"the love of a doctor"

Each piece duly piercing
Its own consequent
Glint, each fragrant fragment

Exclamatory of its berth
In the whole and not merely another
Aspect of the whale

To be turned, that’s right
Yesterday I watched Fellini astride
A blackly garbed curve

And today a strange
Italian stranger engages
Me on the train

There are dreams and then there
Is running late
Again up Lexington, a copy

Of American Music shuffling
Mute in your bag
The startling collision

Of two men in howls
As the light finally
Changes, the sun balanced on

The pin of noon for only
Its non-moment as we both know
The limits traipse

Away in lame constructions
Of air, Giulietta is left
Fumbling after the spirits have left

Her in the same way we wear our hearts
Down to symbolism to
Symmetry to be worn to be blind

Every day is a senseless response
We don’t hold a train
Responsible for the killing

Of a man late
Saturday night, we know enough
To peer behind the bloody

Body at the Body
Politic and what appears
Carelessly lodged in

Its teeth, it is said
A man lives by his tooth and I
Feel compulsively too

Engorged by the signals
Of our age, Chinese
Men stand on my foot on

The way to Manhattan, I bear
A cancer of sense
To drown in the freezing

Poison, I hear
They’ve got Bison in Golden
Gate Park and I have

The love of a doctor who
Herself is learning to love a premise
Of mine, somewhere the maize

Is flattened beneath
My car and my car is the promise
Of emptiness, of a treachery

Forgone as I still rail
Against an empty
Twitching coda, so if you will

Gently tip the assemblage
I will breathe
My torrent once

More

"I indolently excerpt"

we live amid

The immediacies
As the temperature lowers my lids
Seem to also, I see less

The world contracts
And ideas slide like dress
Shoes across

The frictionless
Ice, making one almost
Nostalgic for sweat

A distorted buckling in the Path
Train plastic windows
Becomes almost prophetic

As lady and I slink
To New Jersey
For sushi and a glass of Spanish

Champagne, my head feels
Like bourbon, my nose
Like a pomegranate, in this density

I indolently excerpt
Portions of the skyline
To forcibly imbue

With sense and sometimes
I find the inhuman eye that lets
Things be, being being

Such a concussive set of castoff
Suffrages, much raging
Never punctures the skin or does

So only as a means
To treat threat
Like a balloon, I wake in

A strange bed beside the hum
Of electronics, my hand
On a feverish leg, the suburbs busy

With food and we’re already
Unabashed as for each tremulous
Step there exists

A pivoting fan of vectors
To refract and continue, last week
I found myself without irony

Helping an old lady cross
Third Avenue, she feared she
Would be blown

Over by the wind and why
Not, even should
The beauty of the world shine

Forth like a mountain
Of snow I would
See it famed into crystals

Each piece duly piercing
Its own consequent
Glint

"body is where the knowledge comes from"

Of synesthesia as certain small
Mysteries continue
To animate the instant and you are

As much thrown
Into it as you can be
Said to own

Any contingency in its improbable
Production, this morning I dreamt I
Was looting the house

Of a former reality
Television runner-up only
To be squealed

On by the rich kids, my books
Are yawing atop
The green nightstand

The flow of thought does not
Follow a fallow
Plain, the plan of the day

Is to let desire more or less trump
The mere pleasures
Of fact as the squat woman

On the train garbles
Obscenities of gender and the car
Precipitously buoys as she

Makes to leave before
Abruptly returning through the pursed
Black lips of the door, yellow

Is calling out
To brown, warbling trapezoids
Stalk the stoop-ridden

Periphery for warmth, the stubble
Of winter razors
Foward and I feel more

Comfortable amongst the indefinite
Articles, I feel no
Relief in the parentheses

Dictated by men, when I was a child
I wrote body is where
The knowledge comes from and now it has come

Time for me to choose
A different body, one that intercorporeates
The world as one

Would hold the pattern
Of words unresolved, each a plane
Which normal consciousness

Does not reach, intervals
Where the absolutely new revives
Its excitation and yet I can’t

Get the image of the man on the bike
Smashing into the cab
Door I had just opened out

