Caught a Butterfly Inside a Jar . . .

Don't Say Sorry

Don't say sorry.
I want this.
This way with us, you so very much at the fore
of everything.

You,
opening the jar--
it only takes a knowing look from you, a word,
and I pour my will inside your jar where you lock it up,
the chaste promise, the man who offers you his strengths
in order to trust you with his weaknesses.

There is something that feels like a finger playing on skin
in the airs that connect me fully, yearningly, with you,
the one longed for--deep longing--embodied in the flesh,
turgid, warm to touch,
the elemental ode you etch in my thigh so I want never to resist
the lure of your own pale and perfect skin,
the scent of you in the rooms of memory,
my world,
my will inside your jar,
always kept, and always kept wanting.

Frances

I'm not sure you'll understand.

Frances didn't know what hit her. She was feeble. Bones, teeth, calcified.

Should I have felt guilty? Her haunches, sharp, near breaking, their fleshlessness . . . Old Woman that she was, my fingers on her bones.

Forget all of that. When the vet returned with her Frances entrusted herself to the warmth of my lap, the familiar warmth of my touch on her cheek, she cooed, she purred, safe in my arms. She resumed an entitled position of confidence, a respite returned, solid. I held her waning in my hands. I held her with the muchness of love. The drugs were injected through an I.V.

So strange, her absence upon my return home.

Feels Like Home To Me

You know . . . i've been thinking of you since we spoke yesterday, and how inconsistent, how crazy, or worse, how insincere you must think i am.

that is why i repeat the words--often i have repeated them--i do not think you realize, understand, know . . . .

how very much you feel like home.

because i know you as well as i do, though not as well as i wish i might, i do believe with all my heart that you need to take a stand. you need to become alive.

i've glimpsed the life in you longing to be lived. That, my love, has been your great gift to me.

i am happy with my lot, though that lot feels dwarfed and insignificant whenever i allow you to come near . . . which i do for about an hour, sometimes more, every waking day.

The Torture Never Stops

The idea of a lover (a small hesitancy rises in my throat), of being loved, raises for me a space that feels comfortable, unchallenged, like “home” . . . a little infantile, vulnerable, at the same time safe.

But Allison, she was a woman who professed no love but the Platonic where I was concerned. So then, how may I—how can I—account for the undeniable fact that she remains a touchstone for me? Her very inaccessibility, her many complications, on a subconscious, even perhaps an unconscious level—something in her speaks to my own ineffable self-ebulliences, speaks not so much to the things I “do” in the world as much as to my own unjustifiable presence in the world as it is.

I do not—have never—fit.

Allison, her irresistible symmetries (I can hear her protests), raise in me feelings that speak to my own inscribed sense of unworthiness. I feel her to be “something” (there may reside my "fatal flaw") unattainable. I live in unceasing pain. I’d have it no other way. I beg for the powerful denial of Her. I am happily tortured, prefer nothing else at all. When I repeat the cliche, “I am madly in love,” I’m nearly certain that I am more mad than in love. Nearly.

But the fruit of the poor lemon . . .

I admit, sadly, it would have been complicated. And the jury is still out as to whether it was Allison herself who was complicated or whether the world is, in the end, filled with complications that kill. "She died of complications." It is true, after all, that no one gets out of here alive. Sometimes, of course, only parts of us die, so that a person is no longer fully alive, or perhaps they are still alive but in some way new or altered. I don't know. I'm comfortable not knowing, better off I think. These days my only real complaint is that my hands keep shaking and I do not seem able to steady them.

Though I am decisively saddened by the whole Allison passage, by those four drugged-up fuck-heads, apocalyptic horsemen who trample and who kill whatever and whoever lie in their path (the thing I could not save)--the goddamned sadness feels different than the dreamless dark I have known. It's not the same as the black and incapacitating veil of dolors that wafts over my body unpredictably, that circles my hands and feet and steals the peace of sleep from my baggy eyes. I am much clearer about things now: clear that things are never all that "clear." Rarely is anything ever yes or no. Life events and experiences are more often "yes and no," although more "no," I think, than "yes." No is the operative ingredient of every fatal complication. A friend of mine once said, "the word 'no' has five meanings." He'd encountered that in a dream. To this day I have no idea what it means. The only thing I think about the word "no" is that it is serious. No blood. No air. No voice. No dreams. (that's four; perhaps "no sex" is the fifth). When I'm dead I expect the word "No" will be standing over my body in all its multifarious no-tarieties. No nothing. No shit.

