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.
and just ahead. Invest in
the gradations of their muted
ash-blue silhouettes. Note
the wash of conch-shell
blush insinuating into nameless
flaming as it spreads out to
the west. Take a breath. Make
yourself believe that all this puts
the lie to death. Do your best.
December 9, 2006
Frail Outpost
In the notebook that I kept in
more than a year ago; and now, as I look
out a window over Otter Creek in Middlebury
(cold
lamb kurma and paratha - at "The Taste of India" -
surreal frail outpost here!; surveying granite
arches of an 1890s bridge - gunmetal-rushing
water underneath en route to memories of mills,
my own amalgam private recollections spill
through similarly strange, unlikely channels:
to the ambient peculiarities of place - a taste
of cardamom - clear maple syrup - scented
with my first presentiments of sex - and
D.H. Lawrence, Keats and Wordsworth -
overlay of ghostly chatter, chatter, chatter -
adolescent pecking-order - theme: who am I
in this scheme? I was twenty, here, at college;
now I'm fifty-five, and in the intervening while,
I've gained no greater knowledge of
the meaning of "alive" - except to say that
I suspect it's odder than I knew. But I'll do
what I know: walk (carefully, in
loafers, on the icy slick) into this crystal gray
conundrum-day to see what else awaits
me in its thick and softly obfuscating snow.
December 8, 2006
“How could one moment be better than any other?
There's only ever one moment.” (email to a friend.)
Offered everything I wanted on a platter,
I wonder: what would matter?
Is it a wise idea
to query why one cleaves to one especial fear
in some respects
and re-directs
insouciantly with regard to others?
Can one determine what derives from mothers,
brothers, fathers, sisters, lovers – how it sticks – and why?
Is there an answer to an “I”?
The more I look into what I have labeled soul
the less I’m able to account for how or why it’s whole.
I can’t stop tabulating and assessing heads and hearts.
I don’t believe that we are more than the summation of our parts.
But how to square our facts with love and death and history?
Silly mystery.
Sometimes I wish that I believed all was façade.
Instead of God.
December 7, 2006
Handsome Chatter
My lack of handsome chatter was the matter!
How ardently I dreamed that I might one day
effortlessly, elegantly deliquesce into an eloquence:
a suave array of words – as fleet and sweet as
birds: replete with casually cultivated pith and style –
like Mrs. Parker, Mr. Wilde. But my diphthongs
couldn't get a fix: I sounded like a riled barker
spitting bits of broken bricks – no butter in a stutter.
I played the violin to compensate – then drank
and drugged to medicate – placate the savages
among the sissies in my tongue that razzed me
mercilessly – as they'd done since I was very young.
I lionized whoever could pronounce and pounce:
I cowered, praying that one ounce of what they
had might fall my way. ‘Til one day I forgot, and
something fell like coins into a slot, and suddenly
I found that I had all the wherewithal that they had:
I could dare. Where this came from, I don't know –
and what a joy to notice that I don't much care.
December 6, 2006
How are you?
You mean: how have I come to be? –
to manifest this momentary me?
What a brilliant suggestion implied
in the question! – to proffer a ‘how’ to
an ‘are’ and a ‘you’ – conjugate a ‘to be’
into that which would seek to illuminate ‘me’
not through ‘why,’ ‘what’ or ‘where’ –
but in surely that most efficacious, pragmatic
of queries: the one with the best chance
of meeting and then superseding one’s
most existentially troublesome worries,
and truly arriving at now: a ‘how!’ Best word
in the world! My spirit ingests it and spins:
having swirled, it and I ache to offer
a whole lovely wow of an answer to you.
But we haven’t a clue.
December 5, 2006
Left-Handed and Ironic
“…– locked behind mirrors in his study, his secret heroes
ragging round the fire, Death swots ungraceful, keen on his
career; notes in his journal ‘I have never lived – left-handed
and ironic, but have loved.’ W.H. Auden, p. 49, The Orators
Consummation – devoutly to be wished – this
slippery evasion: to let the yearning be its own
reward – less grasping-after than a moving-toward –
the slick of skin wet with its own effusive sweat –
available and so remote: to have the cherry
blossom at its moment of perfection – halved as
silky-bit-of-thing and nonexistent float: to know that
it’s right there, in front of you – and doubt down
to your mitochondria that it was here at all: a recipe
for Satan’s fall: right-of-passage torture: spice has
staled, no zap: no stirring in your lap; without
direction, soul seeks only insurrection. Little’s left
in sex or touch, and Art succeeds about as much.
Certainty’s gone through the sieve. “Left-handed
and ironic”: have you loved or lived? Push comes
to shove; you couldn’t say. You wonder if there’s
half a silky-bit-of-thing and half a nonexistent
float – in whose way you might drift one day.
December 4, 2006
A Necessary Mess
An anguish and an injury
repeated like a drumbeat
in the head and in the heart:
but how do you decide what
part to put the scalpel to?
What makes you know you're
home, and what would turn
you out into the cold? Slice
this slender tendon, cut that
wriggling bit of flesh, and
you risk mangling the best.
You are a necessary mess.
December 3, 2006
You tear and eat
my clean white flesh.
This is no place
for tenderness.
You do it to me
every day:
and I come back
for more. The way
I grovel at
your knees delights,
disgusts.
A feral feline fights
the way you do –
or would if it
were not enamored
of that gristled bit
of heart you seem
to have to chew
each morning like
a rodent: you
once drained my root
each weekend
like a breast: now
I’m the weak end
of the bargain: left
with consequences.
I’m the flipside of
a luminescence –
disciplined –
resigned: I park
my flesh each day
back in the dark
of our remembered
lust, undressed. I guess
it never was
a place for tenderness.
December 2, 2006
Father Bob
What was it about God that got him?
Me, I'm like an insect: popping,
skittish, bug-eyed – start at every
flash and blip and bop: “no not that!
no not that! no not that!” – he, well,
maybe he required capitals - a He
to make him think that it was possible
to see without revolting. I don't know:
maybe God’s a jolt he needed like
a drug: as hot and sexual as some
big-dicked rapacious thug who keeps
surprising with his tenderness: a potent
father without fatal Oedipal percussive
bother. My brother was a priest:
he took to it like bacon takes to grease.
He’s dead now – died of AIDS:
whom did he meet when he fell
off the page? My life’s a cookbook –
I'm an insect seeking dinner: can't
wield salad spinners very well: you try
to cook an omelet with these tiny legs!
I am an insect: done with eating:
waiting to evolve. I pop and blast and
blither: envious of corks and other
floating things. What brings my
brother back to me right now? Kyrie
Eleison – Christe Eleison – Kyrie Eleison:
doggies bay beneath the moon: bring
my great divine big brother back: too
soon the mercy stops. I am an insect:
popping, skittish, bug-eyed – start
at every flash and blip and bop.