Of my mind, or is it my mind out
Of the image as the sun
Has left us in a prematurity

Of night

"that's not poetry"

But I must do laundry
And get a haircut, make coffee
And obtain an active sort

Of boredom, for it is abhorrent
To me to know
Beforehand what a thing is

To become, the unconscious
Is not incautious, the
Forms of farms are far from

Exhausted and this boy
Is never so, though
This man regularly solicits

The energies
Of others in inhabiting
The accidental garb

Of space, if you
Recognize the flower’s use
As a Geiger counter

You no longer look
Down upon its uncomplicated
Eye, I no longer

Look forward to longing for
Words that disguise
Me, as even now I resort

To assume because knowledge isn’t
Possible, I perceive
Because I am less than

A part of the world and am thus
Excluded from its still
And unitary embrace, when I embrace

You it’s because you
Are possible, I feel a feeling
That elaborates those

I bear, I hear
Here through all the moments
Of there, these verbs only

Denote the impossibility
Of not acting, the song says be not so
Fearful, be not so

Pale, the guitar strings give
Way to trumpets as
A man in a kilt casts murderous

Expletives at a figure encompassed
By cardboard beneath
The Psychic’s eave across

The street, so much in my life happens
That’s not poetry
These days and yet it persists

That way, the black-eyed
Old woman who in the middle of her
Rant quieted to whisper God

Bless you to the pinstriped
Man on the train, the drugged-out
Glare of the boy

Embarrassed by
His grasp of fractions and yet
His laughter is impressive

To hear, the screaming of the black
Transient is carelessly
Remarkable and it feels suddenly

As if one has a choice, all the suitcases
Bobbing like hens, all sense
Conflating in a dim whirlwind

Of synesthesia

"constantly astonished anew"

Because they’re there and we’re
Skipping the marathon
To make love, marathons always

Make me cry anyway, applause drowning
Out the fourth cover of Foxy
Lady, a fat man named Klaus veering

Toward the median and I was
Reminded of the end of Cobra Verde
When Kinski eventually

Abandons his body to
The tide and the terrifically deformed
Man quits his pursuit to gaze

Upon it, we do not appear
To prepare to appear, yet I am not
Without myself, let us

Hold to the appearances and in
Our holding release
The burdens of these bodies made

Thick with unconscious
Care, the tic-tic
Of the birds goes out, my head

Dissolves into the Babbling
Flower, a panoply of hues is resolving
As constantly I am

Astonished anew, a man
For whom the divers tones
Of a mental life meld

At once, though I am still
Too man to know how, to no use
Is it that I wrench

These meanings as it is our fate to live
In the bulging zones
Of indetermination, each hastily

Snagged difference alighting
Within the necessity
Of trapping the next, it is thus that

Our being free diminishes
The existence of all
Other, that our choosing makes

Objects in its sweep
From here to there to here
Again, our needs

Not only consume us
But tear at the very world we deem
Available, a dancing figure

From China leans to
Gesture with her fired breadstick
Arms, one circle converges

On the next as Hiroyuki Doi replentifies
The present, Berdie slumps
In a chair and is bronzed into choppy

Waves reaching nowhere, living
Matter is from birth
Irritable and the office of the image that I call

My body is emptily retaining
Its retinal store, though
Not with less longing, not with less

Blood to go carousing
At the periphery, I think of your teeth
And am smiling, I think you

Are in surgery and dutifully
Amazed over the opening cavities
Of motionless men

"I will know my song well..."

I can only begin this once
I know enough not
To begin again, a bus engine

Revs outside, keeping the masculine
Time of streets intact, I seem
To lack something sufficiently

Violent for this world, these windows
Shut against the literal doom
Of birds for the first moment since

March perhaps, what alerts
Alters, what separates us from all other
Living matter is the intentionality

Of our aping, the rest
Are content to ghost, we must be legendary
Psychasteniacs, commanding

Stillness from bone though
None is to be found, one encapsulated
Day makes possible

The next as a nexus of moment
Ripples within each
Thin leaving we unwittingly

Enact, the sparrows congregate
On a clothesline, the sun
Mocks us with its patient trajectory

