I write a poem a day (sometimes two). So far, just for the eyes of a hand-picked long-suffering group of friends and acquaintances who've expressed an interest in seeing them. Now I'm going to experiment, day by day, by posting what I write here as well. Probably all you need to know about me you'll find by googling on "Guy Kettelhack."
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%22Guy+Kettelhack%22&btnG=Google+Search
Otherwise, check in, as you'd like, to see whatever it is I do. Might provide the occasional entertaining distraction.
cheers,
Guy Kettelhack
December 31, 2006
I Won't Take No for an Answer
I won't take no for an answer. But nor will I trust yes.
What will I take for an answer – an educated
guess? Not unless what feeds the blind surmise has
some relation to what human eyes have seen
peripherally – on the sly. I'll listen to the lone reply
which, passing, nods to the overt but readily cavorts
with the covert: whose sense is dense, and never
offers recompense to expectation: tinted with
a hint but otherwise is full of wanton cry. I'll heed
the banshee wail whose note is hard to tell from
wind in sail: the herald who proclaims an arbitrary list
of names as if each had precisely equal meaning:
leaning towards whatever momentary spurt of motion’s
just occurred: is spurred no less by void than it
avoids a cancer. That’s what I'll take for an answer.
December 30, 2006
When We're Done, We'll Clean It Up
Filigree and folderol of fantasy!
One wonders why one’s brain
appears synaptically inclined
to conjure up such dollops of
unnecessary goo. Put it on my
knee and wallop it is what I'd like
to do: kick its fat behind. But it would
just spray out like bits of gelatin or mercury
or tangle up like fishing line and nothing would be left
but ex post facto slime: fantasies occlude, and block: they
seek an ideology of shock: rude system to insure a thrill
no matter what must be endured: that we can make
the face of anything sublime if we would only,
for example, just imagine ourselves free
of space and time. They fester like
the promise of a meltdown:
dangerous in prospect
but benignant
in effect –
at least until
we help them splay into
the wreck of actuality. Maybe radio-
activity is what it’s all about: to twist and shout
and act our toxic natures out. If so, please understand it’s
for your good as well as mine to take my hand and do exactly what
I want. You be the queen, I'll ask wassup. When we're done, we'll clean it up.
December 29, 2006
My Evolving Fate
If it’s true that we too regularly misconstrue
one circumstance, event or situation as
more crucial than another, then it follows
that we ought to pay attention more than
virtually any of us do to everything: become
a lidless eye: no matter if we’re skidding off
a surface or spelunking into an unfathomable
deep: awake, asleep: there’s nothing up
or down or in or out that doesn’t warrant
the persistent clout of one’s rapt curiosity:
and so in the availing maelstrom of my local deli,
I just tossed an onion – sweet and red – into
a basket with two packages of fancy crackers
(garlic/salt): a kind Korean cashier rang it up,
and as if onions had aligned in Vegas slot
machines, the total was precisely five and
zero, zero: handed him a bill and it’s as if
the world stood still: “Imagine that, no change!”
said I, and he looked back at me as if he
knew we both aspired to the range of
receptivity afforded by that lidless eye. Well,
maybe not: he smiled, at least: and I released
into the day and found my way upstairs to my
refrigerator from which I retrieved a block
of cheese and went about the ministrations
(with a knife) that would result in onion, cheddar,
salt-and-garlic crackers in coordinated presence
on a plate: rife with probabilities, not least
of which is that I’d eat. And so I ate. And met
one meshed iota more of my evolving fate.
