Use

By now you are used to the use I used to make of you.
And what you miss most is my tenderest misuse of you.
I miss it too.

How it Felt Last Winter While I Was Creating the Kingdom of Ends

I have ascended into winter,
ancient, clean and bright,
thinking now of summer sounds and of
the memory of our memory and of
that mixed tape of sighs pondered,
the soundtrack of our lives.

When the days grow dim
cold ways sink their grim teeth
into my thoughts.
And remorse is all I can muster
these short days, these latter
latter days.

Milk Down in My Belly

Do you remember how it came?
Like the patter of the rain?
First soft and then insistent?

I'd been practicing till I learned
most every trick used to discern
the dusk hours from the twilight.

I asked myself, I asked and asked
as if my soul were looking glass
and not the one who's looking.

But this strange peace, it laughed and taunted,
distracted me from what I wanted,
put things another way.

Smelling of sandalwood, feeling bourgeois
bringing dignity to ever new horrors
like suicide and sex abuse,

it felt like milk down in my belly.
Cats land lightly, cats land deftly
and I had landed soft.

Oh, would she stay? Oh, would it last?
Of course the course was just a class.
I don't need this forever.

Gently then, I let it go.
The wind, balloons, the melting snow
all love us in their leaving.

If it was God whose breath I felt
who knows our needs and gives us help,
I thank him for this extra.

Guest Versifier

You know who she is.
All the ladies in the house say:
Hey!

Nasty girl nasty girl
God I love my little nasty girl
Heels, skirt, it all works.
'But I'm a Kierkegaardian, a convert'—that's her advert
No, you're just a special kind of pervert
Wanting some life of the mind
But also just wanting to show your behind
On and on and on and just grind
inclined, reclined
it's what she's all about
turn the lights out, so she can get her freak out.
She hasn't even seen the world yet
just a nasty coquette
A nasty brunette, showing off her fishnets
Not her ethics
Fancying herself a nerd
Like some good girl in the world
But a nasty world
Makes for a nasty girl
She needs her B.I.G. biggie
Because she's a nasty piggy

Is this how it begins?

The two women sat across the table from each other, encased in cloudy light that cast no shadows. 'But is he a good man?' Louise asked.

Silence came along with the patter of the rain, and finally she answered herself aloud, 'Very often he mistakes his own weakness, which counsels him against the venture of a misdeed, for virtue. But virtue is a matter of strength, not weakness.'

Mrs. Dylan would not be one-upped and issued an answer that came to her easily, 'Perhaps, then, if weakness is not virtue it can at least be a matter of grace. Even our weakness grace graciously turns to our advantage.'

Louise felt that this conversation ended where all of her conversations with Mrs. Dylan did: with the possiblity of sinning boldly, with words about sinning boldly rolling lustily off her wifely lips. And Louise could not decide in which sense she was a serpent, in which sense a dove.

Metaphysical Upholstery

I'm trying to pitch a metaphysics show to HGTV. It's called: The Fabric of the Furniture of the Universe.

Know Thyself: The Oracular Card Catalogue

Are you men?
Are you mine?
Are you Mormons ignoramuses?
Are you nobody?
Why are you not a Roman Catholick?
Are you now or have you ever been?
Are you part of me?
Are you part of the middle class?
Are you politically correct?

Are you ready?
Are you READY?
Arrrrrre you ready?

For what?

Ready for a thunderstorm?
Ready for a tornado?
Ready for the country?
Ready for the pandemic influenza?
Ready to thrive as a gay man at midlife?

Are you real?
Are you?
Really?

Are you running with me, Jesus?
Are you safe where you live?
Are you satisfied?
Are you she?
Are you somebody?
Are you still below?
Are you still my mother?
Still my family?
Are you sure, senior citizen?

Are you telling them?
Are you the Christ?
Are you there alone?
Are you there, Crocodile?
Are you tough enough?
Are you tough enough for the eighties?
Are you upgrading an underground storage tank system?
Are you using it right?
Are you who you say you are?
Are you wid it?

This poem is an objet trouve from the University of Chicago Library Catologue. They were not able to satisfy my search for the book which would, if not answer, at least make crucial distinctions concerning the question: Are you moral?

Hardship

We knew hardship
and want
in those days,
back when you could get
a rustic leaf
candle holder
for $32.95
and Papa was still
in graduate school.

One morning, stranded
and alone, I was forced
to wipe
with a page from
the Crate and Barrel catalogue.

Satan and Scripture

Obediance.
I must recognize that I am God's child,
and like a drunkard
after days on a binge
with no idea where he should go,
I rely on God,
placid, head down,
apathetic and desperate.

And Satan says:
but what if you are not
God's child but God's
pet? He says:

If you ask for bread,
you will not be given a stone,
but perhaps feed whose
first ingredient reads
'byproduct meal'
made from beaks and skin,
splines and spines, ground
together, pressed into a pellet.

