Posture

Broody – armored –
like an undiscoverable country –

the ex-football player stands.
His resignation, substance, stance

remand themselves to quietude
and grimace: self-imposed – grand.

.

Strawberries Occur

Prickly static seems to sprinkle over
everything – like bad artificial
sweetener – sticky, toxic, edgy,

nervous, chemical, as if laced
with amphetamine: comparative calm
beauties of the city summer scene –

its warmth, its blue, its rich stirred brew –
cease to persuade: implode, degrade
and break apart: something’s not right

in the heart: a sickening incitement
which excites a superficial blast lasts
for an instant: guts, and grinds

the air: drains some central substance –
unsuspected marrow in the mind:
the worst of it: you cease to care;

then out of nowhere, strawberries
occur. You slice a handful you had
bought and dump them in a bowl

and coat them with some maple syrup:
sweetness of a kinder gentler sort.
Strawberries regale – for now, prevail.

Precipitating spatters scatter in
and out of bowls, abort and bail,
adhere, dissolve, replace each other –

psychic weather systems: mist,
hail, drought, snowfall. Any moral
you can think of in it? None at all.




.

The Car of Me

Each day, I get the vehicle
in gear – and know that all
I have to do is drive the thing –
pay some attention on the way –
pick up the to-and-fro
peripherally swaying on
the left and right, then take

a fuller stoplight view – pursue
a change of course – or merely
roam – or more remorsefully
decide to turn around and go
back home: a confluence
of destiny and chance
besets each nano-moment

of perception: tugged
as if involuntarily yet
at the same time exercising
a volition: choice can waltz
with reflex; does, in fact, its
dance with chance each small
synaptic prance I undergo –

today I’ll see a man with whom
I’ve made a ton of secret love
exact attention from an audience:
leaping jazzily above, below,
around and through the air
among a troupe of other dancers:
much as he and I and we’ve

ensnared each other in our private
shadows; he will demonstrate
to all his fine liquidity. The car
of me will stop there for a while,
start again, and then
vamoose into another den
of blessings and iniquity.

.

The Spirit or the Letter

Group cohesion! –
hunger for a symmetry! –
swaying, sighing at “Messiah”
we all leave the hall, higher –
singing – fused with music –

swinging rhythms and vibrations
that explore the core:
vastly organized into
a mastery – a glory –
all of it’s a bore.

Will you be there
beyond the last articulable prayer?
This law and order –
yearning for a form.
Will you be there

when I’m no longer warm?
I thought I was supposed
to live today, but, well,
one never knows.
Sometimes one goes

without a warning.
This suborning life ejaculating
spatters: hey! – you’re
the thing that matters,
so they say. Until you go away.

I sit here and refuse the news.
Not that I know what
I’d choose that’s better.
But I cannot quite buy
the spirit or the letter.

.

Hot Bits of You

Sweat pumping out the city’s
summer skin – miasmic sex enlists,
persists – thumpingly resists
the least refusal. Walking
becomes gawking – stalking

down the street devolves
into the flat perusal of parades
of bodies which (not who)
entail the utter slavish capture
of the core of you – and you:

the predator who simply
has to cast quick looks to hook
what he pursues: your prospects
propagate: a zoo of fleshly
probabilities insists on coming true –

and yet no single one of them
would do. And so: and so:
here and there you go, stumbling
like a drunk towards whatever
glow now draws you from

the flesh ahead you strain
to see: you cannot let it be:
hot bits of you are left in every
breath: every molten shred
of it excited – and requited.

.

Heavy Final Plenitude

A jungle tumbles, teems beyond, outside
and almost up into my windows here –
Manhattan spills abundantly into herself –
despoiling indiscriminately every leafy spear
and branch and tuft of greenage bursting
through her body’s concrete cracks –
exulting in the glory of her florid orifices –

pulling all towards her messy flesh, draping
herself in it: plumy boas on the burlesque
queen of Tarzan’s secret dreams – intensely
felt but never seen; cross her (as of course
you do), and she’s a blinking harridan,
a shrew, a courtesan who will remain
too pricey for the likes of you; her endlessly

alluring thighs will open only to whatever
promises to pour down from the skies:
she is the mistress of her own sweet dark
fecundity; her seasons shock; she blocks all
barrenness to which she nonetheless conveys
a sideways wink: for right there, right beyond
the brink, the chasm fathomlessly sinks –

it is the bed from which this goddess woke
too long ago for you to know – to which,
eventually, in some season yet to be –
or maybe this one, maybe in the heavy final
plenitude of this one – you will go – and stay –
and not return to say a word: as if whatever
you had been in her had not occurred.

.

What I’m Supposed to Like

Sometimes I like what I’m supposed to like –
say, fresh-picked produce – fancy food: arugula
(that funky meaty plant which tastes a little

rude) entranced me for a couple weeks –
and strawberries have lately so seduced me
that my hands are now the color of a spanked

behind – you may next find me chawing on organic
orange rind or re-discovering the trance
of jasmine-scented rice: or otherwise indulging

in the savor and the texture and the spice
of the consumable experience of life: but, now,
in this strange unremitting gray – this gentle humid

play of early summer cloudy day, and day, and day:
today I undergo an unsuspected sway towards,
perhaps, well, not exactly what I’m not supposed

to like, but rather that odd realm of indecipherable
light which hasn’t anything to do with what
I taste or smell or chew: it doesn’t follow what

I swallow, swallow what I follow: doesn’t care
a whit. To wit: I sit here in its indistinctness
and each notion of a plan – say, man the subway,

see old Frank Lloyd Wright up in the Guggenheim,
climb up to the swirling top, give it a scan –
won’t pan. Manhattan’s camera prefers to span

indifferently across an emptiness: report
the uninvolving news, none of it to do with food
or art or view. So that’s what I choose, too.

.