Our Crisis Jubilee

Here are some poems I've written. I hope they're alive in some way. Sincerely, Kelly

Press Enter to Exit
To Move or Not to Move
Al Desko
As Snow

Misfit 101
Arriving in Florence

It Sounded Like Sicily

Journey Beyond Three

A Life in Headlines

Neo-Geo

Press Enter to Exit

And now, come our likes, our loves, come

with somatic intensities, come capers,

come doings with your thick springs,

come childhoods with your fist of leashes

unclenched, and latch a past to

soar our hearts through the cyclone pageant.

I'll ornamental for, will spread like the hooks

of barbed wire, my other half, useless,

robust, and blaze lamps for you.

Let's no longer care who sees us.

One can release the wilds

of yesterday into their opposite,

for the fluids that flew through us

are now sluggish and congeal.

I’ll keep an eye on the past

and its pacing. I’ll keep the sky

alive with our greatest mentor.

We’ll not air-raid doohickeys

on our presumed nitwit comrades,

shish-kebabing them while networking

ourselves as peppy, posh and sociopathic.

We’ll stop pickling in our self-loathing.

“See you later” implodes all expressions.

The dinosaur pills put in water

sponge into a lacking luster.

Let’s not let them turn us

into a fireless ash, giving over

the second half of life to the recovery

of the first half.

Let's not drill-down value-added deliverables

to operationalize quick-wins for rightsizing.

Even the sky feels owned.

Consumer mourning outlets vary per country
and era, but please, let’s do something,

anything, so the color comes back on.



To Move or Not to Move

First war, then a series of late lessons,

then a harvest of regrets,

idly circling familiar thoughts

like a brat on a merry-go-round.

So I took a bottomless lake,

a body without gravity, serious malaise

and conceived of bringing two fictoids

to Paris where they would conduct amazement

via desultory subjects with fashionable shops

of near-Italian locutions, for I would like

to exchange pleasantries for handbags,

or rather those that go with them.

I’ll wear quirky pulsating bouillon

in the pursuit of a stable regime. But

will the display of handicrafts betray

a palpable boredom becoming

just a snazzy version of yet another

despotic state, as a name-brand car

describes a particular religious intention?
I hardly know where to begin.

Al Desko

Al desko with chile con queso

is cool beans reprieve

from screenshots of crony barbarism

and my digital footprint

going all duck face

Oh, IDC

then lolcat appears

beside middle-aged woman

in lycra, a very keen

road cyclist, hawt

for dodging

the misery index

train wrecks at tech café

but out there somewhere

has to be
the ant’s pants

As Snow

I could travel for miles.

I could fall and rise again.

Crunched underfoot, I’d be hard

as a rock. I’d settle on stones, but

make them soft. Like white drops

from the divine, as white as

glass through which the light

of silence shines. I could

ride the wind. I could be

stacked against a tree, a happy way

of saying death has arrived.

I could be a haiku:

Etched on the bird’s wings

the story of one’s life

powder to the touch

Or be strange new thoughts: Will I

dance around my maker’s head?

People would slip on me

yet I would soften their blow.

I’d have fifty names instead of two.

If I were a flag, I’d flow

with the breeze but be moored in

too deep. I’d like to be a window,

but four-cornered up as well as

out. And as the sky I’d cry,

so let me ease those shores

where the old ocean tires.

Let me be snow so the soul

roams free with little tint of me,

and learns to love that fire.



Misfit 101

for Dean Young

No one knows how to do it – congratulations!

Your plan should be wrecked – chutzpah!

It always intends otherwise, so be ready

to abandon and attend to the conspiracy.

But business is booming? J’accuse!

Go on, rival the world you mitigating agent,

you accelerant of spectral love,

for time is running out!

Draw your conclusions past the edge

of the page to their own extinction,

be it through the impossibility

of their existence, or their self-ruination.

Always gather fuel, sometimes mixing

the beakers to see again what fuel is,

since Monster Will will not die.

Triangulate yourself into

the transubstantiation of your choosing.

First urges are best, don’t be an old fogy

and wreck them – wreck yourself if you have to,

not your work.

May it coincide with the babble referents

of Tonka trucks and Barbie-loves.

Perpetual porous ones, riot in the unattainable!

Let your body pursue its own ideas,

not having the same ideas as you do.

Read about lovers in a book

if you want control.

What’s it all for? Nada et tout.

And don’t take yourself for the CEO

of a large multinational, for being big honcho

is as much whim as smarts.

Were you born in Ghana or Greenwich?

