Killing Time

Let’s kill it entertainingly.

I’ll be as horrible as you,

you be as horrible as me.

Let’s conjure up the view

from which I’m seen

about which I’ve no clue

and let’s collude as well

in opening the door

to your inimitable hell –

musing on the range

of strange exactitudes

we’re using to derange

ourselves in others’ eyes.

It may be that this

won’t be a surprise

to us, but after we

are bummed, benumbed

and otherwise sufficiently

have plumbed the crime,

we’ll no doubt find

we’ve killed a lot of time.

By the way, regarding which,

time doesn’t, won’t and never

did exist. Now that’s a bitch.

All that stuff we’re spilling

we believe we leave for dead?

Wonder what we’re killing.

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Dare

She had one tale to tell.

She once had worn pastel

to Hell (she took the bargain

weekend Dante tour, her guide

a half-moronic Druid) and had

dire reason now to rue it: she

discovered Hell transmogrifies

pastel into varieties of ghastly

body fluid hues, which seep down

through whatever fabric of a shirt

or skirt or pantaloons and socks

you had put on, eternally to stain it

and your skin, effectively tattoo you

in and out of time with it: that is to say,

forever and a day. She was

the kind of nervous little thing

that almost thinks, is only

ever almost there, as wary

as a parakeet with eczema,

wrapped tight inside her folded wings,

red eyes that hide behind their blinks –

and in some locked vault part of her

intent on, bent on pleading to whatever

bureaucratic corporation managed hell’s

defeats and its procedures, not to mention

tainted her pastels and painted her

with their afflictions so she’d ever-after

play the role of laboratory accident –

“o please, whoe’er ye be,

relent for just a beat

and just once let me dare,

I only want to dare.”

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Born of the Vocative O!

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Sadomasochistic Poetic Prologue

O! Like a poet in hot July,

packed into a parka to fry,

crowing his vocative O’s to try

to get at the essence of living a lie,

I’d have asked the lowest fee

from whoever required of me

that I take his prose upon my knee

and pummel it into poetry.

But I had readier meat!

Alone I could pull off that feat:

take my own vocative O!

right after it goes through its olio

of unfenced syntactical sprawl,

then smack it back into a crawl,

prefigure its fate with a curse:

configure it into fake verse,

nobly shaped into quatrains.

Look closer, you’ll see the chains:

below which a pulse sometimes

betrays its ache for rhymes.

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But mostly why whatever I write these days must all

but always be counted as pronouncement, not argument –

effusion, not measured consideration – is because its form

is a cry, a stream of clauses born of the vocative O!

This form allows me not only to say what I apparently

want to say, but not to care, as certain un-hinged humorists

(Gracie Allen and Jonathan Winters their progenitors)

are seen not at all to care about the consequences

(anyway not all that much; you can't upset the cart

completely and still be funny). Not that I'm after effect

for the sake of it (exactly) – I do hold my truths to be self-

evident – I may even have a priestly mission! – but

because this whole business (a word I use a lot to stand

in for 'Everything': suggesting infinite self-interested

bureaucracy, at least it's funnier) is an entertainment.

That's where I shall always orbit the sun of Alan Watts.

I do it because I feel like doing it. I love it. It’s a joy.

Like a scream! Or a pleasant offhand dabble of a finger

in the stream. Wouldn't that sort of disinhibition guarantee

incoherence, chaos, entropy? Maybe if it also had a dose

of hateful belligerence, though that would constrict not

disinhibit. If it’s done because it thrills me unrestrictedly,

it will free me to be clear; I’ll just maybe do it in unsuspected

ways. To want to entertain is, or can be, to want to keep

myself as central a part of this engagement I’m apparently

in as I can (another truth I hold to be self-evident). I want

to be as interested and delighted as I want everyone else

to be! I think I find my greatest coherence in such a state.

Indeed I can't imagine any other condition which could

induce me to relish – as (sounding the vocative oh!) I do –

lifting a pen or a pencil or the other phenomenon we now

all recall begins with “p-e-n”. Yup, that especially.

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By the Way

Though we’re disposed

toward quiet now, the load of life

is a requirement we've

both continued to embrace,

not always willingly, Lord knows

(the Lord we don’t believe in) –

but on balance we’ve achieved

a  modicum of grace.

By the way, where are we?

What is this place?

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Last-Wording It: The Earth IS Flat, After All

Here I go again, attempting to last-word it. Come up with a “truth”. And not for the first time at the unwitting encouragement of my brilliant composer/writer/musician etc friend Roland Tec, who in his response to my poem/drawing “As Flat as You”

(http://guykettelhack.blogspot.com/2017/07/as-flat-as-you.html) asked me “Had you seen this?” – providing me with the following link to a Denver Post piece about a growing worldwide association of human beings who believe that the Earth is, in fact, after all flat:

http://www.denverpost.com/2017/07/07/colorado-earth-flat-gravity-hoax/ - a somewhat winning quote from which runs:

“This is a new awakening,” Vnuk says with a spark in his earth-blue eyes. “Some will accept it, some won’t. But love it or hate it, you can’t ignore Flat Earth.”

