Prophase

They'd say it's a phase.  If they even saw.

I see through the clouds, I'm near home.

I've been here, intracellularly here.

Not sick or gone.  Not gone, man.


I'm on a plane onto a new plane.

I turn my head and my seatmate is me.

Street Musician

Someone tells her to seek the key of A

around and around the evening stays lit

it's a wonder there are tunes, most of space is silent

she seesaws her bow, her chin dips

the theater-goers catch her last chords

think of supper, marriage, of being alone

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

I, Jew

And thinking about all adult men,

some of them quite old, refraining from touching the text,

only using a godly pointer whose term I forget if I ever knew,

I'm sure they must have known, somewhere in Talmud,

the way to bless the sprinkler and the time of day to turn the water on.

And whether to call the play gear 'monkey bars'

since the relationship between primates and 

cylindrically-shaped objects get governed in certain ways.

To them, my ways must seem like Hunter Thompson's,

a man adrift in mistake.  And whether to turn on a fan

in a particular weather.  It's all so crazy and sacred.

And they write about me, in the interstices and prayers.

.

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.

Convenience Store

A living man, a cunning man

whose curiosity, dispassion --

the putative crime of gawking

surreptitiously from the aisle of plastic knives --

I wondered whether she,

clearly from Africa, was dragging her leg

because of a question put strongly

because of an impatience about something at stake.

You know, in the old days -- harried from the shtetl,

railed forth from formal schooling at Berlin -- 

they stood footsore in the camp dust, soon barbered

of their long locks afforded for the dolls of lucky girls.

And cunning men, tired of their passion

in the afterhours of exquisite music and talk

of the freeing-up of humankind,

connived efficiencies unthought-of regarding skin.

.

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.

.

Problem Solver

It's like being buried in sand up to the neck,

sometimes, waking in a hot room with snow showers bulleting the outside baffles on the a.m. window after what could not be otherwise than a dream where you're choking

at the grip of a Brownshirt.

Who somebody let in in order to throw out

the bum and clean up the scum and erase the nugatory values, go back to the founded ones trying to be based on what we think ourselves in our blood we are.

Or is it an elegant Blackshirt, nicely shaved, as he, with humor, shuts the air.

.

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.

.

The Effort

Small, small, small snowflake, small one

i needed special glasses and a tensor light.

Like a preemie, like the thing you have to keep alive

and they wondered why i spent an hour out there

in the cold on my knees not wanting it to disappear.

.

Burglary

Tingling inside the entry hall, left of the foyer stairs

where guests have glanced in worry, hot, up at her shrine.

She's not here and this is a strange, after-hours tour

any room to be cooked by flashlight, meat smells in the air.

What was that song heard coming, coming in, about gone love?

Booties forensic with quietude and task

padding up to the second floor, toes outstretching like beast noses

toward one room and crack of the next for discriminate sniff

so when it comes to choice, one follows the wits, the point of it all

as if it were a jungle night, one can't be heard,

to her mumbled voice on tape by a bedside jug

garbling her text, her very own whisper that it's all okay, he's here

the country, it's in good hands, watch:  the last act's simple comedy --

and the world goes wet, spit pearls like the ones at her neck

making it a new day in the dark, turning it upside down.

.

My Main Man

One of us was a sour apple

and then there was none

It's always dwindling, I'm

someone, with bird vision,

ear on the tracks

doing the head count

ready with the barber blade

an accountant cutting costs

taking a big bite out of life

that's how this show is going

to be run, or my name isn't

.

Hegemony

 Who set this up that we're walking in the radiance of a Fall day

we, talking about it only in whispers, and then only when we're sure

they're in a good mood, catching a ballgame, eating a frank

 
or if we cuddle close to them to be unseen as not unlike,

some of us boutiquing at the shops, the same couture as them

the spitting junior image, same talk, same walk boulevardiers.

 

and why is it these same Mysterians came down came in

and made us slave to their digestion, our intestine -- just

relaxing fragmentarily to look clearly at ourselves, your eyes,

when busily a man in a camp and woman wide spread --

what's their intrigue, how did they get inside me, you, 

conspiring us to go along, play ball, play dead

.

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?

Funeral Flight

 

The airport girl joked

teased him as 'Seattle guy'

storms shook all in him

.

The Process

Entering a room with a closet on a hushed late morning with rain heavy at times

only with the thought of keeping madness within bounds,

legislating reason into it, into the cross words merged with physicality,

hedging with restrictive clauses the feral urges.

Taking a test vote to register in public and hide a subcommittee fire -- 

who governs shall lead each for each into a dark called light,

bills getting passed as countries pass away,

then going into the kitchen and pretending nothing happened but nature.

.

The Five

One normal way. In yellows and greys, in cheek-pinks and corneas moderated to a Carolina blue,the spirited hope of warm day time, loin love and the occasional aged whiskey -- 

that if it were just a matter of being alone, just a matter of self-solace -- this tenderness -- one would manage it like a watercolor, a paper sheet done within the breeze of half-an-hour, sun slapping the hand with its burn.

But then there's night to think of and the second self, impatient, ready for the baton of blood, 

the impetus to purge, to frizz the hair, dance around in nakedness, slap-happy deeds, to the i-don't-care, to the fuck-you, and its dualistic song of oh, oh, oh.

Why, my love, the birth of it!  That other, sequent life, das Kind, 

the leprechaun of a piece of yourself which calls your name in a cat yowl closing on a suckle, burping thrice before dozing into a body-warm swaddle.

Don't we gather here, my friends, open-hearted enough in our success to embarrass the look on each other's face, 

that there's a fraternity to acknowledge at the offramp where cold breath meets cardboard sign and one reaches for the limp bill stuffed in a pocket -- 

avoiding those central places where American men line-up and the bold and crazy women chart a circle of repugnance and you just cast them four odd coins that you scramble-for as you break into run to miss a witch's curse.

The other us, the fifth, we bring to that table, that table of one's own version of kosher, 

what's filled the heart like leftover canteen water, a secret, the slosh of worrying that it's just luck after all, 

that the salt taste is actually one of one's own tear-grieving and we bring in the chairs, vindicate the emptiness by inviting-in the whole world.

.

Weather Man

Aren't all cities built on a terrace of carnage, shifted layers of earth between the pottery and dead language of a first and next

embers cooled and dusted over, pocked by the shepherd staves, pig-shit-on, and trammeled by the wolf packs

whole periods of neighborhood, of relatives by marriage, of bedsharers,

of work life vulnerable to forgetting, to being forgotten, to have been.

Straw beach hats found in a trunk: such are opportunities.  And thinking of them in this city, figments of snap memories, things that might have happened if they did,

several of the friends I've had would remark on this casual reverie, the sitting here at the fresh front staring with a caffeine blank, no doubt to passers-by

puncturing any thought -- if they were inclined to let it breathe -- that here's where the work gets done, where worlds are reimagined

the old transmitting sharpness to the young in the breach, at just the right point, time's beauty mark.

Well here's something, the drunk espresso fine enough for it, clean, and my mood is forward with the ships,

the boats conveying the visitor, idler, the family with a hand-held happy child,

espresso fine enough with a cinnamon dash and unintrusive jazz --

tentative about this, but try it:

On a day of surprise, on the first day of an injustice,

a perpetrator jerks into action, musters his 'crazy' and acts on the unthinkable, and a whole Rube Goldberg of a process sets off -- no hitch -- on its way

and what happens to us, in this City On The Hill, enraptured --

I say to you, do this:  amo amas, you know, catch the U.S. in a swoon, get caught-up in the hurricane, the unconditional love, hoping for the wind to veer.

.