The Jelly on Your Toast

.

https://youtu.be/sqyA93I2RgQ

.

We should like to moan a sonnet,

tie onto a triolet a pretty bonnet -

offer it to you with some petit pantoum -

or scat like Ella - boom

.

some hiphop villanella - perform

something to cool or warm

you, as you pleased:

to put you at your ease,

.

give you the flavor

you might savor

most:

be the jelly on your toast.

.

We'd love to be the riot-

ously pleasurable diet

you consume in your preferred venue.

But first you gotta see we’re on the menu.

.

.

Perils of Ingenuity

https://youtu.be/v4fS0Mynt7k

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Cerebral diversion! – perils of ingenuity.
Does a kitten think of hope and death and count
vicissitudes? One doesn’t know – which is
.
perhaps precisely to assert that one cannot forget

that every abstract thought is no less an effusion
of biology than spit. (If only that, or anything, were it!)
.
“I’m just gonna hang out with my cousin.”
“What’s wrong? You don’t seem yourself.”
“I told her you would be there.”
“Tell me I came back and did this for nothing.”
.
Stabs at prescience: careful divagations of the mind:
“why can’t we go in a car like normal people?” Ha! –

but here’s the ticklish rub: the fickle tub of a coagulated
.
cream: the brain: the center, drain, apotheosis
of the dream: spattered paint. You flatter yourself
you’re Jackson Pollock; but you ain’t. You might …
,
however … not not be – entirely.

Don’t need dope to find hope.

They say. I’d say. You’ll find a way.

.

.

The Thing Known as Him

https://youtu.be/VhQX4Xcyeq0

.

Whoever did it (we’d heard it was a lady),

we never will know: after she’d done it, she

cleared out her brushes and washes and paints

and proceeded to go – indeed, disappeared.

.

Later we heard from somebody who’d heard

from somebody she’d died. Whoever she was,

she’d applied to the thing known as Him

varied hints of her decorous tints: deco pink

.

here, and there, deco yellow, which caused

a stark change to come over this aberrant fellow.

Seen, before, only as unlovely chaos, whatever

this Him was, had clearly acquired a wink,

.

a new touch of guile, a sort of wry smile which

altered Him’s former inapposite faltering form,

which now seemed to warm and set sail

like a suddenly interesting craft whose strange

.

elegant angles arrested one’s eye, fore to aft –

destined to reach a new, welcoming shore.

Eyesore no more, Him discovered his place,

Him was no longer waste. Him was décor.

.

.

Kettelhack Kaleidograms - to come

"Kaleidogram" is the word a brilliant friend of mine coined for what occurs when I subject an image to a Layout app which geometrically mirrors the image into amazing arrays some of which you see here. I can't predict what will come out but every outcome is at least interesting, and some are stunningly beautiful. These can be used wherever you want an image to be - wallpaper, cloth, or singly as framed prints. There use is as unbounded as the imagination. The first one is a 5x5 card:



available as prints or on 8x8 plaques (easily affixed to a wall) - can be made to order from any piece of art in my 'stable'

Pan-Hybrid Scintillation

https://youtu.be/XdtlWEL7zJ4

.

“Let language alter you!” proclaim these two itinerant

professors who alone address “pan-hybrid scintillation” –

not the sort of specialty one commonly expects to think

about until one undergoes the pixilating spill of the collision

with their influence. “Collision with their influence” is just

the sort of untoward way of putting it you’ll learn from them

is not perhaps upon reflection how you would be best advised

in bowdlerizing situations to co-vandalize your lingual will:

.

for instance like attaching “co” to “vandalize” to “lingual will”

or using adjectives like “bowdlerizing” with such plural nouns

as “situations” or to wrangle with the arbitrary senselessness

of “pixilating spill.” But with the introduction of pan-hybrid

scintillation in your psychic gullet you can feel the downward

pull at once of awkward phrases culled at random from the not

particularly consanguineous productions of the mind you find

by not much caring what you find – like “psychic gullet” or

.

“the not particularly consanguineous productions of the mind”.

