Spare Words: 12

1/31/12

Slide Show

Your cajoling angles have tamed

my rolling demons, left them, uhm,

it may be a momentary thing.

What do you know? Same as me,

not much. But based on what?

the present combination of smile, hope and fear?

we’ll build a carnival tent, populate

it with bumper cars, and maybe we

will have enough juice to collide.

Don’t think I don’t know a cheap trick

when I use it. Poetry as tool.

Shame, that, but still, if words are

but a vehicle, I’ll let you drive.

In fact, let’s stretch the metaphor

and call ends and means the pedals

that make the vehicle go:

word as means is go

word as ends is brake,

and everything else is gear-shifting

without a clutch >> just grinding.

So we learn new intersections,

Where you bend, fold, mutilate -
insert tab a into slot be -
this is where I hold this longing –

this but that's not the right word.
Longing cheats the bend of you,
at your break, this is the first name:
and this the second: and have the third -

new routes to take, and plan our paths

around new sentences (analogy = roads),

around new letters (analogy = signposts),

around new glyphs (analogy = the strokes

around your center it will take me to find

the middle. No lollipop, you, but I will lick

until I can’t, if that’s okay? if I have to go

until I swallow you whole?)

The metaphor fell apart on me, and I had to shift

(hint: wink, wink) to a more apropos simile.

I’ve got them all confused: similes, metaphors or

analogy.

Voice of anxious, patient waiting.

Voice of hope that our carnival

doesn’t go the path of the midway,

with the Disappearing Lady meeting the

Innuendoed Man, where all entendres

are meaningless.

Holiday

1. The Poem

As if destiny were not enough to contend with,

here comes this resplendent green trace (of memory)

(at the end of the day…), what is brought,

what is given, what is not understood.

Count your vague empties

versus your countless fulls.

Added up, how does it stack

or hide behind each other?

Voiced the same with different lips,

let us give a nod to the old prede-

termination. Versus the waft

of ordered oxymoronic chances

and certain hefts of carried

fools on the stage under banners.

Dappled exits with their hopeful

pending entrances and, as if

our contentions were destined,

our brought traced green women

hold us against our fears.

Stroke us against our moments

of what is less than doubt

but greater than our brave

incidents, blue-veined

and screaming (we have seen…)

the greatest of our degenerations.

How is this held together? What

internal landscape keeps the thread

from completely unraveling?

Our bethels are so far behind us, and

this isn’t headline news because we

know: we invented

a) headlines, and b) news.

So we’re told what we want:

murder, mayhem and malfeasance.

If you read of murder, you’re not dead,

so that’s good; if you read of mayhem,

you either shake your head or take notes

(the revolution will not be tele…);

and with malfeasance, you get as good

as you give. Give it up. And as if

our chances are getting better, we’re

trying to live longer

to enjoy more

to pay less

to have more

to trade-in

when

the chips are finally, inexorably cashed.

Do you take the bet? What if

your faith is bad? or misplaced?

Don’t count the locks on the gate.

Don’t count the steps you have to take

to fall to climb. When despair

comes the color of mortar and strange

stone, you’ve moved borders to play emperor:

westward Empire! westward!

You will say that our dispositions have been

taken, that yes, Mark, this is silly,

the argument only carries so much weight.

Watch the way middle-age stares at toddler.

It’s almost recognition, but not quite.

Probably once knew each other, but no more.

As if transformation means anything, breath

is slow to change and subtlety

where once heart.

When that meant something.

When was that? We have to imagine,

worse, pretend that once upon a what?

so we have something to miss, some

loss to mourn. With a mirrored lie.

Maybe we can hold the pretense that

we matter, but most likely,

not.

2. Comments on Holiday

Where was I? Right. Destiny. Intention.

I was filled with big ideas

not like the sky is filled with stars –

well, actually, exactly like that.

The stars, you see, that we see

aren’t there, exactly, actually.

They’ve moved on, or have imploded

and in 10,000 years, with wings,

if we’re still here (not literally),

then my point will make sense.

And ‘filled’: really? Tonight the sky

is one-third full, tonight a quarter,

et cetera, like that, ‘filled’?