I continue the habit, from time to time, of running my fingers over the scars, my face marked like an advertisement, a scarlet evisceration of self. Effacement. I too am like one of the four horsemen. Lethal. An arm of death. Armed.

As best as I can remember things, it had not rained, nor was the night in any way inclement. In fact, it had been a beautiful night. I'd been out, a dance recital, and beforehand drank wine at supper. The dance troupe, Latino, lithe, sexy, hastened a beauty that rose with ferocity inside my chest. When the recital ended, exhilaration caused me to jump out of my seat. On stage, the troupe bowed in unison and I shouted "bravo!" Vigorous applause all around. Finally, the last chiseled dancer traipsed off into a wing, the lights went up and the curtain came down, and I, abruptly earthbound once again, felt rude disappointment on that point.

The moment passed, transient, impossible to hold, and fending off a sense that I had nothing to go home to, I shuffled back up the ramp toward the lobby with the rest. I felt like an imposter. Poseur. I stepped outside. Cool air. Transition. I took my bearings and began walking in the direction of my car. Approaching the restaurant where earlier I had taken my supper, not wanting the evening to end, not wanting to return to my life, I went in. I remember doing it: Assenting. I still can't remember leaving.

What comes back to me, the thing I do remember: a moment of hesitation. Turn? Don't turn? I'd begun to turn and tried, too late, to pull out of the seconds that had already whizzed past. A concrete barrier. Impact. Initial disbelief. Then acceptance. Airborne. Car flipping. Falling. Spinning. Glass. Concrete. The world all upside down. Then the concrete rejoinder to my face, hands pushing off, scraping. No escape. The side of my head, my nose and chin. The sound of something cracking in my ears. Surrender, Succumb. Overwhelmed. Black. Accept.

No light appeared, no rehashing of a life. Out. Cool nature, plain and simple. Blood. Teeth. Bone. Fleeting experience of an undeniably overpowering fact: the flesh is weak.

Still, I hoped Allison might have been wounded enough to have loved a face like mine. An unfaceable face. I touch its scars, and sometimes the raised flesh that stretches jaggedly around my face feels like a net, a net of voices, of accusations. It is like a jury that has written out a verdict. A judge devises apt sentences. Yes and no. So very complicated. Sad.

Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?

Just So; In Light

"The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love"--Thoreau.

It's about a shift
in point of view
he says, a slight raising
of the veil, an angle turned,
just so, in light,
as to reflect what lies behind,
beneath, inside.

Inflections of the souls of things
--the soul of things--
he corrects, as if he and I and
the walls are all composed
of the same thing--
Holy--something inside, beneath,
behind--
He's right, this poet with me softly.

Plow it all under, release the shine.
--no, what's apparent's just fine,
every mundane bit divine,
you and me, yours and mine.

Hip_-Hop

Disjointed-Jointed

The view through this first-morning
window is something right out of Flaubert--intersecting arcs
and rectangles presently reflect the morning light as it scrambles
across the city's rivers and bridges. The light converges; remote
eaves hold the remnants of night, its cool shadows. Glass, brick,
metal, wood and sky--essaying deliberate flats-and-narrows against
columnar towers, window upon window upon window--black fractals,
smooth onyx set in elemental relief, time-buffeted and rubbed, sands
of industry and invention--durable utility, yet light shows forth from
every intersecting line, eternity runs along all-diverse trajectories,
trajectories that circle back, fall one into the other, endless
repetition, immutable processes of variation--

This synchronicity, my friend, welcomes me in my New York City
hospital bed, the morning after surgery, convalescing as I think on
Flaubert, knitting back together while ruminating on Mallarmé,
and looking out the window.

Promontories

Prayer Approaching Nothing

When a promontory falls . . .
mum. da.
I am fearfully,
fearfully propelled towared my own isolated inevitables.

like an appendage whose use I’ve lost, a tail cropped,
banded and dropped, fragments . . . not of life only . . .
but even segments of my own True Self, killed off . . .
and what? I do not know. And so I pray. Whole-heartedly.
Consume me, and, amen.

Jellicle Songs For Jellicle Cats

Cats, Old Cats


My cat, Frances, is nearing twenty, which is very old for a cat.

She must sleep twenty-three out of twenty-four hours each day.

The one left-over hour she dedicates to being fed and being loved.

