Not So Much as a By-Your-Leave

One half of me so seldom seems to want to see the other half

whose only interest evidently is to see its other half, I wonder

at the likely losses in the benefits and costs of their dichotomy.

Is one intended to correct the other? Is the other’s mission

to ignore the other’s admonitions and proceed as if no other

half were there? Is the outcome of what one supposes is what

I think of as wholly me in jeopardy? Am I doomed to a psychotic fall

or psychic leprosy? Will all go dark? Should I care? Or did I simply

make their duet up because duality is such a lure and seems

so sure a model for a vehicle for generating rules about no matter

what – the only car to drive and park? Is my divided brain a losing

cause? Is that good or bad? Have I been had by some bored

propagating force who long ago gave up the farce of thinking

there were any laws that could account for my egregious lapses

and now plays his version of a game of darts with my synapses?

Two humanoidal heads and faces rise beneath my pencils,

colored markers and eraser with not so much as a by-your-leave.

Uninvoked and uninvited, one’s not looking at the other while

the other looks at him. Joined together by a flaccid bit of spiral

left from someone’s skeevy mucus glycoproteins DNA they seem

un-bothered by their twosome. I find them not a little gruesome.

.

When This Poem Began

Consummation –

devoutly to be wished –

this slippery evasion:

to let the yearning be

its own reward –

less grasping-after

than a moving-toward! –

No, that's not what

it wanted to be.

When this poem began

like Pinocchio

to turn from an 'it' to a 'he',

I was tempted to trade it

for something more

neatly aligned with

my own kind of poetry.

But then it reminded me:

"I am a pilgrim!

And I tread the road to joy."

It's a good little boy.

Tell us someday

if he made it.

.

We the Civilized

We benefit, so we the Civilized opine, from an innate

propensity for density, as we incline it seems inevitably

from the innocence of infancy to entering the intimate

immensities of later life: the tangled thoroughfares

of complicated love, and omnisexual perversity: thought

immersed in irony and paradox and dissonance, brought

to encounter the impenetrable obfuscations in more

serious investigations of, well, anything. We seem to think

that clarity in innocence is largely lies believed in ignorance.

And that painfully attaining incremental revelations through

essential rites of passage (which mainly mean humiliations)

from and of and with relations, amorous, professional

and otherwise, can lead us to a wiser clarity at last: a clarity

as vast as the complexities of Cosmos but transparent –

indeed, apparently osmotically available to the Enlightened.

No wonder we’re so frightened. But pretty funny, honey.

In fact, hilarious – indeed, nefarious. It amounts to this:

We invent and then ferment what we believe, then we

imbibe it: we’re drinking our own piss. Therefore, of course,

we tend not to get fat. There’s something to be said for that.

.

Color Gods, Color Guards

Without question, Red and Yellow and Blue are the gods:

the holiest triad, the primary hues – oligarchic triumvirate

from which ensues the Collective of Purple and Orange

and Green and their endless derivatives. But Green has been

keening for power – shunted aside for too long by The Primes

in the triad eternally second in line (with its doltish dim siblings,

that oafishly ogling Orange, and the prissily purposeless Purple),

its envy, for which it is justly renowned, has now grown

to a ravenous rage to unseat its complacent progenitors, quickly

dissolving them into insensible paints so that Green can begin

its illustrious reign. It insinuates into the dark and precipitates

slowly on each of them, making each slick with the smell of itself,

staining each with inarguably killing proof that, remorseless, they

all have incestuously used poor Green as their sexual toy. No

greater sin than to do such a thing. But so far this ploy hasn’t

very much bothered Blue, Yellow or Red. They’re quite enjoying

the emerald jello-y streaks that Green nightly appears to want

so much to leak. Each has started to lick off the skin of the other

the lime-minty drips which turn out to be rather a wonderful taste.

They’ve decided in fact now to issue a fiat to Green,

and to Purple and Orange and all of their infinite progeny

similarly to provide all their flavors, in dollops and drops, one

by one, sip by sip so to savor the fullest degree of the outcomes

of being the gods that they are. Green didn’t get very far.

.

