I Need a Bella Donna Fix

for Donna

.

https://youtu.be/dQIys83mptU

.

What’s going on? Your phone rings and rings.

No answering response from anything brings

any trace of you to us. What new gorgeous things

.

in you are coming true? Are you warm as a scone,

fresh baked in an oven of puffin-hewn stone?

What have you done? Simply stayed home alone?

.

Happy about it, no doubt. But your impatient fans

erupt in a rout, not having heard over spans

of silence a sigh, a laugh or word. Whose plans –

.

devil-vandals’,  as wily and flaming as wicks

in candles – swallow you? I need a bella Donna fix.

What do you conjure, what do you feel? What tricks

.

do you intend? Can’t we get at least a little view?

Is some auspicious being now entraining you –

preparing us for something harrowingly true? –

.

yet, being you, with the lightness of a dove –

are you a bird below – craving to explore above?

Whatever’s going on in you we know is full of love.

.

Come on! Spell it out! Flash a Mona Lisa smile!

Let us see you run toward a crimson sun a half a mile,

all dressed up. Let us bother you again for just a while.

.

The Mind’s Sole Province

https://youtu.be/jqGECYI7ViU

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Headless, heedless, needlessly afloat,

the body of a king thrown off a boat

repines, expresses discontent and frets

over its loss: its crown! Cancel bets

.

that what’s befallen it could never be!

It’s a bit of foreign matter in the sea,

untenable, unpalatable even to a shark.

And what’s above it soaring like a lark?

.

What is this orange consciousness

aloft, amid rich-tinted flows that dress

and frame, protect it so it can proceed

from what against all odds – with speed! –

.

it now finds it has fled? A flying head.

Is this a dream? Are you in bed?

Are you floating flotsam, jetsam?

Or are you shooting off to get some

.

new perspective you’ve suspected

you must find, now you’ve defected

from the flesh that kept you dull.

The mind’s sole province is the skull.

.

You can’t accept you don’t exist.

You haven’t told this to your analyst!

You must wake up and make amends.

This can’t be how the story ends.

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What My Murderer Thought

What My Murderer Thought

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Dr. Seuss plus Ginsberg? Some people

have sometimes said that. “Like giving 

good head to the Cat in the Hat!,” opined 

an acquaintance of mine about one or

another vociferous verse I’d subjected him to 

which I'd thought rather fine. "I just spew out 

the stuff," I explained. He looked pained.
“Well, you’ve spewed out enough,” he then

grunted as if he were tough and took out
a shotgun and shot me. Now that I’m dead 

I just keep writing more. Some habits defeat 

breath and death with their depth and their 

.

breadth but god knows what this one is for.

I think I write just like Pussy Galore

freshly back from a weekend of whoring.

But my murderer thought I was boring.

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It Wasn’t Too Much to Expect

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https://youtu.be/Jqpjy8Jimzs

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However unwittingly, two men
quite fittingly found themselves
sitting companionably in proximity
on a late afternoon F train today,
.
each as if humming a kindred tune --
reframing refrains of the other.
One held a smartphone whose size,
shape and color resembled the hue
.
and the contours and heft of a cup
from a thermos his neighbor held up

about at the level the phone occupied, 

from which on occasion he'd sip.
.
The eyes of the man with the phone
seemed in tandem to sip data out
of his own cyber brew, and suddenly
somehow I felt I knew more than
.
before that flirtations transpired
between the unseen and the seen —
sipping data or tea unobtrusively
seemed to join both in a mystic
.
romance of relation: it wasn’t too 

much to expect an impalpable thought
and a palpable touch to beget yet
another grand dance of creation.
.
Or so I decided I'd bet as I watched
the unknowing duet of two men
with a thermos and smartphone get

separately off at the following station.
.