On Not Wanting It to Kill You Soon

https://youtu.be/3QzwMnKJFWw

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When you love a god completely
you are prey to rabid bliss: bless’d
in that inordinately gratifying sense
of cruelty which haunts the root

of “bless” – to wound. Too soon

you’ll face the prospect of departure:

anyway, what seems departure
from the point of view of life:
.

that cliff of death you must imagine
from the scattered evidence will

sever you inevitably from the city’s
early Spring and its resistances
.

and grim delights; that battening
down hatches will eventually
snatch you from Manhattan must,

you have to think, be undergone.
.

Undertaking all the amplitudes of

this renowned dark town before

the undertaker takes his cue –
disposes of the residue of you –
.

is all you’ve got to do. Can you

say the thing outright? You crave

existence in Manhattan more

than photosynthesis craves light.

.

So will it kill you soon? You pray

to it to have some pity – put in a bid

to live beyond this coming May: go on

from here into the coming year to see

.

the seventh day of May in Twenty-

twenty-one. Can that be done?

To be alive to hear the reveille upon

the day that you’d be seventy?

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My Cemetery

https://youtu.be/vYkNei1eY00

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Like New York it does not

wait for me. But when

I die I hope a friend

.

if I’ve still got one

will bestrew my

stash of ashes

.

through the iron

posts that form its

gate for me. Anywhere

.

upon the grass or mud or

snow will do. I love it like

I love this city - for its lack

.

of pity and its fine oblivion.

Obsidian and platinum must

be its favored substances,

.

they're what it would

be made of if it were

a pendant round a neck.

.

Black absorbs, platinum

reflects. Just like the moon

at midnight when it genuflects.

Berlin

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https://youtu.be/g-di1RH4VAo

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Every country brings its children up

imprisoned by its nationality – ergo

every upbringing is strange: each nation

trains its trapped constituents to wrap

themselves in scratchy coverings

of fearsome premises and to consume

great quantities and sizes of infernal

truths that they’ll assume to be eternal.

Thus are we saddled, addled, reined in

like unwitting cattle into languages

and rules and other rude awakenings

against which we have no defense.

.

Hence, perhaps, why, going to Berlin,

where I would undergo the vaguest

whispered consequences of a place

so riddled with its privacies, so rattled

with its rage at having to feel shame

about itself, I couldn’t blame it for not

being anything whoever wasn’t German

could quite name. It’s the country’s capitol,

and yet succeeds in failing to cajole

a single soul into rejoicing in its economic

boom and bloom: there isn’t room

for praise: only blurry memories of days

.

the city can’t re-live. But I wondered

at how any country can forgive itself,

or sieve the poison out of cells it’s

irremediably stained with its inevitable

sins. For it’s not only Germany that presses

into hearts to darken them: harken to

our own beleaguered pasts and presents:

the then’s and now’s of us that bear the scars

of the interment, torture, murder

of the body and the soul to which America

remanded untold numbers of the human

beings it held captive: people it enslaved.

.

History entirely retains its mystery until we’re

able to breathe in the acid tendril scents

it always will have left of any flesh it’s burned.

On such horrors have our nations turned.

Berlin is more than sin, more than it’s taken in;

the USA construes a way to kindness,

sometimes, and to something strongly felt

as freedom. But neither one has solved

the oddity of being human in great masses,

or how to lead them into breathing unity –

or who can’t seem not to divide each

other into classes born of the belief that

.

one’s self-evidently better than another.

For that, perhaps, we’d all have had

to have the same exhausted mother we

could love and who’d love us. Into

what world, though, would that great

strained enormity shove us? A lineage

of disciplined Queen Bees, producing

billions of identical small you’s and me’s.

Immune to difference or strife:

Is that a life that would appease?

Or must life tend to us, and bend us

into terrible impossibilities, from which,

.

at moments, some transcendent loveliness

might find a way to scent the breeze?

Is all that’s open to my human brain

the idiocies of its fantasies? If there’s

an end to this, who could know or see it?

Much less be it? And still I wait to smell

the roses – no, I lie. I’d rather smell

the sweat. Oh yes, it’s sweat I crave

to smell. The sweat of human forcefulness

all siphoned into bodies into sex. Can

a heaven make provision for a hell?

Would that cast or break the spell?

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Mug Shot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5t9z6UfGX0

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If I’d had a lover he would not remain. 

Queasily quickly, he’d crash in my brain, 

and leave my unusable body behind.

How abashed I become when I find

.

myself so un-atoned-for – undeboned

and undrained, maligned and disowned,

retaining what’s left like a hat on my head,

papered with love notes, handwritten and dead.

.

Still I am beautiful in some odd ways.

