Style

“Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness.” Quentin Crisp
(“Hmm. Well, style is until it isn’t.” Andy Stone)

How else but obliquely angled? – darting like a bird –
then hushed: determined for a trembling moment to be still –
before it blinked and shot somewhere within to gird
its loins for the inevitable lunge its hungrily awaiting
world could be depended on to make toward them –

the felt resources and effects of which inhabited the flesh
like some fresh virulence for which there surely wasn’t
any cure – a fever levered pure into eternal stark assault:
forever at the brink of sinking every bit of thinking aimed
at balancing; the halt and shoddiness of every lame attempt

to meet its body’s power! – match its serendipity, stare
down its haughty glower – who is this alien creature who
fills out the hour? – then it pops, a bubble, sweet frail mist:
and something Other lists and slithers into view, a slowly
coiling serpent whose faint hiss reminds you of another

whisper: day comes: dream ends; suddenly you wonder if
your mother’s style was not perhaps suggested by
the fleet and serpentine: not something you’d have thought
before this rocking dawning reverie. You conjure up two
things she never did she said she wanted to: pick up

some extra-crispy KFC dark meat and buttered biscuits that
she saw in TV ads; and go to Norway, board a boat and sail
from fjord to fjord. Well, maybe this all counts for nothing
more than demonstrating your own style in sieving
nonsense into glory. You are responsible for your own story.


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Crib Notes

Today I shall explain my life.
(There’ll be a test – rife with invites
to meander freely: keep this poem
as its crib notes.) First, I seek
the most of what I guess I would
suppose is “rest” from nine to five,
and am what seems most generally

thought of as “awake” from five
to nine, which dovetails somewhat
with a lot of you (I find), but
dreaming’s seamless in me with
the fecklessness – or breathlessly
theatrical effects – of what comes
after it: and since I now require

not just feasibility but paradise,
which needs of course a system
galvanized to the production of
a quite exacting bliss, the quantum
kiss of which I’ve come to think of
as (at least) a nine-dimensioned
game of dice, I must make nice

with every point of consciousness
I can, which is precisely why I am
the sort of man who has to be alive
from nine to five to nine to five to nine.
Sometimes I am so bedazzled
by the buzz up, down my spine
I can’t wait quite as long as that:

the Universe connives so! – blibbles,
skuzzles up and relegates me
to its zoo of love-bugs, snuzzles
me around its golden floor, gets flirty.
Then five becomes four-thirty.
Here’s the test. If I could bundle up
with anybody, who’d be best?


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Politics

“Politics is the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.” Quentin Crisp

Turns out people are in charge! In all their
idiosyncratic variations – every tiny one converges
with the other into something strange and large –
a mixture of the textures of this humid February

day – cool and slightly clammy: overcast
and insecurely winter: as if something private
wished to splinter in and sneak a drug of Spring
into the thing – the stated aim, today, of all

the city’s bumbling sentient beings, trying
in their separate ways to concentrate, and get from
here to there and back again, from psychopaths
who tote their venomous intentions to sweet

grandmothers who dote on the inventions of their
children’s children – stated aim? To vote. And then –
what then? New York City stays the pretty creature
it has always been: created by its dazed inhabitants

indulging our particular concoctions of remorse
and yearning, flirting and bewilderment, and all
the vast variety of human sin: whose last impiety’s
reserved for the inevitable bin to which the whole

amassing carcass of the mass of us will soon,
at our innumerable separate exit cues, creep toward
and climb the sides of to jump in. Meanwhile, I slice
an onion into small translucent bits and sprinkle it

on sliced sharp cheddar cheese, and put the lot
on crackers: picked my laundry up just now as well:
right after leaving an Italian church’s basement
where I took my breathing presence for a moment,

voting for the candidate who, I have been informed,
has (anyway) a chance of staving off our headlong
dive into another hell. Turns out people are in charge!
I wonder who of them will break the spell.