December 28, 2006
My Work
My day is odd and right: it’s full of stain
and covert light – obliquely angling
into corners I could never have foreseen:
sometimes voluptuously rolling onto satin –
dazzling sheen! - at others, tumbling
on a humbler surface, forest-green and
matte as felt: I am the billiard ball; my
day’s the stick: and I get regularly belted:
hit – careen and squall – then fall into
an untoward hole or two: I sort out red
from blue and choose the yellow –
for a while (yellow’s really not my style):
seek a stringency – and sex!: yes – let’s
investigate the body – look at all that meat! –
audacious gift! – tumescent pleasure! –
onward to the treasure! – which we find
by jumping off a cliff into the brine we’ve
left in sweat from humping backs and
butts and thighs: one way to move past
a surmise into a certainty is to employ
a craft – which I now build from fore to aft –
to take off into our effluvially fluent sea!:
without an anchor, fear of drowning, or
a rudder or an oar. You implore me: why
do I grind so much life and mind to quirk?
It is my work.
December 27, 2006
The Way I Think Things Are
Drunk leans on the chain link fence,
fingers clutching wire: stares into
the empty lot – as dense, expired
as heavy winter sky and town:
all sodden grayish brown.
He leers out at two plumped-up
pigeons squatting on the ground:
“Yo! Pretty mamas! Lookin’ fine!”
Pigeons blink – don't seem to mind.
I suspect that any Christ, who’s
asked to prove he’s God, would
look around him once or twice –
then throw his hands up: “Odd
you'd ask!” – then turn and sigh
and disappear – and leave it
up to us to figure out that
neither there nor here is any
cosmological inconsequence.
Nothing – from a pigeon,
drunk, or chain-link fence, up
to the brightest star – is not
a peerless avatar. As I squint
at the near and far, that’s
the way I think things are.
December 26, 2006
You Could Be Next
By now this neighborhood’s my home: its 1840s,
1880s, 1920s contours on McDougall, Sullivan
and Prince Streets – thick reflexive ornament
affixed according to their fashions’ mixed
assumptions and assertions: ramrod sniffy upper-
class to get-your-ass-here come-on crassness –
all have long outlived their first coercions: gently
settle in the gray December day as if they've
never cared much that they looked this way:
frowsy and complacent: older than whoever’s
walking by will ever be. I don't much care how
I look either as I take a breather from the holiday
and cross the highway of West Houston Street
en route to Greenwich Village: out to loot
and pillage for a poem: feel the urge but no
particularly vivid surge has yet occurred.
Then suddenly, I see what I have come to find:
a young man walking his white poodle passes by:
a dog who every sixth or seventh step leaps
straight up – on and off all fours – as if he were
a helicopter trying to take off – repeats the jump
again, again, and I cannot think when I've
seen a creature more transfixed by possibilities
of flight. I watch them walk and leap away
until they are completely out of sight. But
this just whets my appetite. I plan to pirate
something else from this unwitting city unaware:
Be careful lady! – I'm more daring than I look.
I'm out for something even stranger than
a leaping dog with no pretext. You could be next.
December 25, 2006
The Deal
I guess one thing I get about the deal
is its voluptuousness: layers, velvet
thicknesses, and lace: it wants to weave
complexity – encumber space – and more
than not succeeds: perhaps it answers
needs we don't address in the
for now: today we'll milk a brocade cow
and get crème fraiche, we'll kneel to ornate
painted figures in a crèche: like Henry James,
we cannot have too much. I guess one
thing I get about the deal is its propensity
to steel against the emptiness – and hoard –
and treat the solstice like the dangerous
phenomenon it is: the proof that darkness
can and will prevail, against which we
must raise a gilded cup and sing “Wassail!”
Right now, we know there is a banshee
wail deep in the heart of everything.
We guard against the dark, strike sparks,
and seek relief from night. One day we
know we'll lose: today we'll win, or might.
December 24, 2006
My Winter Blood
I've fostered an encounter
with an out-of-date mosquito:
thing has buzzed me every
night: I feel for that poor lonely
creature: wouldn't mind
surrendering my winter blood
to it: but so far he has not alit.
I wonder if one ever does –
alight, that is – I wonder what
he lives on: hope? Christmas
is the oddest time: like moping
through the marshland, leaky
hip-boots, through the reeds
among mosquitoes, bees:
paranoid that rabid otters will
attack: feeling out of whack.
