The Multi-Species Family

https://youtu.be/PvsdgMH2c_s

.

The multi-species family

get my vote for the prize –

they don’t fall into anomie

and nobody tells lies.

.

Marry dogs and cats and birds,

bring up a mourning dove.

You’ll all be happier by thirds

by widening your love.

.

.

What I’m Careful to Say

(from a response to a dear friend who was concerned because one of my recent poems seemed to indicate I was maybe feeling bleak. As is usual with such expressions of concern I started to pontificate in the usual way about the usual ‘suspects’ - aspects of the natures of Creation - but which I kinda liked when I was done so here it is.)

What I’m careful to say (because it strikes me as true not as any conscious coverup) about any drawing or poem for which I seem to be the sole generator is that they seem respectively to draw & write themselves. I don’t know where they come from or even what their mission is for themselves: I’m just the hired hand who wields the physical instruments of their construction or destruction. I don’t write in a ‘trance’ but I am aware that I do everything (I mean in every moment of my waking life) in a kind of slightly altered state; I was tempted to say meditative but that’s too loaded a word. It is a condition of attention which has no connection I can feel to whoever ‘me’ is. It is a self-forgetting not a self-‘finding’ - whatever that may be. The ‘self’ doesn’t exist except as a word made of letters from a vocabulary - a sort of stand-in (as all words are) for an existentially both precise and immense ‘felt’ human experience so powerful that it pushes you to the brink of attempting the ridiculous task of describing it, to do it justice. Experience is immune to description.

Those artists known as great are those who through some deeply magic sleight-of-hand are able to bring to life the illusion that something can with any justice be said. Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson being two. I don’t count myself among them but I do dare to say I am sometimes afforded what seems like an intimate glimpse of what they do - catching them undressed in the act of doing it, sort of. But that’s probably still my hubris.

They both come to mind because each refuses to say what he or she ‘believes’. They (via each’s style: and “style,” as Quentin Crisp reminds us, “in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness”) are abundantly present - who could mistake either of their ‘voices’ for any other - but their business is not to ‘bare’ or reveal themselves. ‘Self’ is the least interesting aspect of what they do. They’re too busy creating autonomous worlds. They’re less like writers than “God” - another silly word or stand-in for Creation. Who cares who creates anything? Who can’t care about what is created?

So I’m never the poem or the drawing I do. I especially give Emily the nod here for demonstrating how to appear to be speaking in first-person - the single letter word “I” is to be found all over the place in her work - but I defy anyone to put an equals sign between it & Miss Emily D. Who in the cosmos knows who that is? Or who any of us is?

Warm best from

The guy who calls himself mostly for convenience sake, Guy.

An Ideology of Shock

An Ideology of Shock

.
https://youtu.be/_4DoxWeG_c4

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Fantasies occlude, and block: they seek

an ideology of shock – rude systems

to insure a thrill no matter what must

.

be endured: that we can make the face

of anything sublime if we would only,

for example, just imagine ourselves

.

free of space and time. Fantasies fester –

promising a meltdown: dangerous

in prospect but benignant in effect –

.

at least until we help them splay into

the wreck of actuality. Maybe radio-

activity is what it’s all about: to twist

.

and shout and act our toxic natures out.

Please understand it’s for your good

as well as mine to take my hand and do

.

just what I want. Look me in the eye.

Don’t behave. Ask wassup. Be my slave.

When we’re done, we’ll clean it up.

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Anatomy of an Impasse

https://youtu.be/nbsZIzRw-v4

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Two circumspect smiles come at me —

but more hands than faces arrive.

Their fingers come faster, inordinately –

suggesting not four hands, but five.

.

What do these hands want to do?

And how does one read human eyes?

I feel a warm madness about to ensue

that might burrow beneath their disguise,

.

if it is a disguise. I make the mistake

of assuming that truth is submerged.

Or is it that this is the innocent break

they must take so they’ll have emerged

.

to converge the point of their flight?

Five hands not four give one pause.

Homonym! Paws with claws in a fight?

Is some pact underway with a cause

.

that I will not much like? It won’t be

the first time. Won’t be the last.

