Laughing
 
 
 
I am laughing said the sun
 
We are chuckling said the stars
 
We are nodding said the  trees
 
We are smiling said the waters
 
 
The red bird said there is silence
 
The deer said there are leaves
 
Slime is easy said the snail
 
There is honey said the bee
 
 
I do not exist the woman said
 
Nor do I the man chimed in
 
My tears are useless said the woman
 
My tears are bullets sighed the man 
 
 
 
I am turning said the gear
 
I am hissing said the wire
 
There is suction said the pump
 
I drive pistons said the fire
 
 
 
I  lead nowhere said the highway
 
I make boundaries said the map
 
I am lost said the truth
 
I am gorged said the rat.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A Boat Trip
 
 
I went to visit the invisible ones.
 
The hidden ones, who have no names
 
And live undeclared
 
Inside the silence of our sighs
 
 
It was a night so imminent
 
so black with silver
 
That the boat that crossed the water
 
shined a lamp against disaster.
 
 
When I reached the island
 
That had been hidden inside the air
 
They came to meet me, shyly, happily,
 
as if their waiting had been an anxious
 
pleasure
 
 
and we talked until the sun
 
spilled light onto the lake
 
and everyone sighed
 
and I could not stay
 
 
 
Returning, I could see
 
the shore I had left lthe night before
 
and the dead
 
leaving for work
 
from their open graves
 
 
 
 
 
Poem
 
 
A poet
 
Lay on the couch
 
All alone in his home
 
And at that moment  a fruit fly
 
Burrowed up his nose
 
And  bored
 
into his sinuses
 
 
Oh no,
 
He cried out
 
(As green walls
 
Defied his erudite
 
ignominy)
 
 
“This is unforgivable.
 
Another telling travail
 
inside an  aesthetic tragedy.”
 
 
“One must write
 
Of great beauty
 
To mitigate
 
Such 
 
Misery”
 
 
“One must speak
 
Of another
 
If one is ever to make up
 
For being divided
 
By these words”
 
 
 
And at that moment
 
He conceived
 
An epic
 
About  the gaps
 
Inside beauty.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Going down the Road
 
 
 
Going down the road
 
I saw blue mountains,
 
and noticed day’s substance had
 
dissolved
 
A little, as it always does when its beauty
 
is loved.
 
What is dissolved is never seen again
 
Though it lingers like a ghost
 
that is waiting for us to remember
 
the ever fading earth 
 
as our guiding star.
 
 
 
 
 

The Scientist Dream

“What is love?”
 
I ask the beautiful scientist
 
And she answers
 
That it is only a physiological symptom. . . .
 
She shows me her symptoms
 
And I show her mine
 
And we play roulette
 
As the numbers go around
 
And the stars fall from the sky
 
 
 
When I ask her to save me,
 
She looks away.
There are limits she says. . .
 
procedures,
 
Ethics. . .
 
 
I beg her to save me
 
And she refuses me yet again
 
Saying
 
‘we cannot save you from your desire
 
anymore than we can save you from
 
your aspiration.
 
These are the most intractable of all
 
The  meta-diseases.”
 
 
 
So I kiss her and tell her
 
That she will be my savior
 
That I  only need
 
her assurance
 
That she will do what she can
 
 
 
Then I nuzzle her slight
 
antiseptic  breasts
 
As she lies down beside me
 
With a long steel needle
 
And we sleep
 
inside a dream
 
 
Of infinite precision
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
From: City of GOD
 
 
 
AND
 
A dullard sat in a window,
 
fat,
 
and wore himself down inside a fedora
 
yes a fedora inside the musak
 
amidst the pleasure of his
 
personal anamnesis
 
from which to sport his vision
 
of a previously (un)met and
 
most comely woman
 
unspoiled as it  were and tuned to what is as if
 
she were what was,
 
as said dullard
 
wrote brokenly of what was at hand,
 
no not what it was
 
but what it was before she came,
 
and said to one  who was not
 
there, ( but speak as if I had been, avec plaisir)
 
" she was indeed as a beauteous
 
queen and held herself aloof,
 
with bright  white eyes and
 
unbleach ‘ed teef "and said man did sit
 
and describe at length
 
the brilliance
 
of her ways and means
 
her hand on fur alas
 
to comfort,
 
and said,
 
allegro or was it andante:
 
"that I were an
 
other in that other's grief, then oh then
 
she, so beauteous would
 
finally, gratefully, beggingly
 
achingly, as if she were a star inside a
 
thimble marked with an asterisk,
 
unnerstan' me. But she didn't.
 
