Muse Doctor

The desk is filled with chronic papers always wanting to solve their own illness

The only depression I feel is the cleft where my male part goes, I am propulsion

The event horizon is breakfast: two eggs better than tits/a keyboard/a dream


I'm a burning ball of fire and feel mandated to 'get things done', therefore I scream


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The 7 Pack

The slot through which -- in late spring, 1958 -- the testicle sank to its current home on the left

gave way to a tear from abdominal crunch for a hernia bulge just above -- hint of a squid's head --

public hair.  Scallop shell and Venus rising.

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So Here You Are

The skin has holes in it

it breathes like cotton

protects against all things

except the universe

has a word to say about that.

The universe has a fabric

it sweats outward

you can't hear it groan

for all the flowers

the summer has around you.

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Melancholia

The woman on the moon is being forced to the earth

she's brought with her, cheese curds in her breasts

her milky breasts dripping tears of her temper --

Gentle Ophelia, she of crazy hormones.

Why not end a world with a cosmic bang

why not go down with a stymied prince

a secret assassination first, R and G, the stab

through the arras, you, he, and a whole world, boom.

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The Leader H

Some have vision, architectural features caught

by the student lens

of an eye.  Walking the streets of a major place

like Chicago or Vienna.

A quick sketch of 'urban outdoors'

taking in a grassy knoll

a spot where grand things happen

and the spirit of history.

Like you or me, not needing the cachet

of a bohemian

of a prole let loose with grudges

letting the flick

letting the point of a pencil

mark the edges

of hard stone onto portfolio pad

just change a world

seen bitterly wrong because it angers you

subvocalizing first

building it all in short, sharp phrases

a voice of vinegar and piss.

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Al Dente

I see you brushing your teeth

in the reflection off the glass-mounted print

of the John Singer Sargent scene

of an Italian fountain with bathing women.

I deny you don't travel.

The Fascist Cut

Who cares about who cares

writing it down is an act of arrogance is a virtue

someone must think, and it's me, and I'm quick and others follow

the scars of experience on a face called text

the whole point is action and the hell with them.

Like a poem about a dog, a cloud, an egg, and a she

one must shoot the dog, eat the egg, fly through a cloud of fucking her

and go high on a sunny place to head a regime.

You see, choice is for the weak.  We're here, just straight-off verbs.

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Art Song

Her voice in the chanson so that I'm in that evening orchard,

in that peach odor, at silk, the soft plush lipid layering, too,

the savory of her in my ear, body gone to mind,

the experience of her, the reason for her, clear

voiced in the chamber of the SUV, she, and me

embarking for Cythera, still living in the idyll

hearing the night fiddle of crickets from the fields.

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Celebrity

 

Young women with a list of long ambitions

pant and mug and snore and throw a lifetime

achievement for just twenty seconds more.

All those little people cast on a couch

a bevy in that human race race ready

for that closer, tight close-up.

The entire humanitarian film world, and

the Housewives of Wherever -- fame frames us

flashes in our face: Surprise!  I'm here and gone.




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The Internationale

Taking the words of the Japanese girl

who saw the 'lain fawring' --

Off a fine Kolinsky sable brush the noon drizzles

Pacific Washington

Studio glass walls and overhead brighten so that from its wool

all sky's created equal.

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I Am Who

Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe.  

Charlotte Rampling as Charlotte Rampling.

Two films:  The Look and My Week With Marilyn.  These movies will get unequal public attention, yet they deal with very similar issues.  How does a public person, one known for physical beauty, form an art despite the beauty?  

I'd argue that Michelle Williams does, just as she inhabits the character of Marilyn, who died trying.  

Marilyn owned the screen, and if memoirs are right, had the personal chops to fill a room and dig holes in the psyche of those favored and cursed around her.  Monroe played, most successfully and often, comedic roles -- yet she yearned to be a serious actress consonant with the 'method' age in which she worked.  We might watch Bus Stop or The Misfits, but we remember Some Like It Hot or The Seven Year Itch.

Williams has the moves down.  The glances, the gallery-pleasing photo moves, the reclining postures, the depressive panics.  Women befriend or mother her.  She stuns or bewilders men.  Sometimes Marilyn's conditions are right, and a project completes.  This is the film world well-handling the real world of the film world. 

Charlotte Rampling, in The Look, isn't playing herself.  She is herself.  