I recall a small mantra: “Don’t be

the impasse.” I am the play and the cast.

Much Worse Things You Could Be

.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMLuxuAUaG8

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The prospect of expulsion

from the only realm of being

one had known to some

unknown zone,

without warning –

say, the zone of floral

quadrupedal hominids,

which, had one thought

.

it possible, was what

one would, at all costs,

have done all one could

to have avoided - eh bien,

screw that, honey, it’s a blast

to be a sunny spiritual paragon

in caravans of other floral

quadrupedal hominids

.

all fêted as divinities

by those unfortunate

enough to not be them.

There are much worse things

you could be, my sweet

petite verisimilitude

of pater-noster

pâte-à-choux!

.

On the Inadvisability of Annoying Endora

https://youtu.be/Aj84_UaoDLI

.

Though “Bewitched” reruns upset him,

he seemed to have to let them vet him

with the rabid Agnes Morehead as Endora

besetting him with her nightmarish aura

.

mostly for re-naming Darren Dum-Dum

(which he’d been labeled by his stepmum).

Swearing once too often “Fuck you, bitch!”

at her is what we think incurred the switch

.

when his shocked face, with dispatch, had

been torn off to reside inside a scratch pad

and reconstituted as you see it here –

where he’s now been encoded for a year.

.

 .

Can’t Awaken a Thing Without a Song

https://youtu.be/9Ts6HyGqvBE

.

Carefully, resourcefully retaining plural forms of every noun,

this sorcerer was wont to say, “Geometries have lyricisms,

which, by nature, tend to calm the human fear of schisms,

upsets and cacophonies that seize and swat our spirits down

and keep them from their aim, which is to realize a miracle.”

.

This meant: to sing! – “to toss the tune up, over, in a spherical

smooth swing.”  “Can’t awaken a thing without a song”

became the lyrics he’d apply to any melody not wrong

for them, confident its dance of words would serve empirical

intentions to enact unprecedented ecstasies of magical elation.

.

Soon every sound you heard from him was a conflation

of whatever rhythms, pitches, high or low or fast or slow

absorbed his genius inner ear to hear new harmonies to show

him how to make incarnate, and keep pace with, fresh creation,

the fresher for his singing “Can’t awaken a thing without a song,”

.

So, hey!

.

https://youtu.be/t_T_LKkwz8g

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So, hey! Is everybody sure they’re real?

.

How do they know? Because their noses blow?

Because they have nowhere to go? Because

they can’t say no? Because they’ve got an

outer glow that they believe will soon achieve

an answering response in lusted-after Joe? –

.

whom you just saw advance upon that red-

head Mary, secretary to the Moonshine Girls?

He’d gladly pay the IRS to go away with

pints of his own blood if it were necessary.

And what’s the IRS to do with this? You may

.

well ask. Questions tend to make things clear.

Ask one and you’ll start to think you’re here.

Ask another and the whole gestalt of what

you think about yourself will come to haunt

and worry, hurt, deceive, desert and taunt you.

.

See that giant lady praying? I’m just saying.

What to Do with this Thing I Do

.

https://youtu.be/tIjzp_3Ushc

.

A drawing plants itself on paper,

waits for a useful assist. What is

its status? How does it stand,

coming out of my pencil and hand?

What do I do with this thing

.

that I stencil, erase, cover up

and cross out, underline, undermine,

circle round and resist, and toss out,

then take back in the flick of a wrist?

What do I do with this thing I do?

.

Should I be its spy? Or ought I to spy

on it? Cry for or at it, lie to or on it?

Ply it and dye it the colors it wants,

then dunk it in colors it doesn’t?

Clapping her hands, she begins

.

now to dance with the bird

and the thing becomes not what

it wasn’t, but what it had always

been: what it is. Absurdly spot on,

unduly complete, with an avatar soul

so replete it resounds! But what I’ve

to do with the business confounds.

The girl and the bird (seeming blest)

clap and whirl nonetheless.

Something at least has done its best.

.

