for Oscar Wilde

If only love came easy.
Once exposed to its removal, its terror, the heart grows queasy.
How hard it can be
To know loving's unlovely
Side: The caught breath once the curtain falls,
Deadened sanctity when recent calls
Turn against self-esteem.
"Was it just a dream?";
"Was it a rue,
Temporary?"; "Was it true?"
Questions amount to nothing.
Answers only seem like bluffing.
I want to love you,
But I know the drill: Two,
Then one. One's pain *is expectation,
One's guilt is association.
"Life is short—let them care";
I wait...I dream...I stare...

What is what it seems?
("What?" is) My thoughts? The wind? Anti-aging creams?
All things, like onions, can be peeled.
To inner essences my being's kneeled.

On this tan cutting board
You earn your corrupted name:
“Alligator pear.”

The serrated blade
Punctures your hide—a balloon
Under a pin’s pressure,

Shades of green furling out.
I’m sure you’d prefer
Vegetable status if you developed

Self-awareness; or maybe
You’d withdraw from knowledge
Of the human type.

I trust my cooking songs—
Slowdive and Chaka Khan—
Can’t hurt you anymore

Than your predestined obliteration;
Mastication via your domesticators:
It all ends in fertilizer.

(Where you began!)

O, avocado, phantom “fruit”
Born of the self-same Life Source,
Schopenhauer’s Will,

My transient enjoyment of you
Within this vegetable salad—
An Achaean enclosed by Trojan blades—

Suffices for a life of sanctity.

Where did I come from?
A country of what?
Big hearts?

That's what the guestbook said,
And the amnesia makes anything else suspect.
Still...

A chipped Greek frieze;
Shade inching over insalata Caprese;
Piazza Cavour from a smudged helicopter window at noon;
Faces in a crowd at LOVE park, rapid fire;
Dusk in an Irish cemetery;
Lakeside heather.

This departure is like rewriting
A book from memory.
How much of me—if any—is there?

for Wallace Stevens*

1.
Just as my fingers on these keys
Make data, so the self-same sounds
Of a CEO’s fingers make me a data, too.

Thus it is the spirit that feels,
Here in this cubicle, desiring—through
Excel spreadsheets, email, a deadline—

Itself.

2.
In the pale glow of a Xerox machine
The body stood.
It sought
The hum of Nature,
But, finding only synthetics,
Sighed with demur,
So barren grew its mood.

3.
They wondered why the invisible child wept
In a security without which Death’s adept;
It could not say,
So convinced were they,
Safety was the dream of a Happiness that slept.

There are situations in which one is cut off from the opportunity to do one's work or enjoy one's life; but what can never be ruled out is the unavoidability of suffering. In accepting this challenge to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment, and it retains this meaning literally to the end. — Viktor Frankl

[T]here is no coming to consciousness without pain. — Carl Jung

Should the conflagration climb
Run till all the sages know — William Butler Yeats

Heart-injured in North London, he became
The Latin scholar of his generation. — W. H. Auden

It's urgent,
Imminent,
Fiercely non-communicable.
(Carry a firestorm in your veins.)

Secrets, secrets are no fun
Secrets, secrets hurt someone

The secret, untranslatable, hurts the secret-holder:
Frustration disguises isolation.
Distilled isolation is pain.
Purified pain is meaning.
(Carry a firestorm in your veins.)

Secrets, secrets are no fun?
Secrets, secrets hurt someone?

O, only momently!
Heart-injury transfigured is salvation.
(Carry a firestorm in your veins.)

"...if a way to the Better there be, it lies in taking a full look at the Worst." — Thomas Hardy

Union desires the ideal.
The ideal, being untenable, victimizes the real.
The real as victim is melancholia.
Melancholia, then, is the loss of the ideal.
The ideal, never being real, is the phantom,
The phantom that confers melancholia.
Lay the phantom? O, Buddhahood
In The Land of Ubiquitous Technology and Reason,
You yourself are now the phantom —
Laying the phantom becomes the phantom.