Crayola Payola

They’d be very well paid, they were told, if they came out

arrayed in Crayola. Five dollars and forty nine cents for a box

of ten markers – about the same price as a single purveyor

of classier ink that you get from the clique at Chartpak. They

were promised a claque of adoring new fans and appearances at

all the trendiest clubs on the planet, expensively framed in a swirl

of acclaim, with the fame of Merle Oberon at her most famous.

Now they’re here in immoderate glare on the wall of a men’s room

in back of a stall in a bar no one goes to who doesn’t get drunk.

So far they’ve achieved the response of a half-conscious stare

here and there. But they’re not in a funk. They know they’re

supposed to bemoan what they’ve done: sold their souls

to Crayola for nada. But Holy Kenyatta, they love being cheap!

They’d rather be shallow than deep. And they’re having great fun

posing elegantly like Faye Dunaway, making a run of it anyway.

.

Be Quiet, Make Nice

Can’t talk to your art without peril.

Or pretend it’s a pet cat named Cheryl.

Ask it too much, it turns feral –

rears up angry and bites

then becomes cold as ice

and as sterile.

Be quiet, make nice.

Soon it will send out its faceted lights,

like a beryl.

.

Color Blind

He’s decided that he’s had enough of color.

So he’s asked that I erase what hues I’ve used on him.

He wants to walk into the white and gray and black array

of something that, when you glance back then look away,

you won’t remember if you saw. Now his colors dim

to raw in front of him and brim out off his back like

streamers in parades gone by. He slides a sidelong eye

at me as if now to imply (I think, I’m never sure) I’m

bringing him to destiny. He says, “now do the rest of me” –

by which – I think (again, I’m never sure) – he means

he’s got the best of me and soon will leave me to endure

the certainty I never will know more. Will I be doing

with or without colors then? What am I doing

with them now? Again, I’m never sure.

.

Inspirational Rhetorical Extremities

To depict what flowers in the cavern of a dream

requires powers you profoundly lack. Yours turn to steam

when they attempt the least verisimilitude – the barest stab

at calling up what really ‘was’. Faintly recollecting

ferris wheels and women’s faces and a little child’s open mouth

exhorts you to dig clumsily to search not for the dream itself

but for whatever cheap availing tricks might crowd

that dusty shelf marked “Inspirational Rhetorical Extremities.”

To riffle through this piffle means to weigh the merits

of a spooky movie’s tactics and the colors of the day-glo

bubblegum conundrum that comprise the cliché pellets of what

few details you constipatedly can call up from your childhood.

Rhetorical Extremities, these be indeed.

But nothing with a feeling that remotely moves you.

And yet (you block the facile rhyme that it behooves you):

you tell yourself to do it anyway: write and draw these

cumbersome contraptions with the only theory you think enjoys

the prospect of a certainty. Which is: you’re dreaming now,

and what you’re trying to describe in what you call your

waking hours, you have powers to depict.

(Even to depict the fact you can’t depict.) How?

Decant Miss Dickinson: “Tell all the truth

but tell it slant.” This sneaky law that governs

poetry and dreams and life is very strict.

.

Like Any Other Love

Can friendship have indemnity? Insurance you

can pay so it won’t end? What would it cost

to toss away whatever drains the source in it

that wantonly ignites and bites, expends delight?

Friendship rarely ends in enmity. Like any other

love, it is ridiculously inexplicable. It surely must

be feeding on some random manna from above,

below, somewhere, a here or there we’ll never

know. Love bestows, love suspends. You may

well find that it depends on saying you are sorry.

I don’t suppose I’ll ever understand its quarry:

what it’s really looking for, what more it wants

that it can’t say, or isn’t saying. Should we all be

praying? Would that bring back its bright surprise,

its lift? Is everything a fickle gift? Surely everything

is far more wonderful. How wonderful is wonderful?

Maybe fantasies of ecstasies are what turn off

the light. We’re all right. Are we all right?

.

Only Then

Presiding over his own demise

But taking his time so no consequent

Ruinous outcome of this enterprise
Be allowed to disrupt too eruptively -- 
Wreak such abrupt surprise
That it gets in the way of the pleasures

Of slowly achieving the size 

Of a full dissolution, voluptuous entropy.
Only then might he test his surmise 
That destruction is also creation.
Only then might he meet God’s eyes.





.

Caught the Tide

He liked her awkwardness,

the smudgy yellow light she’d throw.

Why she’d come he didn’t know;

she gave him reason, though,

to think it wasn’t likely she would go.

This didn’t worry him, he liked

that she was there. Something

in her seemed to alter his relationship

with light and temperature and air:

he wouldn’t have been able quite

to say it but with her mute

reassurances he knew that he was

not so much the child of atmosphere

as sibling to it. But what was he

to her, or she to him? He asked

her in the way they had devised

to speak so they could understand

each other – had to do with

cultivating delicate degrees

of rising, falling breaths – he asked

her what she was and what he was.

She asked him what he thought.

Are you my mother, soulmate,

supernatural protector? She said

she didn’t know what supernatural

could mean. And only volunteered

that she was something different

from what he had said. Will you be

with me when I’m dead? Am

I dead? She said she didn’t know

what dead meant. He found

this funny so he laughed. There

we go, she happily replied.

You’ve pushed us off the shore:

we’re on the raft. We’ve

caught the tide.

.