Winnng not least because of the memorably otherworldly surname of its spokesperson Vnuk. If I were his organization, I’d call myself The Vnukkers. You know, the Aliens the Kardashians tried to wipe out on Star Trek 72?

Anyway, I responded to this post and its underlying theme (I do like my underlying themes!) in my usual way, which I evidently enjoyed writing enough to want even you to see it, so here it is.

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Good - heavens? (Whatever they may be.)

I find myself ever less able to suggest anything incontrovertible about the human condition, except perhaps the condition of terror probably all of us have of our own unknowing. Self consciousness (consciousness of 'self' not embarrassment about social self-exposure) of the kind with which our brand of higher primates appear to be afflicted puts us in an impossible unanswerable position with regard to anything observable in this gestalt we call the universe, one big fancy word of the many we've coined which describe our endless grapples with the meaning of which is teleology: the philosophical investigation of intrinsic use, that everything is here, or created, for a purpose.

The hope implicit in this attempt to reveal an explicative truth – that truth can be discerned – reflects the desperate hunger in everyone from the Greeks to Sartre to my Aunt Eileen to believe there is an answer, even if the answer is that there isn't one. It's the craving either for a period at the end of our 'sentence' (being 'sentenced' to self-consciousness) or for what the first word in that sentence was or is: that yearned-for 'word made flesh.' We conjure lexical meanings (meanings expressed in words you can look up) like the ones I'm nattering out here as some probably ultimately involuntary endgame of what begins at our cry of aghastness at the WTF is Going On Here Anyway? business which our putative Self Consciousness encounters shortly after it encounters itself. When that self consciousness seems inevitably to prove itself helpless to answer any but provisional questions, it – or we – may decide the answer is 'everything is provisional.' We have to last-word it somehow.

I don't think we can bear not coming up with some last word – or anyway bear not attempting to come up with one. (To what other attempt does 'art' bear witness? I would say pleasure! – but that's no less an attempt at a last word.) 'Wit,' said Quentin Crisp, 'is any comment made on the human condition which is memorable.' To me this suggests the great deep first-cause rapid pulse at the heart of discovering the probability that we exist: the urge to be memorable, something someone else can keep alive and important: to be an answer to something. Wanting this makes it sound like it's all about coming up with the right words but I think it reflects a terror much more harrowingly inescapable than the discomfort of not being able to define verbally what we can see. It's what we don't see, maybe can't see that fucks us up irremediably – or at least we are convinced will fuck us up if we don't keep trying to see it).

Ergo the Earth is flat.

I find a gorgeous hilarity in the likelihood that the only remotely helpful word I may have managed to stumble into offering here is 'convinced'. 

And what am I convinced I want/need to do with that word and its accompanying entourage? Turn it into a Facebook Post! To honor its teleological (intrinsic) use as one of our culture's primary recourses to assuage the craving to be memorable.

Blessed/damned if we do or don't. To which I now add my last word(s):

Sent from my iPhone


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As Flat as You!

How not not to be appalled and wonder helplessly

at these eruptions of untoward effects in you!

That now instead of one head you have three

does not illuminate the faintest basis to construe

the least particular of what you mean to do or be,

but that we’re so unnervingly caught in the swoon

of our dismay at what you now appear intentionally

to desire to become: a meaningless cartoon –

well, you’ve lost your third dimension: done more

(or is it less?) than “die” – “here” in some displaced

condition of flat turpitude: a hologram-galore

reflexively affecting to be rounded in a three-faced

way: a shameless sham, the shambles of a ruse.

There must be pitiable reasons you’ve gone graphic.

Do you want to be a depthless blunt display? – choose

the path of least resistance toward that aim the traffic

of Existence can sustain? Oh dear, as in a gentle rain

of madness, something’s ceased now to dissuade me

that your lack is lack – at last, I see the gain:

no longer damnable, your shenanigans persuade me.

So I shall cease dissension and my apprehension –

join your coup d’état and be a caveat with you!

Challenge comprehension: ditch the third dimension:
to bell the cat with you – to be as flat as you!

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Embryo

Nothing living doesn’t grow –

although sometimes in certain beings

it would seem the aim of growth is to maintain

at all costs the complete appearance

of the first small unity that through

the arcane mysteries of replicating cells

it could attain: the embryo – potential kept

right at the brink of its development

but held back held back held back

from expanding: a floor of being, nothing more;

like fish eggs disallowed the sea. He was

such a being: all his energy poured involutedly

into a repetition of its own constricted form

to keep it gleaming, wet and seeming,

always seeming new – a semblance

of a promise. Inside the soul stayed hidden

somewhere as if drugged asleep. Slick surfaces

sealed in a blunt undifferentiated deep.

It’s true, he could walk to and fro.

He wasn’t fun to talk to, though.

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