1.28.2011

SCULPTURES

Emile Gouche once hand-painted
            his own cigarette           hard-broiled heavy
toxic Magnum Opus          Press the snooze button

We share the same separate journey
      Cobblestoned stretching         I could be a wedding
crasher            at my own wedding

Tonight's weather: veiled purring       The earth growls
     speaks confidence like Bogie: 
                 "She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up"

(like that)

Let's flee the retro-chivalric worldview
We are both sheltered             closeted-in       Brandy

       is on television showing the world her
high-heels             in her house-sized closet       I "made no bones"

          about overhearing negativity about my "status"
Some people in my family are carrying around
          Incredible Hulks in their guts                   I stir it all in a pot
Clay-form         At ease in my space                 like a poetic body

"There are no gray areas"        Either you love
           or you hate          Foliated ketubah
with your name written as if eyes taste words
           "flatten out the extra air"         ignoramus
Muses you're not            I miss you & I have never met you


QODESH


I wag my finger at a Red Light
               I'm a gleaming-eyed fish

            Today
                feel hurled from

the highest turret
of Cortachy castle
like the Earl of Airlie's 
young handsome musician
    
                       I just want to be packed into
                       a musical instrument

       Invisible drummer boy

I want to be caught writing poems
about death          A corpse bird 
tapping on the window              My guardian angel
with a mighty sword 
                     shrouded over me

light of qodesh         relieving 
                              mental contents

             I don't want to regret
             never touching this light
             like Hawthorne regretting never speaking to
             or touching the familiar spirit of Dr. Harris


 

1.27.2011

WELCOME

          to my science lab
I should receive a "Good Neighbor Award"
                  Let's play "frisbee physics"
        on this color winter night

somewhere near a seaside cresting with the waves--
    lilies that can sprout
through ice-covered ponds          listening, even
through broad-expanded cold 

for the stirring of an insect

             Welcome to my unraveled yarn
     
     The greatest ideas & thoughts
manifest when the lights are out 
          
     The mind, like burning logs,
surrounded by layers of familiarity,
builds up      when the lights are out 

"Ha-ha" once meant "any unexpected barrier, a dead end" 
          perhaps like the struggle to burst
          from a cocoon 

                               or an unwelcomed villain cowboy
                               bursting into a saloon 
unable to straighten his arms

Welcome to my Black Sea
already underneath your skin
       idyllic garlands & vivid harvests--
tongues of former poets buried in the land within, 
      a whistful gap where you shall
not find me...





UNSEEN BODY BOUQUET

                                                     Consider too what the breath is: wind--
                                                                     and not even a constant, but all the time
                                                                     being disgorged and sucked in again.
                                                                                                    
                                                                                       ---Marcus Aurerelius (AD 121-180)
                                                                                       from Meditations (Bk. 2.2)



To go back into the past (pollinated to glow)
& discover one's body, shelled, the way snakes
throw their skins, locating the intricate axis, leaping
through extraordinary light, shadows' light, of
machine-like discovering. To find every path of
one's former existence as great lumps of frozen
pixellizations, hovering pixellated fragments
of every note, ends & innards of the body: feet, hands,
eyelids, the rows of upper & lower teeth, jaws, nerves,
veins (rope-like), muscles, partial segments of parts
undiscernable, &c. all stripped of emotion. To travel
even further into the past, finding one's body
fragmented to the extent of observing portions
of the body dislodged, characteristically free from
all logic, yet removed as if a place had wrecked,
throwing its parts hundreds of feet in every
direction, frozen mid-air, conformed to its space
as if permanently positioned. Fragmented, like
computer files, yet with unlimited perspective, slowing
down the territory. The traditional injunction to
"know thyself," in this instance, is a verbal corkscrew;
a visual somersault, a certain familiarity that
stands resolutely; seconds pass, leaving the conception
of the physically Unseen Past as blemishes
on the dust of one's incomplete accumulation.
If one were to walk into the future, however,
one's body, like an illuminated outline,
empty husks of a cage--a nerve-center of birds,
of boundless energy, vacuuming-in the coming
velocities--would be forced to the violent spasms
of nearly exploding, but at the great cusp of eruption
our present body enters into that space, each second,
before the future "gives way" like buildings accepting
the uplifting drafts of wind from the pull of a tornado,
scattering Hours like raw materials. 




 

1.26.2011

TOGETHERNESS

"Togetherness" means something different
for everyone.

A tsar sighs each time a lie is found out,
spellbound by a discovery of enormity,
like Christopher Columbus's eyes,
like bubbling hot springs, can still be felt
in crowded subways.

"Karma" upsets the one that doesn't fiddle,
that waits too long for something to happen,
until one's face turns to bone.

If you x-ray this air, you will see me, in repeats,
slipping soundlessly in the whirling sparks of my               Body,
blown against the grating, as if I were within
an archaeological dustbin--dust, itself,                             clashing
like the sudden ring of hoofs upon tilted tables
of ancient granite. 

