Rhyme & Reason

I can’t tell if you’re looking
or you’re thinking.

Something’s always cooking
in you – blinking,
going on.

Doesn't seem like dawn.

.

Now, For You

Now, for you, a sudden
odd companionship –
with its affectionate
and subtle grip –
this poignant bliss you feel
embracing, petting,
nudging and caressing you

in fluid liminality –
a rambling ghost
that coasts along
your brow, ears, eyes and lips –
a sweetness, after all,
which slips you out, away,
so you can stand to be

right here: a current
in the air: you needn’t
fear or fret. Today you took
an elderly and weakly
wobbling cat out to the vet.
His caterwauling
in the carrier reducing

to a mew quite broke
the heart in you.
But now, you hear,
they’ve given him a bath,
and feline penicillin,
intravenous fluid,
and you’ll pick him up

before too long and bring him
home – he probably
won’t last. Ah! – that
is what this fairy flit is doing –
rubbing with soft urgency
against your cheek –
just like a cat.

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Existential Spittle

The ghost-y thing
appears and peers
at me as if to see
what I will make of it.
Or more complacently,
it may not care. Maybe
all it wants to be is there.

And there – and here –
it is. Squirming round
irrelevant rug fragments
like a bit of fear left
over from a family repast:
an Easter dinner, maybe:
something following a fast.

Perhaps it wonders where
Lent went. I got a glimpse
today of where I used
to live when I was little.
A picture of the living room
my mother would,
for Easter, have addressed

with daffodils. I taste
an unaccountable remorse:
a bit of existential spittle.
Perhaps the squiggle
in the carpet fragments
came to grant me
an acquittal.

.

Special Effects

3-D glasses frame and bloat and supersede –
make a flat screen flame and float and shoot and bleed –
conjure, through frail plastic, scenes that flabbergast:
allow computer graphics an immeasurable license
to tart up and preen; erupt into sharp simulacra –

never quite as haunting as a plain organic human dream –
but which, for startled moments, can infuse imagination
with a sudden shocking surreality: apply the sort of paint job
frightened women of a certain age will sometimes use
as guise. Sadness lies in our contaminated eyes.

.

I Confess

Sensually and suggestively beguiles –
hinting at gratuitous heraldic ormolu
and other swelling self-indulgent wiles:
buried in them, still, the Englishman’s
baroque: Charles the Second’s era’s style:

Palladian geometry so choked with
savage curves you’ve got to swoon
a little at each swerve (Westminster Abbey’s
funerary monuments' ornately muscled
thighs: sighs and hidden hard-ons).

It’s darkly English, yes – this sinful-
seeming secrecy of an aesthetic inquiry
requires me to relish to the point of fetish
lapidary symmetries, looping over
into concave, convex sharply angled

cranny, nook and hole: invoking through
the mineral and animal and vegetable,
something like a heedless human soul.
In privacy my idle hand will turn to piracy:
command a purple pencil and demand

to swing into and on the inward body’s
ropes to squeeze each gland to cultivate
a flooding, damned and grand
hormonal intricately pulsing pressing
mess. I crave voluptuous excess.



.

No Longer Here

New York’s preliminary Spring creeps
tenuously out in very early April – as if sure

that spreading its soft lacework too precipitously
in the sudden wake of winter’s shadowed
shape will kill it. And so it sifts, alights and sits

bare, in a faint outline of pink and blue
and green: pale pastel at seventy degrees,
untrusting, sure this warmth is premature.

Its presence quietly calls glory from a distance –
but doesn’t last more than a whispered day or two –
before it’s flooded by preliminary Summer.

Perhaps it knows it never needed to feel fear.
But we can’t ask. It’s no longer here.

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Half an Orchid, Half a Doe-Eyed Cobra

You didn’t think when you set out
that you’d set out to be your own odd
single species of uncertainty, but now,
here, these innumerable crazed and sober
eons of a living moment later, you’re

inimitable: half an orchid, half a doe-eyed
cobra: so in thrall to such a complex mix
of chromosomal and chromatic
cues and hues you ought to be on
someone’s nightly news – a creature

carnival bent on the public demonstration
of evolving random balance –
the epigenetic outcome of what varied
inner and external atmospheric enterprises,
good and ill, will choose when they’re

not looking, thinking, or care much about
the outcome. Evidently this is what is meant
to be, and though the doe-eyed cobra
orchid may be quirk and jerk, no one
can say you haven’t found your work.

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