"Act Two" - with what amounts to "scene one" - covers poems written daily since late June 2006 through December 30, 2006:
http://guyblakekett.googlepages.com/acttwo-guykettelhack-poetry%26ephemera
Here, in Scene Two, begins New Year's Eve's offering - to kick off the next surge of whatever it is I do through (with any luck) the first half of 2007. As before, if you want to know who Guy Kettelhack is, feel free to click Google's link which will reveal a good deal of what I call the full appalling panoply of me:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%22Guy+Kettelhack%22&btnG=Google+Search
You can contact me via email either at
or
Hope you enjoy my forays.
Cheers,
Guy
May 12, 2007
The Larger Thing
The larger thing may be to want to do the larger thing.
I don't know. Here is what I think I know. My blood is
saturated with iambic flow. I cannot seem not to incline
myself to a reflexive use of rhyme. My deepest stabs at
thinking have produced exactly this: the sense each moment
is a kiss, completely separate from any other kiss. The largest
hoodwinking we've undergone we've labeled ‘time.’ I hug
the notion that perception is an unplumbed ocean; and to
taste the consummation in its indivisibility is to experience
eternity. The only course that’s possible is poetry. And if
there is fraternity its sources and effects all happen far
beyond the reach of any human mind. Every time we grab,
imagination stalls: we fall behind. Every time we fall for an idea
we fetishize. Every time that we decide we've measured
out the size of anything we're wrong. To long is to survive.
The moment we quit longing we metastasize into another
creature that can long again with every breath. (This is what is
known as death.) A warring family of chimpanzees: a lazy
hound-dog scratching fleas: I have about as much capacity
for understanding as a walnut tree has knees. The cliché
of the elephant right in the middle of the room that no one sees?
(The larger thing, the larger thing.) Zoom up to a single pore
just to the left of her right eye – a speck of aperture in
the respiring skin of her thin upper lid: sigh to see it fold back
into darkness, thence to light, each time she blinks: caught
among a sea of her inimitable cells: inure yourself to their
unconscionable swells and dips and drink it up – and its
surrounding air – as if the whole thing, plausibly, were there.
May 11, 2007
Hot Latino Kid in Gayest
Hot Latino kid in gayest
bad-boy king of all
manimals who
and luridly
inordinately
on
my
tan muscled arm, looks into my eye and smolders
charm: “Hey daddy
like God-juice
forehead, amber hair – what drug-induced implosion
may
he leers and lumbers like a drunken Roman gladiator
as he passes by: I get a contact high. I'm fifty-six –
still in the mix! – propelled and sped ahead as if by
pixies:
seeming steaming afternoon, they swoop and swoon
and glide: make sure that I don't break my stride.
May 10, 2007
Disgusted Poem
I took my poem to a friend
but he was undergoing such
an anxious bend of trouble
that my poem bowed politely,
bubbled softly to a background
hum, and waited until later –
when I took my poem to my
prosthodontist who dived south
into my mouth to prick its wet
flesh with a needle several dozen
times – well, eight or nine –
and while she rummaged, prodded,
wrangled and beset each gum
my poem cordially decided
to stay mum – and so, though
I was numb, I brought my poem
home to bed with me and plumped
it on my pillow thinking this
more mellow fellow I'd become
might ease the repercussions of
our shared assaults – I strummed
my poem little lullabies but we
achieved, I'm tempted to
surmise, at best equivocation:
I dropped into sleep; my poem
raced, disgusted, off on a vacation –
where I do not know. Next time
I will not let my poem go.
May 9, 2007
Gay?
A strange warm early May humidity
holds sway today: provokes a sweat:
reminds you you are flesh – and ‘gay’:
odd word! – does not convey one slick
iota of the way testosterone pursues
testosterone: nothing frolics in this
maleness: pop into the blue blue day –
dimensionless – an impulse – animal
in more than part – you dart: you
street-smart cat – you column growing
fat – you ape pretending to be man –
you strutting phallic insurrection – hot –
perspiring and respiring in this blue
blue day besotted by your androgens:
you man who wants the man within
the man: you vision – like the one
you say the Buddha had when he
ejaculated God: you strange warm early
May – you funky pit of blue blue day –
you feral mammal – wanton stray –
no way that anyone could call this gay.
May 8, 2007
Cadence Towards a Meaning
Spreading out the fiction of a life exhausts:
every stop is manufactured: memories
are pure abstraction masquerading as
the echo of an actuality: something left
some data in the brain – infinitely malleable –
virtual experience: each instant sieved,
discarded: what remains? – the drain.
