Alien Flyby

Notes Made in Passing

There is, in them, we came to understand,
a rapt fixation on the foot and hand
which seems to cause them all to calibrate
success by how well they manipulate

and muscularly wield themselves – beneath,
above, both left and right – so to bequeath,
perhaps, some sense of bolstering the odds
of lasting longer on their “Earth.” What gods

they importune seem to be physical –
perhaps corrective to the quizzical
ambiguous sensation of the sink
they seem to suffer when they try to think.

.

Imagine: You Are Here

How many breeding bleeding layers
are there in this city’s skin? –
some operative – some discarded

and unpardonable: this half-moribund,
half-breathing porous mesh
of spin and sin and blunt intransigence

and subtle residue – this vast organic
stew which seeps into your thought
and flesh to underscore its intimate

hegemony – its power over you –
in all its multifariously kinky funky
sweat – its threat to all complacency –

this godless naked kickass punk of soul
who struts in refutation of the least
idea that any sweet simplicity could

ever constitute the whole: this thing
that richly rhymes with muck and suck.
Imagine: you are here. What luck!

.

No Ordinary Thing

What could it mean
to glory
in the ordinary
if there is
no ordinary thing?

Glory lives
its story
indiscriminately
underneath –
beyond – within –

nothing doesn’t
make it sing
or spin: it wants
no gratitude:
it sees the world

and doesn’t
fault it.
What is there
for us
but to exalt it?

.

The Work It Takes!

The work it takes! –
to keep a full battalion of relation
up to Being: deploying nth degrees
of seeing, smelling, thinking,
hearing, dreaming, paying heed –
attending to the vagary –
the wish – the need –
employing opportunity – the seed
from which the psyche’s
propagations all derive –
essences of what it takes to be alive:

contriving to construct a sheltered hut –
a temporary architecture –
open windowed wall
and floor and ceiling wherein,
for a moment, you can harbor feeling –
recover from the fall and reeling
for a time: but just as soon
as you have climbed into the thing
and started to believe
in the delusion of a constancy,
it breaks into a monstrously abrupt

disruption: crumbling cliff – discord –
something pulls a rip cord –
and you spiral down to somewhere
new which turns into
where you have always been.
You’d like to think a sentient
and sublime serenity informs some
stillness at the core: from which
proceeds this mighty spin.
You wonder what in heaven
or in hell you’re in.

.

Sensed Through Dark August Rain

An unbidden poet’s
bedeviling cry
levels a challenge,
and waits for reply:

“Why would ambition
ever be small?
You might as well never
have had one at all.”

(Emily pokes at
her flowering sod –
and conjures new ways
to keep puzzling God.)

.

Peeing is Nice

Peeing is nice:
when we have to pee –
we find we enjoy it
extravagantly.

.

Catching the Quatrain –

It’s time for my unconscious
to stride right up to the gate –
and kick it open wider
than it’s managed to, of late:

bid all its forces big and small
to rampage in like sin –
assort themselves in quatrains
with a sly collective grin:

I don’t have time to write today –
or draw much – but with luck
my discipline of daily work
and some amount of pluck

will draw an apposite degree
of something worth its salt,
and if it doesn’t, what the hell,
it’s my unconscious’ fault.

.