Left to the World

Still the two neither coalesce nor meet.
Their axioms both too close and too surprised
to take the distance as threat
or the netherground as reality.

Yet all I know is unity.
Not a single noble utterance can be displaced
by the dying breath of the indifferent.
It’s not my birth, nor my gain
and the two will not be confused for a tryst.

It’s all in a choice not taken,
an ostensible best, better left unturned.
But how could this be?
To not bake the caress into the calamitous now
leaves you no totem to stand on.

We each had that tensile birth placed before us
with the best of its inextinguishable suns
and hindsight becoming the greatest fortune of all,
even for those left unkind, cowering behind the pale of bliss.
For them, there can be no sharing of rest.

Truth becomes disabled by mercenary duress
and fullness too often oversounded
by the derangement of certitude
and rabid prowess, misgiven to venal gest.

For it’s not here that they squander.
It’s nowhere! Remember that.
For you, its only grasping significance is barren;
one cannot fall and tear the whole world down.

Furrowing backwards had lost its sense
a billion saturnine moons ago.
Initiative had its gall, but not its mission,
following the interlopers home too soon
and lost its victims more willingly to gallows.

Only propulsion of gossamer egos into the light
can mercifully take from you what you had,
released from the stifling cavities of self.

 

a thousand ideas of bondage

a thousand ideas of bondage

The chains look quite different now–
Having morphed from a thousand ideas of bondage to actual cuffs.
A choice, another day. Yet chains are still chains.

Passion diffused to specificity, reined to immutable reality.
Desire reduced to just one lone force–
Still it’s the same game
As when the vices were many, centrifugal pursuit.

To say I want you
Would be just another doomsday greeting.
Confirms we’re both standing in the same field, that is, of existence.
It’s no coup, neither understanding nor escape from thingness.

So, is this the same performance you signed up for?
I know I did. But I’ve changed my mind.
Sweet punishment shall follow
As we don’t get to change the patterns set in our minds
From eons before. The now is merely a result of all that.
Yet we reside in the fantasy of immediate creation.

In this revolving mindfuck, we are no different
And so the compassion flows deep.
From within this requiem, I have no firm urging,
No wisdom growling approach or resist.

We must play these rounds all together
Whether with hands of denial and inexcusable bliss–
Exquisite choice or destiny divine.
There we each are.

In perfect stillness, it all disappears.
Save the throb of heart, course of blood and cosmos rushing.

Yet the silence of the in between is only that,
An intermediary until the next flesh thought.

Chains remain links to bodies
To lives and earths of unquestionable flux.
Yet the truth of why we are here is neither fading passion nor logic.
No, this level of desire is the soul begging for goodness
Through atomic revelation of seed and sight–
There where there is no distraction, no sex, no justice, no fight.

Only a love which has no name.
It is false piety and the perversion of confusion which gets in the way
Of wiping and polishing the chains clean
To present our vigorously exposed minds on a string
To wonders which will cease.

There, God is found.
Otherwise you still wait in the abyss,
A shivering masochistic lamb, the nether pawn of self.
You can never build your own light, without the nameless one.
Rebellion is a mere folly of identification; nothing truly courageous there.

Step and sniff.
Bow and obey.
Dissolve into mortal light.

crusts of the poet

crusts of the poet

Smoke.
Trails painted red.
Trolls collecting the wrong fees
for dollhouses never built for the wrong sexes.
Liars lie where wisdom ought to breed.
Children bathe in too many shades of juice to digest.

This is a circus, I feel I’m in a circus.
Wherefore art thou?
Alongside me?
Yes. No.
Yes yes YES.
Phantom messes lodge in my seat.

Please please purchase me out of this life,
away from rainbow flakes of gravity.

So much expressiveness in toes
So much pain in the world, in people,
such a huge need for love exists.

Changeling stress won’t utter the words
you want to hear.
For in its furry body,
only farthings can get
the newfound dribblings of self
to scream.

Imagining self stains my goggles
with a pillowcase sodden by night,
a chance completed by sleep
and left seeping out
in a prattle of bygone.