December 1. 2006
Heavy Sledding
Bear the weight. Make sense of the accruing fat
immensity. Almost all the energy goes up, gets
trapped, then spent, within the cul-de-sac of cranium:
the brainy underworld. Thick as porridge, preternaturally
wrong – like these November and December days
that shouldn’t be, sixty-six degrees but doesn’t feel
like spring – unpalatably warmed potato salad –
gunk – too late for any picnic: funked – dispiriting –
a thickness – wrongly left; bereft of strident and incisive
and relieving cold. ‘Shouldn’t be’ is ‘be,’ it’s only
we who can’t align discomfort with what we’d prefer.
So I defer, again – when don’t I? – to the grind of mud’s
undoing; stewing in the wrongful ‘til it starts appearing
right – ‘til ‘lose’ takes on the vagaries of ‘find.’ It’s
what I have to do to slide behind the guiding mind.
November 30, 2006
Give it to Him Whole
Depict it! Thunder with significance – you nervous
sparrow on a picket fence – you fifty-minute silence
in a glacial psychoanalytic session: justify that
facial tic – that tiny twitter of expression: what’s that
half-lit smile, that artificial glossy guile – part stiff,
part sad: you get that from your dad? Nail that
damning rhyme that plagues you all the time: kick it
in the assonance. Don't take sass from your first
memory of crying, diapered, in the grass: pass
it on like Kleenex to that crazed black man who’s
cursing his synapses – spitting his Tourettes out in
the subway – leather cabbie cap on backwards:
looks good, doesn't he? Wasn't he the scary fucker
coming after you in last night’s dream – the one at
whom you tried to scream but couldn't? Wouldn't he
look fine reclining next to you in bed, about to nuzzle
sleepily into your armpit with his sweet warm head?
You'd watch him take a sip – lick your needless
nipple, feel the ripple through what one might just
as well call “soul.” You would give it to him whole.
November 29, 2006
Lunch Break from Court
Grim giant buildings house the
courts – not much in their gray-brown downtown
interment to disport with: “God,” alleges every
chamber in stripped barren font, is “whom we
trust,” but where, I wonder, have they hidden God?
Can't find much bright divinity in all that plod.
And so, on break, we wander off to get a little fat –
to the periphery of
for dim sum lunch: a bunch of goldfish – maybe
forty – swim and spread behind my head in
an aquarium that first I do not see: until I'm told
by my companion that they've banked up to
the angle of their tank that’s nearest me – a corner
that abuts my skull – as close to where I'm sitting
as they possibly can get and still be wet – in hope,
it would appear, that I might start remitting
fish food from my ear. I turn around to see their
goggle eyes, surprised and stupid, in the frank
surmise that I am there for them. I'd like to be, but
I'm as bleak and far as
City court: can't feed or make them free. Poor
bug-eyed carp: like us, they want far more than
hollow justice. Swallowed bubbles pop like
empty promises – not sweet arpeggiating harp.
November 28, 2006
Oh!
I dreamed I slashed across this world –
a bold exasperation: made all evanescent
subtleties configure into slapstick: was
as brutal as a punch, a kick, as cunning
as a hunch, and picked my way through
rubble to persist as more than anybody
ought to be: oh, you’d have fought to see
me in my glory, wondered what on Earth
could be my story – then succumbed to age
content in having spent your wages on my
show – to watch me fly and flame beyond
all sense and shame – in hope that one day
other human beings might transcend their
tawdry state as humming beans – achieve
a half-percent of what I managed to leave
trembling on the beach: a live detritus of
rhymed tiny creatures dancing in the lapping
surf: oh, you’d have kissed each spot of turf
my golden feet left prints on – cherished
all the glints on tears shed in remembrance
of astonishingly dreamed-up me. A scheme
for which you might admonish me, now,
here, awake, half-baked. But oh! – it’s nice
to feel a psychic quake and see it through.
Go to sleep and see if you can do it, too.
November 27, 2006
I have only one object in writing books: to demonstrate that there could not be anyone to do it.
"The Tenth Man" Wei Wu Wei
Strictly Speaking
Everything’s impossible –
that’s the end of that.
Every proof’s a spoof
of proof. We think we're
sure we know how two
limbs link, bear weight,
perambulate. But their
availing joints defeat
arriving at an even
slightly satisfactory
explanatory point. Go
beyond your monkey brain
to ponder why a limb exists
at all – or how on Earth
or elsewhere it acquired
its kinetic call. Easy
to predict an end within
parameters you've set:
clever, tight and formal.
But ask a gluon, quark
or graviton what’s
normal. Might make
one thing clear. You are
not inarguably here.
November 26, 2006
Family Fare
On a guilt-ridden couch in
a
can obliquely replenish the soul:
this is family fare so I don't
dare detail all the uplift and drain –
all the prizes and losses
I stole and I gained in pursuit
of the glory of loving the Male –
all the dark stealthy care,
and suburban despair: these
audacious, salacious and
risible facts I shall render here
flatly – cold – in the abstract:
every stab that betrayed – each
caress that arrayed yet more
flesh into taboo allure and
appeal – makes me sure that
the body is wed to itself in a pure
state of knowing and dealing
and possibly healing – beyond
what my mother, alive, ever would
have revealed. After she died,
I had sex ‘til I cried: this is family
fare – but you can guess where.
November 25, 2006
Nightly Knitting Party
Perhaps to knit a raveled sleeve of dream
I woke up speaking: might have screamed,
I guess, had I been in a nightmare, but
my sleep has cosseted me for a while
and nightmares don't appear to be my style.
I can't remember what I said; but it was odd
to hear my vocal cords make contact with
my dream self as I came to in my bed. It now
occurs to me to think, and say, that what
sinks in each night must always carry into
day – I'm just not usually aware what way.
I entertain the interesting alluring notion that
the conscious air that lies above my sleeping
ocean may be made exactly of the same
component stuff. The psyche never doesn't
have enough – the problem’s not too little or
too much. The weave in my imagination’s
where I sometimes lose my touch. I now take
this as manifesto: make the night a festival
of dream and speech – encourage each
to flirt with what’s beyond the other’s reach.
November 24, 2006
“…you the quicksand and sand and grass
as I wave toward you freely
the ego-ridden sea
there is a light there that neither
of us will obscure….”
Frank O’Hara –
from Ode to Michael Goldberg(‘s Birth and Other Births)
Ballad of Invisibility
I sing to you: suggest that we
pretend we don’t exist –
push past the ego-ridden sea –
then, fully, not resist –
give in ‘til we can tolerate
the possibility
that if we’re here, we’re ready bait –
a pure utility
for others to slip on a hook –
an aid to catching fish –
not worth more than the briefest look –
a means to some new dish
which we won’t ever get to taste:
a purpose so arcane
so free of time and glow and space
it stumps the human brain –
to grasp that though we’re barely seen
or felt – less than a breeze –
so modest and demure of mien
we neither peeve nor please –
within this free soft floating state
we may gain mind to find
the lowdown on Existence’ fate –
and God’s, and ours – combined.
