All I Have To Do Right Now

https://youtu.be/pArnHiZ832g

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Today I watched a pepperoni pizza give itself

up to two chewing mouths on television –

a commercial for two chewing mouths, I think,

though I do not recall where you can buy them –

and I looked around at the results of my exquisitely

ridiculous good luck at being just where I could

not imagine not existing – what reference

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could I have for elsewhere? – and I betook myself

from my warm January New York City private lair –

to tell you I live there is to exult in it – and with

a practiced fine alacrity I wrapped myself into

a long back winter coat and pulled down on my

thug-shaved head a watch cap, also black, which

made me feel like Jean Genet, and made my way

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to get two slices from a pepperoni pizza at a pizza

place on Second Avenue around the corner

between Second Street where I reside and Third,

where Quentin Crisp once lived – a handful

of inconsequential minutes with a consequence:

a renewed acquaintance with one patent fact,

that I lived in a place where I profoundly couldn’t

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ever be alone. I lived among who knew how many

hundred thousands of New Yorkers in a compass

which expanded within outer city limits to eight

million and a bit. This was lustrously brought

home to me by seeing not more than sixteen

or twenty strangers bustling by me, easily

accommodated by the large capacious freezing

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winter night. Because there’s always space for

the anointed denizens of this unbreachable great

center of the Soul, this city that I nonetheless have

breached and now can eat a pizza in and write

a paean to and do a drawing for I do not have the least

compunction to explain or to forgive. All I have to do

right now is all I can’t not do: pizza-fully live.

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Perfect as a Song

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLQG2nQg1g4

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Intellect, Wisdom. Take me to school.

Intellect’s pretty, wisdom is cool.

Perfect as a song. Don’t get along.

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“Take a walk, have a talk! Start it from

scratch!” That’s an invite to the Booby

Hatch. As soon as they’re out their Mind

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they’re out of their mind where there’s

nothing to find but freedom.

What a terror, what an error that is.

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So get back in line, things will be fine:

give it up and have done with it.

(Forget live it up and have fun with it.)

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The Almost Epic of Rahn-Syd - Exercise in Teleology

https://youtu.be/p1j-xDcLf6E

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There are fashions in gods and on average about only

point-oh-two-three percent of the six trillion divinities

which every twenty-three seconds are loosed on the heedless

oblivious cosmos become something someone remembers

and uses for something to pray to, but who can keep track.

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The others are made to vamoose and they do not come back.

When inevitably they discover they’ve quickly spent all

their apportionment of their supposed irresistibly gorgeous

inimitability to precious little avail, they get thrown in the god-

pail and hauled into something that looks like the mouth of

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what Jonah jumped into when he met that whale, but is really

the portal to random dimensions into which they’ll fail even

worse than they’ve already done. Then Rahn-Syd, the dog-god

of Flatulence slated by fate to be one of these misfires, decided

if fate was as hateful as that, he would conjure up something

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untoward to throw into the infinite vat into which they were

destined to fly and to fester: he was the dog-god of farts,

after all, and he’d learned the supernal fine arts of producing

a literally nonstop onslaught of gas which he aimed at the pass

through which they would have vanished had he not with one

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bang (as big as the one that’s hypothesized to have made us)

quite entirely banished it into the void with the rest of its

component stuff. Of course the new universe come into being

quite awfully stank. For that they had Rahn-Syd to thank.

But only I know it. Witness the teleological power of the poet.

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Last Poem He Wrote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94jFIdkWvbU

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Sometimes when we look into

each other’s eyes, don’t we see

the darkness not the light? –

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darkness that embraces form

and swallows it, creates

the metamorphic night? –

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darkness, where all interest lies?

I  wonder if my mother or my

father or my brother when,

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as I approached with each

of them their ends, identified

that darkness in my eyes.

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Or had when I was born.

Had they always known

we’d never be alone, forlorn?

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Maybe they’d long realized

its size, and why we each

created night when we,

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half-cunning, breathed our sighs:

little nights we’d ride that joined

us as our glances met.

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Maybe we knew everything already,

dark matter massed invisibly inside,

the kind infinity and love beget.

