THE UNDECIDABILITY IN MIDMOST ME

In my crippledness in your crowd

I split into Solo and Also; in my alone

I bleed between my shadow and my ego.

Our currents are blurred. My substance

is ubiquitous, my components are common.

And still I conceive I’m composed uniquely.

My tide advances ashore withdraws

advances withdraws once more. That which

I have just resolved I then unresolve again.

Can an invisible man still disappear?

Women in how many cities

have unnoticed my presence?

We wish to apportion the What

that’s beyond outside into a space,

a time, enumeration, and causality, but

there are not words enough to measure

the random ungoverned imagination,

the divine hunger for enduring novelty.

Yet some of you quest for a wholeness

in which these me cease to exist. I’d

become less than this manyed nothingness.

GUINEVERE AND THE MINOTAUR

“Love is just

an affair

of the tongue,”

you say.

“a poetry.”

“But you’re wrong,”

I say.

(Nor is it just.

But it’s enough

to satisfy

us cold,

us hungry,

us soul-

impaired.)

In our masks,

the cynic’s,

the romantic’s,

the two of us,

“This, our hour,

our hieroglyph,

is powered

by a myth —

is it a tower

or labyrinth?”

we ask.

SOCIETY’S SCRIPTS

We live inside our systems of symbols.

A creed, a border, a script for courtship,

we need our ordered dogmas to worship.

Our yous and Is dance to their rituals.

The score is settled. It is all arranged.

(An individual may improvise

within choreography and chorus,

but the rote familiar eases the strange.)

Algorithms determine processes.

The fixed prescriptions neutralize the strains

and routined weather charts predict the rain.

Tested certainties discourage guesses.

We live inside our systems of symbols.

Our yous and Is dance to their rituals.

CIRCUMSTANCE AT THE CENTER OF THE CIRCUMFERENCE

My mind wrestled itself, pinned ‘tween Law and Gospel, Vision and Division. And pondered my place within the world — a time to remember? To dismember?

And then I heard, inside, Jehovah: “Wisdom is your recognition that midgets and giants are members of one family. And the pierced are the parents of the whole. This saith Allah the LORD.”

(A disputatious bluejay argues over the head of the wheelchaired woman.)

And then I heard from inside, Allah: “The dark and the light, the female and the male, the hallowed and the damned — and the wide and varied spectra between — all inhabit the same castle hovels, eat identical fruits and breads, fill their mutual lungs with the same necessary air. They live only to die alike. Thus saith Buddha the LORD.” 

(A frolicsome collie is crushed beneath the wheels of the speeding Mercury.)

And the, from inside I heard Buddha: “Siblings are the sinister and the sincere. The thankless are inseparable from the sanctified. The unhurt and the maimed share one body after all, hidden by illusions of skin and gender, atlas and caste. Thus saith Krishna the LORD.”

(A gynandromorphic monarch flutters to the patient finger of the eager child.)

And then from within came Krishna: “The ancient one was an infant once, just as the babe shall one day age. Nights belong to insomniacs and narcolepts alike, and the sun is owned in equal measure by the famous and the nameless. Thus saith Ra the LORD.”

(A jet fighter scratches its vapor fingernails against the cloudless sky.)

And then I announced to myself:

Mankind is a patchwork of the alienated and the integrated.

Of the squandered and the saved.

Of the vicious and pacific.

Of the sane and the imbecile.

Of ensultaned and enslaved….

And Heaven the shared possession of our various souls, demarcated by social lines and by lines within our minds.

Thus saith  I.

(Ants parade across the yard’s Formica table.)

And I stretched and left the porch.

AGENCY

Of what is built the world?

Of timber, steel, and stone,

with bicep and testosterone?

No. Of powder and foundation.

Where lies the garden’s lure,

in garland or in thorn?

The harem whips and spurs the crown

To accommodate their station.