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In the layered grayness, clabbered
shadows and penumbral cellar dust and air –
among unlabeled cardboard boxes –
a smudged and chubby little boy decides
that he must sit on one and wait. Perhaps
he hopes some great important secret there
will leak a clue – or is he playing hide-and-seek
with you? – or is he laying plans to change
the Universe? Does he fear some imminent
dark curse? What shocks him? Who or what
has found him out? What awful revelation
pocks and routs the darkness with its sudden
light? Why is he unable to believe the sight?
Is it delight? – or fright? Out of nothing
come the halleluiah and the groan.
So much is going on when you’re alone.
.
Purple dream – blue devil – brother father killer lover –
shoots up from the center of the primal groin: exhumes
himself to join you – salacious fumes – smells like sweat –
manifests a steaming wet hegemony – the magma of a mute
iconic masculinity: he reaches out in lavish tenderness
to you as if you were his son, or were the one whom
he once had, or once had been, too gloriously capable
of some sweet glowing sin he cannot know again. He is
the gape after a blast – echo of a thunder – a vast capacity
for blunder and for sorrow and for rape, for murder and for
that sweet soft landscape of soul in which, although he’s
shattered everything, left nothing whole – at last, for once,
has fathered something necessary. He is the lunk, the dunce,
the brutal pump and pulse and emissary of the shocking
gentleness of unacceptable desires. He is what sires.
The truth is, she would just as soon not delve too deeply
into things: her secret psychic race, for instance – how it brings
two prepubescent twelve year old green, yellow girls into their
endless whirl around around around circuitously overlapping trails
that evidently took and take, will take, have taken them to some
patched version of themselves – herself – that make and made
her the amalgam ring-a-dings they are, she is, will be and was –
she’d just as soon forget the whirring buzz – the spell it casts –
how it impels a yearning to unite with something that keeps
passing just precisely at the instant that it ought to light, ignite
epiphany, a recompense: the girls come whizzing by and miss
each other’s outstretched arms again and she will not, no, she
will not, no, not at all will she say one word, not a single word,
until they reach each other, stop, embrace and kiss. And here
they go on by again, again, and no, she will not speak till then.
.
All he had the energy to do today
was strip down bare and walk into the salty bay.
Last night he’d tied one on; he didn’t feel so well.
In fact he’d have described his head as holy hell
if anyone had asked him.
But now he thought he’d bask in
warm and pleasant lapping water: he would chill.
Maybe soon he wouldn’t feel so ill.
He searched the sky above him: it was pink.
He wondered if that was a symptom of the drink.
The horizon never seemed so flat.
He’d never really noticed that.
Didn’t everybody say the world was spherical?
Maybe everything turned out to be a miracle.
But wait, if that was so, then nothing was.
His mouth felt like it had been stuffed with fuzz.
He hadn’t noticed people gather on the shore.
They looked at him as if they wanted more.
While he stood upright thinking he had capsized,
someone cried out: “A prophet has been baptized!”
Damn, but he was parched – had trouble swallowing.
He waded back, and found he had a following.
.
We do our best to play our parts –
in card tricks, verse, mixed martial arts –
but something gets caught in the fence –
we cannot find an audience.
We like to think that what we do
is entertaining, funny, true –
we trill our tune until it glistens –
but almost no one ever listens.
We’re not an egocentric jerk –
we know we ought to love the work –
we’ve heard that that should be enough –
the rest, we’re told, is merely “stuff.”
But surely we should not berate
our hunger to communicate –
no less than E. M. Forster pecked
out on his keys: “only connect.”
So here’s the thing: go out and play
and razz your dazzles anyway –
forget who doesn’t come to call:
somebody will see it all.
.
Someday our thing will come
and grab us by the hair –
and swing us round until we’re numb –
until we're barely there –
and hurl us into love –
or drop us dead in bed –
whatever it’s been thinking of,
whatever’s in its head.
.
To hug an ideology! –
to love its big blue Buddha-king
monastically examining the middle distance
as if it were the only thing –
as if it held quite everything
she’d ever need to know.
She climbed it daily, naked, with her living glow,
clinging to its cool availing folds,
hungry for its spiritual silvers, holy golds,
peering – bold – as close as she could get –
into the sacred face whose flesh –
her heart had told her, once –
transmuted from the Word
to bless, undress, caress her.
What more was needed than these two?
Why were they waiting for a third?
.