No, you won't be given snake.
But you may undergo
minor medical procedures
without the anesthetic
that would be used
on a human being.

The Things That Make Sense in Dreams

Even then we may have a few questions. . .



What is this?
A cold potato brought from the icebox.
Blow on it
next to the fire alarm to keep things cool.

Why do you
sing karaoke when I'm trying to pack
up before
the fire alarm heats up? It would be good
elsewhere but

here it grates.
Will we be arrested? Not if we keep
blowing on this cold icebox potato.

Photo inspiration and execution by JH

Light is sufficient to itself--
If Others want to see
It can be had on Window Panes
Some Hours in the Day.

But not for Compensation--
It holds as large a Glow
To Squirrel in the Himmaleh
Precisely, as to you.

Emily Dickinson
photos from the Chicago Tribune

John Donne for your delectation

O might those sighes and teares returne againe
Into my breast and eyes, which I have spent,
That I might in this holy discontent
Mourne with some fruit, as I have mourn'd in vaine;
In mine Idolatry what showres of raine
Mine eyes did waste? what griefs my heart did rent?
That sufferance was my sinne I now repent,
'Cause I did suffer I must suffer paine.
Th'hydroptique drunkard, and night-scouting thiefe,
The itchy Lecher, and selfe tickling proud
Have the remembrance of past joyes, for reliefe
Of comming ills. To (poore) me is allow'd
No ease; for, long, yet vehement griefe hath beene
Th'effect and cause, the punishment and sinne.

Pigs in the Ditches, Hummus in the Jam

I've hardly slept in days
so when asked
if I want sandwiches before
we hit the road
I say
Why not?

His house is as it should be
according to his stories
of politics at the county level.

An eleven year old boy
in the backseat
in the twilight
of the Minnesota summer
and in the ditches
are pigs and pigs,
piles of pigs
because the bottom has dropped out
of the pork market
and it is cheaper to shoot a pig
and throw it in a ditch

than to do anything else.

The old retarded couple
who live on five dollar payments
for the privilege of dumping
industrial waste in their
yard. The runoff is toxic.
But what can be done
about it? When there is

so much else to do?

Why not?
So he carries trays stacked high
with condiments through the cool
yard and in through the bug net
and we dine with parents.
The sickly pink traces in the hummus
are not signs of infection
but contamination by way of
a hummus and jelly sandwich.
Grilled cheese, burnt and squealed about,
and tomato soup, supplement
the talk of the decline of Sesame
Street. These days too much Elmo,
too much green screen.
Has it become
decadent? His mother wants to know.
Yes, yes, it is definitely decadent.
We laugh.

They've been watching an HBO series
and in the gilded maroon, crackley spined
history book find out
what will happen,
what has happened,
in Rome.

Patience

I read about a man who acquired musical ability through being struck by lightening. If I acquired patience in this way would it be a mild derangement? Patience is to be acquired patiently.

Bathroom Curtains

a poem by Richard Wilbur:
(I am afraid
that I can't get the spacing right.)

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
``Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.''

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

``Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.''

Just Listen to Your Body

The experts of athletics and dietetics have told me that it is important that I listen to my body. I have heeded their advice, and I have heard some very strange things.

Rat and Friend

The Couplet

Oh, who can tell the artifices
by which it found my orifices?

More on Hunger

'The relation of hunger to food is far less complete, to be sure, but just as real as is the act of eating,'



Simone Weil writes of her refraining from partaking in the sacraments. She continues, 'It is perhaps not inconceivable that in a being with certain natural propensities, a particular temperament, a given past, a certain vocation, and so on, the desire for and deprivation of the sacraments might constitute a contact more pure than actual participation.'

Come Number the Hungers

I've been working on a ditty. The chorus I like but I'm not sure what else quite fits with it:

Come number the hungers.
Come number the hungers.
Come number the hungers.
Because this cult
is difficult
for simple folk
and for us.




I think Kant is playing the game when he writes,
'Happiness is the satisfaction of all our desires, extensively, in respect of their manifoldness, intensively, in respect of their degree, and protensively, in respect of their duration.'
(1st Critique, A 806)

The Dialectic of Wonder

Looking around the world for magic is to make the same mistake as denying that there is any magic in the world, for it is to have the same mistaken idea of the wondrous.

What if what is most wondrous in the world is quite ordinary, is ever before us? Then rooting around for the magical is just one more attempt to push away the wonder.

Rainy Day Poem

did i sense it in your brain?

elemental drops of rain?

proxy for a dropsy chain

of nervous, strained causality?

did i taste it on your tongue?

the wonder of the loud and young?

stifled by a rifle flung

by heaven sent entitled fire?

would you sex me in a box?

would you sex me with a fox?

would you sex me still in socks

with child's rhymes and satan's flames?

now you lay me down to bed.

you pray my soul be with the dead.

put me there in all their stead

if they must weep a weeping weep.

did you close it up all tight?

remember now, turn off the light.

and check the stove, not once but twice

before the future falls on us.