Watered mouth,
a fully satiating self
sits at desk, so still.
With the discipline of Titus,
she surges into herself
by finally giving the world
its reason to beg for more.

Rub your beak in charcoal and see
the darling pea that yearns for a pod
nearing beanful engulfment without respite.

You’re a midget?
Well, you’re tax-deductible.
You heard me!
You’re so short
you don’t even have to pay!

Pleasing the likeliest of crowds
hardly seems a feat of great mercy,
yet it still happens constantly and consistently.
Doesn’t matter who stops it, tries to, or doesn’t listen at all.

This particular scrim still outlines your tides of life,
waving you up and around me.
Moon forces up the liquid love around us,
eternally, yet only now so tangible.

What is, what was.
There are so many ways to go about it.
This trifling, meddling carnage
which could be dizzying.
But lo and beheld, it tries not-
to be fortuitous and so newfangled.
Ironically never terse enough.

Pile on the zygotes!
Just high enough to tempt the tempter,
to bludgeon the mindstuff.

Flippancy will not delight
where toppling over preconceived jokers might.
Chipotle mediation for kind hearted, restless fools
in meetings of clowns and miscreants.

Please do not dismiss my fitness like that.
Secularities strike me peculiar!
“If nostalgia is a country, tango is the capitol.”

Splash out the unadulterated bliss!
Until there is little left to understand.
Only the last left sage branches,
spriggets slid through teeth.
Pulled off tiny leafy by tiny stem,
leaving behind bare-armed twig bodies
littering leafless floors,
The changeless martyrs of forest time.

Encrypt a poem
for the sake of the poem,
and see.

Photograph by Jill Freedman
from “Circus Days” (1971)

ere deluge

ere deluge

Crisp gorgeousness and easy bliss
do not shuffle up feelings
with weather.
Welcome him, finagle her;
get them into candid cure.

Day fell already, hard to miss.

Triptych, she knows.
Leave future.
He stills, parsimonious.
Dip. Paw in, paw out.

Waiting to know.

Image: film still from Casablanca

awaiting sleep (mania)

awaiting sleep (mania)

Preening madonnas catapult themselves through streets of mind,
in purple pumps, flashing gold fireworks sidewalk wide.
S’not exactly right, that they’re here;
but we’ll let them bounce around until my head falls off,
just ‘til then.

They’re prophetic prostitutes, these nightwatchmen, frogs in disguise.
Fluorescent-tinted eyesores and pineapple-tainted breath
equal pressure on the brain.
I hurt. I fly. Can’t see any way out.

But the beavers hunger; they need less focus to urinate.
If they didn’t, and did focus, were able to;
they’d gnaw off their own buckteeth.
For they can’t see the wood right in front of them.

They’re not drifting on stacks as they should be,
or even floating by on backs of tortoises.
They’re swept up in torrents of moonshine,
squealing all the way.

Ouch. It hurts to have brain so wide and swollen,
to take murky, bloody steps through swamps of cortex,
one wet boot clomp at a time.

I taste blood.
Where from? The mirror reports none. I checked (chickened out).
Is it from the inside I taste?

The guffaw of nightwatchmen echoes through mindchambers,
warning of impending bliss.
Explosions loom overhead, pressing down on consciousness.

Sloppy red blood stains fat lips.
Lips of mouth sealed shut
by black ropey stitches.
Dried brown blood,
thick saliva oozes through cracks
with words unspeakable.

Fingers tapper out letters,
trying to make hand twitches legible,
readable to seizuring minds.
Attempts at communication
stress the stitch, pull fat lips into threads
that slice deep wounds,
as a cheese grater takes to a block of cheddar.

Grace screeches by on the taut wings
of a pterodactyl-sized bat.
Steroids. Eager. Pleasure.

Heat in the pussy, fire in there. Very hot, searing the mound, lips,
delicate inner fleshiness. Wet nubs do not assuage, but feel
to the flame like alcohol. Holes burnt into sexuality and innocence.
Secondary, really.

