Amigo mio

Amigo mio, señor menos sibilante que la brisa,
Hoja en perpetuo otoño,
Pétalo que viaje por paracaídas,
En los remolinos del viento.

Debajo de las plantas,
Y en fondos de arrugas profundas,
Encontrarás el último polvo de arena,
En que vagaban los discípulos de Jesucristo.

En la nave levitan cánticos trapenses,
En la cueva elevan levaduras indómitas,
En el marfil captan deseos destapados,
En la torre estiran océanos auroras,
En los astros cruzan cuerpos errantes.

Polilla empolvada,
Criatura de sombra y cielo,
Criatura de luz,
El viento roba tu esencia,
La brisa te lleva al numen,
Aleteas contra la noche,
Me encuentras
En un peldaño inadvertido.

Not lost

Thus we fling into successive siftings:
Tremulous on the edge
Gleaning, leaning, teetering,
Kissed by the wind,
Of a sudden, all in,
Down and bouncing down,
Among slag and slough,
Cornice and crevasse,
The paths of ancients,
Seeking, who knows,
Earth, place, rare arete.

And when the day is done our wayward pebble,
Adopts sun as tutor and softly settles,
With alike bunch in a friendly groove,
Only to, when prompted, launch anew!

When will our loose-footed friend,
Immensity's implacable pull forefend,
And giving up the day declare,

Advent to a single-state affair?

--
And for a similar tale, see this account of the The 25-Year Riverine Journey of a Wooden Boulder Carved out of a Felled 200-Year-Old Oak Tree.

Meeting house meditation

Quietly, for a time, I replace,

My striving ego with a state of grace,

Shuffle my insecurity, doubt, and fear,

And place them on a burning bier,

And in the emptiness descry,

The luminosity of an open sky. 

Allow me to be

I'm as boring as a book on tape,
As melancholy as a song,
As alluring as a nape,
As illicit as a bong.
I'm as bright as the night,
As petty as neighbors,
As pure as off-white,
As binding as favors.
I'm as open as a window,
As astir as passion,
As pampered as snow,
As free as sin.
I'm as one as Pangaea,
As holy as Aquinas,
As dissolute as Krishna,
As meretricious as highness.
I'm this-all and more,
As fundamental as a quark,
As latent as a question mark,
As welcoming as a paramour.

I want to date...

i want to date a boy with cojones, pendulums producing forms that clash with the collective. a boy whose musk suffocates, whose eyebrows choke, whose knees cleave the warm soil. a boy whose ache for me is surpassed only by mine for him. a boy who demands but doesn't take, whose will shelters me and strips my defenses. i want to date a boy who carves me from stone, lubricates me with forlorn tears, erects a pedestal of sand at the sea's edge. i want a boy with cojones, who penetrates the pabulum, whose glance is a call to power and whose caress a call for peace.

inspired by ghostbongweedofthesamurai.

In consequentialism

I am a pixel in a
gray panorama.
My father was before
Me and furthermore
So is she.
But she likes me.
So wait, why gray?
Why not luminous rays
In viridian seas
Ribald reds
In Rothko's head
The absence of light
In the singular night
After all gray is made
Of multitudinous shades.

Twitter poetry will not be forgiven

Daybreak.

The burgher's bilious guts erase the dawn like too-much-mayo tuna salad.

Borrowed couch. Cushions are the bulwarks of arms.

Politeness is the cushion of cowardice. 

Somewhere, a feline feeds.

Nightbreak. 

Diurnal dreams disrobe in the dark. 

Mimes know not their boxes' surfaces nor subtle beasts their desires' insides.

Don't judge my crimes by the wan light of smart phones.

Take me out to feel the suns' rays.

Find your devices useless in the glare.