November 23, 2006
Truth is
Truth is, you've ruined me for
other men. Zoos of masculinity,
testosteroned to fare-thee-well’s
and howdy-do’s, could not induce
me to abuse myself one whit on their
behalf: you are the only fatted calf
I want. You bear the brunt of,
then surpass, whatever fantasies
I may contrive: you are too bountifully
alive for me to turn from you –
addictive stew of stuff! – you are, alas,
enough: too much. I've lost my touch
because of you, you glue, you
tunnel view. If only I could say adieu
to you. But I am stuck in all your
fragrant muck, and must make do.
November 22, 2006
Pillow Dreams
I have ten pillows on my bed: two are thin
and flat; two are wide and fat: two – small
feathered plumps I plop and lump into soft
clotted clumps beneath my head like stiff-whipped
cream: three are ‘throw,’ faux-velvet green:
one is small and oblong – satin-sheened,
and burgundy. Spread beside and under me in
various configurations, they're like parts of speech,
I've come to think, for which my dreaming
lingual spirit reaches to concoct its picaresque
inventions: green verbs, red nouns,
blue conjunctions, taken from a slew of dictionary
mixtures: harvested from vaster lexicons than
mine. They seem to know I've figured out their
kind, and practices: each night, now, when I settle
into them, before I start to fracture into mist,
I proffer my night’s wish list: ask my pillows
to provide me with a certain length of reverie:
and dare suggest the sorts of stories I like best.
Custom-tailored hells and heavens now regale me
through my sleep in two- to three-hour segments
so – between my pillows’ angels, devils and
their deep blue sea – I might get up to pee.
This is as close as I can get to dreaming lucidly.
November 21, 2006
Here’s how I’d define the thing:
it doesn't have to entertain or sing,
although it mustn't bore. It mustn't
not suffice, and mustn't not deposit
you into a state of wanting more.
It mustn't not delight and mustn't not
unnerve, and if it serves up double-
negatives, it mustn't not confuse
a little. Mustn't not be visceral as
spittle; mustn't not be fully mouthed;
mustn't not allow the possibility of
getting lost and feeling found. Mustn't
not amend an error; mustn't not be this:
the only way, today, that you can find
to say exactly everything you know
about your terror and your bliss.
November 20, 2006
And yet
Volatile ejaculates – tears rising from
erections of the heart, stiff refusals to
take part. No fashionable rationale avails:
no easy mantra cuts the wail. It isn’t
even really about him – it isn’t even really
about death – although it also is, it also
is about him and his death – and Death
in whose cold rotting orifice your face has
more than once been thrust. No pretty
way to say it. No words to say. And yet.
November 19, 2006
Prospects of Enlightenment
Just now I caught some gold:
soft orange kitten’s fur: I found her
nestling in the folds of blanket
on my bed: she was as tiny as
a mole, and cried profusely to be
fed three heart-shaped chocolate-
covered jam-infused small cookies
made of gingerbread: I broke them
up and felt her needle teeth,
sandpaper tongue eat crumbs of
them off both my thumbs: her purr
grew faint as she decreased to
the minute dimensions of a fuzzy
burr: some spiky little thing off scrub-
brush in
tawny mesa – burr’s a burro, whom
I beg to drag a blanket towards
my nakedness – but won’t.
Is this enough? So full of stuff.
Prospects of enlightenment seem
shot. But dreams are all I’ve got.
November 18, 2006
Boredom
How is
it possible?
Twenty-one and bored.
It must be this: life's smorgasbord
of provocations is a hierarchy: one-upmanship
of stimuli: no, need a higher high! Gold
is never good enough.
The Universe is
made of stuff.
Need more.
Now that's
a bore.
--------------------------
Struck
Surging up from some appalling
well – bursting from a cell –
like some horrific liquid crystal
skull – awful dome of psychic sea,
pellucidly emergent – nightmare gray –
yet glassy-clear as day, mid-November
day – sickeningly-warm-at-core
November day: has its viral way
with everything it lurches toward,
and through: you never were
depressed before; you didn’t know
the meaning of the word; but now
in this resurgent swell, this upwelling
from somewhere next to hell,
you taste an acrid salt – the sea
assaults your temple: presses – simple,
fatal, terrible and clear: a friend, once
here, is gone: once near, is now
unfathomably far. Killed in a car.
Struck: stark: impenetrable dark.
November 17, 2006
"
It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure
there is not a certain impudence in pretending to add
anything to it...." Henry James, Italian Hours
A Certain Impudence
All’s fair in the pursuit of profit. Aggrandize souls,
or bank accounts: we hunger for unthinkable
amounts: we’re profligately bound to excess:
lungs would have infinities of air – some hearts
won’t thrive without tsunamis of despair –
or joy – or cold indifference. Henry James ate
smorgasbords of these – and more: he bet
his wits that flesh from word was an inevitable
alchemy. He knew soft portals through to, out of,
and back into mortal life.
all her endless meshing twisting capillaries found
reflection in his kind and cruel inscrutabilities.
Maestro: how, with your prodigious appetite
for all our indecipherable bits, could you let death
erase your breath? Why should you have ceased
to speak? If ever anyone might be expected to
report from Purgatory’s point-of-view, it would be
you. Perhaps you do. Heed these cool November
whispers – bursting, soft beyond a curtain:
simpered: dense. They have a certain impudence.
November 16, 2006
Anxiety of Influence
You flip through poems, wonder why
so many seem so wussy. Frank
O’Hara was no pussy: whipped up
scripts at lunch and left a bunch to
woo you, maybe: didn't matter if they
did. Fun was in the pump and dump.
You ache, you think, for finer cake: for
brand new batter: baked from scratch.
But you're more like a boxing match
than cook. Look: fingers jab on keys:
each a punch that either misses
or relieves some Notion of its wits.
Syllables-in-spasm: hit them hard enough,
they'll chase you off the mat, jump
pit and chasm ‘til they get you back.
Every poem is a record of precisely
what you lack. Locked – full of doubt:
knocked out. You search your mother’s
cloudy paintings for a clue: but they
withhold: more false than true. Senses
bog. Won't settle for her pretty fog.
November 15, 2006
Salted Fish
Today you’ve tried to net
a tide of syllables and set
each one aside out flat
to dry like salted fish:
hope to keep them in
the baking sun until they
finally succumb, stop stinking,
you stop thinking, and
the Universe starts winking
at you as if you were
closer than you’ll ever be
to understanding anything.
November 14, 2006
Reflecting on My Mother
My life made her spin –
hers left me in doubt:
she saw me in,
I saw her out.
---------
Today
Drafty corridors, familiar streets of mind:
you think you’ve seen them all before:
you’re drawn back to the contours you
have known: a comfort in their feel; as if
you’ve grown them, own them, can with no
particular distress or effort conjure up
the ‘real’ – its smell and taste and song:
and yes, you can: and yes, the man
assembled from these quantities and
qualities does not acutely long for anything:
the many things that constitute identity
at times like these appease the merest tug:
look in the mirror at your mug; appreciate
through this amenity a firm and sweet
serenity: acceptance past the need to
analyze: perhaps a life of sighs, not quite
contented, but preventing much surmise
beyond the comfortable cage. Dry tinder
for an unsuspected rage. Today desire
will hit you like a fire, and all will burn to ash.