This is documentary.  It's about her as an actress, and it does intersperse cuts from movies in which she's acted.  

She talks about acting, and in one interesting scene, she and her son, who's directing the actual film we're watching, engage in a stare-down, phrase-response acting exercise, wherein they repeat a random line back and forth and form a dramatic moment between one another.  At points, they 'blink' and move to another line conjured up by the context and continue on.  Fascinating.  

Yet she declares that such exercise bores her.  By contrast, we see her interacting -- for real -- with men and women whose artistic projects she shared -- novelist, photographer, poet, artist -- and with confidantes and friends.  Even, occasionally, random strangers.

Rampling, almost always in her film persona, plays the neurotic, the distant, the stern, the corrupt, the determined, the strong, the disarranged, the sinister, the seductive.  Some like it cold.  In The Look, we do see her British-French humor come out among close relationships.  Whatever the mood, she makes clear -- explains in the serious parts of her conversations -- that there's a 'space' that must be found, forged, secured, around her wherein an authenticity can emerge for whatever acting or photographic moment she's in.

Marilyn Monroe couldn't be Charlotte Rampling because she was Marilyn Monroe.  This may sound self-evidently silly, but the point is this:  beauty alone, what draws people -- a myriad people through the accident of a lens -- needs character.  Michelle Williams has done much to show she has the character to play a Marilyn who wanted it.  

Charlotte Rampling rejects a friend's remark that she's 'grounded'.  Though she doesn't say so, she may have preferred being called 'centered'.  One can't help seeing her intelligence and maturity, a kind of depth that an icon like Monroe might seek but find no easier to handle than a wet bar of soap.

An American like me might pause to ask:  is Monroe us?

Post-Partum

Symbolism is no fake.  Things are not just 'things' in themselves, blunt stuff that has no fourth or fifth or sixth dimension -- measured in a mind's eye.

The woman of a couple she's dismayed since much of the space, the ample flat being let, is dressed in white, fashionable teeth-like bright

Clean and pure, the bounce of 'no' color, the heart of a child ready for impress of primary hue and crying out loud for only the good we have to offer

So her eyes downcast, her mouth covered-up, she's rushed back to the real estate car and even thinking why did I trust this why even come close to this monster place

Brought to the spotlit rooms where shadows shall come, where a clear glow hints an eventual dusk, its ghost, just half-a-tick, half-a-tock, away

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Art Means Work. Yes, Work.

This should open your eyes and interest you.  

What to those of us who are 'just plain folks', who believe in 'democratic arts', who may recognize that being called a 'philistine' is a slur, but simply show our social equality in return (Back at ya!) -- what to us appears as an elitist enterprise, ballet, really produces more sweat in a day than a lifetime of backyard barbecues and lawn-mowings.

This clip doesn't show it all:  the blisters and infected corns, the slipped discs, the exhaustion, the struggle just to be able to get a chance to suffer that way!  The schooling, the disciplined adolescence, the foregone 'outside' life, the forced 'early retirement' at 30 or -- if you're truly strong -- 40.  

The sheer physicality of it.

The mental grit needed for it.

Nils Tavernier's film of a decade ago, Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet, honors the institution it views.

It should also raise the question:  How much guts do I have -- how much have I given?

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Mrs.

In a perfect world this would be a space machine and she'd be here herself rather than a closet

we reach into that gap among the rounded hangers and conjure maybe an article of clothing gives a clue.

Part of her is frozen in the image -- that can't be taken of her only what someone misremembers faintly yet as an artifact of beauty but second only to her -- that registers

The rest, the real thing, is flying-off somewhere with the hearts and woe-squeaks of little animals called men.

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Another Year, Another Quiet Mike Leigh Triumph

No murder.  No sinking ships.  No wise-ass teens.

No Legions, no small-town-joe-makes-good.

No court of law.  No con.  No 'bad-lieutenant' cops.

No talking dogs. No blackmail, and no hooker scenes.

 

No corporate conspiracy.  No royal court.  No 'hood'.

No war.  No aliens.  No capers.  No 'black-ops'.

No poor-class gal to get the handsome lead.

No 'magic' world of shallow, feel-good 'myth'.

No rape shock. No coming-of-age in a 'simpler' time.

No cowboys, no pop music.  No selling-out for greed.

No mystery to solve of someone's quirky death.