Quotations: poetics

William Hazlitt: "Poetry dwells in a perpetual utopia of its own." (*)

Philip Larkin: "Envoi"

The question of poetry, of course,

Is difficult: some say a poet should

Mix with his fellows, be a social force;

Others say he should be simply good;

Others, that he should be a communist;

Perhaps a scholar, even drive a van;

Or spend his waking hours in being kissed;

Or all these, and become a Complete man.

//

Myself, I think that poetry is merely

The Ego's protest at the world's contempt,

And that there are no normal poets, really.

Therefore, if as tonight, dear, he should move

In motions of spending and the acts of love,

He has lived his poem; all his power is spent. (*)

Charles Simic: A poem is like a girl at a party who gets to kiss everybody. No, a poem is a secret shared by people who have never met each other. Compared to the other arts, poets spend most of their time scratching their heads in the dark. That’s why the travel they prefer is going to the kitchen to see if there is any baked ham and cold beer left in the fridge. (*)

John Steinbeck: Tom wrote secret poetry, and in those days it was only sensible to keep it secret. The poets were pale emasculates, and Western men held them in contempt. Poetry was a symptom of weakness, of degeneracy and decay. To read it was to court catcalls. To write it was to be suspected and ostracised. Poetry was a secret vice, and properly so. (*)

Walt Whitman: Life...unrhymed poetry. (*)

William Carlos Williams: 
      It is difficult
to get the news from poems
         yet men die miserably every day
                     for lack
of what is found there. (*)

Urge of the demi

You
And I
Are not one.
You take for granted
That I take for granted.
But what if I know myself?
What if I know what I know
And know what I don't know?
What if the world's more duping
Than duped? More deceiving than
Deceived? What if the only true things
Are paradoxes? And the only true things
Are ineffable? But there is an extinguishing
In the blue hour, of a small and isolate thing,
When an ectoplasm struggles to exist or erupt
From the static form formerly filled in and warm.
But no, nothing. Nothing brushed my face, no moth
wing wafted my ear, nothing numinous oozed away.
Fuck death. Fuck death and dying, I'm sick of trying
To care about carelessness. The point's been much made
And death poetry will not be forgiven. But what poetry will
Be forgiven its importunate existence, time and energy eating,
Silk-lipped mouths, still toothy, pap-hungering, all glossolaling.
Excuse me if I'm an anti-edificer here respecting neither fronteirs
Nor roles. I'm not sorry. I've tipped passed the point of pardonable
Eccentricity into po-mo multiplicity, unhinged Zappaism, iconoclastic
Scribbomania, an artificer of worlds unbounded, over eager, word drunk.
I seek to hold and spellbind you and myself with my prosthetic proselytizing
and imperfect cosmos. Ingeminate me. Or spurn me. It's all the same. It's all been
stamped, felt, built, killed. Coding's easier than decoding. Bellies bloat on the immaterial.
I am one of many. We're all in mystery. We refuge in representation's ever order of the day,
Each era is overtaken in the unfathomed advance that berefts bedrock but leaves not nothing,
Perhaps interstitial nets for the networked, intersecting in n-dimensions, dew-sodden and tenuous.
I grant that I take for granted that you take for granted. But perhaps our for-granteds synergize or cancel-out and
We know that we know and we know that what we know is as nothing as everything. Our worlds and words are
Inscribed in level sand and a moth wind wafts. We are voiced and eructating and we may not be one but we are not alone.

Quatrains

-
Flipping felines yowl
"Copycat me pussy!
With sure celerity
I never fall afoul."

Re-posted here.

-
Kiss-me-quick toes,
Giantess arches,
Gorgonzola veins:
Endless delectations.

Re-posted here.

-
Fight or settle.
For what; what on?
Here I am, Salt Lake.
Move along...wait, stay Mormon.

-
Here I am, dank swamp,
Retrograde river romp.
Here I am in the ether.
I’m an eel in the ether.

-
Here I am, the womb.
I'm a parasite in the womb.
I'm a sybarite in the womb.
Can't keep me down.

