relative importance

What good,

I do not proclaim,

what good is it?

What purpose?

What function?

And to what degree, and how?

Here is another image from my life-

Doves, Roses, Waters, Lillies, etc., etc., or some such “beautiful” bullshit-

and attached to it some such projection of my psychology.

Because those “eternal” “beautiful” “waters”

stifle my exuberance with their arresting gag

and I am “moved” enough to “write” a “poem”

and because it is only water,

and because it is only a poem,

and because yous wander normally amid only waters,

I know that I am alone.

Nothing is more isolating than my love for these died away "moments".

My insistence on the power of

4pm light on leaves

a self-indulgent thought at 4am,

is, admittedly, a private lunacy.

I do not proclaim.

There are skyscrapers for that.

I do not analyze or press

Gods or Governments for answers to these

similarly

imaginary questions.

The Practice

When it is
                  after midnight
and I am
                  alone
when I am
                  honest with myself

I take my cynic by the hand and tuck her in.

There is then my cup of coffee and this collage:

     your body
                                 something I once wrote
                     her body
maitri
         yellow walls

beautiful, [to follow], starved in an open grave, purple electric, warm and free

"... is a placeholder term for the thing I so want which will complete..."

I deny myself-- please,
I do need your permission--

it is no mere term and it is no term

it is a practice
                            and I need your permission

to do it.

Let us consent
                              her body
let us consent to
this practice which we afraid do want.

The temple of my imagination
                      suffused with purple electric-- think

about the world like that
                  not the world but this
                                                              only

a yellow room and us practicing there-

and then there you are again
because I am a string of hypocrisies
              if I am

so, I am not.
                       except nows

        when poetry

dream mind body awake

they'll ask

process? method?

they may invoke Ginsberg

first thought, best thought

they may invoke Potok

who, dead, still revises

this is a parallel universe moving more quickly through time

this is an hallucination

this is salvation

this is

god

the answer is

no

no, the process, the method,

you have it, you impoverished

the papers Pablo stole-

parables of Pablo

palabras of Pablo-

no, blessed are the poor

blessed is Pablo (a priori, a papyrus) and blessed are you

for yours (notre) is the Kingdom,

no, the process, the method-

the process is kneeding dough

the method is baking bread

the approach is with butter

the tool is a knife

-haolo io,

epucra mae-

the eyes are eternally

the ears are eternally

the nose is eternally

the mouth is eternally

the flesh is eternally

there

folded- gently!- in his fields

which are mine, which are not mine

gently so as not to puncture the blueberries

as he makes bread with me

because I am the bread

and the wine is me

so that when I come to altar white

it is stained by me spare

the scientist- haolo- spare him

the iodine

and let him more easily observe the leaf

making glucose and being a leaf

and being a leaf and
being a leaf
and

four out of five poets agree

a terrible thing is happening

  or has happened oh god is time out?

except it is a lovely thing

it rotates in blue roses

  ah, yes, those,

outside my bedroom window while I seek sleep

what tragedy to be lulled by it

for we must always

  except once

wake

perhaps the predicament itself contains the answer

  four out of five poets agree-

that fifth poet

he has led the revolution

  by keeping his eyes open

of thorny things

The Sort of Thing

where the garbled tongue salad of street Martha

is the god-river coherence between soda buildings

when finally you look up, look up

like a purified foreshadowing except etched in the present

and reaching not beyond the present

so that when you read it it is an obvious surprise

which is also movie endings

in which the isolated chants of sandbox children

are found to have been the integral truth

so that when he appears

barefoot man on stairs

it is that he plays guitar

so that when I say my body is a pool of electric violet

it is that I saturate the earth with my tars

and absolutely nothing else is the case

Frosty Woods in Summer

into them prematurely

his and mine these woods

not

for you.

we can make stones and put God in them

and we can make a pile of them

a pile, a pile, a pile of them

and we can make a pile of them, we can

only

make a pile of them.

we have made stones and we say

yous have made stones too and

that is all we know [of and to] each other we are ghosts

still

these woods are haunted by us

the haunting is a thing felt

my ghost, I cannot kiss you

but [or] for

I love you

in the only way love can be

piled in the river

being tender stones.

I hold otherwise the phantom hand of a flesh-man

who skips my stone heart down river

where it meets the heap

the heap, the heap, the heap of stones there

it is the heap which is the hearth of loving

the phantom heap who's lost by counting

whose reality is only

whose constituents are lonelies.