Everybody seems to want
something. Low-grade chronic
expectations of disaster while
pretending to be happy: prone
to tears at manufactured memories:
constipatedly attempting to adore
oh-come-let-us-adore-him:
venerating sappy. I'm slogging
through the marshland, naked
now, determined to take on
whatever varmint wants a piece
of me: my fists are up, I will
not duck. The afternoon grows
long – and soon the night
will come and slumber on.
I can't recall what’s wrong.
December 23, 2006
I Suppose I Know
I'm really good at saying no, but I suppose I know
I will succumb – although the caverns I hide out
in until right before the things I've mightily resisted
once again have won are inaccessible to you:
don't try to tell me what to do. But oh! – the day
I've had. It’s Christmas – so the damned entirety
of everything insists – and I crept up from my dark
cave as if someone had stuck a sharp point of
a holly leaf into a voodoo doll that looked like me:
I zombied to the store and bought a dozen things
or more and made up little Christmas bags
of silly stuff to give to people I invited in a dazed
involuntary state to venture out with me into
the Christmas night. But worse: I scrubbed
the kitchen floor – and more: the bathroom sink
and tub and tiles and all the while the little artificial
tree I told myself this year I definitely wouldn't
drag out, put back on a bookcase, had escaped:
now there it is, its tiny lights a goading bit of evidence
I have not conquered anything. I draw the line:
I will not think about the holidays that used to make
some sense: the ones for which my mother was
the recompense: no carols will be sung. But probably
that’s dumb. I suppose I know I will succumb.
December 22, 2006
Just After Solstice
She says she can't abide it:
if only he would treat her like
the brilliant woman she would
like to think she is – and is,
or would be, if he'd only stop
harassing her poor psyche
for a moment – she'd foment
a very different order – be a very
different being: seeing would
be glorious as soon as she felt
loved. Instead she’s shoved
herself into a pit about as lovely
as the word I'm thinking of
that rhymes with it: all brown:
diseased. A shutter won't release:
she’s wedged into a crease
of suppurating dread inside
her head. She thinks she might
be better dead. As she aches
into the phone into my ear,
I look out at December
just after Solstice: twenty-second
of the month: a tiny bit more
day today than yesterday.
The light’s a sweet dove-gray.
I wonder it takes to learn
to love a day this way.
December 21, 2006
A Virus Pens a Poem
The time has come to write
an executed document –
corral it out of sight
until it has the shock you want:
the proper distribution
of aches – unkempt desires –
the ink a dark ablution
of body fluids: fires
of fever burn an even
slash across the page:
black hole you can believe in –
dimensions that will rage
you brutally into the new –
pro-rated over afternoons
of feeling sodden: screw
the consequences: moons
are all that matter now.
The time has come to write
and sign the thing: avow
your substance is the night.
December 20, 2006
Left it to Beaver
Every day, religiously, I come to leave it to old
“Beaver” reruns to inoculate, intoxicate like heroin:
with endless cool annulments of the worried mind:
just try to find a finer tailored calm example of this
medicine than June, the heroine, the mom! –
American aplomb without a limit or a barrier, low
voice like a deliberate repression of some bluesy
tune: blown to slightly smoky crystal kept from ever
shattering: a smattering of sleepiness without
one hint of sex. Each episode she murders Oedipus,
as son and rex: in every form of man who comes
to feed from her accomplished ruthless hand:
pious husband Ward – her boys: the ripening and
thwarted Wally and the cipher Beaver, talentless
and plain. Watching this is opening your toddler
mouth to a suburban rain whose density condenses
to a syrup: lick your fear up: drown it in this drugged
incarcerating wine! I lapped it up like policy and
prophesy when I was nine. Now it glazes me like
Mrs. Cleaver’s ham into an eerie, not unpleasant
stupefaction: baked and stunned and pink: supine.