You seek by reflex: just as dogs sniff
concrete walks for clues – effluents that
might bring news: body fluids rule for dogs;
what rules for you? Taking stock’s a mockery:
there’s nothing to sort through. You are
the pathways that your thoughts incise
in cerebellum and cerebrum – every synapse
scratches: you're forever in a groove. Imagine
you can stay or move: it’s all the same:
your skull-bound meat retains whatever
it’s decided in its coiled gray insentient
warm conniving mass is true: no pain except
the concept of a pain: no taste except
the notion of a taste: a holographic stew
and zoo. And yet a simulacrum of a soul
accrues: intensities transcend the mechanism
whose wet evidence you have been able
to construe. Two days ago, the day before
your birthday, you beheld an autobiographical
concoction in your mind: you conjured up
the slowly blooming time, four years ago,
before your mother’s end, that you became
her friend. “Birthday” had a meaning then.
May 7, 2007
On Turning 56
A regulated calm –
as if in memory of
what a bomb can do:
this vigilance is interesting.
Here is what I know
at fifty-six. Time does not
exist. Nothing’s lost,
nothing’s gained.
Except an ambiguity.
One day is not exactly
like another. There is
no other day. Point of view
is temperamentally
decreed. A man does
not run out of seed.
May 6, 2007
"I hate music but I like to sing."
from "I Hate Music," Leonard Bernstein
We Like It When The Bad Boy Wins
Floyd Mayweather beat up Oscar de la Hoya
last night; well, Oscar did okay, but he lost.
(Tough you-know-what, Oscar.) Floyd is nasty:
Oscar’s a poster boy for something, not sure
what. Today I’ll play the violin like Floyd – fast
as his left jab: fingers nabbing at the diddly-
diddly measured blasts of motive in Rossini,
Haydn, Mozart – double-handed, like a Star Trek
android, gay and mad – and tough as Reyes
leather. Homage to big bad Floyd Mayweather.
May 5, 2007
Monkey Race
One tries to make it fit –
odd impelling hot poetic license to remit
whatever figuration the ridiculously
plangent sense you call your soul
requires: commit it to a goal –
one tries to see it whole –
one looks at other manners
of requiting other fires: assuaging
each desire as if longing mattered –
tries to see the symmetry – not merely
scattered bits – tries organically to fold
an origami butterfly or bird from one’s
dimensionally challenged wits:
flatness, surely, is absurd.
There is no up or down in space;
one wonders if there’s love there either.
Oh, member of the monkey race:
hand it over, take a breather.
May 4, 2007
Portrait of the Artist with Alzheimer’s
If, as I suspect is true,
each fragment of a point of view
is holographic – offers all –
my father’s sketch bewilders. Call
the portrait colorful or gray,
but I recall the vivid day
he drew it – bright crisp afternoon
in fall – his infant laughter soon
recoiling into concentration
as his pencil flew: a conflagration
in the right side of his brain.
By then, you see, he couldn’t train
the left side to obey him; speech
was quite beyond his reach.
But lines he tumbled onto paper
profligately grew – and taper
now to this drained recollection:
full of the strange circumspection
ten long years – or were they short? –
can bring. Perhaps it was a sport
for him – the last he would enjoy –
to wield his carbon and employ
his naked talent one more time.
Allegedly, the face was mine:
Cocteau, El Greco, sadly spun.
Did he remember he had reared a son?
I wonder if he wondered how.
I guess it doesn’t matter now.
May 3, 2007
Horoscope
Today you’ll flow:
relentless sex and funk.
Tomorrow: you’re debunked.
Perplexed: you’ll clunk.
Non compos mentis.
Scentless.
What foments
a moment? Gone.
Don’t rely on dawn.
May 2, 2007
All That I Can Conjure Up
Pregnant cherry blossoms flood the limits of
the trees on
that you can stroll beneath them, bat their clustered
petals with your fingers and they will not fall.
Specificity that blinds. There are many other kinds.
+
The fresh completeness of their absence is
befuddling. The Universe as I perceived it with them
in it had a shape. The hole they left does more
than gape. It shreds the fabric: threads are pulling
which unravel any sense that what I know or what
I've ever known is more than fabrication. Rhymes
that I rely on are like random lily pads across a pond:
now they coalesce into a fragile station: fairy-tale
provisions to enable me to wait for an unfathomable
train. My brain is leaking memory. My psyche is
a sieve: I think that I recall what each dead member
of my family had to give: I huddle under trumped-up
charges that we each knew how to laugh. I'm sure
we did but that does not amount to half of what
the sub-atomic structure of their presence meant.
My recollections of my father, mother, brother have
run dry: my solo eye is spent. I seek some semblance
of their living glory. All that I can conjure up is story.
+
Delicate imbalance: caffe-latte-colored teenaged
boy sits on the subway carefully avoiding contact:
big red baseball hat meticulously skewed and
angled backwards towards an ear: eyebrows arched
above the orbital entablature of his gaunt face:
sweet iconic challenge: counter to his fear. Another
momentary tale that I'm reduced to telling here.