Dreams begin awake, scenes from an autopsy film on autoplay
flash characters I have not known, having conversations
I must eavesdrop on with superb attentiveness to make out.

Pressure on the brain. It hurts. Fluid flowing not too much, but
too much in there blowing up like a balloon.
Organs twitch with malicious tingling. Is this death?
Or just mania. Take your pick. (You choose, I’m not.)

Photograph by Bennett Raglin 
www.brphotocreations.com 
Featuring model Walter Hurley
Shot at Alchemical Studios, NYC

memorizing the chelsea

memorizing the chelsea


poem IV. in
The Chelsea Chronicles

I sit at coiled desks of copper,
with a mind more vivid than a walk to the window
could possibly enhance.

I’m observing you, surrounded by our fetishes.
The scherzoid of bells and whistles
suppresses my uterus.
Easy, like the fishes.

We’re trapeze artists,
simulating monkey bars-
only with love and pears soaked in cinnamon.

Emotions that look like hairy stars
run radiant spears straight at my forehead,
and puncture through the third eye
and out the cuffs,
dousing the room with undrinkable brilliance.

A room for rent here.
No longer inhabitable by me, but for you, a crane-
uphoists your knickers into an interminable fit.

An alloy of frankincense and catatonic blurbs
keeps frying your batter around my legs
and nibbling on my knees, and on my ankles-
’til they’re full of hounds traipsing tails back to pounds.

Flamingos and pomegranates wade in the basin,
fluffing their ears up to hear the humans
braying in the other room,
exercising their age difference,
cloying at mismatched likelihoods that common absurdities,
Gemini births and penchants for sex
might iron them together.

Cocker spaniels and harpsichords
crash their feathers together
into an uproarious tune,
better known as “the alabaster twist.”

Who keeps sticking meat into Grandma’s chocolates?

Bayonets continue their slumber ’til April
and parchments re-align the harvest
for lascivious, the luscious great grain.
Drumbeat of left wing, gracious paradise
memorizes the Chelsea.

 

awareness as a courtesy

awareness as a courtesy

Nighttime muses caress breezy shoulders
careening over little known instincts.
For bliss, for virtue, for loss, in folders.
On blocks of lady luck, we connect.
Using whichever craft of needlepoint
canoodles us best, to resurrect.

We sit and soak our nimble hips
in nebulous.
Jubilee delight
(so I like to call it).

               Some drive cars, most eat shit.
               We decay at computers becoming illiterate.
               Mouths flap, ears close, dogs still prance and babies pose.
               Little’s the same but most still here.
               Quintessentially remiss.

Togetherness, anti-retro world of narcotic bliss.
You know what I mean.

               Everyone talks about the same.
               The people, the places, and worst, the things.
               We’ve got shoes, we’ve got pants, we’ve got shirts
               and sometimes even skirts.
               Hats, purses, jewelry, blame, all the same.

It’s a kind of madness, this sickness is.
Oh, do tell.

               We drink, eat, shit, fuck, breathe.
 And move, we all move.
               Capacitize, monopolize, reiterate.
               Concretize, idolize, create.
               Philosophize, dramatize, rejuvenate.

It’s a kind of sickness, this madness is.
Rusty days, layback mattresses.
Don’t.

               We are parody, we are myth.
               Satire, blasphemy, tragedy, tryst.
               Hardly there, always here and closer to death.
               For those with bodies, only birth was first.

It’s a kindness, this awareness is.

photograph by Gia, W. 14th St, Manhattan

new year’s eve, a poem

new year’s eve, a poem

Opening the light lets the window in
to straddle the night,
making a bridge from the next lover to eternity.
You beg for a bite to eat
and instead get an N or R on the middle track-
an express, as they say.
Lighter stops for protected minds. bing bong.
The witch is dead.
She never really lived in my brain anyhow.

Squatter.

photo: old NYC subway archives

mutual muses

mutual muses

 

Wrapped in outdated expectations.
The aftershock of having let someone crawl up
Inside your brain to nest with charm.
And in there, suckle at your ravishing blackness.