Maybe Toronto has the right tongue

for the human pang.

Have one foot in the tribe of your camp

if you like, but for God’s sake not both feet.

Late in the party sleep in the chandelier.

More wreck and less discourse please.

Wouldn’t it be nice to make birds

instead of birdcages?

If you hit a wrong note, lay on it

like Coltrane.

If you want to be a wizard, make

sure your dog pulls back the curtain

so you can say, “Pay no attention

to that man behind the curtain.”

Next slide: ___________________

A lullaby to frighten us out

of our pitiful impotence

would be swell.

To be an unacknowledged legislator,

or to be a legislator of the unacknowledged?

It’s better if we don’t fully understand it,

so take it out of the stable, ride it

to God-knows-where and let it

find its way back.

May you get better at not knowing,

in order to sketch, botch, slog and

grope your way through.

Oftentimes find your lovetime,

when the flowers turn towards you.

If you found Grace Slick at Trisha Nixon’s

wedding trying to dose the punch bowl

with acid, what would you do?

Insert M-80, light, and let the pages

of the Norton anthology fly!

So that meaning can begin, and

in so doing, be undone again.

What’s a Teddy without a tantrum

and a good smack upside the head

now and then?

Can I get you a number of drinks?

The audience? They’re for privacy or

they’ll think you mongrel,

so don’t worry about them.

Think of someone arriving and now standing

next to you in the poetry section

of the bookstore (now extinct). You don’t say

“Hey there, how about ol’ Wally-boy?”

but fold in upon yourself in embarrassment.

What is that about?

Performance: Was your poem drawn up

by committee? Then why sell it

to a committee?

Perception: clash of the seen

with the unseen, glimpse of the nudge

between love and endsville.

Be careful of the rhyme bloom and doom.

What I know about form could fill a thimble,

what form knows about me will be my end.

If only for the liberty of unimaginable opulence:

I still don’t know what I’m doing.

Don’t reactors have somewhere within them

a radiant core?

What if I turn myself into a laboratory

to cultivate – here come the monsters!

Exibit B  - --  - _ --  ---- - __ - --- _ - ___ --  - --

As the Liberty Bell is more convincing

with its crack, is not everything

more valid while obtaining the desired

suddenness of particular associations?

For day is darkness compared to

the lightening-filled night.

When wine is flowing with the sound

of thunder – oh happy grocery list!

When blood in the erection is taken

from the brain – oh happy unthinking!

Constantly disrupted, constantly regrouping,

like when one meets another’s eyes,

how else account for that voltage?

Nay a brittle cause for crack-up,

than for music since we’re nimble.

Why work on craft when we could be

clobbered by angels? Maybe we can’t

make them come, but we can

sweep the steps of the temple.

Don’t skip the vital rogue data: let the primitive

reassert itself.

Like the early delight of third graders,

natural-born surrealists, saboteurs, reckless,

ready to plunge in, laughing, their hearts

kites wired to a hundred ears.

Reading by flashlight in the storm,

ask yourself, will it be worth those

last moments of the batteries?

For information is a corpse

to a mad-hopping hope, beginning again

and again, reveling in mortal being,

aspiring to the everlasting.

Like the geometric proof of a foxglove rising

through cement, like a body breaking through

the idea while the music reinvents us,

a signal going through us
like an inkling of God.

Arriving in Florence

We saw a horse on its side, breathing

like a fish on the bottom of the empty river.

I wanted to kick the horse or pull it

right side up. My sister was ill and wanted

to go far away, a strange thing to desire

on one’s wedding day. She threw a horseshoe

up into the sky and it came back down,

scattering everybody.

My sister’s talking on the phone,

the expression on her taut face matches

the telephone cord: umbilical, biblical even,

radiating a palpable energy.

Must be Mars again, separating himself

from the pile of sick birds.

Who would like to sever the chord more?

He? She? Me? Spending so much time

saying goodbye, no wonder everyone’s ashen-

faced. Goodbye, trees. Goodbye, disconnected

heads. We’re on our way to the stars.

I heard everything that could possibly be said

about the matter of dysfunction, until

I saw no shadows, being filled

with light. And laughter. Thank God

for that. There was also no river,

jammed as it was below large birds

circling above our pluckable heads.

Not much else besides the ticking

and talking. We thought when we arrived

it would be all Venus, arranging the pieces,

but not so, said Mars, lying flat

on the empty riverbed, struggling

for air and water. He wiggled and moved

dust around, creating soft-choking clouds.

The voice on the loudspeaker turned out

to be my voice. But this had happened

over and over, before I realized

I hadn’t turned the power button on.