You see, then, such are my big ideas,

such an explodingly small slice of me

these notions of life, death and destiny.

The rest of me just hums along,

marching corridors, walking through

walls, raising the dead, healing

the blind, day to day activities

that we’ll call ‘existence.’

What do you know, I could stop.

Put an end to these miracles,

call this life lived and sit back.

Put my feet up, have a drink

and a smoke and seen my boon

results unfold. Panoramic!

But I might’ve missed some loaves,

some water, some speaking in tongues,

there might be that errant sinner

in need of my salvation. There are men

with hammers in the yard, even now,

and I’d feel terrible and blue if I let

them down. Again. It’s enough for me

to know I’ll disappoint them, my revelation

wax and wane like the ides of need.

You don’t miss sand until you want to

build a castle on the beach

on vacation with a pretty girl

and the need to create some-

thing impermanent.

That’s destiny, my life’s story.

I’m not saying I’m the sand or the need,

the vacation or the girl of beauty:

but I am the beach. The crux

of matter in the analogy.

What after all are stars without sky?

We don’t know, and if they’re all gone,

it doesn’t mean anything anyway.

The sky is gone and we imagine stars

so we can wonder how

alone we really are.

That’s your sand without beach: desert,

where no castle holds and pretty girls

don’t vacation, and no need to create:

you simply start counting and putting

your sand in clean well-lit piles.

One two three Infinity! Infinity!

jinx.

1/30/12

On Astronomy

I. – How It Works

It’s lonely, situated at this one sea,

on this one beach on this one planet

in this one solar system in this one galaxy.

Can’t even get a good argument

up any more, I’m so old.

And forgetful. Are galaxies bigger

than solar systems? Or is it vicey-versa?

And speaking of verse, where does

the universe fit in? Between

galaxy and the solar system?

After solar system but before

the galaxy? Before the galaxy

but after the…

you get the idea:

Out there, somewhere?

We couldn’t find the stars

we see tonight if we had to:

they are so gone now,

stacked behind each other, chuckling

at our telescopes and fractals,

playing hide-n-go-seek with time/

spatial relationships. Leaving

their pinpricks of onceness

in the canopy of our, our what?

galaxy? universe? interpretation? simply

to fit our mythology: we are alone,

we are not alone, god

loves me, he love me not…

II. – Why It Matters

My friend Ellen wanted to go to the sun

when we were seven.

After trying to dissuade her re:

impossibility, heat, distance,

improbability, space, and her

mother’s call to dinner at five-forty-five,

I stretched a humongous rubber band

between two swingset posts, and

pulled back as far as I could

without tumping the playground equipment:

implicating Ellen firmly in the apex

of the mode of transport,

GERONIMORE!!!, we cried,

sort of simultaneously, and

SPROING-OING-OING!!!, released

her to her vagary.

I never saw her again.

Her parents reproduced and did

not miss her much, except at five-

forty-six that one day.

I’ve been lonely ever since,

in this one galaxy in this one solar system

in this one universe on this one planet

on this one beach at this one sea.

Retitled Lullaby

St Peter at the gate, saying No No No,

really starts to wear thin.

Now, let’s get this straight: heaven does not

exist, but if it does, I want in.

Unless I’m going to be reincarnated

as something cool like a panda,

or illuminating like civil unrest protest,

or smart like a spring bonnet,

or useful like an apostrophe,

or deciduous like spun honey,

or perennial like a nightmare,

or tall like a lighthouse,

or annoying like a lilac,

or loved by someone, maybe

someone like you.

But not you, exactly. That is already gone

and I am left with replacement parts.

I need someone with your bamboo sense,

your restless modesty,

your head shape and size,

your possessive placements,

your hived pollen chasing,

your haunts and your shadowed losses,

your signal to come home safely,

your not-often-enough blooming period,

your sense of wonder and dread at that

which

you do not and can not understand.

There is a roll-call ongoing, with a litany

of calamities, smelly innocent mistakes

committed in the name of distraction

and/or jealoused, wanted, malignant

attraction.

We want what we can have, except

when we can not, and find ourselves

at a distant key without a lock.

Why Meter Sucks

You know, sometimes, poetry just doesn’t work.

Well, such as here, for example.