December 19, 2006
Life Without a Mate
Cruel senile delinquent! That’s who
you will be. We'll find you naked in
the streets engaged in various untoward
activities involving marmosets, uncooked
spaghetti and a paper toweling tube.
You won't use lube. You'll be audacity.
But as you tabulate what specificity of
insight you can claim from the vicissitudes
of even your most ordinary interludes,
you feel constrained from obligation
to report: sex is not a finally availing sport,
and love’s a glimmer on the brain:
sustained precisely for as long as you
don't notice it: like air you'd choke on
if you realized you breathed. Alas – one
realizes that one breathes, and loves,
and though the air’s still there, the love,
once labeled, scares itself into a mist:
despite how ardently you may by anybody
have been kissed: gone – lost its dawn.
Look for play at this point in your dissolution
and the only kind that interests you’s
against the law. Like throwing random
punches at a stranger’s jaw. Husband?
Wife? Not your fate. Life without a mate?
One long blind date. Don't be sad. Given
most alternatives you know, it ain’t half bad.
December 18, 2006
Can't do Kant
He tells me I should pick up Kant.
I tell him, not right now, I can't.
Although I know Immanuel would boost
me - so would Plato, Seuss and Proust -
and other numberless smart cattle.
But I know I must pick each battle
and decide quite carefully myself
what next to take off from the shelf.
At some loss? Sure: but let's say I'm
too sure there's too damned little time.
-----------
Anyway
December cloudbank – moving
like a giant Chekhov stage-set over
unseen space: this great eruptive
and translucent mass – all pearl and
milk glass – with the sting of something
sour, darker, wilder streaking through it
more like hiss than lightning, but with
no less zap: all falls through semi-blinded
windows in my lap. Someone knocks:
who’s that? Christmas is a-comin’:
vacuousness getting fat: wide open –
and as gray as the impressive ambiguity
of this fine
any mote of it, and say: let’s stay –
and play – anyway. Go to blazes, holiday.
December 17, 2006
To the Bone
The world will not obey.
He cannot get his way.
It seems to me he doesn't
notice that ‘his way’ was never
really his, and that his only
profitable business is to find
a way that is. But who knows
if I'm right – and so what if I am.
“How to have a happy life?”
he asks. “Find the real –
ditch the sham?” As if I knew
the secret to reducing this
to tasks: could isolate the wings
and thorax of contentment like
a lepidopterist. I wish I were
an optimist – knew how to make
him laugh and sing – but I don't
know a half-a-thing. Scraped
down to the bone: "I love you,
honey – but like everybody
else, you're on your own."
December 16, 2006
Hush, little baby
don't you cry –
you know your mama's
bound to die –
(Bahamian lullaby - source for “All My Trials”)
Last Straw
She receded due to climate change. Each
life must ride a range of weather – undergo
its chronic revolution: strange precipitation,
involuted storms and seasons, winds and
drought – within, without: no pause. The end –
eroded: she could only drink through straws,
and with the morphine, sometimes barely
then. I think it’s fair to venture to suggest that
I was there as much as anyone who wasn't
sleeping could have been: although at night,
when I had gone to bed, I wonder what went
on inside her head – if she worried whether
there'd be light where she was going next.
No text for this, but there was Sprite, which –
long as it was icy – she quite liked. I bought
a plastic bag of straws, the kind that bend:
a hundred of them. She sipped through six.
More than three years later now, I just
discovered that I've evidently gone through
all the rest but one. Maybe it’s all nearly done.
December 15, 2006
Sort of Man I Am
Some say we are the Net of Indra –
diamonds linked in strands – all infinite
reflections of each other; or we are
a hologram – illusory projections
of the Super-real (in every atom of
the micro find the macro): or we’re both.
One of my favorite lunches when
I was a kid was Spam my mother slid
out from its can and sliced and fried
and put on toast – all salty, bland,
transmogrified: it glistened like an Indra’s
net of meat, a hologram of ham. Today
we zap spam to a cyber purgatory where,
perhaps, it waits to be imagined as
an Internet of jewels to serve to fool
the eye by mirroring a sourceless light.
