On Beauty,

or A Few of My Favorite Things,
or Error as Architecture

An oily snow mound in a parking lot. The frame of an old car in a junk heap. The way your lip curls up when you sleep revealing your upper teeth. The artificial green coloring of the frozen spinach that rubs off on my fingers. The eye of the crippled homeless man at the bottom of the escalator in Grand Central Station that rolls back. My judgments. The things she said when angry. The show that was stiffly acted and tastelessly directed. The thoughts I thought when lonely. The words I excised from this poem just now. My tastes. The way she named her experience friendship while I named mine love. The warts I burned off my toes in fifth grade. The way the wedding ended too early and nobody was ready to jump into the river. My desire. The things I turn from. The sudden movements of my mind. The things that turn towards me. The introduction of disorder into the system. The melody without shape or arc. My training. The ugly ass tie my friend wore the other night. The fatness of Americans. The atomic bomb. My discriminations. The proclivity for blood in human relations. The persistence of ignorance. The genocide. The difference between wise distinguishing and naked awareness. The nay-saying mind and the yes-saying spirit. The slave humming her song in a tone of utter despair.

All thoughts are God’s thoughts

All thoughts are God’s thoughts.
Even the wrathful ones,
Even the wicked ones.

All thoughts in all minds at all times.
Even behind the empty eyes,
Even inside the TV heads.

All thoughts are God’s thoughts.
The end times are near,
Not everyone will be saved.

Transubstantiation

The steak is rare and blood red.
Your suffering is raw and tearful.
What is felt is passed around like so many invisible handshakes.

Mother’s mood is in her milk.
Father’s desire is in his genes.
What becomes is in the seeds of the universal oak tree.

I eat the steak, I drink the milk,
Through my being all things are transubstantiated,
I take on the suffering, I embody the desire,
Through your being I am converted.

Freak City

for Williamsburg

We are the people you sleep with
Moon scattered nights among the records
Obliterating boundaries in our worship
Our forms will live on forever until they pass.
Others look to us for limberness of limbs
For a sign of universal relaxation
In the way we wear our muscles and tattoos and shoes.

We are the people who get dragged home
This routine of expansion and contraction
Of sleeping until sleep is exhausted
Of proving that yes still works best.
There is a hidden basement downstairs
Where our angry hearts beat on strings singing
Don’t bond to the tides if the tides are not what you want.

We are the people who have invented UFOs
Telling our stories to keep you afraid at night
Our cross-currents of heartbreak and selfishness
Our riverside romances do not die easy.
Others wish to see if we float like witches
For a sign of the reality of damnation
Don’t look now if you want to go on believing as you do.

Sherpas

When my life flashes before my eyes,
In that famed final moment of lucidity,
I am convinced that what I will see is not
My first kisses nor the birth of my firstborn,
But rather the hundreds of times I have given
Directions on the streets of New York

To wayward wandering fellow-travelers,
Who stand with their upsidedown maps
And their clueless, terror-stricken faces,
Suddenly staring at the holes in our reality,
At the flickering of the substantiality of space,
At the streetlights beckoning us uptown.

To get to the Public Library, one walks west
From Grand Central along Fifth Avenue,
To find the Carousel in the Park, one winds
Southeastwardly from Sheep Meadow,
And to find Brandy’s Piano Bar, one sings,
“On East Eighty-Fourth, between Second and Third!”

The sherpas have the mountaineering skills
But I have memorized the subway map.
The guides have strewn the land with signposts
But I possess the toy box prize secret decoder.
And when my mornings are labyrinths, my fear
Becomes my tool for unraveling spirit-in-action.

Mythologies

These are the days of our exuberances,
Of our enlightened and neurotic qualities,
The blindness of Cupid.

These are the movements of our minds,
Of our prejudices and our self-confidences,
The cunning of Daedalus.

These are the dreams of our reality,
The fabric worn so thin as to become a hole,
The death of Zeus.

Portrait of the Universe as a Young Man

It is the process of gestation,
An abstract phenomenon
That is hereby depicted in plain
Words, straightforwardly.

The adherence to the thoughts
As they arise, the stripping
Off of the layers and the muck,
The modernist mumblings,

The ego disguised as genius —
For only Tumult, Son of Thunder,
Knows well the whirling dervish
And dances well into the night.

It is the schoolboy become artist,
The transformation of the human
Into the cockroach or the sun
Or the sunset or the mulberry,

Into the whole luminous shebang,
Sanity still intact, if possible,
Raw heart extended and exploded,
Guts spread out upon the pavement.

It is, simply put, the process of
Becoming, this so-called work
We do on ourselves, constantly,
Tirelessly, our observing minds

In headlong effort to represent our
Inner landscapes of convergence,
Not to save one from the empty wheel,
— to point it out, to calmly cry out,

Look! there is no other, there is no
Black hole, there is no you-dream,
There are only our quotidian saviors,
Only coffee, and perpetual gestation.