The fresh completeness of his presence is befuddling.
May 1, 2007
When You Are An Alcoholic
When you are an alcoholic, sweet
cream of your life is to appropriate
the Universe and make it pour.
Whatever you've been given,
you want more. That's
me, all right.
And I won't
change
without
a fight.
Oh, I no
longer drink
all night. Or ever in the day.
But I'm a sot for the ecstatic anyway.
April 30, 2007
Secret Steel
Final day of April –
harbinger of May –
all its fragile cape will
flutter, fall away:
yet its faint whispered feel –
brief gasp – curtailed length
belies a secret steel –
formidable strength:
through winter to the fall
weather’s freely spent –
from balmy day to squall –
Being won't relent.
April 29, 2007
One Iota More
Listening as hard as babies do –
fragile, cognizant and grave:
tender eyes that take in every twitch
so urgently: as if to save
each memory, to put it in a bank –
there to call on when he needs
to fund the gaping mouth and throat of
his anxiety – he speeds
through savings like a womanizer
in a whorehouse. Grown-up boy:
please pray one whit less for miracles –
one iota more for joy.
April 28, 2007
As My Synaptic Faeries Danced
The seeming promise of a clemency –
as formal and as normal as the bell
that called the
in
now seeps its iterance into my own
resistances. My city glitters with
bright reassurances: agleam with health
clubs and organic greens: Kabbalah’s
chic! – a pantheism wants to lay its
thousand eyes and hands on – speak to –
everyone: beatify, caress. Blessings are
cold comfort: gratitude’s a piety: overtones
of ringing metal freeze the ear. What
I would have must be so near I cannot
see it and so formless it commingles
indistinguishably in my blood: altering
the ways my tongue tastes food. My
appetites are rude: they are a fright:
they're in a mood: they must be fed: today,
tonight. By my innumerable passions
am I led – meticulously wed to me in
a kaleidoscopic unity: a whirling daily
punctuated mad reflection on the many
in the one. I drank a quart of milk just now:
I thank the Universe for its decision
to invent the cow, and for the savvy
manner in which I have been invited
to ingest – digest – Divine through
the bovine: I stood there drinking, in
a trance, as my synaptic faeries
danced. When nearly all the
arrived at church and cried to be
delivered to the paradisal ether from
the deathly earthly sod, Emily stayed
home, drank milk, and talked to God.
April 27, 2007
Rhymes With
Every fifteen days or so, one ought to write another Manifesto.
I've been lax: I don't think I've hatched one since before I paid
my taxes (money going out distracts). But here I am surrounded
by the slick unnerving quivering abominably slippery detritus
of too many poets Allen Ginsberg tells me I should read! I'm sick
of Corso, Kerouac and Catullus: I’d like to sic on them a battle-axe:
stick them in a poisoned little cottage in St. Mary Mead, and let
Miss Marple drive them mad as she perseverates exactly how
and why they bleed so awfully much all over everything. Severing
myself from all their urgent diction, I protest that I’ve enough
inside my magic chest to entertain without resorting to their
egoistic fictions. Oh, I guess they're not so bad – not, anyway,
much worse than anyone one meets, the homeless clueless
hopeless beaten prophylactic walking tactics we call personalities –
let’s cut ‘em all some slack. It’s tough to get up, go, come back. But
here’s the deal. Today I say that if we are to get a leg up, we have
got to penetrate the cosmos like a flying fist, make lists of aspirations
into something more than listless wisps: alchemize the stale into
the fresh: make flesh from a synecdoche (rhymes with
indicating genus by referring to one telling part of it – ramming all
the universe into a quark: seeking macrocosm in the micro without
going too completely psycho – prize precisely what a poem is.
(Extra fizz: I remember, in
I was just one month the younger side of twenty, I took in the whole
bejeezus of what I would spend the rest of life recovering from:
a synecdoche of softly moonlit skin: taut arms and back of somebody
called Jim. I never dared to touch, but it is not too much to say
that everything that I would ever want resided in this glimpse of him.)
April 26, 2007
My Granule’s Name
Brief encounter – pressing limits –
rude and asymmetrical incursion:
like an oyster shell – its moist
and vulnerable swell of meat
cut by a knife-edged grain of sand:
urgent to make room! – remand it
to another court – decide it into
virtue – shellac it to a gloss to turn
the irritant into what would dispirit
you entirely if ever you had had
to suffer what would now be its
unconscionable loss – beyond
which you could not imagine living.
My granule’s name was Daniel:
ghostly gift that keeps on giving
me reminders that if ever I suspect
I cannot outlive love, I'm wrong.
Which doesn't mean another sharp
and jabbing speck I'll want to turn
into a pearl won't come along.
