular spew

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that this Portrait of Artist as Rodent came through

to reveal. To what was this mis-markered art being true?

Did the markers do this on their own? Very few

of the rats we subjected to this interview

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could communicate anything we understood.

Only one rodent muttered while chewing on wood

it was clear as the mud was in his neighborhood

that those maladroit markers were up to no good.

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But who wielded those markers? I asked cautiously.

Whoever had done this, it can’t have been me.

The mutterer answered, if I didn’t know, how could he?

I face the same locked door. I still lack the key.

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A Lunatic Billet-Doux

https://youtu.be/-qDJ8aRuS-I

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She or he was spawned by a random imagination –

Darwin’s mutation – but randomness shocks like

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a fetish in sex: surely we’re something compassionate

logic intends and projects! What would things mean

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if we weren’t? Predation has hungers to feed it.

Wouldn’t exist if the thing weren’t needed. But flowers

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and weeds in the breezes with no special ends are like

all that upends and distends and engenders this being:

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he or she loves to dress up to the uppity Up-ness, way out

with a shout beyond grout, gout and doubt and surmise,

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morphologically sprouting unreason, whatever the season,

and yet without effort sustaining a steady and gentle

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acknowledgment of all of the busy be-jeezus that teases

in front of, around and below and behind those kind eyes.

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Why should this be a surprise? Or why be surprised

at surprise? One wants to believe Truth is spherical.

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No ruptures to break its smooth skin. But what then to

make of the miracle? Which is every last thing in the spin?

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Surely nothing’s a miracle then. Oh no! oh-no, oh-no,

oh-no, oh-no, the she-and-the-he in her-her-and-her-him

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overflow in a bum rush to me. I was beginning to guess

at the rest. Never has oh-no seemed more like oh-yes.

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Language and life are a lunatic billet doux. Unsaddled,

unbridled – embracing, for no godly reason, you.

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Considerably Bent, But Whole

https://youtu.be/4Gh88mcQZJg

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Equa married Nimity and all was very calm.

They breakfasted on their aplomb,

and dined each night on the exquisite balance

of their silent and sophisticated sighs. Until, alas,

their elegantly half-closed eyes half-gazed into

too many middle distances for far too many days

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en route to asking why their two existences,

now joined, were such a bore. “I can’t take it

any more,” Equa heckled Nimity. Nimity

decided it was time to put an end to deadly calm.

They’d detonate a fragmentation bomb! They got

one at the supermarket, tossed it rashly into

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their unused garage. Kaboom! Garage barrage!

“You unrelentingly fragmented me!” besqueaked

a quivering pile of yellow wood chips. “I used

to be a totem pole! From Warsaw!” whimpered

several thousand other splinters on the floor.

Nimity and Equa wondered how to make amends:

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“We’d help you if we had the hands to do so!”

Then Equa suddenly remembered what was

in her trousseau. A magic wand! It had learned

to wave itself and do its shticks in school back

in the Great Beyond. Equa promised: “It will raise

your status, Totem! Just you watch!” The wand

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obliged, re-purposing the wooden chips into

a loopy many-elbowed angled and all-purpose

worker, front and back entangling over, onto

Nimity and Equa, now a new, un-fractured golden

handyman. A grand debut! Unfathomably new!

Factotum Pole! Considerably bent, but whole.

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Thaw

for Bruce Tone 1931-2019

https://youtu.be/Ig8ZzH1AI6c

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Fixations wear fables like sables: compulsions sport dreams

in luxurious reams of distraction, a lavish display, a ravishing

ravaging of all the scattering remnants of their sterile schemes:

the brutal stings they bring when they are after you. Doesn’t matter

if they’re true. The fable’s dream apotheosis might be Moses –

that enfeebled fabled star, the major focus of the hocus pocus,

leads our skeptic souls to promises he promises to keep,

although he takes a leap, a dive, he dies before he can arrive.

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Whatever jive requires that the soul pretend it’s in the Promised Land

becomes a holy history, a sacerdotal fact. Which we use to crack our

heads like coconuts and pray for Moses’ ghost to come down here

again to rummage ‘round inside: however he divines its shreds

and juice is truth. “My advisors are infallibly invaluable,” reports

the altered icon, now surrounded by three floating disembodied heads,

whose expressions range from vacancy to sarcasm, ever-widening

the chasm between them and him. Moses knows he has no friend,

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he’ll meet no one who in the least agrees with his great theses,

but he begins to thrive in their dislike: he knows far more of life

now he is dead: it is the strife that foments art, and art is thrilling only

when it courts its vast opposing flood, the army only after blood,

its blood and Moses’ blood so it and he and we can know what we are

made of. Anyway, that pretty much describes the mediation that

this artist fellow, Marvin, dressed in cloth stained violet and yellow

on the lower right discerned had been the point in his last meditation:

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mediating fluidly between the traces – tangled laces – of his memory,

and this event of seeing savagely beleaguered Moses on the day

he went away, and maybe after sitting down with God for tea,

discovered his identity. But now the meditation’s tiny spider

delicacies start to blur. Marvin can’t make out the lines that separate

the blessings from the curses very clearly any more. He wonders if

he sees a thaw. That’s when he sits down to draw, begins to hum

and sing. Right now Art’s the point of Moses, him and everything.

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