-
Manifest destiny's
Logical conclusion's
A Pacific of pilgrims,
But, “We shall build here.”

-
Balustrade autarky,
Inside I'm free.
Percutaneous X,
We inter-annex.

-
Take nothing
Tell no lie
Grow towards the sun
Until you Icarus.

Id for ideas? (no Freud at all)

Do ideas excite you?
Do they drive you
like a bullock whip
Or pull you
Like a magnet?

Are ideas internal
Possessing intrinsic
effervescence, velocity?,
Personal vectors
Of being and doing?

Are they social fodder
For connection
And contestation,
Lubricants of the day to day.
Are we ideational men and women?

Are ideas higher or more
Than other things?
More vital, noble, profound,
Unadulterated or distilled,
Disconnected?

What are ideas anyway?,
If anything at all,
What do they touch?
Where do they fit?
And what are they not?

Ideas are not deities,
(But maybe vice versa),
Nor material or palpable things,
Like viscera
And stock options.

They could be science,
After our knowledge alembic,
But may be more aesthetic,
Like bird's songs,
Possessing singular transience.

Ideas are probably relations,
By virtue of binding,
And almost definitely information,
Bits, that is, guiding
For instance, geese to migration.

Ideas might be
more like instruments than songs
For a role in achieving.
Or perhaps ideals
Infinitely reaching.

But do ideas excite you?
Or does some other thing?
Baser and simpler
Impulses and incentives,
With which we're all familiar.

Money is motivating,
Profane and material.
But without nutrition,
Vacuously instrumental,
For what, for what?

Maybe hedonism helps,
Ideas with directives:
All voluptuous things.
But lamentably tempered
by treadmills and falling returns.

We'd shelter in
Basic needs satisfaction
If it weren't so human
To want more and higher
Forms of gratification.

What then are these more-wanting
and demeaning returns,
If not ideas as natural laws?,
However contingent and uncovering,
Are ideas also governing?

Whatever it is they are or do,
Do ideas excite you?
Are you even excited?
I won't blame you
If you're not.

Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase (spoilers)

"Sometimes I get lonely
Sleeping with you," she said.
"Just great," I said, "Just great."
I was already lost.
She was the kind of girl
That'd sleep with anyone,
I was mediocre,
But OK about it.
It was improbable
That such a person as
Myself could be living,
That such a relation
As ours could last for long.

Another girl, with an
Auricular something,
"You know nothing," she said,
"For sure," I said, "For sure."
On a wild sheep chase,
Ovine totemism,
A vital dynamo,
A fixed point in time space.
Points have no names nor selves,
Suspended over all,
Sheep have both,
A Will, a whip, a host,
Scourging blood for weakness.
"People are weak," I said.
"You don't know this thing," he said,
Gangrene rot worsening,
"That exists in the world."

"Where's the time go?" she asked,
We were close then,
Closer than ever, before the end.
"Time adds up for us," I said,
"But it does not expand,"
No, time does not expand.
Time trails off into death,
Darkness alone shifting,
Like mercury motion,
Voiceless snow falling soft,
Afterward all silent,
Inexpressible cleave.
Getting back to normal,
On a cold, concrete sea,
All alone with the dead,
And ears to hear the waves.

Note: this is "plagiarized" from the text, more of a tessellation of quotes than a novel effort.

Michener's Sayonara (spoilers)

Hana-ogi:

Rroyd, Rhroyd,

When you kissed me at Bitchi-bashi,
A good punishing smooch,
I knew you were the tall stud of substance,
I had longed and waited for.

It was but the work of a moment to,
Lay your head in my lap,
Then tumble you by the Shinto shrine.
You felt millions of eyes on you,
But had eyes only for my golden glamour.

You could no more resist carnal thrill,
Than the revelation of whole to whole,
The cohabitation of one in another.
We needed no common tongue to build,
A world away, rapturous, and auto-catalyzing.

