Mouth Gym

All day I iterate:
incessant and repetitive syllabic jabber
modulating up and down and in and back throughout the ladder
of concerned and sweetly reasonable turns and tones
as if I were invoking all the grown-up conversation
that I heard on phones and in the kitchen
and the living room and bedroom down the hall:

all the sounds around me when I was an infant:
trying vaguely, maybe, to attempt to comprehend
at least if all these mostly gentle bends and twists and little laughs
that seemed so prettily persistent meant that their
soft ambience intended happiness: more generally
basking in their vocal flows and ripples, floating
through their stippled starts-and-stops

like bubbles popping in a bath –
attempting, maybe, also
to discover in the lilt
a way to inculcate
a safety out of all
the mass of noise
that seemed in grown-ups to be strangely inexplicably

a product of their poise. Their lips were slick as butter.
When I was older I began to stutter.
Today I don’t, so much,
but keep in touch in ever-present ways with the amazing
brays and sways and phases of the phrases
that beset my psyche’s east and west and north and south.
Every day I have to exercise my mouth.


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Extremely Secret, Intimate

The several people over time whom
I have carefully watched dying seemed,
at least in bed, to have coursed gently
to the end, which lent my thinking,
blinking eye a sense of gradual abstracted
involution, as if one-by-one the bits of them
had started slowly and implosively to spin
around the outermost thin gaseous rim
of some extremely secret, intimate

black hole which would eventually draw
them in: the agitated surfaces from
which we claim to name identity seem
to exert the least resilience of the lot:
a person’s idiosyncratic urgent
have-to-have’s have either all been got,
forgot, or dropped quite mindlessly on
some unnoticed spot. Biology takes over:
like a cat, the dying I have witnessed

seem somatically to know it won’t be
long now and retreat into the dark – perhaps
for dignity. A last benignity of evolution
gives the flip side to the violence of taking
one’s first breath, to death: rolls out
a prairie of comparative serenity as
blessing for the grand audacity of having
managed to sustain a life at all.
But all of this, of course, is folderol.


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Stymied by the Sky

You’re caught in cool brief licks
of mist condensing from the fringe
of an immensity of atmosphere
which roils away not only here,

above and through this New York City
rush-hour drizzle-spritz but blankets
and absorbs, resists – before
fan-dancing back into the clouds

which pile up beneath fleet freezing
jet streams, wrestling with the shrouds
of equatorial up-wellings from the planet’s
warm and spinning middle to present

unending no-holds-barred rude nude
galumphing fights through sheer blue days
and thunder-heavy nights: you are
the least bit of the riddle: fractionally part,

perhaps, of some small dot above an “I”.
You’ve set yourself to the investigation
of the textures of Existence –
and you’re stymied by the sky.


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Existential Doubt on Election Day

Manfully determined to subscribe to the collective
hunch behind the premise of what we’re to think
is happening today – while nineteenth century

symphonic music prays and brays its heart out
on the radio, and I meticulously cut and interleave,
construct a sandwich lunch of dry rye bread

and thinly-sliced sharp cheddar cheese – I come
to wonder what of these or any other avenues
to which I’ve access to appease my hungers

and bewilderments can possibly succeed in making
me entirely believe that I am here. Next, perhaps,
I’ll try to sleep, have sex, or defecate: attempt

to graph disproof or proof of something absolute
until some aspect of my being anywhere comes
clear. Perhaps, at least, I’ll find I’m somewhere near.


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Selecting Precedents

Maybe there are small and intimate
and subtle aspects to electing presidents,
but finding them would be like searching
in the sea for a pellucid jellyfish in midst
of a tsunami: all conspires to crush
the singular: nothing, now, conduces to

the sole and vulnerable breath. However,
little in what’s happening today, tomorrow
or the next day has much chance
of changing what I see: a graceful brace
of branches with an army of attendant
yellow leaves beyond the sashes, frames

and shutters of my outer sight – which
seamlessly connects to secret windows
that afford my mind its inner light. Each
fractal surface of each fragile leaf portends
a geometric destiny: symmetrical
exactitudes of reaching out and falling in

which leave me vulnerably breathless
and as full of rich unknowing as we all
are now, and as we will be when we
know what we will know tonight.
I wonder if selecting precedents has any
lasting power to give joy or sorrow flight.


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As True a Part of Me

It ought to be enough
to take a gentle breath
(no consequence need press) –
to welcome sloughing off

instead of piling on –
to let excess evaporate –
create a clearer template –
an a capella song –

succeed in introducing
a lighter way to be;
and yet as true a part of me
depends upon the sluicing

through of an impenitence –
a lust, hot and anarchic,
heeds the devil’s bark: quick
to the rescue of the sense

I crave of the complex.
I’m no sweet singularity –
I’m made of brash disparity –
ungainly, wide, perplexed.



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And ah, today! - November

Today is full of sleight-of-hand and transience: catering to
flights and shades of floating flummeries, fat jello moments
packed with sly suggestion – unrelentingly producing lack

when touched – as soon as I so much as brush the barest fluff
of their unbridled bluffing they’ve Saint-Vitus-danced to nothing:
jittering and brimming over like the colder bolder ghosts we were

supposed to have indulged last night on Hallowed Even: I am
their host, however, every dawn and dusk in every Winter,
Summer, Spring, and ah, today! – November: during which

one does remember maybe just a little more than usual
the complicated ways that people die: especially those deaths
that don’t result in failure of a kidney, lung or eye but signal

certain draining sad cessations in the heart. I suspect there is
an art to recollection that I’ve not yet learned: before I can
invoke a long-gone contour – try to stoke it through another

shadowed corridor to flame – the impulse ruptures: once again
has drained and burned itself to yet another floating flummery,
fat jello moment packed with sly suggestion: colder bolder

ghosts: those heatless heartlessnesses conflagrating into nil.
Find some warmer, shyer creatures: ask them to come in to dine
on all that I may have or am and take their fill. I hope they will.



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