Though not without warmth, our arms
Grasp each other’s backs
And our stomachs bulge to touch

One another at the point
Of their turning inward, the songs says what
Good is the vision of a world without

The will to despise it, the limb
On the tree between the teeming apartments
Remains unburdened by the black

Plastic bag shuddering from
Its branch and we likewise shoulder
Remnants of lives compulsively

Lived, I want my friends not to feel
Slain by the slickness
Of art but the incommensurable

Crowning of flesh, the crowing
Of blatant mouths
Whose cheeks flush most

Shamelessly in the challenging
Of weathers, I make bad
Coffee, flout the proprieties

Of dress and carve a boogie
Of vectors from room to room, my hair
Curling at the neck, my neck gone

Tingly at the acknowledgement
Of a landscape by Tanguy, its silly distance
Coursed by melts

In wondrous penumbra, for you
See I know that desert, the one that holds
Everyone in their own

Inconceivable lateness and I’ve thought Yves
A name unfamiliar in its elbow
Like pose, the mugs in the cupboard

Wobble in response to the underground
Train’s relative glide and I’d like
To put something difficult together

Together, as often we are in an un-
Certain confrontation
With the things, the play

Of lost objects, the shifting
Limit of equilibrium we ceaselessly
Lurch toward, our instinct for

Renunciation burning
Coldly within a coda of disappearances
As if the world were a solution

Of magnets, though higher
Than actuality is possibility and I
Find these movements

Temper themselves, in my dream I
Became purchased
By a large, wealthy Italian

Family to “fix” their youngest
Daughter, who spoke
Only in tongues, I woke to the hydraulics

Of the 75 bus, which was picking
Up strangers at Bartel
Pritchard Square, as perhaps

I am also, these lines
So solicitous, gently intertwining
The desires of company

With the commerce
Of possible gossip, the street so
Acoustic in its precarious

Lanes of performance, Courtney
Wants coffee and bagels, Serena wants
Apples and coffee, I want

Coffee and the anti-tranquilization
Of Holland, 1945, fuzz
Blistering like the nervous

System tapped by microphones, delirious
Cells amplified as they carom
Through a dying spell and I likewise

Want to keep white
Roses in her
Eyes, so I go

To the park to be pelted
By leaves as an Italian greyhound
Named Bologna begs

For my food, I once knew
The smallest dog in Brooklyn and I sang
To her on our short walks, Millie

Dog, Millie dog, small enough
To be a slop for a hog, small enough
To be a little watch’s cog

But she moved to Minnesota, where I once
Shook a hologram
Of the president’s hand and held

The skeleton of a two-headed calf
Named Spider, I want
To name this poem something

Long and people it
To crowding
With fevered visitations

For you see I see
What I mean and these beguiling
Visions are inseparable

From me, I’m not afraid
To admit it, the clouds are heavily hued
With infantile pinks, the spinning

Blades of the fan have lured
My skin into volume, the paronomasias
Of advertising exhaust

Me in my hapless groping
After sense, I am
Not content to peck

At the surface of an inexhaustible
Depth, I want these
Scripts to be less of who

We become, just as the dead
Bulb shivers into a bloom
Of eccentric shards, I’m asking you

To accompany me
Through the deformations
And into ourselves for

When you have no
One no one can hurt you and I
Refuse to go blind

Amidst the threatening
Of affects, there are people on
The brink of a green

Ocean, their eyes green, their arms
Crossed and they are roping
The tide for you, your green ocean pulsing

Because they’re there

DISEQUILIBRIUM

I don't know how long, but for the next section of ill-defined time, I will be posting selections from a long poem I've tentatively entitled Disequilibrium. My understanding of that term is initially related to Piaget's concept of it, disequilibrium being that disconcerting space where you face novel information and must find a way to make it useful to you. It was his conviction that it was only by maneuvering through this space that we truly learned anything. I also feel the world to be a complex of systems striving for an equilibrium that may, in the end, be a specious concept. As you may have noticed, not much writing is happening for me in the way of poetry these days, but with this new work spinning into the darkness, I have hope there will be more.