Riding the Serpent

Traversing the tops and the bottoms and sides
of each gliding meandering question, you almost
enjoy the weird harrowing ride – as you slide
to the middle, hang onto the wobbling hump on
the back of the snaky reptilian chump who appears
to be running the show, whose ridiculous takes
on the fast and the slow and the little and big make

a quizzical jig of each blundering stab at establishing
grounds for an answer. Astoundingly fancy
shenanigans play in the spaces you’ve prayed
might be filled with clear air: murk in the sky of each day
tends to slay the least hope of allaying the funk.
Ferreting through these immense misconstrued
hills of towering junk, you debunk only this: that thinking

can’t miss. And yet there is something appealing,
erect, circumspect in the mode you’ve protectively
labeled “the intellect” – something so sweet in the treat
of pretending there’s meat to be hunted and fried
into logical tenets of cause and effect. The heck
and the hell of inspection – of riding each gliding
meandering question back into the stable, to put away

wet – is something you’d have to regret to give up.
The reptile you’re saddled to hisses: “Live up to
the nonsense and make it beat time: parse everything
into a rhyme. Slithering over each fence for the thrilling
suspense: who cares if it never makes sense?”
Though on Eden apparently God dropped
the curtain, it isn’t so bad to be riding the serpent.


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Prose Poem: To Bob

Today is my brother Bob's birthday. He died March 1989. (I was with him.) Anyway, this morning, right before waking up, I had a dream that he and I were on the second floor of some house looking out a closed window at a backyard; it was night – dark – he was dressed in some colorful Hawaiian type baggy swim trunk thing, I was in black – and we saw what seemed to be reflections of ourselves in the backyard, dressed the same way, in the same “poses,” and he said, "look Guy, we're down there!" And I said, no we're not, that's just some weird reflection from the glass in the window. But as I said this some old gray bearded man walked up & started engaging our “reflections” in conversation. And my brother said, "see? we are down there."

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[pic - from left: my brother, my mother, me]


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The Thing We Know Today

The hunger won’t be sated –
that’s the thing we know today:
despite the fact you sit here
with a sack of pretzels on your lap:
they aren’t very good, in fact:
why does all the salt fall down
into the corners of the bag?

Naked pretzels taste like what
they are: hardened flour paste.
Your hand keeps digging anyway:
perhaps one crisp reflection
of a perfect pretzel paradigm
is somewhere there – ready to
appear when you are least aware:

ah, but you’re too needy, greedy:
cannot be surprised by chance.
Unless it is the chance that this
disgruntled moment constitutes
one tiny quiver of one eyelash
of the lidded glance of some
great creature – of whom you are

infinitesimally part: unless this
craving in your stomach and your
heart amounts to one slight
twitch within the crow’s feet
on his sensitively pebbled skin:
unless you are a necessary
sort of meshed few molecules

that help a billion others guard
whatever aids experiencing light:
unless you’re part of some
strange complicated apparatus that
enables sight. Perhaps your ornery
distress is part of some much
larger being’s yearning for success

at seeing more than he had seen
before: an itch that leads to
an enlightenment. Ah – but on
the way: these salt-less pretzels –
and your craving, unabated..
That’s the thing we know: today,
the hunger won’t be sated.


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Welcome to the awkwardness of being male:

in which all elements of personality are sloshed into a pail
and hauled from hill to vale without attaining much
of anything beyond a heterogeneity of hits and bungles,
rumbling through the jungles of what’s doomed to

breed the Masculine Experience, whose task and seed
and sin erupts into the blunt abrupt appearance
of the phallus-bearing blunderer: dumb and blinking
and unthinking as a punch-drunk pug: welcome to his

mug of suds and hormones that excites – and then invites
oblivion: fermented brew of terror and testosterone: welcome
to the inadvertent and involuntary blast of squiggly tails
of thousands of spermatozoa pushing small blind

lumpy heads in search of beds to kick back in and smoke
cigars, little flickers who would strive to see themselves
as stars, who rhyme with Venus but end up, if mostly
dead, on Mars. Welcome to the awkwardness of being

crucified upon the chromosomal Y, looking lunkily
around and seeing nothing but the muddy ground, missing
pretty much the whole shebang of sky. Oh my. I do
appear to be perplexed. I get like this when I have sex.



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Ah, but don't forget

What is my pact, today, with you?
We cannot do what won’t engage the two
of us in something just as close as it can be
to ecstasy – and not just some banal variety

of blast: the thing we choose must last,
which is to say must meet the test of passing
through, beyond, into that realm in which
a soul might find companionship. Or should

we just abandon ship and swim our solo ways
to separate shores? Ah, but don’t forget:
there are no laws: no distance and no future
and no past and every time we think

that we escape, some new divinity hauls
back her haloed head and laughs. As if there
were a ship, or shore! Here’s the only word
that says whatever I know, darling: more.



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Outside My Magic Windows

A dental bridge comes loose –
my cyber-server’s software has a glitch –
a tiny itch exactly at the center of my
back comes back, and back, and back –
the cell phone needs recharging
sooner than it ought to: all of what
I thought I’d brought to this shenanigan
of daily life – to regulate its gears

and minimize its strife – strikes new
angles: like that RCA dog tilts his head
and cocks an ear at some strange source
of sound: something’s slightly queer:
not unlike the weather that appears outside
my magic windows: softly awkward
and upset: a grumpy toddler who’s awake
before she’d like to be: a little

spittle at the corners of her lips as she
decides if she should cry: a kind
of juggling of the fragile light components
of Existence – slightly misaligned –
askew, a kind of abnegation, in the sky,
of blue – in favor of amorphous gray:
a fine miscasting of the play: outside
my magic windows come the oddly

wonderful, unnerving, and exasperating
imperfections of this day – as if
to flag me down to the array and notice
that it’s happening. My magic windows
will not tolerate cliché – or even
one slight whiff of smug complacency.
Bump into the blunt amazing grace
of place, and space, and see.



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Towards A Theory of Love

Perhaps it’s like the rain, or sun, or snow,
or fog – a sort of meteorologically
unavoidable experience of doggedly

determined soul: a kind of certainty that
changes scenery and fills each hole – makes
itself as indispensible as air. But now I look

and nothing quite like that is there. Or rather,
now I feel, and what I can discern is real
is something more elusive than a propagating

atmosphere. The darkest curvatures
of night retain a seed of some full panoply:
ready always to delight in germinating, in

inevitably bright recurring light – beckoning
to anything that whirls – abounds –
disturbs. Few nouns – innumerable verbs.


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