Distillation

Heisenberg = light is aware that we are looking.

Consequently, we may do well to greet the light

politely and not stand at a remove from it

before we probe.


What it is that we suss out

may show more about us

than it tells us

about light.


If this were unique, you could call yourself Friday

and I might be able to sleep

on top of something other than a chemical wave


You aren’t and can’t be my bodyguard

and I already was your long lost friend.

We remain stuck in the middle,

betrayed in equal parts

by entopical phenomena

and thuggish frailty.


I hoped we might slink into Abu Simbel

with a telephoto lens and be rid of our past

for one partial moment.
But before we will go clandestine outside

The all ages show with pilfered cigs

Standing ill-at-ease with the asymptote

Of unspoken mutual attraction.

But observational quarks will always catch

irksome shadows that we cast

by being present at the scene.

From that well-tilled soil, cheap grace is sown

Insight-peddlers flush with vig

occupy the field

Wielding shunted subtitles and indiscriminate colons

To cap the telomerase and seize up the rhizomes.

Their false light is so warm, though,

and it moves quite fast in its own right.

Being remiss, we accept acceptance

in lieu of exceptional experimental results.

We cease experiments altogether,

fearful of being found out.


Pussies, the lot of us.

Like it or love it or leave it or leaven it

There always exists a scene

and we will always be outpaced and outshone

And it will always be something less than clean.

That is the baseline - it does not excuse the task.

To greet the light with a stiff spine

seems the least that could be done

on behalf of our lowest interchangeable sign

Let the sacraments fall where they may and

the soothsayers claim what they will.

Say hello, and then get on with it.



Cui Bono


cri_guston.jpg


I belong to the school of watching people try to act naturally

And decided recently to incorporate trying to get noticed for good deeds

Into the curriculum to replace trying to get noticed for voluptuary consumption

And its predecessor, trying to traumatize banality for the giggles

 

A deadened mind is no more attractive than a cankered heart.

Put that in your casket and cremate it, kids.

 

You can sit at the edge of my mental furniture anytime.

It is capacious.  Just sit and cogitate. There might be some anxiety in

Falling off the perch, but mine as well become becalmed.  

 

Leaving your spot, if you coarse out and down to the diastolic pump,

For whom, would you say, does my blood most freely flow? 

Can empirical measures tell? 

The outer limits of self-fashioning have softer teeth than

the outer limits of accounting.   

I would rather swim in money than self-expression. 

 

Going green at the gills when the pump stops working, then go

Blue at the tempo of funereal decay, which – mutatis mutandis –

Decrescendos out of time and

Into charred black history. 

 

I belong to the school of capturing people trying to act naturally.

Play acting Goffman will not beautify

Any of the old anxious slogans or titillate

Any of the overdetermined overtures.

A grinning shark and vertigo comprises all of

what has been left over. 

 

Still, a cankered heart trumps a deadened mind trumps

A desiccated vestige of a constantly-evolving ideal. 

Say what you want about the virtuous lash, but

It leaves a mark.   It’s mine as well. 

Just try to stop me.