Acute Aversion

Goosed by the Freudian principle that

what one mightily claims to detest may in fact

be what vitally one most desires, most

of the Creatures residing inside him began

to devise what they thought would be wise ways

of torturing him, by providing the vividest visions

of what he can’t stand: in their belief that by

driving him mad he would reach a catharsis –

releasing the largest out-pour he’d yet known

of imprisoned potential: they audibly groan

with this prospect so loudly he thinks it’s his

own grumpy bowels. What his creatures are sure

is his most covert love is his most overt hatred

of anything “cute.” One after another they’d

send up their sweetest most heart-wrenching

plump heffalumps from the cuddly snugglery

where more and more would await to be let

through the gate to implore their new savior

to savor abjectly adorable sentimentality. Now

he hates them in what has become his intensely

demented reality: he sadistically crumples each

sketch in a fist – impales the crunched paper on

sticks, row and row of which, speared with their

quarry like new-severed heretic heads, line his

lawn in a grave conflagration. One by one they’re

consumed in the flames. He defames them with loud

incantations he’s sure will arouse and awaken

the minions of Satan to come and assist in defeating

this scourge of The Cute. He meets with success:

his urges to purge are completely assuaged.

The fires he lit quite effectively rage to consume

them. Now nothing can ever exhume them – or him.

Art is exceedingly dangerous. Be here warned

to avoid what this verse has implicitly, torridly

drawn as its moral: never read Freud.

.

Backward Art

Two creatures announce that they want to be Art.

Should I want to take part in this serious enterprise I must

agree to their terms. First, be furnished with four virgin

pencils which range from the adamantine to the charcoal,

full spectrum of faintness to darkness and hard unto soft,

whose lofty encompassing goal will consist of the mission

to cast all life's tattle-tale shadows and blurry penumbra

and unthinking dashes and untrammeled scratches

and whirls and elliptical pearls of the kind that Vermeer

had in mind in his sketches of girls. But banish all color,

they said, that's what Art ought to do: "in black and in white

to go forward" as they will take frequent occasion to say

is the only acceptable way to achieve how they'd like us

to see them: in cold naked light – in perpetual flight to their

bold perpetuity: "what the sparest and barest and purest of art

ought to be," said the creatures to me when I started to pout

that I couldn't spread out my Crayola payola on this dreary grey

panoply. But I carried it out: I went in and I routed about and came

up with the smudgiest black-and-white thing, and you know,

I suspect that its elements do after all rather forcibly swing

to the offhanded flow and the stylish sway of how they say

they want art to look. I’ll have done what they asked: let them

bask: they're the winner. I’m thinking of dinner right now, anyway:

some slight poignant mischief and glee let me see what to cook.

all the hues I forsook. Red, yellow and green, pink, blue/purple

purée: sometimes sweet, sometimes tart, hot and acrid. Art

should go forward! they said and they say, every night

before going to bed. I am going to get at it backward.

.

Where Wisdom Slinks

If wisdom were a crystal ball the crystal would be cracked.

The medium who’d peer into its sinuous refractions, whom

you’d hear attempt to speak the mysteries that lay in its

divided parts, would know enough not to be rough. Encroaching

on a fault in violent geology requires a soft approach. To kick it

would be wicked. Caressing it was best. You never knew

what molten brew might be more ready to construe its chaos

upon you than you had bothered to imagine. We never think

we’ll die. We may, at levels where our mitochondria supply

the breathing secrets of existence, know that dying is a lie, but

do not count on that. Any hope too tightly held becomes a bat

that writhes and spasms – wriggles monstrously against your grip

to rip away. The medium is at a loss today. Wisdom couldn’t

give a toss about whatever you would like to have a bite of.

But oh! Don’t diagnose or explicate. Wisdom is a current

in a fractured body, lacerated by exacting laughter so disruptive

and delightful that it would be tasteless to the point of spiteful

to subject it to an exegesis. Sweet Jesus, don’t explain the joke.

You’ll make the cosmos choke. Parsing it eviscerates the wow.

And then its broken bits will coalesce into a killing danger

it would now be far from wise to beckon forth. But reckon with

assurance wisdom always slinks throughout its course along

an imperfection. With luck, one random day, down in your sinew

you will know because it’s in you that this is its predilection.

.