Name It and Claim 'It'

if betwixt the summer sticks

you fancy that you see

a bottle cap, a dinner mat, detailed morphology,

then don't deny the thing you spy

but name it, name it true and

when the world of looks becomes just books

the word will then see 'you'.

Negation Woman

This is Negation Woman--a dialectical super heroine who is able to use her powers of thought to negate any actuality. But when it comes to her hair, she finds herself in the same conundrum as Marx when he complained that 'If I negate powdered pigtails, I am still left with unpowdered pigtails.' (Marx, 'Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right', 1844)

(Negation Woman was conceived of in conjunction with SB the SSB.)

My Third Aphorism: An upbuilding tautology?

A question that arises for philosophers is whether ought implies can. It can hardly seem worth remarking in such a philosophical context, since the premises obviously contain so much more than (or at least exactly as much as) the conclusion, what I will remark here: If you ought to do it and you can do it, well, then, you damn well ought to do it.

Long, Lazy Lists

read me no more bedtime stories

through which I may achieve noesis

of the variegated strands of psychosis,

this your tender attempt

to list me drowsy.

lover, list me drowsy no more

for as in summertime I despised

rows of bodily diseases, put winter-wise

I become a hypochondriac

of the soul, yours, mine.

When I Grow Young

In a land where the people grew younger instead of older, would the steady, contented lovers question each other thusly: Will you still love me if my beard grows wispy and I begin writing my thoughts in a secret journal? Will you still love me if I become unreliably tossed about by wild passions?

Deep Thoughts, With Your Own Poetaster

Here's my first stab in a new genre: the aphorism.

When we consider the question of whether virtue can be taught, this mirrors a question that we consider less often: Is a true seduction possible?

A Cursing Poem

I'll be bound like the Fenris wolf

since you, be bound like you.

I'll be chopped into three firm bits

since you, be chopped in two.

I'll find solace in a brothy soup

if you find hope in stew.

I'll gulp from mouth of the gutters

since you sip drops of dew.

I won't finish the whole damn puzzle

if you don't have a clue.

When it bounces off me like I am rubber

may it stick to you like glue!

I said 'glue', you clueless two bit stewed dew sipper!

The Cold Snap

world, where is your hats?

may we all grow grimmer

and slimmer and harder

as our ears become colder,

the flecked sky grayer.

they tossed them in the air weeks ago!

says the world.

well, then, when they all come down

may the hat of another

plop on the head of each

to each's warm, fat delight.

Scattered Thunderstorms

He watches me
like he watches the weather.
Will I tend myself
as I would a garden?

What is Simple

The simple present is not so simple,

the simple past less so.

With the simple present we can say

not simply what is done now, once,

but what is carried out habitually.

O, sing the praises of the simple present

and the eternity contained therein!

Magnify its capacity to express the unity of what is,

what was and what is to come!

We break bread together.

We have broken it, we break it,

and we go on breaking it without end.

If the simple present simply expressed

what is done once, would death lose its sting?

I eat a crabcake. I die.

So that the magnificence of the simple present

lies not in taking away the sting of death

but in giving us a tense with which to

voice our perplexity over it?

O, the paradox of the simple past!

What could contain more nostalgia than this tense,

able to express the end of an eternity?

It is able to express what was done habitually,

a happiness kept and known over and over,

a bliss that could be an ecstasy of routine.

It can express

a time ended, a lost life.

Its status as a tense suggests that this brokenness

is inescapable, enshrined in language.

That's the restaurant where we met up

after he got off work and where we ate pancakes.

That is the bed where we sweat and slept.

We sat in my wigwam on Tuesday afternoons.

In the evenings we jogged and wondered about where

we might holiday and what we might have for dinner.

Enoch walked with God 300 years before he was not

because he was taken by God.

Our ways are segmented ways, ways like worms.

A Plague of the Discarded

Why is there this trash on the wind?

In amongst the seagulls, the kites, the airplanes, the lady bugs

are napkins, newsprint, takeout menus, maxipads.

The wind blows across Lake Michigan

sweeping, equally, leaves and kleenex.

How are we subject to this plague

of the discarded?

We've all seen American Beauty

and we all know that scene

with the soaring, hovering, dipping

plastic bag. Yes, I know it was

a bad movie, but such a bad scene?

I mentioned it once, musingly, to a man

who never became my lover

before he never became that.

'That is America,' he said, 'a beautiful piece of trash

caught up by the wind.'

Had he spoken the cold, deep obvious

or the friendly false? I was young then.

That must be why I couldn't tell.

My own material culture, my history of the body

are different these days; still, from my sofa

where I watch the water and spy with terror the swarm of

white and whipping trash, the spectacle of air swimming grandeur,

I cannot fathom the cause, the speed, the elegance, the multitude,

the final resting place

of all this debris.