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This Thing You’ve Got

(for Catherine, on her birthday)

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https://youtu.be/G4oi8EUNt34

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The woman’s singing to the girl, the girl

sings back – informing and reforming

to rewarm each other’s hearts

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and histories, their mysteries, to broach

a new approach, address a lack that now

has found a round replenishment in song!

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I have known the girl and woman –

how they’ve thought they felt and how

they’ve felt they thought – but suddenly

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as they’ve begun to sing it’s like I hadn’t

known them long. I thought I knew

their essence: I was wrong.

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It’s your birthday, Catherine –

and the birth year of a new career: what

you’ve yearned for since the girl in you

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unfurled into her hunger for an unimpeded

life. To offer us a view of the immensity

of love which pours into your singing:

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a place for us to be a part of you.

Your “i” has found its dot.

It’s real, this thing you’ve got.

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Judy Garland Poem, Take 7,351

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https://youtu.be/LqXH68BwMRc

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“I think she looks pretty.” Sure, why not. She’s anything

you’d like. To me, she looks like what I look like when

when I’m so myself, so tired of my own insupportably

boring neurotic egotism that I can’t not spin out 

alchemically to transmute all that matted dross into

an unexampled purity – purity’s the right word, even if

it’s purity (which by the way it always is in everyone)

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made of mucking up your stories and your lusts, maybe

most especially your lusts, not the overt sexual lusts 

but the ones you have for scratching your dry scrotal sac

raw because you love the exquisite itch and translucent

crispy ball-skin flecks which flutter down, or your inability

to pass without subjecting to exacting scrutiny a single

fallen thing glossed by the rain at night – like jagged bits

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of broken concrete, rotting leaves, torn Doritos bags

promiscuously gleaming in the wet dark streetlight glow –

without having to take pictures of it; it’s the purity

of a keen hunger to gratify particular senses in particular

ways which never won’t make an odd angle of it or

require ambiguity to persist in its mess; it’s the purity

of being packed with amalgam ambiguity – so apparently

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heterogeneous and clumsily casual – but so intensely

absorbed by its own sensations and obsessions it distills

into an essence which if you squoze just a few drops of it

out of your soul into Dixie cups, passed it round to random

passersby, would almost certainly kill them on contact, like

certain kinds of love do. Which becomes the sort of purity

you’d want to watch do anything at all, like stand around

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looking out a window humming to itself. Judy Garland

pretty? Or too beyond beyondness for description to begin

to tell you anything you could pass on that would do

justice to it, with the single exception of Joe Mankiewicz

who, in words that managed that feat, said “she knew what

music was for”? Try not to pass out while you try to imagine

what that could mean. That’s what I’d say she looks like.

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The Ever-Living, Ever-Loving Donna

https://youtu.be/MaIcL9ZFTP0

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Silly Incarnations always wondering about the words for things!

Let’s just say her Psyche, Soul and Funny Bone (that frabjous femur

is of course what God is) sit around and chat while cosmic blasts,

amid insinuating internecine senseless soft manipulations that

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accomplish nothing any sentience understands, applauded by

excited atoms detonating like fresh movie-palace popcorn and

the rest of what both crashes and/or doesn’t crash but falls with all

the sifting strangeness of all Accidental Art: recollecting steam

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she saw stream lucid and concise from her grandfather’s lips,

as if he both were taking sips and slaking thirsts of others looking on:

sending humid messages abroad with care to keep their weightless

delicacies perfectly intact: somehow with her certainty that they were

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destined always to exalt the highest purposes an Incarnation had

the nerve and fervor to enact, which meant some grand hilarious

shenanigan, too brusquely silly to permit you to retain your pee.

Humor when it makes you urinate with helpless incapacity is too

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exquisite to be borne. Which means supposedly you have to die before

you get to sample it. Until then, silly incarnations trample over their

confused sensations, looking for some Mystical Experience to help

them bend their over-prudent laws – transcend. But not her “soul”

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and “psyche” or her funny bone. They’d long ago jumped every fence

attempting to confine. Strange to be an incarnation and know nothing

is malign. It erases any need to die. “So be is what I’ll do,” explains

the ever-living, ever-loving Donna. “Why? Because I wanna.”

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