Metaphysically or Otherwise

What was the thought that made you pretzel up?
What brought you to this awkward place?
It couldn’t have been too abrupt.
Not long ago you had a face.

You sit and make your knuckles crack.
You feel as stupid as a cow.
What to think to turn you back?
How the devil are you thinking now?

Metaphysically or otherwise,
was this your fault?
All you can surmise
is, you could use some salt.

.

(See Stage Right)

If it’s true there is no time,
and all is simultaneous,
it’s nice to think that Cinderella
never really is, will be, or was alone.

Instead of ever sitting by herself,
she’s always next to everything
she has or will become!

Of course that would include
a black abyss of doorway
(see stage right). There always
is, will be, and was eternal night.

.

Sense

Sometimes you cannot put a human face
upon the thing at all. You decide
the vision’s blotches have intentions which

produce a generating propagating system
and a strong protective wall. You see sense
in its conglomerate immensity:

the fine organization of a cell: not the chaos
of a random hell. Surely colors hold a clue.
Without meaning, what are you?

.

Sextuple Dare

Today one took exactly what one had –
in this case, one’s six heads (not bad
for an array of crania) – and wrote a page
of mania they could recite upon the stage:

lately they’ve been aching for the limelight –
“write a roundelay and make it rhyme right!”
So I did the thing, which they then memorized –
but when time came to sing, the six were paralyzed!

Or so at first I thought: but no, they were content
to sit there on a chair, with no particular intent
to do more than to gaze and stare out into air.
They had colluded on a double – well, sextuple – dare:

to see if they could get me to produce a way or mean
to gather up an audience and get them seen.
Six heads don’t have too many places they can go.
When the chips are down, put on a show.

.

Something Soporific in the Air

Napping
naked
in a chair,

he almost
could
imagine

that he
wasn’t
anywhere.

.

Autumn Is Icumen In

The face of Autumn
flashed at me today –
as orange-ish and green-eyed
as an Irish play, but calmer
than the whiskey-riven
driven drama that might be:

sweet, in fact:
surrounded by a panorama
and a panoply of gently
jarring brownish reddish
green and yellow radiating lines –
beseeching, breaching,

reaching out like veins,
like vines – linking Autumn’s
geniality to unseen climes,
and climbs – inducing
these too-easy rhymes.
There the face was,

smiling like a glamorously
artificial Whitman:
old Walt drained of salt.
Pretty, though.
Autumn is icumen in –
August soon will go.

.

Still There

If a poem is successful, you can’t know from it what the poet thinks. You can only know what the poem thinks. Anon.

.

He comes and sits upon the bed.
I don’t think he is Hunger.
He isn’t pleading to be fed.

What accounts for all the blue?
Might he be Sorrow?
He says he simply likes the hue.

Is he Emotional Paralysis?
Dissociative Trance?
He says he’s not about analysis.

I tell him that I’m getting sleepy.
He doesn’t seem to care.
It’s all become a little creepy.

He’s still there.

.