Over and over, saying something,

and nothing.

The wedding cake looked like a birthday

cake. Something in cursive written

on the side of it in red letters. Who would eat

words? I thought about childhood.

All splits. I thought about the future.

Splits again.

Maybe we should reposition ourselves

upside down for a while. The bridges

aren’t working, so slippery they are with dust.

I walked across one of them, part way,

and felt the frustration of the horse

and the desperation beside the empty river.

So filled with static, the loudspeakers

weren’t working again. I felt like leading

a revolution. Though there was no enemy

really, but outsized, unexamined flaws.

Who knew this lovely valley, so green

and fertile, could get so cold.

Who knew we’d have to squint and grasp at

the forty-year bonds cracking between us.

When I came to, I threw my bullhorn

at the loudspeaker.

When I came to, I was pinned to the air,

overlooking the valley of leaves

turning color, smoke gently lifting.

Extreme end-time had come.

We were shells tossed out

of the stormy ocean. Mars had fallen

and we were shaken. His self-reigning

had smeared his face where once

solid metal was, from a visage shiny,
to something more like wet rust.

It Sounded Like Sicily

When the yogini (tantrica?) asked me to love her

I whispered: precipice, into heaven

Because precipice sounds like presuppose

Because I wanted inundation

What? She said

Yes, everything, I said

Her ears from the East

Her eyes approaching

I knew I was damaged, but if I could

sustain one song: I could be, suppose

Sex on the floor in various poses would be best

I whispered: statuette, monument come to life

To begin, I named us sexually

It sounded like Sicily

For pure, I said pristine looking

over the ocean, isle for vocation

Vision and ocean, they go together, she said

Could it be that you and I

look at the ocean together, I said

And again, twice, thrice…

I would need to live in a large

Space, she said

I knew I was yearning, but

asked, What kind of space?

Like that, she said, and pointed to a mirror

framing the moon. What? I said

Because the precipice was so high

Because pristine can be such a mess.



Journey Beyond Three

Why will you not let us in?

        It’s true we’re made of dust,

but are we not also our father’s kin?

        It’s also true we’re born

from your foe, our mother, but was it

       us who swiped at you so?

When you both moved from one side

       of the country to the other,

did you not have all you wanted, removed

       from our mother and your

rows? We visited, my two sisters

       and I, wanting to be

close to our elusive father. Drawing near,

        I glanced up and saw king-size

on the living room wall, a family tree

        without us there. Why did

that happen? Though I didn’t ask, to

       invoke what may lie deeper in.

I dropped my eyes and withdrew

       to the kitchen, where I

learned a son would be born. What will

        you name him? I asked.

“Why, William Dwight Shaw III,”

        you said. What? You

       

can’t do that. “Why not?” you said.

        Because that’s me!

“He’ll be from your father, and from

       your father’s father, it follows

therefore in word that he’ll be the third.”

        Yes. Except for me.

Am I not worthy to be? “You are, you

        are,” you said with a smile

(just not as much as he). Our talk declared

        done, I asked myself,

who will be this William Dwight Shaw

       III? Who will be me?

*

As it turned out, three girls you begot,

       in part for the previously

three to be forgot. The same dog

       was bought. And the succession

of things said and done, why such need

       to wipe us out at last,

by taking possession of our past?

       Will frames, names and

numbers be the way to prove your

       worth, when it’s inherent

by your birth? At least twice now

       you’ve tried to erase me.

Before there’s a third, I protest, your

       stepson is a little more

than none. But not too much more,

       for when my mentor

overturns the cup I bring, let there fall

       out only a drop or three,

all the more room to let in, to reach out

       and sing. For I feel I'm

finally beginning to see. It’s you who’s

       my spritiual teacher, asserting

your world, awakening mine, how to be,

       whether bought, sold, or

to unfold, to scold or not to scold: such

       fire all these years, until

at last I realized not to take it personally.

       I began to hear as if I had

no ear: the vitality, far away, now near.

       Where are we trying to get to

from here but a stomping prosperity,

       when what’s closer and

more real than our interrelated causality?

       I see your charm, spirit

and zeal too. We’ve even talked, us two,

       but little’s been real or

true, and that being my fault as well,

       I now make this earnest plea:

May you no longer need to triumph

       in a sordid majesty; May I

no longer need to triangulate between

       your guard, my father and me.

*

But let’s be honest, this will not

       happen. There’s still

too much coercion and resignation

       to bear. Father, you love

in person, but wrestling with being

       seen but not heard, cave

to your deceptive wife. Where are you

       in this amalgam of three?