Eventually if you follow their example you will run the gauntlet

of inapposite configurations of vocabulary while developing

a nose for better and less flatulent locutions: for example, never

mixing “run the gauntlet” with “locutions” you decide for no

great purpose other than the patent goading terror of not

coming up compulsively with adjectives that manage to evade

cliché despite their awful clatter in the ear (like “flatulent”

.

tied to “locutions”). When you are done at last with explications

they provide for parsing out the flight of the most morbidly

resourceful underpinnings of the implications of your most

voluminous ejaculations you’ll have learned incontrovertibly

and in the most collaterally endo-genitally macro manner

that the way to keep from grabbing words committing flabby

verbal violence is: never say what they would say. And that

the best solution to not knowing what to say is silence.

.

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A Lovely Experience

.

https://youtu.be/cR8yGr4Wlsc

.

Be skeptical when you hear stories about derring-do.

Remember the red herring story’s a red herring, too.

Someone named Cobbett in England in 1805 bent

our ears with the tale that by rubbing red herring scent

.

over the trail in a hunt as a boy he’d distract all the dogs

from the scent they were tracking: red herring stink fogs

the olfactory sense in a canine’s prodigious capacity

to pick up smell: but Cobbett’s claim had the veracity

.

of all the bloody hell you’d told your brother you’d done

on the weekend, the awful spectacular transgressive fun

with which you were determined to shock: that you’d

kidnapped a nun but you couldn’t reveal all the lewd

.

and astounding particulars you had pursued after that

with the sister: no, not with the virtuous cad Pastor Blatt

always ‘round, with his nose to the ground, seeking evil

to fuel his next sermon in lurid detail and medieval

.

morality for which he’d long been egregiously famed,

packing in every illicit detail, with every perp named!

And that’s when your brother said, “Look to the skies

at the moon. Is it a red herring?” This scattered your lies

.

into chaos, somehow: strewn like confetti into the cold

emptiness of your interior, your old assertions, once bold,

were so feebly inferior you barely knew that the moon died

that night. Nothing could be understood or identified

.

with any proof, wrong or right. This shot through the dawn

of your consciousness, gun through a roof: you were gone.

You now knew eternal existence proceeds beyond breath.

Being is nothing at all. It’s a lovely experience, death.

.

But They Will be the Ushers at the Wedding

An Investigation of the Critical Mind

.

https://youtu.be/0CjKceR4GzE

.

It occurs to me that even when I'm fiercely immersed in

something – hmm, when am I ever that? – I can't think even

of a remote example: okay, let's say, when I opine about

Henry James' 'late' writing, and try to explain what I love

about its aural effects, I suppose I look for easy and pleasurable

ways to reinforce or, en passant, add credence to a claim, but

all these observations are made in passing. What they serve

.

is a poetic intent: to fashion a clarion call, not not to "make

a point" (indeed I’m almost only ever talking about a single

theme: unknowability), but to have it arise out of whatever

is engagingly at hand. If I find myself suddenly thinking up

an argument with a more scholarly scent (I suppose that's

happened here and there), like a flash itch to see something

in terms of what I understand to be semiotics – I play fast

.

and loose with that, too: the aim is never consciously to define

anything, but rather give a visceral take on the sort of minute

limited breath of a thing that tends to interest me. I love playing

just a few notes. Example: choose any two contiguous sentences

James wrote after 1910 – like this, from a letter to his niece Peggy:

“I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could

pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate

.

way I should be in favor of doing it.” It’s perfect, personal

and completely James. A kiss and a handshake. I am driven

by whim to find and settle on whatever caters to the whim. But

when the whim arises out of an immersion as odd and wide

and full of suggestion as mine is in Henry James, it will be a whim

with a built-in mission – certainly to underscore my view of

the 'whole' – that is, my overall feeling called up by reflecting on

.

something – someone – I love. Everything I write, like each photo

I take of New York, amounts to a love letter. But as with anyone

I love, I really do welcome departures – upsets – incursions

of something unexpected. With whatever or whomever you love,

you always want, I think, more truth. So it's not an onanistic

return to a fond fantasy. The thing you return to is alive,

not dead, and you seek in it and bring to it evidence of the quirk,

.

the unforeseen, the untoward kick and slap. Actually, James'

language gives this to me all the time. It's not some dreamy sea

of cadence; it constantly surprises; at its best it follows the mind

so closely that it recreates it. I find simply by charting my reactions

to it, I establish as much of a relation with it as I can imagine

having. Not that it may not rivet me to learn the facts about

the Dreyfus Affair or Belgian soldiers in the Great War,

.

but they will be the ushers at the wedding.

.