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Emanations

Admin 
Hilarious mendacities are a god’s
false sinews of immortality

Condensed concentrations—love
is here for you if you grasp it

Gramps spoke with his fists because
the mean Passaic streets so “learned him”

In a party run by sociopaths and opportunists—
you’ll be a pawn, a sad sack member of our team 

Only the leader is ever complete and you, the
loyalist pure of heart, are alone without deceit 

When he delights brash horses and young
children, your charismatic leader is a god

Sometimes our people won’t respond
without money— the sinew of his power, 

the meat of the nut—ulcerated
skin hidden beneath thin tissue

It’s significant but is it true?
We cling to the fitful fantastic

In the blistering process of renewals and
regeneration all our empires must fall

Caesar knows the mob is gullible—
giant brutes or malevolent children

are made great in the excess of his power
Even the trees, he thought, applaud me 

We are ruled by a mob and remain
manipulated by political hacks

Caesar didn’t seem obsessed when after
he successfully hid his obsessions

Power is realized only in action—
If it erupts it’s there 

All power redounds in a lonely  
sacred fickle shroud of immortality

A gull that man, a sucker—
his stern, irrational prejudices grate

Espionage and sabotage are 
the weapons of his weakness

The emanation of starlight and
heat is the essential fuse of all power

Human nature invokes inequality
and as I get older I heartily plead 

for that which makes it, dissipates 
it, emanates it like the solarizing 

of the human, the humanization of
the sun where all of our lives emanate

-March 7, 2020-

Primitive gifts

Admin 
Primitive gifts make power
flow from the invisible to
the visible—Wars are won not
by the best stuff but by those 
with the most stuff—The essentials
about us are not our mastery and
all of our traumas are private

She gave you cheap trinkets 
and thought “that ought to suffice”
I’ve faced death three times—
once in the ocean, once in the
street and once under the surgeon’s
knife—“In these fraught days 
wolves roam free in our streets”

Payback, punishment, restoration
of balance—proclamations of distress
become the essence of suffering
Empathetic, loving, caring 
but without naiveté, he was
no mark for the unscrupulous,
the devious, the hateful

In a court of law perception 
is everything and who wouldn’t
want some dark-eyed careless girl
to decipher for us all a world that 
is, in so many ways, beyond us? Does
a spiteful wolf ever tell the truth about  
anything? Sense is what words

signify, optimism is his buoyancy
and his pessimism scours the depths
Why summon the dead when it’s us
and not them in turmoil? Rigorous,
vigor when you lack the sense to qualify
it all, every description theory laden,
in fear of earth’s desolate oblivions

What we fear most is extinction,
of course—He wouldn’t play chess
because if he was going to work so
hard he thought it best to accomplish 
something beyond our ruthless
opportunism and bloodlust 
“I was hoping there’d be more 

good times with him but a
terrible, awful thing happened”
He had to find his own way
that ugly man who answered 
the door and refused to speak 
French to me (so much was his
hatred of Napoleon) because 

what he needed to know 
couldn’t be taught—that is,
exceptional strength, powers 
of endurance, suffering and 
animal toughness—He never 
really saw that one tyrant at all
but glanced at him only once

in a momentary blurred vision
The cunning pleasure we take
in our own minds’ tenacity, the
layers of cant under which we
conceal our viciousness, can barely
protect the childish in me, the
abiding sweetness that loves you  

-February 22, 2020-

Creation

Admin 
Creation is contrasted coordination—
This world’s not just one arena
of intention and, if you see only
what you want to see, your freedoms
will reduce to muted mediocrity 
Let’s make some decisive improvisations—
Chance favors rigor, preparation

and the only roads that never find
Rome are our mediocre middling ways 
She smelled better than I expected,
nothing like what I thought and better
Flesh is individuality, our
bones are our universality
“When he returned to the visible 

they didn’t recognize him though,
for so long, he’d walked among them”
It was always about the expression, 
contrast and containment of feeling
Creation isn’t unity, it uses it—
Creation’s  improvisatory contrast
Is there any meaning that death

fails to destroy?—“not for an age
but for all time”—The world is 
more than one mask of intention
In the Eisenhower ‘50s my parents 
decided, “to hell with politics, politics
that disappointing lying bore
The American people are callous 

idiots, stupid, brutal, childish, angry 
Let’s pursue, instead, protected private
lives, like nightly constellations
obscured in bright city lights”
“But to do so would be wrong
So the King can’t do it because
the King can do no wrong”

I’m determined to wring each
precious drop from the time 
left to me—“Rabbi hurry back,” he   
said, “There’s so much I need to learn
from you and my sun will soon set”
Trust a person until you learn you can’t
and then, never forget that you can’t