“A happy wife, a happy life,” you say,

       evoking Macbeth. But

it’s a sustained bout to discover

       oneself reduced to

a bracket. Why would I remain in this

       racket? For the partial

comfort it brings? Because I’ve lost

       my center? The cost of

hosting another in the head and heart

       may be the best place

to start. I’ll prepare then another way

       to be. Less tongue and

eardrums to a different rhythm.

       I’ll try and letter a deeper

cosmos. Dante harried into a dark

       wood, then dove into

the universe. I’ll build within

       this slip of pebbles,

spacious un-control, and uplift.

*

(I’m writing another section [in four-line stanzas] which unpacks, explores and visualizes this “other way to be” and “spacious un-control and uplift” in a kind of Buddhist resolution to the previous strife in the poem.)

A Life in Headlines

Boy thinks school is like a rotten house

and wishes he were snow so when thrown

down by bullies can land softly on his feet

hoisting a new view

a blitzkrieg of study

the simultaneous gaze

windowing several wedding parties

geometric proofs

most of us are like this most of the time?

*

a stage-three fright alert

activist forgets stupid people who gain power

are never stupid about threats to their power

a mountaineer’s glissading boot-path

after girl walks in, and especially out, door,

humanistic qualities increase in writer’s work

main event in man’s life was his non-marriage

little holy trickeries of rum with mint

swinging from a chandelier

*

a civic-seeming ordinariness

privately repudiated

two-time felon

and one-time Pulitzer-prize winner

declares art and crime

the only careers with any sex appeal

*

historical ventriloquist, confusionist

and tantrumist, now deflecting arrows

towards acerbic lightness

for who wants to be indexed

to a subprime? Advancing fork

without a pie, end-arrows have ouch.

The clock of snow becoming

rusty with happiness, breath is
finally flowering in the cold.

Neo-Geo

Drug aisle’s come and eliminated the present,

flawlessly creating glowing diodes

highlighting body wash;

the ambient bondage

leaching xexon light

instills storyness…

Exasperate and confound the enemy,

says Retriever-K.

People will continue, but as clicks

and apply, replies Demo my NeoBrand.

I suspect your original is having a human change meltdown

makeover, Facebook playing plastic surgeon again. What image

do you aspire to?  Unplump, unbuttoned and convivial? A party

that spills out onto the lawn?

                                                Fear Of Missing Out here. Hi guys.

Did you hear that?

                        Hear what?

What’s your pocket of space-time

as the noiseless foot of FOMO trots beside?

I need to feel endless in every direction.

Text-expand.

I feel myself observed, I constitute myself, pose,

instantaneously make another, transform, advance into,

settlement, unrevelment. Join me before re-tedium installs?

Don’t try to reverse-psycho me into that strobe.

I hear a self-declared narrator. Narrative is for dead people.

We solidify only when subjected to likes.

Compassionate capitalism?

Neighborhood, yes. Ocean over, yeah! Connect!

Don’t accuse me of being an accumulation posting.

How are you incorporated? 

Which experience of almost?

Global-decorative here, same-paged

in whited-out work-face. You?

In post-op black hole, where logos mock and scroll.

Continuum of translation?

Affective possibility space.

Meet me at Inc. Corral?

Can’t go outside.

Why not?

Hasn’t been rendered yet.

It’s an idea I conceive of as architecture.

Articulation space of speech.

Coma-Boat.

I hear we’ve got to learn to walk backwards

if we’re going to fly.

Why fly?

The world ended three weeks ago, starting now.

Command-Z-it.

Done. Capitulation is sexy

when you land on the right vibration.

You are your area only if you take it in.

What’s “in”?

A gravity slave.

A decade dropped like glass?

Sluggish cognitive tempo.

I’d rather borrow tomorrow’s fun.

You’re really starting to put some lead in my pencil.

Text-slugged: ancient-jargoned non-compute.

What donkey-sphincters use

to script the war, offshoring bug-splats.

I’m bored.

Halt! Hypervigilant for threat: lower-case

sans serif appearing (corporate code for friendly).

Promise of proximity?

Refilter your image.

Emerge enhanced?

Or attract new likes.

Problem arises.

Perfected self might win?

Selfie-ready, but…

Unsafe?

Beginning to withdraw.

Why now?

No encrustation; will soon be reversible.

I see your mark.

My clone and his clone’s avatar are at war.

Post hyper-cute adoption video?

Post-haste too many lolpeeps.

Time wounds all heels.

                        Enough said.