Our Frontier

Hand in hand, to walk on sand, through water, in the rain,
sharing, in companionship, the pleasure and the strain:
each secret lure – each intricately idiosyncratic bent
to which you’ve ever lent

your wishes and your life:

the strange deliciousness of strife –

the predilections you exhale: a breathy cough

proceeding from what you had thought you wanted, flying off:

to stride along the stormy beach, its roiling foam of sea,
exchanging fizzling bits of you and drizzling bits of me:
investigating privacies of every stripe,
the whispered wet and ripe

experience of being here:
that, my dear, is our frontier.




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Colorful Personalities

Colorful personalities

can be a little much.

Sometimes they lack

the common touch.

But when they sit there

quietly and gaze

at you, engulf you

in their brilliant haze,

and thoughts you never

thought before abound,

sometimes you’re glad

they stayed around.

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Bringing into Being

Bringing into being is a daily chore.
First you must create yourself (again)
and then create whatever more
you need to lend a meaning to: a Zen

approach to senselessness – to give it
form it seems to want to have that day.
Life is oddly willing to obey: to live it
is to co-conspire with it: to push away

whatever neither of you wants to do
and concentrate on something closer
to a pleasurable culinary rendezvous.
Checking out the produce – grocer

and his customers: sniffing, poking souls.
Procreating, co-creating – filling bowls.




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My Daddy Had Flat Feet

Forebears fashion you.
Confluences of the slew
of influences which assail,
afflict, affect, embrace
and feed your chances
of a life proceed as keenly
as a surgeon’s knife

throughout your tenure
as a living being here.
Capacities to see or hear
or think or taste or smell
will swell and ebb inexorably
as genetic markers draw you
through their web. My daddy

had flat feet and Alzheimer’s,
and boy, was he a crooner.
I have his voice, a bit,
and feet, and wonder how
the rest of him will treat
me with its legacy, years
from now, or sooner.





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How to be You in Public

“Style, in the broadest sense of all,”
said Quentin Crisp, “is consciousness.”
It isn’t always bliss to find this out.

It takes examining your loves and hates
which rarely will not quantify some
qualities you may not want to flout.

And yet if you are to be true to you,
they’re crucial to pursue. What to do?
Grope the potent metaphor. Condense

your gory impermissibilities into some
indecipherable tantalizing trope. Soon
you’ll give your psyche hope – and do this

all the time. You’ll hide it in a rhyme.
You’ll nestle in a covert fame what
you once wrestled secretly in shame –

through the mortar and the pestle
of imagination’s alchemizing rapt intent
to get away with crime. Your purple hair

and calligraphically attenuated aubergine
moustache will artfully imply your hidden
cache of secret ardor for the private

batting of the lash of some bright eye
belonging to a species you dare not
describe. You’ll acquire mystery –

and a transgressively alluring sheen.
And who knows – maybe end up
on the cover of a fashion magazine.




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The Other Route

I've tried to beg
the table leg
to cease its importuning:
it will not stop communing

with my dreams –
setting up its schemes
to worry me awake –
to make me take

the other route.
I can’t dispute
its blunt opinions
without making minions

of them hastily appear.
When I say no, they jeer.
I’d like to chop it up
but that would hop it up,

I'm sure. Its face
would find another place
to taunt me,
and to haunt me

and to drive me mad.
Why would it be bad
to do its bidding?
You must be kidding.





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Torch Singer Dream

You sang so sweet and long and hard and loud –
you ripped the tender surface of their hearts:
corralled their painful loves into a crowd –
and parsed them one by one into their parts;

you bled their essence through vibrato and a beat
until they almost couldn’t take the sound –
but also wouldn’t let you rest and stop, retreat –
because of what they’d lost and what you’d found.






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