All my indolent insolences are arrays

of a neophyte painter’s attempts at self-portraits,

fatigue in the Art Students League: now a fortress

of family stories I have second-hand:

my father and mother met there, made a stand

to live out their fragilities into the night

of their lives, into which I arrived, a sight

to behold which no one beheld, at any rate

not in the manner to which I’d thought Fate

would supply. Even my name is awry:

A cypher, a stooge, an irregular regular Guy.

The problem, a small one: imagining “I”

has much business with “me.” They fly

in the face of whatever has labeled them.

Notes I have written on Guy? I’ve tabled them.

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Hera and Zeus

https://youtu.be/PiEcmwZTpOo

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(with thanks to Rick Shupper)
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And as we all well know, it's only Hera's

touch that we can count upon to quash our terrors

when we think of all the awful careless errors

.

all too frequently committed in the name of Zeus

when, after far too much ambrosia, he'd be on the loose -

applying tasteless changes to the graceful spruce,

.

spreading as if virally to every other fir tree. The nugatory

waste of Zeus insensibly marauding into every category

of the living plants! -- particularly that of Morning Glory

.

which in Hera's hands inevitably realized the true divine,

especially in lavender or violet or purple-blue, the fine

revealing sensibilities of which are infinitely out of line

.

with Zeus's bad-boy tactical attack: to cast a ghastly spell

which could oppose the foolish acts of Hera, and dispel

all mortal hope: his Morning Glories looked like hell.

.

So how his rages must have burst

when he again discovered the accursed

finality of the reality that Hera got here first.

.

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Checking In with my Singing Voice

Checking in with my singing voice has become an interesting venture - it’s as if what this voice demonstrates is, despite my having (I suppose) to accept that is the product of my body, created by my lungs, mouth, throat, musculature, brainfunction, hearing, that it finally is a quite separate autonomous creation of my body - my voice, like any thought, proceeds from me but it is not me: the collaboration it makes with the breathing fleshly apparatus upon which it depends is subtle and strange: I know what I think I want of it but it has its own agenda. When I become close to thoroughly pleased with it, it’s because it feels full of unexpected magic. Body and voice collaborate at their best when both insist on achieving their individual aims - then they become an actual instrument. The faculty of ‘intention’ becomes then a mix of mind and what feels like chance but what may actually be my voice holding out through all of the body's machinations (physical and emotional and possibly mystical) for the sound and feeling it wants to have and be. Then sometimes for a whole evening it can come close to what both flesh and it yearn to be together. But even then it’s always the oddest balance, alive with misconstruing, electric with misunderstanding, hot with ambivalence - all of that creating a trembling unity, a center that cannot hold, though somehow is holding anyway and co-achieving the vibrato and shaped notes and very human feelings that they each either can live with or exult in. In the best moments these co-achievers (body and voice) are by far more exultant than merely accepting, thrilled at having come as close as possible to a goal that satisfies both. But how fragile and fleeting an achievement it is!

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The two songs I just recorded tonight - Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Summertime - bear witness to this co-achieved fragile exultancy. This is not to say that they're by some outside measure "good" or "bad" - that's up to whoever listens to them. Only that they became something close to what they wanted to be.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

https://youtu.be/AwKrq9Ceggs

Summertime

https://youtu.be/tteytHtKgsU

Getting Down to Essence

for Richard, on his 79^th Birthday

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https://youtu.be/eaSF7GsEigE

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“Getting down to essence” is a topic you have

taught me lessons in, an intricate curriculum

qui tournaient toutes les pages de ma vie

quotidienne – or so in French I think as we sit

.

in Le Pain Quotidien, lessons I’m quite sure that

you’ve no inkling you have given me: lessons

that have riven me into more pieces than it

would be provident to count: extremities I can’t

.

surmount of self and being that you now see

splayed across this screen, seen in the scene

of that café – you on your iPhone to Toru, me

a scribbled tone poem, silly rhyme and rhythm,

.

riding schisms that obtain between our old

endearing brains, a landscape of two bumber-

shoots – erroneous, felonious – harmoniously

blabbing, acting, dreaming, fearing, mourning,

.

loving, laughing until we can’t breathe, with no

defense against the seethings of complexity

that somehow, now, seem less to vex me

than to leaven me, voici, ici au Pain Quotidien:

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as on tap with Essence as our Boycat or

our Girlcat, and as pretty and as witty and as fat

as Kitty – all of us in the enlarging lap of all

the days and years that were our daily bread.

.

To learn to get down to an essence will instruct

us how to get ahead: a process of exfoliation,

dropping all the mishegoss, stopping all the folderol,

throwing out the hems and haws so we might

.

finally inhale far less impeded air: a time now

to release – rewrite the laws! Blessed because

we’ve wisely taken care to see there’s less

we need to think about. But all the lessons you

.

have taught me teach there is no less, there’s

only more. Life is Life Galore! Essence only knows

abandon. Essence never lessens, it expands.

I’ve felt that from your heart, seen it in your hands.

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