But you, you simple and lovable fool,
With your beefhead Broadway blathering,
Dreaming yourself an architect, of setting me free,

Unwilling to forsake your foundation,

Yet demanding it of me.

In the end it was eyes you lacked,
For my, our, the multivocality,
And your own home-love hypocrisy.
Japan was never a place for you,
You were a place for Japan.

And so when your friend blew his brains out,
And mine stuck a knife through her neck,
I went to Tokyo knowing the future.
A succession of small rooms and big stages,
Discipline, promotion, bellicosity,

And an end to love.

Roy Gruver:

Hayano-chan,
Lo the postillion,
Takusan-love for the tadpole on my pillow,
I'm the one's been struck by lightning,
That will never strike again.

Note: First of a series of poems on books I read.

I want clean blood

I want clean blood
Break through the scab
Shine through
Translucent patina
Smog slab
And beneath
An ocean of incarnadine.

A spoken triplet

You’re a residential nomad,

You bring your house with you,

You’re a hermit crab.

Inflect the banal

Inflect the banal.
Inflect it with tinges of color, corruption, doubt, impossibility, magic, mystery.
Capture the conservatives and the dreamers,
Seduce them with the almost-imperceptible,
Tangent to the known and knowable,
The distorted prosaic.

Inflect the banal,
But don't over-do it,
Don't spew florid particulars,
Don't bask in wonderment,
Don't succumb to bombast,
Don't asphyxiate with love.

Inflect the banal,
Tickle the imagination,
Kiss it lightly,
Slither a razor blade over it,
Reserve the cat o’ nine tails,
For special occasions.

Re-posted here.

Muscles and entrails

If practice makes perfect,
And practiced practices are habits,
Then perfected habits are practiced.

If mastication speeds assimilation,
And indigestion is somatic sedition,
Then unseed sedition with ration.

If excessive excess is infinite infinity,
And excessive moderation is infinite finity,
Then moderate excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

If the early bird catches the worm,
And the late bird captures the moth,
The booby goes to the sloth.

If phraseology is phenotypic,
And the corporeal forms assimilate infinity,
Then the emperor's clothes are immaterial.

Invincible in the wind

Invincible in the wind,
On the stairs, by the road,
Passerby glance,
Bewildered,
Can’t sense the afterglow.

Doughty lad towel clad,
True in tension, blood below,
Darkness embalms,
Aloneness,
Can’t see for the afterglow.

When the bus overtakes,
Diving whale, stabbing crow,
Hurricane tunnel,
Laughter,
Can’t strip the afterglow.

Who for?

It's mine, not yours
For me, not you

Twas cathartic to be a creator
Demiurge without a care
To tryst my willing paramour
In my screen-illumined lair

I'd bang away frustrations
On her cacaphonic keys
Reveling in ministrations
Let me count the ways

Then at some point declined
Innocent purge and delight
Occluded by dross and grind
A tale as sad as trite

Thus underswept the symbiotic world
Connections strained and wavering
Lovers taken by virtiginous swirl
Separate currents braving

Mercurial winds dash and reunite
Old oscillation eternal
But it is possible to reignite
Disclaimed sentiments fraternal

Over this micro-land
I reign gatekeeper creator
But resides here more than planned
Life which transcends the mirror

I have returned to this earth so sere
To huddle with my entities
I hope the time is near
To reclaim the nursery

It's ours, not mine
For us, not me

Smiling is sexy

Smiling is sexy, but it's hard to grin,
When you've got an extra appendage,
Disconnected from its foundation,
By consensual sacrilege.
Intangible, parallel to the earth,
Full of memory, bereft of berth,
A bridge to nowhere, disused
Function, no longer fused
To another, it decays with haste.
The cthonian vole and sprightly
Chrysanthemum contribute imperceptibly
To its demise, reprocessing without waste
Once-merged soul soil now expired,
Reveling in love and life inspired.