My Astonished Stomach

The cold crisp roughage I just had for dinner – to which
my astonished stomach must be now attempting
to accustom itself – was a bright refreshing tasty interesting
alternative to creamy comfort food’s warm pap: no buttered
noodles here, no fat to pad the lap – but celery and salsa
and Bosc pear: the first to scoop the second and the third
to offer respite from the bite of spicy pepper with a bit of sweet:

its bare mélange snapped, crackled, popped a summer
moment into February: treated me to the forgotten fresh quick
bitten cold experience off just-cut edibility: propagatingly
alive. Winter wind assiduously laminates the city’s icy hive
outside – the night congeals; the freeze could kill. But, warm
inside, I’ve just enjoyed a gustatory chill. Soon, however,
acid reflux will commence, and I shall have to take a pill.

.

Happiness

There is, strung randomly across
the barren edgy arms of winter trees in me,
the thinnest tattered linearity, a ragged
flapping sentience which absorbs the freeze

and buffeting of glaring heatless
February sun, soaks up the suffering in its red
silent screaming as it sets – witnesses
how this begets the onset of indifferent night:

there is in this deteriorating light,
and in this shredded silk thread’s vacillating –
alternately limp and tight – attention to it,
the profoundest gladness and delight.

.

Thank God That’s Done

The ways you prodded, poked, provoked, cajoled and teased
your consciousness into varieties of loopy understandings
and succumbings: their peculiar brandings of the heart
and flesh and psyche, the rewiring of requiring,
the beguiling of the mind into the styling

of new aptitudes for squalor,
the propensity for pallor
and decrepitude – all

the relentlessly

repetitive

ineptitudes


of having


“fun” –

.

Goop

It’s as if whatever’s inner
wants to have itself for dinner –
swallowing its sharp unease
like a mush of black-eyed peas

strained and thickened into soup –
overcooked, to make a goop
that blunts all color, texture, edge
which lately had it at the ledge

about to jump.

.

For Your Safety

There is a jungle beast in me who climbs
and leaps and drapes his insolently lithe
and slinky body from the vines and branches
of his favorite secret jungle trees –

part leopard’s grace, part cunning ape –
he grows in deviousness and agility
and strength – becoming bolder in precise
proportion to my growing older: as I age

he prowls less patiently around my rib cage –
incrementally increasing his frustrated rage:
such dark ferocities glide out of his
hot heart that anyone who saw me walking

down an avenue who knew would call a cop.
Wise move on that observer’s part.
Who knows how long before, abruptly,
he erupts. I’d encourage you to lock us up.

.

Large Significances

The axis of your consciousness alarms today:
dips deeply left – tremblingly revolves
around a hot loose buttery dark current

running through its wobbling diagonal –
randomly electrified with jolts of coruscating
bits and bolts and scraps and shimmery

sharp shards of memory in semi-visuals:
a bit of iridescent ear, a testicle, a lower lip,
a stretch of glossy hair – a sense in which

you’re here and there – not knowing or much
caring whether there or here is there or here:
a limbo in which, now, a cartoon chartreuse

day-glo bimbo juts her large significances at you
while a giant azure avatar grabs at her, plops
her on his pile of shoulders and goes off into

a black hole jar of marmalade – the hue
of whose jeweled orange bitter-sweetness
seems intently bent on symbolizing something

crucially abstract. The shell of who or what
you may have been or tried to be before you slept
exactly not at all last night has cracked.

.

Watch Another Episode

Watch enough police procedurals on television
and the bland benignity of most of life begins to drip
away – to slip through apertures all lubricated with
a murdered human being’s blood: everything is DNA –

betrayed by every shred and bit and morsel in the flood
and splay and spectrum of the flesh: demons lurk

in semen: follicles are diabolical – and you will never spit

into the bathroom sink again without believing you are

somehow tendering your essence and identity to those
inevitably prying dour forensic snoopers – gorgeous
women, men who coolly primp, parade their sexy bodies
in Las Vegas or Miami or Manhattan’s lurid midnight

light entirely to apprehend such fetishistic secretive
degenerates as you. Take your cue: lock your door:
reassure yourself there won’t be any more: be strong.

But watch another episode and know you’re wrong.

.