Don’t worry: something will be left, and last.
November 13, 2006
You-probably-would-rather-not-know-what
It’s gotten strange. I far prefer the range of what my mind
provides each night when waking consciousness subsides:
you think I rhyme too much in poetry? – ha! – see and hear
the flow-and-whee of all my stream-of-dreaming plots and
scheming; not a lot to measure sense with: more what one
might well decide in waking minutes to dispense with: sluicing
outtakes from the mad sad ghost of Dr. Seuss: a kind of noose,
one surely ought to think, for anything worthwhile: a wily pile
of patchwork swatches jerk and latch to choo-choo trains
of loose associations: solos in a phalanx through a tunnel of
connecting colons mass into a chorus singing songs of sophistry,
apocalypse, with drugged fat parting lips awaiting entry
of you-probably-would-rather-not-know-what. Just the sort
of scene, deliciously, though absently, that you imagine might
erupt into the confines of a funeral or turkey dinner or political
convention: belittling pretension in abrupt hard celebration
of precisely nothing. Then, of course, I wake, these lovely
prospects flake: I’m back in cool and rude vicissitudes I’d left
so willingly the night before. I look for all my effortlessly
thrilling heffernüsses, but: they’ve all snuck out the door.
November 12, 2006
Ode to ‘Coffee-mate’
This silken gloss of Coffee-mate:
who knew? The sort of additive
a finer temperament than mine would
probably eschew – but I derive such
pleasure from its ersatz powdered
cream: its cloudy softness sings:
suggests that coffee and the world
might be a potable and habitable dream:
as sweet and blithe as marshmallow
and sap: no more that snide and awful
trap – the harsh and shallow ledge –
of living in ‘reality’: as I sit swallowing
my Coffee-mated caffeinated treat –
Perception’s edge seems more
like privilege: a royal gift deployed
to make sure I enjoy the lift of life:
an antidote to strife. Non-dairy creamer,
you resolve resistance: slide. With you,
all aspects of Existence seem to
want to dream, dissolve and glide.
November 11, 2006
… Interruptus
Mindful of objections from the megalopolis,
I climb and creep out from the top back
window of my basement, tiptoe through
the predawn chill and tip my Ego-cup to spill
a precious essence into cracks and crannies
of the edifices and contrivances in Superego's
twisted cobbled streets – until Id seeps into
the ground to found a tiny dynasty of phallic
roots and hungry mouths that lick and nibble
hidden sweets, gain strength and swivel south
down into heavy soil whose weight compresses
them to oil; I feel their thickened slickness
lose to gravity all former traces of a city
quickness, suavity – and heat up, slow and
far beneath the cup from which they poured,
to garner force progressing to atrocity:
ferocity: my slag has turned to magma, rising
through the gorge: about to forge a Universe,
split rock and turn it into dream, create
a palpable Eternity from pornographic steam,
I'm just about to scream when – I awake, quake
turns to sigh, and I experience again the full
humiliating dumb travail of being male – and
taste the void of all those words by Freud.
November 10, 2006
Just One Word for You
Some days you wake up
loud. As if the crowd
of creatures that you call
a self decides collectively
it must come tumbling
off the shelf – right now –
to stomp and kick and
rumble: bumbling, hooting,
shooting off their mouths –
growling, prowling like
a bunch of soused and horny
fratboys: hit the mat boys,
fight it out amongst yourselves:
and so they do, but there’s
a toll on you: your social
graces all get black and blue:
your couth has gone
the way that hardballs
went when batted by
George Herman Ruth:
whomped beyond civility into
hostility: you’re stumped.
You’d best repair to somewhere
locked and isolated ‘til you’ve
found a way to creep on top
and over this untidy hump.
Til then? There’s just
one word for you. Taboo.
November 9, 2006
Covert Sex in Sacred Places
It’s
easy
to be middle-
class and Buddhist.
If you've got stuff you can
luxuriate in the fantasy of letting it
go. Harder to love the monkey god! –
jumping out of shadow-corners, beating
time and stroking body parts.
Spunky hunk: you know
feelings have lives
of their own,
and you
don't
give
a funk.
The love
I'm thinking of
is not like you, though
Lord knows you
occasion
it.
November 8, 2006
What I Call Guy
One wonders if one’s wonderment is never
not drawn to familiar themes: if all we know
to write and play is music that evaluates
recurring dreams: to turn the prism endlessly
on one known shaft of light: to ferret out
new angles of one’s sight in hopes of cobbling
together some unprecedented peace –
some outcome to the fight of understanding:
underhandedly I sneak back up to fleece
my private yearnings – see what I can steal
from them – catch them unaware – but they
all always know I’m there. Lurid, purple and
inexorable swells: you are the jungle and
the garden of my heavens and my hells. You’ll
be with me when I die. You’re what I call Guy.
November 7, 2006
Election Day on
Thin sour milky clouds beset and shift,
enshroud the elegantly twisted columns,
cornices and battlements and concrete
cornucopias: the block entices – tricks –
the eye up – down – around – these heavy
ornate bodies – 1880s upper west side
of horseshoe crabs upended for a Neolithic
ball – weighted down in troglodytic evening
gowns – barnacled with granite ormolus,
medieval armored suits, and fruits –
brownstone bodices and hems – dark
gem-ridden bulbous Mayan and Egyptian
skulls: empty hulls, defensive shields. Not
unlike what human worry wields when
an anxiety ignites – and terrifies: congeals.
November 6, 2006
Dashed
Shocking as a poltergeist –
quicker than a punch –
slower than a sloth descending –
towards a lazy lunch –
pinker than a paradigm –
longer than a kiss –
hotter than a steaming clam –
deep as the abyss –
all that I would have you see –
melds into a dream –
consciously approach the thing –
carve a “be” from “seem” –
use a dash to draw a line –
sweeping as the wind –
ride it right out from your heart –
‘til you can rescind –
every lie you’ve ever told –
every gasp you breathe –
at your fear of being here –
at what makes you seethe –
not believing you’ve a soul –
buying a façade –
all to dash away, away from –
knowing you are God.
November 5, 2006
Wanna-be’s
They swarm all over me – these rotund little wanna-be’s –
coming out in armies when I try to conjure poetry or
play the violin: they like to see me battle my resistance
to creating – rooting for me to give up: they love it when
I lose: they giggle and they schmooze while tumbling
gleefully in pudgy pac-man bodies – heartily agreeing
with me when I think I can't do squat: swatting at my angsts
and pangs to make them redder, hotter, fatter, worse –
full of goading curses, pranks – setting off their firecracker
bangs each time I think I have achieved a little peace:
“wanna-be, you wanna-be, you wanna-be, you wanna-be!” –
each squeaks at me as if each were a mouse – cuter
than a cockroach or a louse, but just as virulent and itchy.
Makes me bitchy. There’s only one way I can shut them
up – and cut them down by half. They hate it when I laugh.