I'm a small, gray bird with intuitive sensitivity,
but do not be deceived, for my heart is strong
& unfearful, like a man that takes out his own
tonsils with a cactus. 



_______________________________________________________

In the 15th & 16th centuries, it was believed that the mentally ill
were possessed by devils & that touching the patient's body 
would force the demons to seek shelter elsewhere. Today,
they are pushy & insistent. "Everyone needs help." Pharmaceutical
companies are spaniels. We're all terrorists, so they say. 
Every bed-happy government is bent on mythology. Narcissistic
pandemonium. "OUR PUSH-BUTTON HEAVEN." Blow everything
away unless it suggests intimacy. I peep forth laughing from 
amid the watermelon-pink flowers. I stomp a mud-hole in every
comfort-inducing gadget. Underneath my clothes are mountains
of cushions. Underneath my pillows are images that no camera
could capture. I hide my head there, like digging for diamonds.



THE NEW SEED BLASTS

upon the vine. I find you
when it is I that I find--
heart of eutexia, of your eyes
that move me like
heliotaxis--accentuated lush--
curve of Irish lilt--any "tongue," 
any sound heard like a composer
wrapping his body around 
the music like a ballet dancer--
bursts from brass wind
instruments or a "brass" wind. 
Flaming love, not a stuffy critic,
has no "elect"--but with
its variety of masks & creases 
of misrepresentation, emerges
truth, unconcealed, in fullness. 

II

Phenomenons not. Knots
of touching, greeting, protecting;
love doesn't "see" in lobes
like not allowing the right lobe
of the brain to know what
the left lobe thinketh--no,
ultimate love derives from
"The Prime Mover of Motions"--
no suspense of maintaining pressure. 

III

A love, vast & gushing
through the channels of the heart,
revived the moribund banks of
one's delta, hovers in the moist air
of the soul, through the eyes it flows,
the tongue it speaks, never chased away
by an echo that emotes of which
Death may eye to obscure. 

IV

Love's vision, sharper than the
eyes of Leonardo--gentle as the 
vivid hues of a peacock's fan--
ignores the force of gravity, unseen
but seen, instead drapes us, in rapture,
in admiration, like currents of vapor
or moving arabesques of cloud, borne up,
flexed, and played with our Wanting,
our Yearning, our pre-programmed wiring,
by brisk winds of Man's ancestral genesis. 




EGGS

"Hurry & get pregnant
Your eggs are getting older      maybe stale" 
a 38 year-old woman said
to a 37 year-old woman
                 I need Binaca
"concentrated golden breath drops" 
           Golden eggs
Breakfast is never the same

My sister is grossed out
because my uncle said, "it's unborn chicken"
             The truth grosses out
             everyone     an unimaginable key
in a real-life lock
             Every egg is "advertised"
proximity of watchwords
            An egg's fertilization in the animal world: 

Overlook a hunter's home
A wealthy home
     Pelts of polar bears      beaver       tiger    & jaguar
overflowing the floor      On the walls
moose heads sing censored things

Put me on a collapsible cot       Eggs of a new
Civil War linger         "I could have 
had children with Peter, Jim, Kevin or Charles"
the 37 year-old woman responds
      A nuptial chamber explodes

I study the menu: 
           Eggs any way you want them
Inward eggs
Sanctified
           Nevermind the "mortifying lingo"
of women your age
           Nevermind a Madcap mistress
           young & whelped by lust

Eggs       Your eggs are pictorial with
              -in
              Your eggs "good 'til the last drop"



______________________________________________________

The way 
       that a musician
       may "pick"
his guitar

So does 
      the poet
      that reaches up
& picks the stars 




________________________________________________

There are formless furrinesses in Codes--

"that willing suspension of disbelief" (Coleridge)

fraught with psychological luggage. Who is

liberated & who isn't? "You know, I don't

think I need cash anymore, you know?"

Think in diagonal. Early December, 2010:

Delta plane sliding in Minneapolis, "a moving

impression of grandeur." Take the whiskey bottles

from the hands of drunkards, return them emptied

& ready for the insertion of a ship.

Never expect cracks in the edifice, just lick

the cow-lick of exuberant optimism

the way birds hop & sing beneath leafy branches.

Mammock the mammons, sloppy-loppy tongue

of "loose sentenced" lies from the inveigher;

"kick the possum out." Spiritual invalids

as pursuers of fantasies. I'm adrift

on an ancient sea, but an ocean of renewed

fruit. A city will rot to the core that a pinch

-penny community cannot afford; garish, pre

-tentious, dull, meaningless, inhuman, drying to

the consistency of beef jerky. But the same city

of your mind, of your heart can become a

complete garden city of peace by receiving

Yeshua, who'll renew ya. The cat moans

& shakes in sleep. I'm soon to wear the powder

of snow. Winter presses: unleashed chests compressed.