And so, in a manner not unapproaching prayer
 
he said instead nothing, 
 
and remaineth  sitting, and staying
 
what would come, until he began
 
to suspect himself of doubling
 
or tripling  or quadrupling
 
himself but knew nought how to
 
uncompromise the (un)said implements of 
 
his measure and burned  about her pelf
 
for the hope of her great and
 
small charms to burst upon his
 
languid member enwrobed by her
 
as if by a pinkish chocolatier, the stars to winkle
 
in the hoard of her monuments
 
(and though it stunk of allegory it was not)
 
And she, whose most
 
marble hinderpart had not meant
 
to thicken itself on yon pelf of muffin,
 
concerned  herself not with visions
 
but with the practicality that surrounds desire,
 
turned without him and from him, as if the wind
 
were her prerogative, which it was and
 
wasn't, and said what she had to say
 
to an other who had been , like
 
one locked with ugolino in a tower,
 
locked with her and  licking in her jellied
 
bower. And  he. Poor sot, with fedora on his
 
empty head,
 
who had not known but who
 
had foreseen, kissed her empty pallor
 
as if it were not indeed to become a
 
memory and  turned and walked
 
from the door of  the
 
nunnery
 
and was heartful sore with hope
 
& slippery.
 
 
Whereupon, elsewehere,
in a city inside a city inside a tiny lavender
basket of potpouri 
and flowers,
nested in a scape of towers 
was  a blueprint of said city
broken into forever 
as if said eternity was breaking against
itself over and over in misery
(and it was) inside still another tiny
basket of potpourri and lavender
and a bit of dried rose petal,
wafting over hidden hours
of a ruinous dark mansard
whose presence there was, well, dour.
And inside it darkness came & went,
full of  writhing figures that tossled
and poked and prodded  seeking to wear
said city for a trinket, aroused in stupor
and  in turbulence
waited quietly, yes, poised to steal
what they would not admit.
And in the course of it, these darkened ones
did pass a parcel of landscape,
didlling the plovers and burning
 the titmice as if to say sit down.
 But they didn't, and were,
most fouly and methodcially,
as a blueprint might paper over a window,
subtracted , by those external to love
and it's revetments, and by those internal and reified,
 that wished to believe in
themselves as against themselves. 
And thusly that little manchild wept,
and toute le meme  chose , the warden ,
 who had not come in until this minute,
 led him down the hallway into the chamber,
where he was fixed in his gratitude,
and remaineth until this day,
unconsidered in his ashen countenance.
 
**
 
While elsewhere an homunculus
had come to winter as if the snow
 where a form of his quietude,
which it was, and he lunched
 across the drifting prairie,
turning in desire,
not for amplitude but for vision,
and the implements of sky
that made him necessary and quiet,
a tiny acrobat or toy inside said desire,
albeit a desire that comes sideways into nuance,
 and lifts the clouds above the soil,
and sets the trees against them
and scribbles a kind of cheery ambience
across the countryside,
lifting and superating and swallowing again,
and that selfsame homunculous lay down
against yon tree and fretted long and loudly
re his passionate incredulity
at the turbulence of the strictures
that verily surrounded him,
cavorting  uproariously in the supremacy
of an untoward, yet felt & present continuity.
And his fellows they did offer,
no not one not two not three but four
 or was it more than four offers,
 in which to bring him back
to that which was and is
fragmentary and improper,
and he, looking out upon a sea of dilletantes,
his self reflected as among them,
did as homunculi did,
and nothing nay nothing
would pull him from said  flowers.
 