November 4, 2006
My Boy
Signaling he knows that he’s about to get a treat
by ceasing caterwauling and assorting his Egyptian
limbs demurely – elegant, erect – before my feet –
darting his pink tongue up, once, to nose – to let me
know again what he supposes will occur – my
feline ward allows me, for a moment, to demur
by reaching out to scratch his chin: but then expects
me to produce the goods: I do. Situation is win/win.
Our dance seems so familiar – odd, as if I’d dreamed it –
crosses species lines: bewitches faintly – like a hex –
I think of all the sex I’ve had with others of my gender,
and the bending of our roles: gay men appropriate each
other in familial ways: fathers, sons and brothers,
sisters, mothers, pets and lovers: all provide implicit
categories – covers – for the human heart’s affections:
predilections bred, down in the DNA, to order found
relationships into an intimate array: and to eroticize them
at the damnedest and most blessed junctures, puncturing
through every last taboo. My kitty doesn’t care if I am
naked or wear clothing when I come in and make love
to him by snuggling his flank and kissing fur, and
reassuring him that he’s the best cat in the world: we
blur our differences, become whatever each of us
would have the other be. I saw a man today I’ve seen
sporadically for years – with whom I’ve played varieties
of parts. How sweet to brush his lips and touch each
other’s hearts: to feel him as my son and brother, lover –
cat. Nothing has to come of that: it’s merely offering
affection – and a tenderness – acceptance – as precisely
what they are: expressions of implicit and irruptive joy.
Although I know him almost not at all, he is and
always will remain – just like the cat I tend – my boy.
November 3, 2006
Today I Envy Trees
Today I envy trees – that is, I wish
I had their simple aims – oblivious to
superficial influence: a steady confluence
of sun and rain and soil is surely all
arboreal life requires – and can quite
plausibly expect: tree soul has, surely,
very few desires: but oh! – then, next –
come hatchets, bees, and tree diseases,
aphids, fungus, caterpillars, hurricane
and drought: the things we think we
cannot do without would turn out not
to be enough: bark is not so tough. Worm-
eaten, bent and split by lightning and bad
luck – and less naïve – we'd drop our
leaves. And yet perhaps the hatchets
wouldn't cut all life, nor would all sickness
thicken us beyond repair: the grief,
despair encoded in a dying leaf would
always sweeten colors in the fall: tree
yearnings may not be so simple after all.
Pecked and bothered, stricken, then –
relieved: perhaps constriction grows –
constructs – a better, wiser and more
supple me. Or would do if I were a tree.
November 2, 2006
“Consciousness is staccato, not fluent. We perceive in tiny packets
of information. Our attention is easily perforated. But we need the
world to seem fluent and intact, otherwise it would be unbearable…”
Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind, p. 216
(Change the Metaphor)
Familiar cliff: stay and twiddle
through the moss and weeds? –
or take a deep whiff, exhale, jump?
I'm a chump: my sentient mind
defeats me when (switch tropes)
I get into the ring – against the ropes –
unable to avoid the sting and
whomp of jabs and bludgeoning
of stimuli (try new conceit) for
which I have precisely as much
thirst as deserts have for rain
when they are driest; that’s to say
(in simile, surreally) I'm like
a hungry hummingbird who’s
just found tzimmes at a seder
whose sweet syrup he can sip –
makes nice with grandma –
plans to raid her pantry for the rest:
largesse and amplitude! –
what to sample, dude? Got my
invitation to the orgy! But I'm
already logy, stupid, ass-down
on the floor. Advice, guru?
(Change the metaphor.)
November 1, 2006
Sex and Violins
Sound byte – epigram – punch-line – quip – tactics
to distract me from a necessary trip – each poem
that I've written in the past few days is full of nervous
party tricks: attempts to waylay me from listening
to one damned note that plays inside my head
relentlessly: bowed open G string – oh, the violin’s
audacity! – Pandora’s box to me: every time I touch it
something odd and terrifying wriggles up and out
of my unconscious sea: jolts of memory compete,
contrast – shame and ego – summon up my past.
No accounting for the reasons – though they're surely
legion: took it up when I was nine – still developing
a spine – stumbled on vibrato onanistically at puberty –
promulgating uses of my left hand surely not expected
by a music faculty: chiefly pretext for my terror at
the opening of doors to some unfathomable realm
to which I couldn't grasp that I had access: what
‘success’ means, I don't know – in or out of playing
fiddle. My bow would like to diddle – lengthen,
stiffen – me: my violin wants sex. Music is complex.
October 31, 2006
A Poet Considers House-Cleaning
Nothing isn't interesting. That I select from PBS
a show on Freud instead of diving into the apparent
void of rhinestone jewelry on “Home Shopping”
doesn't mean the brassy lady holding gewgaws up
for someone’s delectation isn't just as full of miracle
as an empirical investigation of the purposes of dreams.
Neither is less human than the other: each is mother
to imagination: both schemes gleam. Blink at bling
or heavy thinking – notice you're alive – and you've
partaken of the most phenomenal phenomenon that
Being can contrive. So surely it should be no problem
to derive ecstatic metaphor from having now to scrub
my kitchen floor. Or is that going rather far? One stain
looks like a jack-o-lantern, one looks like an aging
whore, and one looks like a close-up of the Evening
Star. Perhaps I’d better leave them as they are.
October 30, 2006
Had it Up to Here
I feel like wrecking things.
Ripping pictures off the wall
and kicking out the windows.
Screaming down the hall
that everyone’s an asshole
and should fuck himself
and die. I’m not sure why.
One tends to want to
decimate externals when
what’s kicking butt are
the infernally internal prisons
of the mind. To look is to
create precisely what you see.
Today I’ve had it up to here
with being what I see in me.
October 29, 2006
Taste of Fate
I barely notice that I’m past the actuarial midpoint of
my existence until – as happened yesterday – my knee
begins to ache. Surmise: the body bakes and one day
burns? (It almost always worsens in the middle of
indulging my most thoughtless quirks, reflexive turns.)
Perhaps less bakes than clabbers – thickening
en route to cheese. The milk and whey of everything
are rendered, clotted, rotted, dried in incarnation's
slow relentless squeeze. At times like these I see
my own demise as clearly as I might perceive a leaf
drift sweetly down the River Lethe. Then: today –
quick shift in course – as if discovering some new
resource – an unexpected dawn – or having had a taste
of its inevitable fate, my ache is spooked! – and gone.
October 28, 2006
All Wet
When I was small I put together everything I felt and saw
and heard into a magic box – my marionettes, my father’s
singing voice, cold afternoons in fall, my brother’s love
of ocean liners, next-door-neighbor Laura’s golden pony
tail, my mother’s black seal coat, my lust for Tony Dow,
my fear of saying anything aloud, my craving to eat roasted
turkey skin, my thrill at having stolen things from stores,
my absent pleasure sitting on the front porch bench describing
arabesques with fingers in the air – a motley mess of
here and there that made my days into a daisy chain of
retroactively acquired sense. Now that I’m large, I’ve gotten
dense: the box has turned into a warehouse – packed,
perversely spilling, introjecting fillings into fillings so that
nothing is the same, and memory’s a loopy game, recycled
to a faretheewell, new random permutations of a self
from threads and props condensed to shreds and drops –
magnetized by breath and sight into the simulacrum of
a being with a brain. I find myself identifying utterly with rain.