Scan the Man

https://youtu.be/PEijazvRfF8

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It makes a kind

of sense, this

silent push to slip

into the shimmer

of a cyber hole

and hide amenably:

a new imaginary grace

.

that could replace

the awkward scarred

brutality of this

expiring city where

I now must needs reside.

(Must and needs belong

together; let that

.

English phrase abide.)  

What’s money but a toss

of paper rectangles and

button-shaped pastilles?

Storm the pastilles!

Maybe that would be fun.

What will anyone I love

.

decide to say to me?

Pray to me and I’ll

absolve us of our sins

or be absolved by you

from having to say

anything at all.

.

Not that I’m not

jonesing to have

confabs with whoever’s

reading this, and not

that I’m not liking pouring

out what’s left of yesterday’s

refrigerated coffee from

.

a clunky pressed glass

pitcher generously dosed

with half-and-half into

a big ol’ Houston Texas glass,

the kind they pour sweet tea into.

Not that anything’s amiss

besides the city’s endless

.

emptiness which has

to be more vacant than

it’s ever been in history.

Why are we here?

Scan the man, report to me

what he apparently can’t say,

that dumb ass who

.

did mumble something

I could not make out

a word of. But

no thing warrants

complaint.

There is no thing.

I push poems

.

out and sing,

suck lollipops

and draw.

That’s how

I fuel me

and New York

City’s gaping maw.

Obsessa

.

https://youtu.be/o53VoWOSn6Q

.

Fair to comment: when Obsessa speaks,

she wreaks havoc, but enticingly – replete

with internecine wars as if of church

and state that correlate with nothing you

have ever heard nor are ever likely to hear,

except from her. Slavering over intimacies –

she savors their finer points, impenetrabilities:

today evinced in two tense thugs wed to each

other, awkward at an outdoor table at

a kindred conundrum, an East Village diner –

whose inexplicabilities, despite the hollow

pretense of Obsessa’s pleas to help resolve

them – pique you and delight her: indeed

.

incite her to pile on in lavish detail more

reams of complicated mises-en-scène

and stark untenabilities to rattle every

premise you’d not known you’d harbored:

as if you were a groggy sentient sailboat

tediously ever-in-the act-of-coming-to

from sailboat stupor to find out, anew,

your reflexive You-Boat turned to

starboard when it should have turned

to port. Obsessa does get on one’s nerves,

but by surveying the display of volupté

in her inimitable moral culs-de-sac and

shaky logic, we see she cannily refurbishes

.

the very room in which you notice them,

front and back: suddenly and thuddingly

you trip into an alternate insanity: new

visions of the meanings of quite everything

around you. Curtains, chairs, framed photos,

what Obsessa wears, sky and city views

outside the windows utterly rewrite

the news and now you’re floating in

a cosmos you don’t know a thing about,

but one far more egregiously ridiculously

interesting, alluring and insane than any

you yourself had ever had the balls to dream.

Now you are the center of its scheme!

Pregnant, Fragrant and Vagrant

https://youtu.be/hKCD-J4U47s

.

We walk around pregnant and fragrant

with vagrant ideas, dreams and plans – willing

them to become real:  to evolve or devolve

into bright and efficient solutions to filling

.

our numberless vacancies. Most are stillborn.

But sometimes a few may come through.

Two that survived became some of what I am,

and all of what’s gloriously and abundantly you.

.

A Society of Buddhist Hoodlum

https://youtu.be/cHWiQi-J_bA
.
We think we see her run into unexpurgated dawn:
striated sapphire sky, bold sun above the breeze –
but she sees cold integuments of existential brawn
beneath and far beyond supposed microbial realities
.
of viruses to wholly different dimensions – as teasing
and unholy as the myriad of other realms it underlies:
she’s absolutely riveted by how profoundly pleasing
it is that the final truth she’s gotten to is a disguise.
.
As solo monitor of A Society of Buddhist Hoodlum
she can state with thrilling new authority, “I am.”
But what could sate her, constitute the good from
finding all this shameless infinite variety of sham?
.
Leaning on the dictionary definition of a verb
or noun, you will go down: all “is” is, is “seems.”
Blast assertions! How to make them not disturb?
Aha! She finds it’s easy. Run over them like dreams.
.
.