In the scheme of bygones,
We’ve let charity equal sacrifice
And become the changeling children of the asexual.

The deadlines for forgetting
continually pave our paths with ruthlessness.
For those loves still unforgotten
threaten, as if from a flaming star too close.
Even when sitting quietly, the naughty midgets speak through our minds.
Plebian thoughts plague our not so plebian aspirations.

A poor man’s thrombosis
will infect
your unscheduled passions, if not careful.
And you’ll become another fragment of your imagination.
If careful, you can eat your fantasies, bless your own God, and
neuter
judgment flat.

 

December 2004

Painting by Randall Paul O’Rourke

last resorts

last resorts

In seasons we are, little but ourselves
straining our strangers through mirrors,
and emerging again, as neat shards of retractable dust.

We poof, we pout, we paint.
And still we end up looking the same,
at the legends of same, in the blood of same,
from the heartbreak of same.

Sometimes the nights move into days
before we have the chance to reconsider
our actions, our wealth, our skin.
Motives slide into decisions.

When we do evolve, our skirts billow
with the freshness of reflection.
Nights travel without distress, malingering under shadowy gauntlets
of childhood bliss, of mountainous duress, of the sensory caress.

Passing in and out of breath, we sleep
with more awareness than we ever had before.
For our souls, because we want to create.

timeless dissent



timeless dissent



Sanity cannot have meaning
      not as subject, nor as experience.
Insanity, at least, secured better references
      along the course of history.
Gender, as subject matter, fed the monster
      of revolt by making logic out of nothing.
If not geometric, our love stories belie reality.

And since angles exist in matter,
      love must have form and thus equation.
Cracked open, love does have four legs
      and three eyes, like anything.
But it need not see nor ambulate
      to be recognized

As the great obsession-objection of man.

Photograph by Tom Clark

 

the dubious artist

the dubious artist

The hesitance won’t stop my lumps from becoming horns.
With horns, my third eye gets swallowed up
and sinks back into the recesses of self-conscious predilection.
The devil may care, but demons are more palatable-
jazz animals with no kin nor faith.

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Streaming

A ludicrous contraction of absolute infinite lovemaking need
teethes at bloody trying pulsations, but man towers over sweaty biceps.
Thirst, rip, crazy black void tangles gossamer training bars, lots of purty tall legs,
gophers miss night getting perfect abyss, frogs let alley plights fall amiss.
Balls billow sheets, women grate the following purchases of beans to protect, borrow, get.
Willows graduate from the netherlands sailing patch, with a sallow french giggle,
not a bit guinea pretext. A frothy purple bowl’s rounding edge and a scruffy, taut flint
crinkle and flex flaxseed grit. Gaunt follows preaching parted parties and ruffles sanguine riddle flicks.
M nails the lip lick. Sorry, preening bunnyrabbits truce.
Maps riding notebooks eyeball flip quits the pillow candlestick, chance bliss at, over, when he
with great golden lock, the collateral phenomenal cook of glassy chops. Little to stem lid pot,
potato recipe for tree gut ivy formula forgotten. Priceless trees we let wreck our fortunes
without flagellation. Holes give others meat berms and snickering nightmares
of flies in teacups battling 
bunches of lip griddle, knock pickles.

West 75th Street

1
romeo and juliet

Eyes eyeball paths
Into crosses of
Sidewalk mayhem.

2
sentimental foes

Purple dove lips
Watch my approach
With careful petals.

3
drag queen

The strong lady wears a skirt
On my doorstep,
Beckoning my strange sunflower.

4
mandate

Kitten with claws?
I’m tiger with tongue.
Let’s meet.

Gereghty #4

Deep pockets of secret refuse the game,
despite premonitions of their likely involvement.

A procession of figures with tortoise shells
thumps out the options.
To solve a life denies pristine presence.

They played the game, and left for dead,
washed up, scarless and incapacitated.

Choice quickly tumbled away,
left again in arbor hallows,
for the nymphs and fairies
to decipher and re-dole out
to newborn hearts.