October 27, 2006
To Hell and Back with Bach
Loose the yearning from the fear –
get this Bach shebang in gear –
align the fugues so that they play
like muscles in a heart: waylay
the ego and invite the whole
musician to lift barriers to soul
by executing craft –
clinging to it like a raft
in rapids so that he or she
might find a passage to the sea –
engender innocence again:
you’ll know you’ve done it when
you can’t remember who you are
precisely as you’ve gone as far
as possible into the specificity
of every meshed unstable multiplicity
you’ve ever been: bestow like Nike
with a wreath a victory to psyche
over grief and gloom and insecurity:
Bach wants a savage purity
before he’ll let you cast his spell –
derived from traveling through hell.
October 26, 2006
Freedom’s Tight Kathunk
"I don't know how to explain this, but I was th)nking, yesterday,
(from an email to a friend)
What do I feel?
Who can tell?
Is it real
or just a spell
a brain will make
in search of icing
for its cake –
tired of spicing
things it’s spiked
the senses with before.
I think I liked
life for a moment: bore-
dom then recurred –
as fear, disguised:
ennui’s a word
that kisses, lies –
pretends it wants
diversion when
it really pants
for nine or ten
ahas!: proof that you
are still alive.
Meanwhile I shoo
away the jive
synaptically
and fight my funk
and wait for free-
dom’s tight kathunk.
October 25, 2006
Report From the Vicinity of David’s Nipple
Michelangelo played three-part fugues of muscle,
bone and skin: I locate models of colossal frank
expenditures of flesh and spirit roiling in him – sleeping
in his boots, between his bouts of wielding chisels
to chip David’s veins in rains of marble dust: after
rupturing the mass into its salient detail: brusquely
shaping surface closer to its ideal form, rasping it to
burnished slickness – warm
alive, like all the rest of David, in a hundred thousand
perfectly directed blows – soft and hard: starting from
a block two times as large as what we tremble into
at the end: clay and terra cotta models blasted, strewn
throughout the den of Michelangelo’s libido – and his
studio: poetry unveiled from rudeness: worth all crude
unsightliness, detritus and travail: energized – and
muscular – relaxed, and poised: music synthesized
from noise. I am ineffably content to ride a ripple
on the pectoral surrounding David’s leftward nipple.
October 24, 2006
Brain Drain
Gaping: banging like
a barn door in a storm –
muscularly shut –
crepuscular – abrupt
and bright as
constricted as a womb –
empty as a cave –
its particles –
its waves:
no wonder
I can’t make
my mind behave.
October 23, 2006
Fussy Babies!
Black marks diddle across the white like killer ants:
battling prospects of my ever fiddling to their
requirements: I should put my violin away, sink into
retirement: let some other sucker play. But no:
today I have to armor up and clunk into the war again:
orchestra rehearsal for a concert in a week: my
brain is only fractally aware: as soon as I approach
the ant-hill of Mussorgsky, legions of cerebral cells
and hormones swear they won’t obey: all they want
to do is make me go to sleep so they can stray into
fantasias unconducted by the likes of mortal human
beings: oh! – the dance my head will dance to conjure
up persuasive rationales – instead of pushing me
to act by picking up my bow and undergoing all
the throes of agony I probably won’t ever feel: see,
that’s the deal: this swarmy build-up of resistance
is, I guess, a part of what must bring me to the music.
Fussy babies! – the concoctions that comprise my
grumpy self don’t understand that mama’s got her hand
on what will be their favorite candy: here – she drags it
off the shelf – for all my baby grumbling me’s who cry
as if they’re not about to get exactly what they want
and need: tasty dollops to relieve their deepest hunger.
They act as if they have to suck on cactus. This
is what I go through every time I have to practice.
October 22, 2006
Damned and Unrepentant on the Amtrak
Spotless t-shirt – lanky
surfer body: perfect blankness:
doesn’t know that when he
checks a mole disinterestedly –
gazes at his skin and rubs
a muscled upper arm – he’s
all the dangerous seduction –
charm – of riding trains:
brainless plenty, mammal
cunning, precociously abutting
godhood, all sweet shutness:
golden buck. Damned,
I glimpse a speeding maple
through a window –
raging yellow swatch –
like spotting crotch in high
school gym. Unrepentant,
I sing silent hymns to him.
October 21, 2006
A settled and determined sense
right here: established through white churches, picket
fences and a panoply of other proper and meticulously
painted sorts of 1830s politesse; elaborately simple
houses dressed in memory - though not the troubled ripe
mentality - of Emerson, Thoreau bestow a scent of stringent
grandeur in the autumn air, careful and covert: abruptly
figured in the blazing glamour of the gold and red October
oak and maple staples of the landscape: sunset colored
grape against an apricot- and azure-pastured sky: odd
interesting concocted lie, and place: three-hundred-fifty
years of incrementally acquired 'face' - a living mask,
now left to stand for something that it hopes might once
have harbored grace: hungry for an image of itself it would
do anything to think it was.
a lullabye
October 20, 2006
Mangy Dog in
Soft odd motley crowd, October mist in
I don't know what is here or there: I'm lost in
slinking as if courting a castrophe - disaster surely
lurks around each corner: turn into a street and find
unnerving amiability: everybody wants to help. (Mangy
dog inside me wants to yelp.) I figure out the Green Line,
take the T to a museum: wander through the Fine Arts
in a fog (still that frightened dog): miasmic wariness
befuddles air: I'm not aware beyond some distant
whiff of all this painted, marbled stuff: I think I've had
enough when suddenly I'm walloped. Never seen this
Jackson Pollock: horizontal strip of canvas, swashed with
black and gold and green, drunken Japanese in rut:
a sweep of kick-ass assonance - and
on me - and though I seemed to have to meet it with
a fight - now the blanket softness of the mist seems right.
October 19, 2006
The Thing That Wanted to Hop Up
Peek-a-boo, I won’t see you – unless the time is right –
and what determines that has more to do with what
appear to me to be the random firings of a random
scattered portion of my hundred trillion synapses:
somewhere, daddy, you’re in there. You weren’t
in your own too much – when you lost touch and died
six years ago, insensate, void of memory and self:
memory is self, of course – discarded on the shelf,
for you, dad, long before you took your final breath:
I do not know what I can possibly expect from death,
and cannot know what you found when you crept
toward yours in the increasing blankness of Alzheimered
fog: but I remembered more of you today than that:
and find within my memories a simulacrum of your style:
your smile was childlike even when you had your wits:
you longed, I think (I may be wrong), for something
to hop up and kiss you – tell you that you hadn’t missed
a thing – that you were loved: it came out when you
chose to sing – when didn’t melody come out of you? –
well, once: when you attempted to ingest my news
that I was gay: that barred the way for song for just
about a week: then you began to speak and melody
came back because the thing that wanted to hop up
and kiss you, tell you that you hadn’t missed a thing,
that you were loved, turned out, in some way, to be me.