April 25, 2007
If Only He Could Get the Damned Thing Right
Perfectionism gets an undeserved bad rap – pursuit of it
creates a glorious illuminating human map! Observe
the fevered artist so compelled to serve a vision that he
almost cannot breathe: determined to provision the battalions
in his mind and heart and lap – to send them in a sea of craft
to capture Helen – bring her back to swell the throne
his artisans have built so he can own the outcome: dwelling
in projected satisfaction of retrieving the divine to sort it
into legions of its avatars that he designs: combining
permutations of the objects of his talent ‘til they've granted
him reprieve: rubbing to a feathered glossy fare-thee-well
each gold and silver leaf and berry on a jeweled cormorant-
supported seat – which waits to bear the finished icon of
his joy and grief: to sup on meat to which the gods have only
not been summoned since he’s wrestled, thrashed and
sieved and carved and painted them into a secret bas-relief:
trapped to do his bidding – imprisoned by impregnable lead
laurel wreath: all this the artist would bequeath if only he
could get the damned thing right. Oh, what to do with all
the dreams and dreams and dreams one dreams at night!
April 24, 2007
Vegetables Having Way Too Much Fun
Floral orgy! – immoral sprawl – profligate pistils
and stamens and pollen – rude cannons of spore:
had enough: I can't take anymore! But they could give –
do give – a flying – ha! – try to duck! You can't.
Damned love juice of plants: I don't go dropping
my pants everywhere! Spasming orgasms – spewing
an amative chlorophyll stew through the air –
vegetables having way too much fun – indiscriminate
sex-guns ejecting ejaculates – tiny catastrophes
stream into sinuses – sneezing and wheezing:
I'd rather have fleas. Stop copulating, trees! Please!
April 23, 2007
Hors de Combat
Sometimes you think
you'd like to have a week
where nothing happened –
each date in the calendar
an empty square. You'd
dive into cool Tuesday’s pool
and come up to a lovely
void – free of contact –
fresh – imbued with none
of the alloys that sully daily
living’s fare: uninterrupted
prayer. Then you think: why
wait for that? You're there.
What’s a void? – isn't
everything contact? You've
always been hors de combat.
Play each day – make play
a synonym for pray. Let
the silly notion drop
that you could ever stop.
April 22, 2007
What Aunt Helen Used to Say
“Been collecting since I was a little girl,
garage-saling with my Aunt Helen, may
she rest in peace. We just liked it big
and gaudy,” says the
goes where it is sunny and the vendors
don't seem shady, buys what gewgaws
she can get for cheap, dangly chandeliers
and rhinestone necklaces and bracelets
that would make Aunt Helen weep –
and that she now brings in a heap to have
a go at
unnecessary as a stash of ancient Roman
party glass. The lady wipes a tear, and
adds: “Aunt Helen used to say, ‘You
break this stuff, your ass is grass.’”
April 21, 2007
Potted Plant
What would be the perfect quatrain –
sleek as sculpted stone?
What would keep perception’s train
in situ? What great bone
exists to interest every dog? –
what incarnate heat
might you contrive to cut through fog
to rivet living meat?
You haven't time today for tomes –
an urgency afflicts –
you scramble through your batch of poems
to find a clock that ticks –
and you are at a loss again –
you cannot make the claim
that you've resolved the barest when,
or what, or where – or aim.
Must you give up? – and thus
abandon trying to trade ‘can’t’
for ‘can’ in the miraculous?
Pot another plant.
April 20, 2007
Almost All There is to That
What else is there but a poem?
I don't mean the literary thing –
I mean what happens when an idea
springs so hard and hot from that
despondency you call a heart that you
can't not respond in kind: the thing
that threads a joy through all the terrors
in your mind: the error that succeeds
beyond all odds: that coded calling card –
ubiquitous as gods. The weather
changed! April’s intimation of a summer
just arrived: the season’s invitation
to remain alive. The Twilight Zone
plays endlessly on Channel 44:
Rod Serling’s coruscations blast their
caverns through your psyche’s floor:
suddenly you feel a goring hunger
for a cake: expensive, full of butter-cream:
correlative – subjective, not objective –
for a
too blue, the air too keenly sweet for
you to gainsay your great anguished
mission: to find ecstasy to eat. So you
walk down the street through
weekend fantasies – too many ardors
to repeat: Dean & DeLuca serves the point:
alimentary excesses larded everywhere
throughout the joint: you see a hazelnut
gateau, just under thirty dollars, buy it,
and you go. You're home now – had
a biteful of the fat. And, like a poem,
that is almost all there is to that.
April 19, 2007
Leaks
Lovely to be tired. Jagged heavy
dream-like shards of psyche rise
and fall – like chunks calved off
an iceberg in the global warming
of your head – a heat-kissed cold –