I bet if you transmogri-fried me up
a portion of the Indra-netted night,
it wouldn’t taste unlike a hologram
of my mom’s Spam. (Sort of man I am.)
December 14, 2006
All the Many Middle Distances
Loosely coiled lengths – gently tangled stretches:
warm as the idea of mothers: light as breath
and bothersome as tinsel – always just a little
tang of sex: skeins of dream and memory and
expectation from which you might weave a season:
tied to too much in the past; you’d like, you think,
to cut yourself completely from their grasp
but that would sever you from any life you know.
Always the extremist, you are drawn to glows of
other Universes physicists inform you are suggested
by the particles they study: why do you hate
Christmas so? You wish the particles you saw
at least were snow: but they’re the motes that float
in all the many middle distances that you’ve
investigated, from your bed, since you were very
small. They don’t suggest another Universe at all.
December 13, 2006
My Quarks and Leptons
Deviously powerful, unfathomably small –
my quarks and leptons stage revolts –
effecting showerfuls of rude unlikely
transformations, they defy the rules that
govern large and lumpen me: I am to them
as several billion miles of sky would be
to one pore on your skinny knee. And while
they’re playing wild and free – far from
the unimaginably huge environs of my
human potpourri – in all their weightless
idiosyncrasy (where they’ve the luxury to be,
and sometimes not to be) – I suffer
from Newtonian gravity that pulls from
every nasal cavity a substance not unlike
slime mold. My leptons, quarks could give
a flying you-know-what I’ve got a cold.
December 12, 2006
Happiness
My ears were full of pressure, Sunday,
off the plane at Kennedy – ‘til one by one,
in a cascade, their tiny packets popped
and riffled – just a block away from where
I live. At first the ripples seemed external:
as if keys I’d taken from my pocket had
cartoonishly and audibly awakened – were
reporting on their happiness at coming
home: I didn’t understand that quarters
of the many-chambered dome that holds
my brain had just, on my behalf, contrived
to clear my otic path of aural foam: implicitly
suggesting that they wouldn’t, for the moment,
let me down: they’d keep this sensory
appurtenance in check – since I had kept
my bargain to return to our beloved town.
December 11, 2006
Life, Sliced
Today my slice of life is buttered with a cold –
and lower back ache: not a bad cold, not a bad
ache, but enough to let me know today’s
repast won't be a piece of cake. There’s texture,
though, in tiny crags and crannies of my thick
and thin perceptions – little pockets of distress
fill up, let go, fill up, let go – seltzer bubbles
popping in my head. Abundant grays – like
unsuspected planes in 1940s film noir faces –
paint my space. It’s not a feeling you could label
good or bad – though has a certain grace. I take
some Ibuprofen, lie down: listen to the radio play
rounds of
to leave to take the subway to the upper west side
cat I tend. Entrained, everybody else’s slice
of life seems plain. A frowning Buddhist monk,
enrobed in brown – does he have hemorrhoids?
(he squirms so in his seat!) – two Mexicans sit
next to him with thick black glossy hair in peaks –
like Mayan icons loosed from a relief: the pews
are filled in subway church today: and everyone
appears to be preoccupied with his or her particular
and separate array, display and curds and whey.
I get off at my stop, and see the cat, who howls
with loneliness – I feed him, hug him, leave him –
then, while walking back, up
I see a man whose slice of life is clearly far more
complicated than my own: like a Dürer etching,
he is thick with line and shadow, matted beard
and shiny balding pate, and pushes an amazing
shopping cart filled to the brim like Santa’s
sleigh with bulging bags of stuff, which wobbles
this way, that way: cornucopia of desolation.
He nods politely to me as he wheels and teeters
by – and each of us gets closer to a destination.
December 10, 2006
This is a Test
Four-twenty-five p.m. –
eleventh of December.