Every day is arbitrary in its whims and fancies.

You might as easily win the lottery on a Wednesday

as be flattened by a truck, y’know?

But for poetry’s sake, who gives a flying fuck?

Unless you believe in providence, or divine intervention.

Then, maybe, you do. Give, I mean, you know.

A note of tema con variazanioni here: many people,

maybe not your friends or your family,

or even the general populace as you imagine them,

would not even know the difference between a powerball in the hand

or a Kenworth up the ass.

Think of, maybe, smaller countries.

Not so, perhaps, developed as ours.

Doesn’t that make you sad to know?

It does me.

Of course, I wrote it and I didn’t have to.

I could have kept my mouth shut, as it were,

known it still, but not shared it with you,

and I would have been sad, still, to know it, alone.

But, it’s already sad so why be alone, too?

This is better: you and I, knowing,

being sad, but doing it together.

Boy, the ducks are pissed today at something in the pond.

I should feed them more bread.

Frost, Ubi Sunt

Nothing there is that loves a window:

anything happened in the pause

between the as if of orange and the because

of the road. Which the lion crossed,

renuded, for fear of his shadow.

Faith? For pebbles of quartz? For nonce,

for naught, something she said:

“I think I planted one, a purple triangle,

well, a flower for all that, okay, an acre

of weeds, but they are beautiful, too,

n’cest pas? Or oui?”

“You can’t let mute things like feathers,

for chrissake, deregulate your lefts and your

cames. We got walls for reasons, y’know,

and how many ways you gone look out

that winder at flours mealed,

stoned, risen and frittered?”

“Begonias, Pomonias, Patagonias,

Cunnilongias, houses, stars, and roasts.

I need to learn so much about grapes

or satisfaction, I’m cleft,

you know, sworn in two,

with rooster in hand.”

“Borrow my ax, cleave completely,

and leave a wing under the eave

for ornament. Ants have craters.

Who knew? You’d have to be

an anthomologist to even want to put

them under a microscope, count

the filament of the cilia on their

petioles. Poor apocrita formicidae.

How unhappy, how close

to immortality, how far away.”

“Did you wind walls today?

Were you viewing hills through woods

and fields? Is this why you’re bitter?”

“I wended not today, I porched.

I saw tricycles at swim, I saw

a shoegum gatherer, I watched

Christmas trees, I watched paw-

brushes: I heard a telephone

make a sound and was glad

at its newness, this marvel,

so glad I stayed porched through

its howl (it stopped, alas, and I

missed it, not much); I waited

out a November guest, and

Christmas came at last, hoo-

rah! and gone to town, hoo-

rah!; I was stung by a gentle

wasp who mistook me for mate,

and I, annointed in the moment’s

passions, missed him fierce when

I swatted to squash him; I saw

a dragonfly with windowpane

wings and wanted to inch closer

to see the world through a gossamer

haze but remembering the wasp,

kept my distance; no good protest-

ant saints to a wandering this way

come, so instead, I invented good

reformist relics – straw of leper’s

bed, splinter of cripple’s crutch –

and buried them in my loam

for future finders to exhume

and praise; I spit a grape seed

at the old copper cuspidor, lone

in a corner, but it bounced

from the rim, my true aim I did

not miss, and found home

at the trellis, and now the porch

is vined, aswamped in the fruit

from which the future will glean

wine; I have come to laurel

this forgotten hope, and instead

I rust with the other links

in this old bench’s chains.”

“Your tongue gives salt or sugar

to the banes of your chill, your

hand blackened instantly by

day-light, the merest spurl

of a cigarette’s smoke, a gas-fire

in the hole, going to burn

the hymenoptera queen back to hell

from which womb she sprang.

Lick the flame at its blood-root,

yes, with taste of mud-rut

and all. Succor in the grains.

If it scares you, what will it do

to us?”

“Slay you. Or banish me. Scare you, maybe.

For the wounds of day and war,

prepare you. I’m audened to death

by the minutiae; leaves me gray and cold,

stead fifty above but ninety below.”

Leaves this shadow from its perch,

this timid spent sense of what is best

and what is less;

we are determined,

unlike before, live this haunt

from anthill to sod.

