Tango with the Tangle

You never plan to wrangle
with yourself but sometimes
speculation strangles in your

internecine mesh of cognitive
equations and subordinating
doubts and soon you find

you lack the barest clue about
how to pursue what you had
started out by thinking you

should do, where you should
go. You rather like the tango
with the tangle, though.


 
 
 
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Creature To Confess To

She had alarming predilections: finger-painted
walls in fuller lurid tints than even her peculiar skin
evinced, with its disturbing range of violets and pinks
and blues: she was a grand mélange of coalescing
perturbations, swarming hues: visited by strangers,

labeled strumpet, grew her hair into a trumpet into which
entire souls divulged their vagrant fears: her hidden ear
took in the whole of everything: she was the creature
to confess to – to profess to – to lay out the spread,
and picnic on it with you until both of you were fed.


 
 
 
 
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La-di-deedle-doo to You!

Let me take a soft extended moment
to alert you that the next time
you wake up and cannot quite imagine

how to talk or otherwise engage
in human intercourse of any kind,
expect to find me peering into your

extravagant amorphousness
and thinking it the sweetest thing.
Just sit there like a pudding while I sing.

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What It’s Hungry For

Strange to have to make it up again,
all over, every day. Summon it from
your elaborate collaborative core:

conjugate its tensions into sense, coax
it to warm form, coalescing out of all
the jabber and the lore, sired from

desire, thick resistance to desire –
gathering what conscious strands
you can into at least the simulacrum

of a man: breathing it to sentience –
enough to get it to the bathroom, make it
pee and shave and shower and put

contact lenses in to see what manner
of a power in the mirror might today be
looking back at it. Strange to have to face

the lack in it, and steer its apparatus
towards the door, hoping that today it
might get more of what it’s hungry for.

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Memory of Then

He had to push his ardor harder,
risk extinguishing the pulse –
certain that the light of the exertion
would exhilarate. Surely there’d be

something so inimitably glorious
about effecting such a tumult,
such a burning, such a chaos,
such a spill. So what if it would kill.




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Blue

Blue seeks boudoirs to beleaguer:
today, in one, it found the loveliest
mulberry-colored easy chair upon

which, backwards, it could drape its
azure indolence, turquoise despair:
it likes the way this boudoir’s filmy

pastel curtains frame its pestilence:
waits for sweethearts to return so
it can make them spurn each other:

loves pretty rooms to spread
a gloomy view. Wouldn’t you?




.

Your Own Dark Case

Sprouting slowly up in browns, dull greens
and blues and purples, stricken by
a sudden superfluity of hopelessness,
your own dark case – some base experiment
your mind had thought to wield upon itself –

from which the whole of you now can’t retreat –
odd! – goosed, released into the atmosphere
by joy – wherein you had remembered
how he’d run across a loud Manhattan street
all goofy-limbed and toothy, roaring,

soaring awkwardly when he was probably eleven,
ten – a boy: and how this vast deliciousness
had proved he’d really lived. And how
the memory had severed, sieved from
its progenitor, long dead, into the head

of someone – you – who now remembered
for him – echoing, vicarious, alone. One brother
breathes, another died. Slippery, this silent ride:
to languish in this anguish, take its measure.
The greatest secret is the pleasure.




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