No vampires, zombies, cannibals.  No crime.

With humans, we know the fragility of bliss.

Simply, cinematically, we aren't prepared for this. 

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Ten Things I Don't Like

 *

                                                                                     **

1)  People walking and conversing on cell phones as if the person were actually 'there'

2)  Living off the same adolescent 'oldie' music for 20 . . . or 30 . . . or 40 . . . years

3)  Being monitored on the job in order to 'document' the 'quality' of my work

4)  Power tools on quiet mornings

5)  How -- almost anywhere, certainly in politics -- cheap words drive out the worthy ones

6)  Film titles with any of the following words: 'chocolate', 'deadly', 'hell', 'kill', or 'wedding'

7)  The violence inborn in humans that is exercised for just about any excuse

8)  Customer service being redefined as irrelevant, pre-recorded phone options -- or -- pages of FAQ

9)  Full-body tattoos executed by a needle-man who thinks cartoons are 'high art'

10)  Having to pretend I'm having fun

* Great country, very good cast,  bad idea

** One good player, vastly overrated director, worse idea

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Klee Clay

Wandering the lateral floor plan of the house's gloaming.

One room's watercolor of a Tunisian town in the strictest sunlight streeted around the warm pools of oasis

thickens by proxy the drink in my hand of unfiltered, pulpy a. juice.

One's anxious about fall floods and winter's approximating, about the absence of stars and the plenitude in roof gutters and curb grates.

One's anxious, too, with art, with the largeness of wanting geometry to breathe and offer deep kisses, to parturiate, bring hither a living wail, remove the curse of the night hills, the potential white hills.

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Fill A Room

Her bright face is emblematic of a queen of heaven

Done by some Italian master years ago and in museums,

Yet she's working here, in the terminal, where we work,

Until the time her legs lay bare, her child falls, Spring comes,

We give her gifts and coo over the squiggling infant.

It's all about birth, it's all about wanting to arrive and not leave.

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Erato

I've dreamt about this woman, in her storefront,

Hollowed-out office shell on the first floor,

And anxious once again to wend my way

Peek at her place, empty except for a junk piano.

Middle-aged, gothic, ballerina-thin, this wraith,

Watch her again on her feet, arching up,

Reaching into the high-set, arc-lit nook

For inventoried goods, for offerings my way

With a promise of a sparrow, Katherine

Hepburn, plain nickels, dimes, a celestial map,

French words, leaning towers, beads,

Chowder, bubbles, child head of future kings

Rattan and stone, twigs, yellow feathers

Bingo discs, springs and blocks and portraits,

Apothecary powders, small, rare eggs, 

Dehydrated peaches, targets, roots,

Sullen nests and blood spots, winding wire,

Toothpicks and a clapboard storage bin,

Corked flasks and the Goddess Isis,

Handbill, parakeet and string, smooth frames.

Things not there -- but more for that:

Lauren Bacall, a Bakelite grill, owl eyes,

Sticks, The Palazzo Pink, old carpet wedge,

Stoppers in a cabinet, wire barriers, soot

Medici and mah-jongg tiles, shadow

Collages, shadows of collages orbiting sun,

Bric-a-brac inside the fold of dreams -- she's

Offering in her turn my way, her adagio --

Text of a romance, fireplace, matches to burn

An architect's schematic, pool house, transept

Smelling of chlorine and sky, The Café Mar,

Money news and a shaving brush, number 12

Sunlight wet as an after-rain, copper rings, a vow

Renting a boat in Prague and going all the way

A marriage of the mind of her black corneas

Extended pen, and the history of what's next.


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Credit This One

Here's one:  Adrien Brody.

In The Pianist, he's Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jew in Nazi-ruled Poland, a man socially restricted and marginalized, his family sent off to their death in camps, he himself for years hidden in Warsaw. 

No film can handle the reality of such powerlessness and brutality.  This film, by Roman Polanski, himself a boy in Warsaw then, suggests the accidentalness, the luck, involved.  The world around is being destroyed.  It's Brody's sensitivity and quiet that holds his sanity in place.  

And it's his music (not to be blithe about the mega-death of that war) that suggests some kind of transformative value to it all.

We're still working that out.  Hence, the actual Szpilman performing for years afterward.  Hence, Polanski with his deeply ironic cinema.  Hence, the much younger Brody channeling that experience for us.

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