Breaking Rules

https://youtu.be/Mnd0ZgQW-u8
.

Twenty-twenty is the year we’re in.

I’m thinking Nineteen-Thirty-Eight is when

my mother sat for this reflection painted of her

in what I imagine was the quiet din of soft

.

intrigue surrounding painters in a studio

of the Art Students League, studying

this pretty young art student Alice Blake,

who’d have been on her way to twenty-one.

.

I’m sixty-eight, and looking at the girl who’ll be

my mother. I wonder if by twenty-one she’d met

my father yet. I doubt it. I’m standing looking

up at her unseeing oil eyes: I’ve spelled for her

.

my age and stage of having lived now nearly

seventeen full years since she was last alive.

By then she’d been a Kettelhack for seventy

much longer years. The dactylic Kettelhack has
.

now been left to bring me to my fame, as I wait,

not waiting, to dive into what I have no reason

not to think will be oblivion. I wonder in what

arcane idiom I might spell out my question

.

to this proto-mother Alice Blake to find out what

if any rules I ought to break before I join her 

where the moon presumably don’t shine. Breaking

rules as my last act would be so very fine.

Poems and Poets

https://youtu.be/mcm9oUT-KyU

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Poems toss and turn
and yearn ambitiously
ambiguously: coyly donning,
dropping fig leaves in
.
the windy autumns of the heart –
on the one hand they
admonish and demand –
and on the other, part
.
with every expectation
of an outcome – with
an arguably psychopathic
cool capacity for little
.
textures, small decisions,
surgically precise incisions –
self-forgetting: moments
after bringing things to heat.
.
Poets are a bit like that
as well, of course, but
they can't, quite to the degree
a poem can, be what they
.
eat. Poems self-consume:
they are the food they
cook. Which somehow gets
the poet off the hook.

.

.

Mulberries

https://youtu.be/Koe1gC2j1oU

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I’m not ironic, I’m American: meticulous, direct! Driven

to depict the private flickers of the blast of my Big Bang,

my solo sonic boom.  Here’s what I discern. What else

but a ‘void’ can one face? What else but the unemployed

infinity of nothing could I be the child of? When ‘infinity’

and ‘nothing’ pause together in a clause, Famished

Mind wants so for them to cause orgasmic spasm,

seething warring parts – BRING IT THE FUCK ON

.

and NO! – pitched to an untoward extremity. The true

Identity of Trinity therefore reveals itself in God, whose

word-made-flesh turns out to be a pedantry furnished

in burnished diction, supernal grammar, eternal alphabet.

God’s a school marm. Wet or dry, we’re a marvel of

a spinning lingual vacancy, hollow unity, a Source-Void

paying us an adequate annuity that with impunity permits

us to reflect upon the probable delusion we exist. What

.

greater manna could we wish? Could there be more

to learn than this? Not so’s we can see. Freeze if we stay,

burn if we go, who cares, don’t know. But hush! Look!

I’m asleep on a lawn at the back of my house, aged three –

could this have been me, ‘neath a Mulberry bush?

We picked mulberries, yes, from a branch. But not on

a prickly bush! Full of ticks probably! What does it mean

existentially? I’d have sworn what I knew was a tree.

.

Here we go round the mulberry bush

The mulberry bush, the mulberry bush

Here we go round the mulberry bush

So early in the morning.

.

If there’s a god it got lost in the push,

lost in the push lost in the push,

if there’s a god it got lost in the push,

but a new one is always aborning.

.