At Last, Beneath My Blooded Pen

The problem isn’t what to write.

That’s always been completely clear.
Oracularly come to light –
these clues about what might be here!

These dreams in dreams – articulate,

at last, beneath my blooded pen:
their matter, now particulate –
amassed and patterned. Ah, but when

will you take any notice of

these vatic veins – the blooms they yield? –
embrace their fragile lotus – love
the lilies in their flooded field?

My liquid syllables run thin

now they’ve discovered they’ve not led
remotely to your swimming in
the blood my blooded pen has bled.










.

What Ghosts Do

 

I’ve
no idea.

Do
you?













.

Qualitative Methodology

To summarize, we’ve had to say

we couldn’t find another way

to wed our bodies to our minds –

to see the modes in which each finds

conversion in adversity,

immersion in perversity –

without describing devious

behaviors of our tedious

component parts, from head to foot,

up with which we’ve had to put.










.

You’d Think You’d Find It

Why is it so hard to read a mind?

You’d think you’d find it in expression –
the tremor of obsession in a wary blink;

the glaze of an immobile stare –

the glare of a determined impassivity –
repression of some hot internal blare

of terror, rage or sexual fixation;

the heavy-lidded daze and slow predation
of ennui. So much should be obvious

in you and  me – strangenesses we fear,

plenitudes for which we long. Strange
we almost always get it wrong.









.

Dressed for Circuses and Stripped for Wrestling

In the inky black

of the Unconscious
they reside: a larger side –
and smaller side astride it:
dressed for circuses
and stripped for wrestling;

waiting to emerge

to train the brain to entertain
more untoward moments,
they contain those bits
of anarchy without
which you would

stand no chance

of gaining mastery
of the ineffable. They aren’t
terrible at effable, in fact:
you might decide
to call them back for that.









.

At Times, Of Course, Like This

 

You find that you like gray, some

days – how it achieves its say,
perceives the cool array, subtly

holding sway, managing in quiet

to convey its calm vicissitudes,
allegiances, proclivities – the ways

it beckons you to stay and take

a seat and listen. Rainy gray
that glistens is a treat – though

can, of course, entreat your tears

to reappear, invoking fears,
reopening despair, those cares

deriving from the countless

recollections of your catastrophic
loves and flitting broken trysts –

your endless undone lists. At times,

of course, like this, gray can
make you want to slit your wrists.








.

Posing for a Formal Portrait

Posing for a formal

portrait makes it seem
as if it isn’t only possible
but normal to be dressed

and pressed into a scheme

wherein some consequentially
defining meaning might be caught –
so that in some bedimmed posterity

when you are thought of,

if you’re thought of,  
something might be known,
by something shown: a swatch

of an incontrovertibility: that you’d

been seen, and could be seen again.
That might be nice.
Let’s get painted twice.








.