Jump-Rope Rhyme for God-lets

The drill will never be as thrilling as the war --
you do not need rehearsal anymore --

the stage has long been set and there's no point
in staying off it now: you've cased the joint

entirely enough: time has run out --
the cues are calling you: abandon doubt

and take the boards and let your psyche rip
and publicly announce itself until you drip

with that sufficiency of sweat which indicates
a living being has occurred which predicates

response to, and engagement with, the whole
predicament and science of the soul --

to dilate inner eyes -- intensify the hex
of what it means to wrestle darkness into sex

and make the crazy creature you've become
into a symphony of parts less than the sum

of what you know now is the currency
and conjugation of the verb "to be."


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At this Angle of the Sun

Oh, to capture this, a bit of this --
a whiff, the slightest savor -- every
day to see through this precisely
flavored angle of the sun when I sit here --
today it's six -- with evening almost
palpitant but still too far away: it still

is day -- the light becomes so round
and inner that the shadows make a dinner
of it: as it fades chiaroscuro grows,
enfolds and swallows more dimensions
of the visible until you think, of course,
there have to be far more than three:

it's best exactly as it's glowing now:
the barest tinge of yellow in the egg-
white sky -- harboring the thick and lacy
cool clean misty green -- a shifting solar
sheen dispersing a July humidity:
the fragile shading of each tree,

and somehow -- always -- this inveterately
sailing and prevailing New York City
sense of place and air which makes it
quite impossible to think of being
anywhere but here, exactly at this angle
of the sun, each day of every year.


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The New Religion

“Let me show you my tits,” says the putative
spam-dwelling madam: though surely it isn’t
the prospect of relishing mammary glands
with which I would be here importuned –
but the fun of the random assault: the brash
conquest – the mad ad hoc chance – like
a blind man who tosses a rock in the street,

or a gambler who rides through the clock
playing slots – that the shock of the neat winning
outcome – a shattering window or cherries
aligned – is quite simply a product of waiting
the requisite time: expectations discharged
to an abject belief in a quantum mechanics writ
large: probability now is our god. I’ve wrangled

all day with my HP computer which bluntly
refused to do one comprehensible thing in
response to my reasoning pleading: but suddenly
it has stopped breeding inanities: choosing
quite calmly for now to behave, save for spam
with its offer of big-breasted babes. When
one bows to this eminence, one must be brave.


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Rimbaud Drinks a Spicy V-8 with Lemon

Resort to flavors actually
cutting into tongue:
as if to set in motion
sympathetic undulations

in the deepest stirring
underpinnings of a living
creature: “spirit” seems
a feeble sin of an excuse

for this sharp thing
that moves the system into
gear: that source and center
to which you can’t find

a way to be too near:
you spear it now with this
tomato juice and lemon, spicy
brine – hot pepper: puckering

to an exacting permutation
of the infinite variety available
to tease the palate
into paying more attention

to the bite that shoves –
abducts – and will not
tolerate the rut of comfortable
mild diffusion: opt for

its profusion of particulars:
vividly vehicular: a race
of horse-carts through
the heart: whose every part

is whole: savor in this sour
simulacrum of the blood
a taste of what disrupts –
ergo constructs – the soul.


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Bright and Noisy as a Fight

Long checkout line: East Village supermarket on Fourteenth,
a day before July the Fourth: lugging yet another gallon
of my cherished fat-free milk (love to chug it from the jug) – two
packages of pasta – orzo, bowties: and sweet-pepper-and-tomato
sauce (tossed a slew of silly metaphors into unpalatable stew,
eschewing clarity for inky postulations that relied for their

splayed hoo-ha of confused relations on disparities as thick
as smudges on a drunken urban planner’s city grid – which like
a squid – look what it did! – I sprayed all over that last screen
of obfuscation I just left on my computer – ouch!) – sharp dig
into my ankle by a stick: I turned around to see a blind man
in dark glasses navigate the space between me and the rest

of his presumably unfathomable lightless panoply: I tried
to steer him closer to the register – “big crowd!” – I said – no
answer: grabbed my hand, inspected it as if it were an unshelled
clam – then rammed his wagon sharply into my left hamstring:
tingles still! – guessed the man did not speak English (‘hell
with poetry today or any day – those mindless stabs

of lilting nonsense that won’t leave my ear and nose and groin
and heart and butt and toes alone) – bought my stuff and helped
the man unload his jars of apple juice and rolls of toilet tissue
to the moving belt towards the checkout lady who informed me
just before I left that “that old man behind you isn’t only blind,
he’s deaf.” City’s suddenly as bright and noisy as a fight.


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Kablooey

Is there no waiting? –
or is waiting all there is?

(Wumdy-waddy-wumdy-wizz.)

This business of “the moment”! –

where’s the explicating rhyme? –
the doom-defying reason?
Bees and birds
appear to do
just fine
by instinct
and the grace
of chance:
why are my pants antsy?

Tell the truth.
They’re not.

Lately I’ve been thinking that the rot
is not so much that I don’t think
I’m doing what I ought to do
but that I do not
openly exalt
what I am always
secretly
exalting.

My greatest shames
confound around
my many loves that dare not
speak their names.

I tell lies
when I apologize.

So here’s the facts at last.
this life is one big blast:
fresh-and-screwy.
The natural condition
of the soul’s kablooey.

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I Don't Like July Much

February of the summer – tumbling slowly off
another peak into another purgatory: I don’t like July
much. Surely I should side with all the nearly

naked bodies romping down the slide of this
abundantly lubricious season: surely it gives reason
to exult in its immoderacy – all its blooming

gorgeousness of vice wherein varieties of insects,
human beings, weeds and blinking little mice
all open up their apertures to the inveterately hot

and spicy: but I find the whole thing dicey
and if pressed, as clearly I perceive myself to be
today, would have to say I don’t approve. I want

more shadow, coolness in the groove and oh please! –
far more darkness in the night. However, offered
a sufficient summer ripeness, I would bite.


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