It is the Final Day of January, After All

The blended ripened volume
of the day attends to me again:
rich late winter afternoon fills up

my eyes with the voluminousness
of foreseeable demise: it is no secret
that it will be dark. But now the light

is magisterially parked in Brahms –
achieving one last grand C major
melody: soon it will be paler Debussy,

and then descend to purple Mahler:
after that, well, it depends: my
interfering heart and mind will collar

night into whatever fantasy in
whose creation they have not
informed me yet they will collude.

Music might be guillotined entirely:
lately they’ve been reaching
for the inharmoniously rude.

It is the final day of January after all.
February may decide it needs
its messy say. Heads may fall.

.

On the Murder of Someone We Knew

“God is the King!” Well, be that as it may,
but when one of our number goes down,
and another one does, brutally, every day,
every death puts a crack in His crown.

.

Like a Bandit

What I would do
if I were you
must surely be irrelevant.

But oh! – if I could
let you know the rabid pleasure
you unwittingly bestow

by merely walking towards
me in a room, your hair
un-groomed, hand-mussed,

stuck up in random peaks,
your square butt flopping down
into a chair, your legs

splayed wide, your body
leaning back in
unaccustomed thought, your brow

a kind of study in the sort
of slightly fraught
and pensive frown

a jock would make
attempting to remember
something hard in algebra,

perhaps a whiff-bit conscious
you’re displaying all the delectation
of you in the round,

allowing me to look,
just look –
oh, if you knew

the things you cook
in me – the private ways
I steal you like a bandit.

If you were me regarding you
I wonder how long
you could stand it.

.

The Soul’s Gadgetry

Its magic never goes away –
this gadgetry of soul – which works
incessantly all day – precisely
to assay perceptual intricacies:
measuring and weighing, holding up

in its sleek sweet mechanic pincers
every fractal whiff and wiggle
apprehended by the mind – to turn,
contrast, investigate: to find exactitudes
of core and edge and spine and aura –

all in order to discover just that angle
of a side or top or bottom of a stretch
of, say, the textural translucence
of a sigh or sleep-warm skin which
offers, optimally, every best view

it can get of what’s within and how
it plays with and relates to – alters
and engages – what’s outside.
Just now I took another little winter nap
and all my gadgetry went gently snap

and whizz and pop and calculated just
the right illuminating fizz to keep me
in the business of experiencing
my own strange existence. I thank it
for its pulsing fond persistence.

.

Someone’s Gotta Do It

I try to catch me unaware
before I dare effect my daily
execution: you see, I need
to kill myself each day
but – like a ferret, bird or eel –
I’m hard to find and steal
and keep my hands on.

I beckon – crook and wag
my index finger – crooning,
“here, sweet baby, don’t
be scared,” hoping I will
take the bait and creep
out from my daytime lair.
Generally eyes get wide

and nostrils flare and I am
nowhere here or there.
But sometimes, when
it’s late and I have had
enough of daylight
and the sorts of grating
loud realities that daylight

seems to like, I strike
a tacit pact, agree to crack
the shell and all the inner
semi-liquid me bloops into
some new swelling splay
of entropy, and that,
my friend, is what you see.

.

Poemdoodle

I honestly have no idea
where any of this comes from.
I sit here, dumdy-dumdy-dum:
and humdrum quatrains come

+

or verse-lets
aching to become
sweet little tercets

+

or a sonnet which now seeks to savor
something in the realm of dreamlike senses
that appear to want to change the flavor
of my adjectives, adverbs and tenses –

so to be the signal I would send out
to those yearned-for ears and hearts and tender
sensibilities which might then lend out
news of what they’d heard, to her – to send her

on a further voyage through to some king
who might help the lot of us to fuel
yet more fusing coalescence: drumming
into some translucent state of jewel

a balcony from which we’d then have shown
an alchemy transfiguring our own –

+

which might not have put out its glimmer, quick –
if we had enabled the trimmer trick
of treating her gout
so she wouldn’t spit out
the whole of this foregoing limerick.

+

You ask: who is her?
I reply: she is she.
Use correct grammar
or don’t speak to me.

.

Themes repeat –

again, the violin – which I resist, again:
I disinter it from its case again –
to practice Brahms and Bach and Beethoven

preparatory to rehearsing in an orchestra for yet
another concert – the prospect of performing which
I constitutionally seem again prepared to hate.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that every string
has loosened to the wan flaccidity
that every man has nightmares is his phallic fate.

Patiently, I tune it up: slowly it resumes
at least the simulacra of its function –
then the A string snaps. And I pretend

(swallowing my bitterness) I’m tender as a mother
while I passively-aggressively extract its silver ends
and thread the new string in –

and slowly bend
and coil it –
and twist

and twist
and twist the peg –
and tune it up

and tune it up again
and tune it up again
(repeat by powers of ten)

and here I am again again again
resisting the poor wooden creature in my lap,
hoping that another of its strings won’t snap –

or hoping that it will. Why does this always make me ill?
“Use your music,” said my mother just before she died.
It’s like she got inside and pried.

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