Oh how lovely . . . to be a very old cat!

some kinda sing havin' to do with the in-b'tween spaces

Between, and Out, and You

There is this murky world:
all blacks and whites and
overlapping blues,
none of which feels
forced.

The love you do not feel.
It’s all too stark. It’s hard.

In this world I am a kite,
slicing in and out of clouds,
slung between ecstasy and fear,
strung between joy and despair,
tethered to a world of apathy and tears,
a world I'd gladly leave behind for sky.

But they're all One World in the End.

And so I set my self to write a poem,
a poem that flies without a string,
once and for all, after all these years,
salt, seed, cloud, rain,
and me cut free.

I used to be able to describe in detail the tissue-thin
roach eggs lying in a corner of the hot apartment, black and
brown babies emerging, their shit-seeds found
in unexpected spaces, between white pages stained with
the small brown remnants,
baseboard lined with boric,
glasses filled with cheap rum
despair--

When I grew up I moved out,
tried to leave that house behind,
all its dissipations,
I gave up drinking cheap liquor
started drinking wine instead.
Between cutting ties and burning bridges
I'd barely time to think, to drink.

Then to find,
beyond the blush of wine,
You, and the open sky.

All I Have to Do is Dream

April 27

Strange dream:

A pack of deer charging up a hill

And onward, majestic, their grace-filled hinds, heads aloft,

And a tiny newborn left shakily behind,

panicked and eager—both;

And myself, caught up, in the woods, cheering the straggler along.

What's Love Got to do with It?

STOP! In the Name of Love

I am broken. I think that’s why I have trouble articulating my feelings, difficulty locating my thoughts. I have trouble making clean connections. I’m all association; never deduction. I suffer from a failed coherence of selfhood. Self-incongruity. I lack poetry. Inchoate persona. He-he. Not funny.

Whatever great thing it is I decide to attempt, I do initially set out with some kind of “vision,” although, even from its inception, the vision is never very clearly established. Never simple or plain. Not entirely. I stab at things, great and small, as if with a dull knife, leaving only masticated valves, lacerated tubes, sucking blood and air, all the result of desperate action. Behind are left the things I maimed, unkilled. I am unsure, unskilled. I ignore important details, overlook simple mundanities. I opt for that which lies beyond me. I am ordinary. I insist on achieving the exceptional.

I think it was Aurelius (or was it the Buddha, or David?) who wrote “don’t sweat the small stuff.” But it took some complete ass to determine “it’s all small stuff.” Not everything in this life is small stuff. I know. Instead of wisdom I was given to masturbatory idleness. I was disengaged, avoidant, from birth. Not wisdom but “wasdom.” Wasdoomed. Boom. He-he. Again, not funny.

This soft underbelly of pain—the scar across my face, the arthritis that locks down my vertebrae and causes my hip to seize—I would never have believed that I was capable of such self-mutilation had not even more serious consequences passed. Which they did. “Consequences?” you ask. I didn’t know then. I did not wake up one day and decide that I would inflict tragedy on some person, on some people, some family who did not even suspect at the time that I existed, that I might have lived nearby, just down the street even. We might have passed one another, more than once or twice, in the supermarket. They probably saw me drive past their home a hundred times but never really noticed. Not until that day. This is bad. And although this sense of things, these memories sans Beauty had come forward in my mind only after encountering her, Allison had nothing to do with any of this. The accident happened long before I met her. I need to stop now.

The End

Souled Out

It is admittedly soul-boggling, the fact that I have bones, a full skeleton’s worth, a thing I’ve come to know only by viewing other disembodiments. How else would I know that I am a biologically sophisticated vertebrate?

Bones and red jellies. I’ve been living on beef, red wine, and chocolate for far too long. I’ve been in love so many times that I have learned love does not exist. I no longer believe in love. So here I am.

Wishing I were wrong. Reflexive. Not quite suicidal, but sad, not far from that meaning, that je ne sais quoi, a thing she once possessed, now all my own.

Silence is Golden

Hunter of Silent Flight

I don’t know how to bend her heart. My word-barrages only
tend to separate us. Its her fault; she drives me to these flights.
Near her I grow increasingly lost, energies dispersed, elemental
and dissolved. Nothing like control remains. I am all gut, windy.
All Desire. All Want. All set in flux like nature, moving
everywhere at once. I try to hold my tongue, think "Quiet.
Steady," but the word-tide I cannot stem drowns my cause,
threatens to deluge my best, and tender, and kind intentions.
Why should words come into play at all? Words are strangle-holds
in an ill-advised and hopeless cause. Silence says much more.
More silence tongue or else, I fear, she’ll point us toward the door.

