Simon Jay

Simon Jay

knows all our little ways –

he’s felt them rise

within himself in waves

then sink to the unspeakable:

those dark and leaking lovely

places you’d as soon forgo,

though don’t forgo,

but say you do

(can’t wait to come back to).

Simon Jay, though,

never doesn’t ferret through

the slew without insidiously

laying down the traces of his

DNA the whole way in and to

and out from all those

untoward graces

you believe you’re better than:

the fettered man,

the dense lump of a Trump,

undone by fun and bumped

into The Moment – where

you hear you should be living –

sieving you ungivingly,

intending surely to foment

so much of everything

that Simon Jay can say,

first thinks he won’t

(“no, don’t!”), then does.

Oh, by the way, the buzz

is that he’s not not gay:

Yay Simon Jay!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s_kB2c1rjQ

.

The Art of Not Being Descartes

(for Donna)

“What is all this?” must surely be a candidate

for the iniquitous ubiquitous first question

asked by sentient beings everywhere; well,

asked by those at least who dare to cleave

to their galactic versions of Cartesian reason:

you think therefore you are. From that self-serving

point of view, who else but you could be the star?

A star exploding into untoward elements which cool

on spinning orbs to sod: can Word be lurking far

behind, all ready to be Flesh, Body of the Letter?

How more neatly to suggest that thought is God?

(Harold Bloom says add the Odd and you have

something better: genius.) God is Phineas Fogg,

finding, naming, blaming worlds. Existence

is a language test. But you and I will shock the rest:

we’ll dock them in our pockets of resistance.

Like nests availing birds, we rest on other

than another’s words. I am the place you live.

You are the thing that lives there. What undergirds

this into grace? What theory does God have waiting

for us to remind us of our place? We don’t care.

I am where you live. You are who lives there.

.

Momentary Trick

At last, George Frideric Handel

cuts/caresses to the quick:

his baroque concerto grosso

in F major does the momentary trick:

distracts you into thinking

his accomplished comfortably

corseted amusements might slice

through this dull lugubrious confusion

and relax you: straightforward theme,

untaxing fugue, much less exacting

than Bach’s tediously virtuous etudes.

Interest doesn't have to irritate.

Expletives can be implied.

Euphemisms can abide. But ha! –

tough (gerund of the “f” word) luck.

One ride upon the wings of Handel’s

sweetly inter-gliding strings and you’re

bestride your yearning for a certain

kind of touch, and everything

is once again too much.

.

Climb on – rhyme on!

Climb on –

rhyme on!

Mime us all a sample

of today's cuisine,

all you've seen

& heard in

every moment's ample

feast.

(I may be a beast

but you're no burden.)

And oh, the times

we'll have

with all the rhymes

through which your presence

lends

its lavish

salve

and spends

on presents

meant to ravish

us

without

a doubt

or fuss -

but with a quiet effervescence.

You bewitch!

You must be rich.

You know how to live

you give

a penny

turn it into any

glorious

uproarious

occasion

whose persuasion

manages

with its advantages

and views

to lift,

to choose,

with heart,

another's

gift -

a truth:

forsooth!

a mother's

love

of

art.

Mabel and Fable

Mabel the mother had always been drab;

Fable her daughter, formidably fab:

so fab she had long since become inorganic.

Mabel looked on in a panic as Fable inhumanly

groomed herself into unnatural angles and folds

and extravagant dips, over time, as she somehow

divined in, and managed to wrench from, what

once were her hips – amid all of the other hot-house

mutant forms she’d assumed, involutedly

blooming into yet another synthetic esthetic –

which to Fable expressed jubilation! But Mabel

assessed mutilation – a doom, not a bloom,

with no room for what Mabel believed to be soul.

Then they posed for a portrait together. Expecting

to weather the shocks once again of their rocking

antitheses, ha! – their antitheses had become

intimacies, new and mild, without threat

of attack, like the unquestioned fact of a mother

and child. Who cared about theories of soul,

and their basis? Mabel and Fable had always

known homeostasis: had always been whole.

If Fable were able to make herself look like a bowl

made by Gaudi, well Mabel was glad, just as glad

as she was to remain unreservedly dowdy.

.

Another Way to Know

Fixations are predations. They subject the psyche

to a mindless sway in which we say and pray

all night and day I-likey-likey-likey-likey till we’ve

drained the language of its juices and most uses:

dropping all but one auxiliary verb – the sole necessity,

demonic talisman, the god, the holy writ of “must.”

Fixations earn because insist on trust: they can be

trusted to exhaust and to deplete and yet forever

promise plausibilities of the replete, the unimaginably

sweet outcome in whose pursuit we end up spending

every slice of who we are: we hold onto a great gold

glowing chunk of what think is star – deaf to all

entreaty to do otherwise. And yes indeedy, darlings,

this becomes the size and content, then, of life.

We do so like its glow. Which for a heretical few

illumines a mystical purview: another way to know.

It is a star. Everything’s a star. When we’ve really

looked, we see we can be seen to startling advantage,

hooked. There are pleasurable purposes in claws.

There is peace that passeth understanding in

this pause. Release afforded by quite other laws.

It isn’t what we’re told, it isn’t what we’re told.

It may be, surely is, some other enterprise as well.

But heaven doesn’t seem to be a part of it, or hell.

.

Lovers and Loves and Lovers

You think you’ve had them.

You know that there were times

you were excruciatingly obsessed –

that what determined your desire to live

was nothing more or less than the degree

to which he could be beckoned into loving you –

by which you never knew exactly what you meant.

Loving was a sort of shoving into or away from

something else. There weren’t words for it,

or couldn’t be until you could permit

existence to exist: until you could

be interested in what was really

going on. But that would take

so many decades to discover.

The dawn was coming, though. Today

you knew that it had come. You saw

the one you had resisted seeing: the one

whose being tortured you for so long with

its worn-out iconography that you no longer

had a clue what really “turned you on.”

You saw him and it wasn’t he, the last one

you had wanted. Now he was the first one

whom you didn’t want at all. People weren’t

things to want. Love was not a thing to want.

The dawn’s become a morning now.

Soon you’ll see your life’s first

afternoon. In four years you’ll

be seventy. It will be still be light.

Then love may come. Love may be the night.

.