We sink lower to know:

this was ours, but

what is left for god?

Shadow of a Finger

One of those things, where you think you’ll wake up

because you don’t want to be doing what

you’re doing, and there’s the disconnect,

boundless and traveling at the speed of touch,

between the doer (you), and the being (you).

Being: closer to benign than anagram

almost allows. I’ll not bore you with the details,

dreams so tedious and meaningless, but

here are the main ingredients:

tunnel, door, brick, step, post, gun.

Here’s the plot:

door opens, gun fires, body falls.

Here’s the explication:

The tunnel is simply a means of transportation,

and the brick, dimensional for mood.

Step might have meant stumble (man’s fall?)

or goose: so hard to discern,

but post definitely meant to convey

atmosphere. Or local color.

Or something phallic.

Meaning shifts so fast –

ephemeral, heliocentric;

what is today a minor glory becomes

tomorrow’s faded wick, lights

out, oil away.

Door is there to open,

gun is there to fire.

By extension, you may extrapolate

that there is a trigger and that it is pulled.

There are no characters, per se,

well, except for me, and the person I shoot.

Does it matter whom? This is child’s play

after all, more along the Chekhovian third act lines

than an act of violence, although again,

we are trapped in the means of interpretation.

Say we are at a diner, with a chiseled Formica

counter, and pie cases, meringue 6 inches high.

Are we fooled by appearances?

Are appearances fooled by us?

Is it still retro-cool if the meringue is bakelite?

And the diner’s a converted church reformed?

What matter how fast the bullet traveled

if it’s fatal? We are traveled at the speed

of touch to reach this place, nod between pull

and such, or push. Is the gun real?

Or the trigger? What

matter? What matters is the force

of the finger, the desire at the post

to see the other fall.

Wake. Play. Sleep. Dream again.

And linger at the moment, at the step,

looking into a mirror at the top of the ache,

and look again at your finger: here is

where you break.

1/28/12

On Modern Usage

Aristotle's Rhetorics slapped me from my word,

called me to my tissue, to my sinew.

The Politics left me cold, blued, and tattoo'd,

a snake in a heart of syntax

holding a flaming sword in a hand

(this snake had a hand, and wings,

and a flowered, knowing wink)

and a scale balanced on the tail,

the words I Love the Rose Marie I Know

writ large

moëbiusly around a circle

that eats its own arrowed end.

I'll not discuss in this forum

my on-again, off-again, on-ibid relations

with the Poetics, those sculpted shards

of umlaut and gravé. This is simple stuff:

an em-dash, an ellipsis,

a colon

for emphasis.

Take soul! brevious, grievous reader,

for we are blinding in for the final landing,

abode of crystal and lender

that will haul our teeth out one by one,

only then allowing us to suckle

at death's nipple. Blue milk for all, and

if you see Rose Marie, please

remember me,

shrunken participle and all.

Untitled #22

One way of looking:

a tree is a set of roots

exploding towards

space.

One way of looking:

your future is a tree

reminding itself

of roots.

To see

your roots with me:

One way of looking.

I breathe to be

your space.

A Very Literal Translation of Ovid, book IV, lines etc.

The flowers, what she saw she wanted: him,

but why can’t red be true to any but red?

Morning has come as a flat tire,

floomping along, preparing to shred.

Some days you want to push it, see

how far it will go. Some days

it’s best to pull over and get out the jack.

Let the greased handle do the work.

In fact, stand aside and don’t move at all.

Where was it you were going?

That’s right: you don’t know.

You don’t know

where you are, or

where you’re going or

why; you do not know

where you came from

and this scheme of a berated morning

provides no mile marker or road sign.

Let’s place you in a field of bluebonnets,

at a stand of pines beside

the disappearing asphalt, returning to gravel

and sand, now sienna horizon gone,

and graves of shrub and exalted scrub

retake their scorned position,

and there’s your morning ride, like it was

never there now, garaged miles away,

far from this field you stand in,

missing him, missing him,

this reluctant oiled jack handle a totem:

everything slipping away.

No children, no crying,

but drop it, drop it right now,

it’s too hot to admit or to dread.

You’re alone today.

Why must red be true to red?

Everything else is translation.