**
In darkness  little men
came home from their inheritance,
and stole forth, lucrecius- like,
to cut the distance into quanta
and ask of night as it echo-ed
an im/ pertinent question
which is/was: exactly how shall we divide it ?"
and though they wert overtly
in their well-off precociousness kissed,
they continued sewing lapels
to flowers as if it were beneficial
to sport an other.
And of a means and of a kind, it was.
and the night did sway
and the day did anchor,
and the day did sway and the night  did rankle.
and said moon, which was a silent orb
of crystalline floating above a snowfield
of a many mansioned teal,
a  tinny reflector burning
a piddling hayfield, that moon
which was a prairie load o' pregnant dafodils,
burning into the night sky and  waiting,
yes waiting somehow for what was almost to come,
as a ball of tofu well- flavored
with the sauce that kissed it,
so that it retaineth it's flavor into the night,
which was not unlike the savor
 of yon succulent pullet,
neither suffered nor laughed,
nor looked askance,
but  hung against the darkness
that was as a pit of black velvet,
and seemed thereupon to laugh at them
as if their words were too small a thing
for its description, which they were.
Yet said little men in darkness crouched.
And discussed over wine and cheese
and a most pleasant and savory
wheatbread cracker,
muchly and thusly ,
how to put that moon  out.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
From: 13 Collages of the Princess
 
Collage #11.
 
 
 
“Look.” said the weasel. “Dream” said the bear.
 
“Sigh” said the water. “Rise” said the air.
 
She closes the book.
 
There is the green decor
 
she lies back and sneezes
 
and then she snores
 
*
 
 (SIGH little bird,
 
I am way too blue.
 
A neighbor’s writing has become
 
pretentious
 
while a teensy sparrow has come out to play
 
only to become the desire
 
of a man taking aspirin.
 
and that is my secret.
 
It has come out at last
 
 
I have spent all my life learning
 
to be a human being
 
Only to find that human beings
 
are idiots like me.
 
But one day a bird fell
 
out of the sky
 
 
and we cried so earnestly that nothing happened.
 
Then one of one of the princess’ eyelids twitched,
 
and a beautiful woman
 
accused the sky.
 
For all had disappeared of hope and consequence.
 
and the toom toom toom
 
of a baritone with the boutenier
 
breezed past us as he chased the
 
whistle of the train
 
into a rushing sea of impending air.
 
             
                          
 
                                    *
Any minor beauty may arrest the princess’ song.
 
The dresses blow across the lawn
 
in retro pink and blue bouffant
 
where lice inherits the hive of her hair
 
and shadows skate across the Neva
 
to bend and genuflect
 
as they disappear
 
                                   
*
 
BUT life is not so real
 
as we might have it if we are turning
 
red.
 
It is a half-toned photo of an axe in the corner
 
and a little girl satisfied to choke on a cigarette.
 
The shapes we come through in order to meet the prince
 
speak to us now , merely of emptiness.
 
He is the shadow
 
of what we used to know.
 
His science holds the smoking gun, and the poets come to breathe the fumes.
 
Not knowing the names of things. Not speaking about the water that has figured
 
flesh
 
or the time that is timeless as it writhes in death
 
and pursues its love as it must pursue
 
emptiness.
 
The princess is lying across the bed.
 
She is sighing at the scene of her victory
 
which she has fashioned into the victory
 
of her sisters’ arousal,
 
and the high-toned brow of one too tall to renege.
 
Beautiful princess, we love you and we want you.
 
Beautiful princess we have you and we do not have you

and that is how we desperately want it to be.
 
It is our silence that we carry into the afternoon

and the sun.
 
It is our misery that we ask you to turn into solace.
 
There is a window that looks out on the grey of the city.
 
Behind the window the heads pass by.
 
Outside on the ledge a bird pecks
 
at a crack in the wood.
 
The sky passes over.
 
There is a single cloud.
 
Yours is business.
 
Yours is the business of business.