I merely speculate: the sea of synapses I swim in has
one aim: to truss up all my mishegoss so it feels
palatably free. I miss you, dad, and contemplate how
fully half the chromosomes that keep me swimming in
my idiosyncrasies were given to me – ardently –
by you. You taught me that the natural condition of
the Universe is ecstasy. Right now, you’re next to me.
October 18, 2006
The Erotics of Place
Finagling my way through foreign parts –
the auras, hearts and oddments in a space! –
it’s hard to miss the power of place: its funks
and flowering perfumes – the grace and
silliness and sex – the frilliness and whirls
of soft Pacific breezes and the hexed pursuit
of bodies that unfurls in Folsom Street in
literally beside myself – I watch as something
like myself traverses streets and dances
awkwardly with beasts to beats that no one
understands. I’m home for several days:
enough to take deep lungfuls of my glorious
indifferent gritty city – to prepare to make
another trek to somewhere else on Friday.
I spend my few
my courage – emptying my psychic luggage
so that nothing will be lost on me when I entrain
to
unraveling all that is familiar here – below,
within, above: traveling is making love.
October 17, 2006
Blessings, Counted
I engineer my poor near-rhymes –
mild dissonance:
too jet-lagged to pen clearer kinds
of assonance.
Conjure sound and manage it?
Too hard.
But welcome any vantage point –
be glad.
(Consider the alternative –
and frown.
United’s Number 8 might have
gone down.)
Thick consciousness arises – and
it blankets.
Sometimes you despise it – then
you thank it.
October 16, 2006
Through Its Purple Flowers
Perching on its precipices - climbing and descending
through its purple flowers - flagrantly denying
certainties of an inevitable doom - a spirit flits here -
settles there - makes the requisite accommodation
and repair to its mercurially shifting bloom: a soul
must have a place and this soul's obstinate: insists
on grace. You see it in the faces of its supple
incarnations: honeyed children - gentle lovers -
heroin-addicted others swooning in the
District - dancing to the underlying strictness of
a clock: a minuet of tick and tock which measures out
the nearness of an end. You feel a terrible finality
behind, beneath, within the San Franciscan light
and sweetness which suspend you. Yet you're sure
that nothing in its softly sifting, falling, slightly warm
and cool and humid dissolution couldn't mend you.
October 14, 2006
In the Dye Vat
I’m fabric soaking in the vat of
taking in the haunted tints of
and the Castro: flat-top ornamented houses
in inimitable waltzes with themselves contrive
the normal from untrammeled fantasy: a formal
politesse and gentleness amid the pastel
howling echoes of intrepid long-dead drag queens –
among a smiling ghostly welter of innumerable
others: pioneers who’ve stained this roiling
rolling hilly mass of possibility – steeping in attar
of poses squeezed from the extremities of soul –
gloriously sucker-punched with vistas of the Bay.
I cannot say how this is staining me: my warp
and weave are molten with a tie-dyed iridescence:
my tangled fibers only drink; they cannot think.
October 13, 2006
Seven years since I was last in
this morning I return for several days – my
history seems biblical: throughout it addicts
fuck apocalyptically: deaths of icons intervene –
my father, mother, and two-thirds of what had
once been me: stories of an inner edifice
blow up in stages, towers of
into flame and split and spit me into shreds
beyond the reach of shame: incinerated –
blasted into ash – ridiculous that I’m still here.
to edit someone’s book proposal in the day;
and spent each night insensible – lasciviously
splayed into a heap with some bewildered man
named Zeke – in sunlight I would natter on;
at night I couldn't speak. Today I bought some
underwear and socks and sat in one of
bad food while I mused on all my wonders:
this dry urban bungled burger was a miracle,
a thunderous revival of my certainty: a symbol
of unlikeliest survival: nothing like a mediocre
meal to make you feel you’re real – in
I bet
October 12, 2006
Keeping Abreast
I don’t understand breasts.
Perhaps it’s because I’m male and gay.
But don’t they get in the way?
It must be strange to wake up every day
and think, “there they are again.”
But then I can’t think when
I haven’t wondered similarly
at pendula that hang from me.
I don’t understand breasts.
But neither do I understand the rest.
October 11, 2006
Fat Chance
If the war’s within me –
who are the foes?
Perhaps that isn’t how it goes.
It may not be that sort of fight.
Not might versus might –
but ‘might’ seeking ‘is.’
This biz of life defeats analysis.
The abstract cracks.
Damn this itch – that’s
the hitch – attracting like a magnet
scoops up iron filings all
of my defiling claws: I scrape
the question ‘til it breaks and
shred again the fragile scab
in search of pertinent eternal laws:
I seem to need to bleed.
I want to know, that’s all.
Tell and show me, won’t you?
Don’t you think I’ve had enough
of sorting through this stuff?
Give me the mechanics.
Don’t tell me that it’s “in God’s
hands.” I want to know
what’s in His pants.
October 10, 2006
That’s When I'll Make Love to You
Who, me? No – you entertain.
I've got a lazy brain. It likes to loll about.
And scowl and pout. Sing a song that ravishes.
Like
with its mutant and incarnate dreams. Polish it
so I don't see the seams. Lyrics,
like the best inamoratas, pay their way
when they can sway to beats
and hum a catchy tune and cry on cue
and bark when they are done.
Love pedestrians: be the
Highway when I push a button
on a sidewalk pole and make a hundred
autos stop to let me cross as if
I were a cow with right of way in
traffic – let your song be graphic –
toss me into the obscene.
Be a lark and gild the sun then turn it blue.
October 9, 2006
Pariah Poem
Had it been up to me
I wouldn't be
the thing you see.
(I escape
feeling like an ape
playing with my shape.)
It’s all a blur
so I'll transfer
the blame to her –
not because it’s fair,
not that you would care,
just because I dare.
Erato
made me swear and blow
in laryngitic tremolo.
I've withdrawn: hence
mind’s gone tense:
craves nonsense.
Scared away my audience.
October 8, 2006
Tiny Grapes
I eat them like an addict: tiny
grapes, and sticky, taste like
honey made to mix with wine,
translucent – fine – green –
red – still on a vine: like jewels
the Trojans might have hidden
from invading Greeks: like bees
or ants or flocks of birds or Greeks
or Trojans: that's what scores
of tiny grapes in clusters are: I eat
a city, maybe more: I'm like
Godzilla or the Whore of
a jungle chimpanzee, trapped –
transferred to a zoo and caged –
placated with a string of treats:
the sort of thing a wounded
creature eats: the sort of thing a bee
would want to make or mate with:
that’s the sort of wonder of these
disappearing grapes: that they
would take my mind off him,
and give me something to abate
another hunger. Nothing stays:
this is what I learned today.
October 7, 2006
Wrestling the Angel
Sometimes I sense
I’ve felt all the intensities
I ever will: defense
against romantic densities –
old love, I guess (long gone).
