Self-Critique, Late Winter

Split phrases – frightful tricks –
that wield delusions of an inner sight:

speciously oblique. Reconfigure all your
arbitrary blasted bits (enjambements

meant to make them look uniquely “deep”)
back to all the prosy paragraphs they

clearly came from: ha! – as if you could let
meaning seep into the thing through

dazed manipulation, lazy laissez-faire:
inertia in the guise of daring: lasered from

some underground you found by merely
typing ‘til your fingers hurt. Your zingers?

Scraps: concatenated dust and easy dirt.
Sins and egoisms in the name of “art.”

There: that stings the heart.


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Leap-aphobia

Exultantly allowed again
to be a touch contrary –
an extra day pops in to
lengthen gleeful February –

alas, its sass does nothing
to relieve its neighbors’ arch
resistance to this folderol:
the windy blowhard March

and huffy January both have
turned their backs against
this upstart in the calendar,
and do not like it: whence

comes this appalling circumstance? –
the months are losing sleep!
Every damned four years we
watch while they all take a leap.


.

I think I'd like to say I was depressed today

I think I’d like to say I was depressed today –
like a child who conjures up a story for a play
and needs his characters to be as large as
street signs: “you be Happy, I be Sad, you be

Mommy, I be Dad.” Paint the thing primary Red
and splay it out into a backyard theater: later,
take the silly plot to bed and dream it into other
kinds of being, seeing: something loose, translucent,

more diffuse. But first I want to spread the simple
seeds: sprout them into basic needs and see
what breeds into complexity. Ingest disparity:
swallow fear, hilarity, belligerence: investigate

experience: what is it made of? Take a blade
to love, and fear, and cut them ‘til you tear them
into wriggling bits: what have you got? This hot
evolving mammal species which we evidently

represent appears to have to self-reflect, to
choose between, among a kick and genuflection
and varieties of ways to pull and push, deflect,
reject, repress, embrace. I think I’d like to say

I was depressed today: acquire a place from
which to dive into unfathomable space. Although
if I just counted motes of New York City floating
in the light, it probably would also be all right.


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Nearly Fifty-Seven Years of It

At thirty, you were full of angst and quite
as certain you would not survive as if you
had been closer to a final dive of ninety-five:
your assets were a jumble of instinctual

mishaps: sexual shenanigans were losing
their reliability: nothing had the snap you
wanted: everything you let the world see
was a front. You then surprised yourself by

somehow getting bunted from the plate into
the outfield – fifteen years away – when by
the age of forty-five you thought you’d
finally arrived: a sense, you felt, of warm

acceptance – wry, ironic, and more full: sex
was better, as you found the wherewithal
to live your own desires: fronts had fallen;
you no longer followed anyone’s directions

(to the letter): you had reached a level playing
field – a fine plateau would lift you, keep
you on a path whose point of vanishing
appeared quite clearly on your blue horizon.

And now you’re rising to your later fifties:
and the insults of incarnate life are rife – still
manageably small, but now there is no doubt
at all where all of this is going. What have

you been sowing, dear? What have you got
growing here? Ambition, love – whatever
you’d expected to continue with the same
excruciating ardor you had known before –

something swept it out the door. All you know,
at fifty-six, is this – set in bright suspension –
betting it against the night: there is no
getting it right. There’s only paying attention.


.

Hey, boy!

Hey, boy! Dissect joy.
It won’t matter.
Slice it ‘til it splatters
and consider all its organelles.

What makes it swell
and laugh, not care by half?
Determine whether
it has hemispheres that

conquer fears or
only latitudes that grab
at attitudes and
turn them on their ears.

Must it rhyme, or
merely mark the time?
Calculate exactly
how far into you it goes

or stays. Give it up
and stick your feet
into its Pegasussic stirrups
and take flight. Sweat

with it, and melt – and fall –
work it over in the ring
with all your might.
Get sucker-punched:

and drop again, all stupid.
Feel its Cupid arrow in
your ass, let it pass. See its
yellows turn to grays.

Forgive it for its inexplicabilities.
Go in on those days.
Meet it in parentheses.
Let it count the ways.


.

Milagros

Ascribing verticality – deep levels –
to the thing provisionally seems
to bring a ring of truth: surely what’s
“beneath” contains whatever
ruthlessly obeys the deepest
law: the source of all that delicately
evanescent ardor of our being which

propels us through the maw of
everyday: its seat must lie in
strata deep below, unseen but felt,
enlivened by the heat of something
like an existential lava – here,
down here, is our imagined genesis.
But I don’t know: there are no leveled

paradigms for me today. Today
I climb up from a dream of Mexico,
and find my edges just as spread
out, full of complicated surface
as the flattest two-dimensioned
intricately decorated plan of every
bit of that land’s brilliant mix

of votive brightness, force, intricacy
with which my dream began:
a flat-mapped reverie of silver baubles
mashed to star-shaped delicate
geometries: a fractal landscape
of Milagros* that encodes in it the whole:
every bit of it’s on top: there is no

lurking inner cavern for a demon
or a soul. What you see is all you get.
Let’s forget to think in tiers – trade
them for this freshly flattened field
self-evidently here – displaying
everything at once: revealed, unshod.
Surface of the skin of God.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milagro_%28votive%29

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The Underside

You stuttered once so badly that the only
virtue you could understand was verbal
fluency: one craves the thing one lacks.

But now, somehow, when something like
a lingual flow has intermittently bestowed
itself through some unprecedented crack –

you take it back: you disavow the craving:
streams of endless verbiage, as slick as eels,
have, in themselves, about as much appeal

as breeding slime. What piques disgust
today is just the thing that used to ache
in you for easy eloquence: now badinage,

per se, seems like a stark banality:
a sickening misuse of time. But why such
vehemence? Passionate disgust is suspect:

lift its heavy stone to see what on its
underside may really be disturbing. Curb
the quick conclusion: and examine it for

opposites: its curse may well embed in its
reverse: caught in the conviction’s passively
aggressive rear. And what, when you lift up

the stone of your abhorrence of the glib,
appears? A hologram of mirrors: into which
you glide like Rita Hayworth in “The Lady from

Shanghai.” Still here: glassy maze of fear.
And yet a hologram: a quirk. Doesn’t matter
what you think of anything. Do your work.


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