Or maybe words chisel things, hunt for
a voice that would not speak, that would prefer
to sing if only sing it could. And I a Michelangelo
confronted with a silent block of promise, a figure locked
within--one only I detect--then called to name the yet-
born thing the only way I can. Still, because she knows
my oafishness, and all the clumsy routes I’ve gone, she
knows that I’m no artisan. Not only can’t I sculpt or
sing, words remain a clunky thing I toss out like an
army made of breath, excavating passing things,
things beyond my depth, the things that pass between
us pure, beyond all fashioning. Unspoken flights I seek
to name with an arsenal of words, though pass they do
like eyes askance, or flee like flying birds. The meaning
that I want to make, with words I hope illuminate, of all
these words that come and go, the best of them is “Love.”

In the Still of the Night

Maskulinity

I suffer periodic delusions of grandeur. I move in nighttime spaces, blurry spaces between grandeur and despair. This despair comes to me in colors I cannot name.

I ask why. Often. I suppose grandeur weighs more heavily after one publishes a book. But after that? I didn’t know. Don’t know. Self-accusation. Doubt. When I began to write it was out of love. How do good things go bad? Acclamation. Artifice. America.

It’s that night-space between, lingering, interminable, that makes me want that sleepless, dreamless night to end. I drink to close out the dark in-between. Drink shuts things down.

Sometimes (rarely) I cry. Anxious moments instigate tears. On those few occasions I do cry, that surrender means I’m on the edge of some annihilation. I feel unstable. Vacuous. Afraid I’ve never lived. Bravado slips off night’s ledges. Fear inducts tears that cling. I can’t even ball up a fist to shake at God. I’m a poseur. A dilettante. I go limp.

Nothing has ever come easily to me. Only this mask. I am Mask-uline. Ha-ha. I drink. It helps me every bit as much as it kills me. It helps me because it kills me. It helps me. It kills me. It is killing me. Help me. Don’t.

You see? I am beyond delusions now. I am only sharing feelings, feelings like rose and indigo inks drawn and set down on paper. An image from another time. Ink is no longer “drawn and set down.” I don’t know if the past was any better. It was another time. My gut has history. My sense of things has been forged over time. In the end, my feelings are tied to the past. My life. A history of wasted time. Of not knowing. Dreamless life.

That sounds terrible, doesn’t it? My feelings. Very Dr. Phil. Very Dr. Joyce Brothers. Lost in an age of celebrity shrinks. And for all of it, I no longer feel. This is the extended irony that runs this narrative.

Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word

I’m Sorry
or Hemlock

How can I not love you? Please tell me, because
I am afraid that loving you means pushing you away.

Tell me how Beethoven could not have loved the strings,
the piano, music. How could Shakespeare not have loved
the quill and the stage, his art? How might Socrates not have
been enamored of the Truth?

My art? Loving you. Help me extricate myself.

I am hopeless. Driven toward masterpiece.

You, Me.

Dear Prudence

Darling Richard

I want to say the following thing, I don’t know whether I should be saying this to you, I, uh, took a picture on Main Street where the Metropolitan Plant . . . was, where there’s a little wired corner of the senior housing with a unicorn in it, I took a picture. It’s no longer there. I don’t know if it was vandalized or not. I haven’t been there in a while. But I asked one of the resident’s what it meant and he said, “Hope.” There used to be a unicorn shop in town, I discovered. Just for novelties. I was out there once and there were some boys near this woman sitting. She demanded, you know, not demanded she said there was a boy throwing gargabe so I told him not to litter. I have a right to say that to him because I am an adult. I called Champagne Rivera. I think I just wanted to make sure I was really there because I lost the paper. I spoke to a nice operator. I think that’s where they do government research, there. I used to ride past on my bicycle, government research and I think there was a CIA office there also. And the last thing I want to say is I had a bad experience with my dog last night and I called my doctor and he said I had a bad habit with my dog. I have lots of bad habits. My doves. There were these boys by the recreation field. They were playing, throwing a ball, I don’t know if I should say this, throwing their balls, ball in the air, and I yelled at them. There was truck, a Good Earth truck, parked. It was there blocking them. They probabaly had a right to be there playing those boys. I think it was a Good Earth truck. I hope I didn’t say the wrong thing.