Other men pursue –
through spot-lit brawn
and charm – a slew
of other men. A lover –
what would that be like?
Someone under cover? –
in the light? (Strike
three for me.) Segue
to October rain – I bop
along the street: reggae
beats regale and pop.
Angel dripping dreadlocks
offers me his paw –
Soon we’ve traded headlocks –
ending in a draw.
October 6, 2006
Drop the Art
Subtler feel:
brush the side
and softly steal
the thing with wide
sophistication... (no! Nerves
are shot: a man
is made of swerves –
you cannot scan
him like a painting –
sing him like a song –
the rawness tainting
everything – you're wrong:
you're not enough
to alter this.
You're made of stuff
that falters.) Kiss
it anyway.
Dare to - start.
Go astray.
Drop the art.
October 5, 2006
1000th
Yowsa! – for the thousandth in the series –
what’s been rousing me and housing me
since May Fifteenth, Two Thousand Four –
when I first shut this door behind me and
discovered I was home: began constructing,
one by one, these cubicles and corners
I’ve bedecked with psychic silly whatnots
and have lived in since: and now, within
ten-hundred chambers, disparately stained
in mist and blood and sweat: draped in burlap,
silk and chintz – with scents of sex and buttered
toast and slowly roasted memories of family
and other tragedies and joys – I employ
the luxury of taking stock: ephemeral and
shocking – rickety and full of holes – a hotel
full of mostly breathing me’s: this teasing
scansion of a mansion! Let there be more floors
and halls and closets, trapdoors, attics and
assortments of enclosures all unlocked and
each a poem – in at least some partial bloom.
I keep expanding every day: I need the room.
October 4, 2006
Like Opinions About His Penis
I don't much like books. They want too much sustained
perceptual obedience which my reptilian brain is not
disposed to yield. Mostly I would rather spend my time
in fantasies I guarantee you'd rather that I kept concealed.
But now and then I stumble onto something that I think
I ought to crack the spine and turn the pages of – take in.
Put some new idea onto the cookie sheet – shove it into my
hot cranium to bake it in. I thought I might read something
on the art of writing poesy. I picked a widely recommended
guide but – woe is me! – it didn't turn the tide. Maybe its
pronouncements were too superficial or too deep. All I know
is that before I'd finished reading half its jacket copy,
I was fast asleep. Funny how this stuff I do does not much
care about the ars poetica to which some think it ought
to be subjected. Whenever I attempt to importune my
poems to line up – behave – I am summarily rejected.
The dominions –
verbal genus –
a poem dares pursue:
like opinions
about his penis
a man won't share with you.
October 3, 2006
Soul Soup
He sits across from me as full
of all the piety of hope as he has
ever been, sure that what was once
a heart of tin in him is flesh now,
ever-fresh now, and inviolably
past the mesh of fear and doubt –
insanity – that had consumed and
stamped him out just months ago:
now, surely, once the flow of life
had been resumed, as surely now
it had been, would be, will be –
he’d be fine and done and safe.
My darling boy - my vulnerably
wide-eyed waif! You think you’re clear
as consommé: but, like the rest
of us, you’re thick as bouillabaisse.
October 2, 2006
God, and Howard Stern
I just saw Helen Mirren play the English queen.
She did a more than creditable job of manifesting
through her craft whatever of
could be gleaned and heard and seen – she kept
the movie moving: certainly was not a bore. And yet
I wonder what it all was for. The talent, energy
and smarts entrained thereto – why so few real
breakthroughs? Too many stay too far this side of
density: you wish they'd stray and hop the fence
to see the odder, deeper fits and starts of hearts.
One tires of power-mongers, politicians, public figures
rising, sinking – learning what celebrities and other
clods are sniffing, drinking. I want to know what God
is thinking. Unless I do. Maybe purpose lies right on
the surface – maybe God, like any other shock jock,
is (among his other tricks) the gossip and the crock.
October 1, 2006
Family Plot
That it’s so odd to let them go
does not mean I would have them back –
it’s more that in the cosmic flow
I cannot help but feel a lack
(the Universe is wholly kept,
of course, in symbols I devise).
It doesn’t matter how I’ve wept
or tried steadfastly to revise
the circumstances of the plot
so that they might more deeply please,
the fact remains: my family’s not
alive, but I still am: a tease –
bewilderment – a goading prod
to my blunt sense of what should be:
a seeming abnegation God
subjects me to, indifferently.
But while I look into the hole
and wonder what there is to save –
perhaps I miss just how my soul
has grown – beside the open grave.
September 30, 2006
Today’s Maxim
Despair sets an agenda –
so do rage and hope:
palliations meant to ease us into
thinking we’ve alternatives
to groping blind.
Let’s change this cast of mind.
Instead of cleaving to
a sunny outcome, moping into
the morose, or getting furious,
let’s be curious.
September 29, 2006
In Another Foreground
Monkey puppet – dates from 1939 –
isn’t looking fine – ratty brown –
once had shiny button eyes – chewed
off by me at two – got lost the way
things do. Other relics last: photos
from the past: the Macy’s Toy Pavilion
at the ’39 World’s Fair: my mother
worked (and got the monkey puppet)
there: she had a flair, at twenty-one,
for looking like a doll: adorable in
pinafore. She sometimes wore a picture
hat – I have another photo of her
dressed like that – the Trylon and
the Perisphere comprise the picture’s
blurry rear – my mother innocently near –
overshadowing all background. In
another foreground, back when I was
two, and chewing buttons off the monkey
into scar, I wonder if he had a clue
that we would end up where we are?
September 28, 2006
Quatrain Stop
I've always been able to count on epiphany:
give God a whiff of me and he explodes:
take a step out – I'm exposed. My soul feeds
on distraction: my life's an infraction of every
conceivable rule: I am a deceivable fool for
the jokes and enigmas and folks who inhabit
and school me in mystery: history turns its
presumption of past to, and sutures the future
to, now: holy cow, I'm aflame with re-naming
whatever this scheme is – whatever the dream is –
whatever the reason tempestuous rhyme has
me spinning through something I used to call
time – disavowing it all, and careening with
surely unwarranted joy down the hall – when
it’s suddenly cropped: all the life in it’s stopped.
What had once been Fantasia afflicts me with
dullish aphasia: can’t speed through the hatch
and be free anymore: can’t locate the latch
and the key anymore. The flow is shut off;
the show is cut off: I’ve rammed to the end of
my cranial meat; must defer to a sense beyond
sense that entreats me to trust the grand slam.
Mammalian perceptions, revealed as a sham.
I am that I am.
September 27, 2006
City Boy
While my alchemic mind
may design a supernal
Norwegian-Bolivian fusion
cuisine, or unlimited schemes
for replacement of genes
or vacating the present
in time machines, my bodily
limits are leaner. Shut me up
in a suburb and valiant attempts
to believe I am anywhere
else won't avail. Sufficiently
asphyxiated, lungs will fail.
September 26, 2006
Immaculate Conception