Be careful of being fleeced; "professionally

mechanical in the face." In time I will

fly away, & come to think of it, where is

The Flying Car?





1.24.2011

NEWSREEL

The newsreel ends where one sticks an oar into cranes
    The old street cries     but not like dreadful months
in a war in Moscow or Siberia    but instead a street
that cries in New Orleans        Jazz has become a
young man with heavy eyes     Nothing ever returns to normal
like a flashback     Shrimp vendors  sing new songs
to housewives & children in windows above
    Does youth ever tire? Does an exhibited painting
"show itself"?   a code that is erased is a silence
   that drenches a city where the ripest young things
break into adorning shrieks over hoodlums, drunks,
rednecks, hazardous strangers--this "thing"
a Ding an sich    tip-toes around the future visage
   of an age-wrecked composition     A life-span
is the living language of a land clotted in
communities    with heavy emotional freight
to set oneself apart that excites the blood beyond
98.6     Mediocre or Meteoric      The newsreel begins
where privacy is a palette for concentration
   A wild impulse seizes me   Does "skill"   
spontaneous skill       communal skill    settle into
general ease or private discipline?    Is it much more
   appreciated? Like the dashing off of a parody
with heavy alarum    or not exacting the submissive solitude
to write but entertaining the tremor of a piano
   but unable to play it well     or a talent for
dabbling in paint or decorating a home
    Becoming "acclaimed" sounds eerie       I pierce
& press to extract the juice of "permanent errors"
    sacrificing seriatim    yolk of yore
Some houses        like city streets     are more jolly
   when silenced    where mottos are ghastly
pallor clings to every detail through thin air
    The newsreel shuffles     A poet malaxates
the carapace of continental exclusitivity
    A television scattered into fragments
This is to endure an unearthing of a preferred
    narrative    What you may prefer: watching a
German man observe his lover riding his bicycle
   along a country lane     or observing in closeups
simple pastoral tragedies     You want your life
   to be more effective    to see the "good" in
everything no matter the susceptibility or reluctancy
   like handing wilting daisies to bearded old men
that gestures effervescence like a spawning stream
   in summer's golden ecstatic lather
   Keep your Nomex on at all times so that no one
can burn you    chisel you into chiaroscuro
   Everyone wins           pass it on



PROTEST AT POZNAN FAIRGROUNDS, 1956

What of this ruthless shallowness?   history, dries,
lingers like ocean-erosion, then barren. 
       A photograph of a Polish protest, poignant 
       in this sermonized-like march. 
When officers fire into a crowd, every bullet sweats bullets; 
eyes of quizzical heroes-to-be sustain their standing. 
       On that bloody day, the way melodrama makes
       its own rules, demonstrators were driven flippo--
       they marched along Poznan fairgrounds
       chanting, "We want bread!"          Earlier, police
had let their force-field down & in unsustained 
suspense, spit fire across the Beckettian landscape
killing a 16 year-old boy.   The rioters
        dipped their Polish flag in the boy's blood
        carrying it high through the streets
        as if the land had turned into a suburb
        of Transylvania.  Attempts to desensitize 
the effects of power & violence.   To later soak
risk in water to numb the pain. 
        To weaken the sinews of tyranny,
        stretched to the steam of a singed teakettle. 
The skeletons of the Innocent belong to limbs & trees,
become balladeers, outspoken, overshadowing lands of malcontent,
        understanding everything.



EMPTY MAGNIFICATION

A camera         A camera that praises shadows
   instead of light       is a camera with insight
Or      cones in the retina      like enormous tracts of desert
scarcely satisfied      If a blindfolded society
    could thrive (without standing, moving) it would be
even more victorious with a double blindfold     
    Suddenly     dogs barking in the neighborhood
(two of them wearing red sweaters)
I watch for shadows underneath the door-slit    I am
a human flicker out of focus this day     the caves in my
throat sounding off like a quivering fog melting
    the way a particular street's ex-sewers   (a wave
of relief)     surges through me (the knowing of "little things")
The week of white-grey skies has diminished
   winter's colorless aluminum giving way to nonspectral
violets & magenta      browns & grays   
agglutinated with honey-light        Cat grooming on
the black-gray checkered blanket      fur like
paper-fine pastry       I could be shaving a swatch of
sandpaper         You seem confused but do not be alarmed
    for is the cuckoo bird in error when it leaves it eggs
in other birds' nests?      Were Michelangelo's raw
& oft bleeding hands nothing more than bubbling blades
of red-orange lava?     "Finely divided uranium takes fire
on exposure to air"     With eyes of angelic light   I could starve
myself to weightlessness     Look! in the sky!
          What you cannot see can track you down
snatched up with eager spite
          What you can see can make a sound
a diver floating in mid-flight
          Water splashes through words        A camera
's aperture    unconscious during every interim
I'm a human flicker out of focus this day
        "Empty Magnification" at my heels
like a snarling dog       the way Orpheus was snatched
from life's continuum