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"Ah, g'wan"

He is a poem: colt-like pent-up
agita condenses in him:
breeds his winning angles, glances –

unsuspected choices – soft tangled
subtle voices breathe through
his testosterone-rich baritone:

Mercury plus every mortal fallibility:
an ineluctable profusion of effects
deriving from some secret recess

(liminally criminal – illicit – sacred:
suspects never will entirely be
named). Once you texted him:

“There’s so much life in you.”
(You almost said “too much.”) Used
to parrying seductive ploys, he texted

back (you pictured wary blinking
eyes – not unaffectionate –
less colt than fawn): “Ah, g’wan.”


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Fairy Godfather

Quentin Crisp, whom
I was privileged to know,
once, and ever, manageably
evidenced this glow:

manifesting essence so
entirely in touch with
its upwelling springs
and outward interactions –

as if his human being
were a silent symphony –
that he could not avert
experience of sympathy

with what and how the world
and each of us must play –
alert to fleeting nuance
and to all the flapping

splay of its unnerving
context: so, today, when
I must trundle out my
violin and lend it to my

temperament and to
the uses of a larger music –
its eruption and its wisp –
I shall think of Mr. Crisp.


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Bona Fide Attractions

It’s probably a good idea to travel to
a bona fide attraction when you can –
Niagara Falls, Grand Canyon or the Yucatan –
and someday maybe you’ll do more of that –
but your internal universe is so unwieldy –
fat – appallingly insistent you attend to it –
that little else, no matter how amazing
you are told it is, can make you bend to it:
trends or movies, clothes or music
or the latest digital technology – the channeling

of sexual biology into the Internet – bemuse –
befuddle – don’t to quite the same degree
you see around you fuse you into passionate
engagement with the muddle of deciding
what to do with time. You’re not even fully
confident there’s such a thing as time: much
less that you should worry what to do with it.
You rub your windows like a child, in winter,
fogging up the glass with every breath.
Clarity is not the aim: something seethes

around you: makes you far more interested
in feeling than in figuring an outcome –
wrest a verse to make it open like a purse
so you can stuff it with whatever namelessness
emerges: the latest version of experience
for you is playing Bach and Mahler
with a crew of seventy musicians – acres
of violas, cellos, violins – a harp – and clarinets,
bassoons, and oboes – brass enough to make
the northern winds feel jealous of your

wide collective focus, of the human sense
that you have brought to sound: something
that was never sought is found here:
and you’re baffled by its motives and its cost –
you’ve no idea how any of it works, or even
if the battles and the losses and the wins
entailed, incurred, have anything to do
with all the wars you think you’ve fought.
Powerful, dim: gods are in the mist: a lonely
glide – distraction. Or a bona fide attraction.


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But Enough

"It is the last, the last forever. I shall feel very lonely…at first. But enough.”
(Henry James on the death of his sister Alice, 1892)


You think of death and dying differently today:
oh – still immutable and strange, this vertigo, this
sway, this reeling thing – but now its fragile specificities,
blunt consequences bring more delicate bewilderments:

something almost childlike – odder, kinder, lighter,
freer than you’d felt before – or maybe you had
always felt it – maybe it was all you knew embarking
on the endlessly ridiculous amazements which construed

the infant you: this, coupled with a new capacity, as if
your view of life had shrunk – intensified – to the microbial:
to neural flicks – a secret lens with quick and thrilling
access to synaptic zaps, meticulous intricacies of

the electric circuitry of the exacting human animal –
and its protracted journey towards an end: what end?
You can’t see past the atoms of the shifting blends,
the blinking tints and shades of purple, cream and brown:

the slickly interrupting intermingling mass: the intermeshed
establishment of balanced frail somatic grounding
pressure which amounts to sweating, crying, dying
flesh: what and who is this? You’ve somehow gotten

just as close as anyone could get to the abyss without
receiving what it might bestow: nose pressed up to
some dark glow – you almost catch a scent: and someday,
probably, will know exactly where your father, mother,

brother went and where you’ll go. Meanwhile a February
rain: whatever wakes up from its sleep remains.
(When content is too thick: serve it in quatrains.)
Fading blue through alabaster of your mother’s veins.


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