“We don’t need everyone to agree
We just need for them to behave”
“We defeated them utterly like
stubble cut from under our blades”
A comet is just a large dirty snowball
whose magnificent flight is obscured
in city lights, caught in the rancor 

of death’s tremors, so sing
“Once she was hot 
Once he was strong
Now she’s not 
Now they’re all wrong 
with each essential
drop we see”

It’s a savage game played by
and for savages—“Any music 
that’s not a single-minded sharply 
contrasted interpretation fails”
It hurts when I can’t believe you
Seeds germinate from the invisible
to the viable, just as we do

-February 8, 2020-

At a funeral

Admin 
At a funeral feast given to 
heal our community, a spider 
crawls up the wood slat wall without
conscious intent, spontaneously because
that’s what wild brown spiders do
I didn’t start out to love you
like a spider who can only set her

snowy, intricate, finely spun webs     
Death is the horizon—irreversible,
permanent, inevitable like a small
brained, pale-faced, prim looking
man with his faultless black suit 
and snowy white tie, like a morbid
invocation at a funeral, imbued 

with tragic straight-laced cries
Some humans ascended 238,900
miles to the moon for what?
Rocky without life, barren, 
whitish, mawkish and some will do
it again with bracing courage and
high-minded originality 

in the rib of the real where there’s
no bottom, no shame, no limits, just
the relentlessness of hard fought quests
Intellectual ferment has consequences
An artist exploits well-defined 
expectations which he proceeds 
to meaningfully contradict 

as autonomous, unassailable and
seductive as a spider’s alluring  
weave and web or a surgeon who
should think a lot more and cut a
lot less because the loss of liberty to
a generous mind is worse than death
One woman I knew was a pusillanimous

liar—made up witches, fairies and ghosts
mean we’re never really alone—and I thought
if a quarter of her catastrophes are real
than maybe I can believe in her enough
to go up to her and ask  
“Why so hideous?”
when a minute spent in her  

company is a minute lost forever
Like some hero who baffles all
the attempts of tyranny, she cultivates, 
quite effectively, a mask of royalty, 
an escape from her own subjectivity 
because one could so easily die in
an airplane “designed by clowns

who are, in turn, supervised by monkeys”
in a barely imaginable expanse of time
and space where we fight hard for our place
and where wonder and awe lead one thinker
after another down wrong paths of illogic 
and sophistry where they’ll learn
to fake it all in illustrious old time

looking brown paint and phony cracks
“Maybe the opposite is also true”
The involuntary bodily functions that
allow us to live are hidden except, in
part, from a limited number of intricate,
burdensome, complex, medical electrical
tests as I hunger alone for her love

-January 25, 2020-

Dry, sour

Admin 
Dry, sour opinionated men—
their warmed over overweening brains,
these tyrannical beings—their tepid
visual clichés—trap, scold and clip one
another as if this was their special inhumane
play to engage in reciprocal disasters
She led a monogamist, stagnant life

The idea of reciprocity left her 
impervious—you gave, she got,
that was it—magical days so swiftly
fade, regular days the usual ways—
a plethora of usual days
The insidiousness of their waltz 
was a special pathetic briskness

In a foreign place what to us seems
beautiful leaves the natives indifferent
What they find beautiful we find 
strange—our future, reverential 
perspective—we would if we could 
generate extensive forms of new life 
like a child of glass embracing

some new theory, its impressive results
achieved with a minimum of stuff
Such was the theory of light and space 
and time and of kings who are feared
and not loved, and I knew when I 
fell asleep she’d disappear into
my savage, impenetrable rage   

We accept the fictional idiosyncrasy of 
unpredictable inevitability, instinctually 
at first, intellectually later, because the
other is just like us and cares for us 
deeply or, rather, the other is nothing
like us and couldn’t care less
“You’re sad,” she said “so I thought 

I’d try to make you less sad 
but I couldn’t”—she wasn’t 
the right person for that 
We tend to idealize our parents
Take my view of Dad—to me he was
stable, brilliant, funny, a PhD in philosophy, 
very diligent, good at his advertising work

looked up to by colleagues and reliable
but for others he had an angry temperament
at home especially with his first son Howard
whom he couldn’t stand, always losing his
temper with Howard, violent with Howard
who was afraid of him—at Dad’s funeral
(he died of cancer at age 40) the line of

cars to the graveyard seemed endless—
all those colleagues, all those adult
mourners, his wife, relatives and children,
including Howard, who later said how he
loathed his father and who would then
bear the guilt of surviving a man he first
looked up to and truly learned to hate

“The other is not derivative or 
contingent or subject to or relative 
to or limited in any way”—but
I’d be ashamed to take any comfort from
this rich and imaginative traditional account
of our god and being as might only be found in
the most probing and profound works of fiction 

-January 11, 2020-