Wilds of the Mind

The thoughts, the sequence of the concepts we are following, are trying to express, sometimes get away from us, sometimes evade us, like the prey escapes the predator in a chase.

A friend had this experience in conversation with me. Suddenly his thought eluded his presence of mind and he lost what he wanted to tell me. This happens more with the wild thoughts, the new ones, when the conversation is in an earlier stage and the concepts inchoate.

I told him, “You must domesticate your ideas, make them your creatures, animals that come when called, so your process is not the hungry savage half animal himself seeking the wild ideas and untamed notions.”

I saw the cheetah of his desire to express something panting and exhausted as the antelope of what he wanted to tell me bounded away.

I told him, “Wait by the water hole: the animal you seek will return.” Sure enough the idea returned to the water where he waited, where his eager predatory desire to express something lay in wait.

The animal always returns because it can exist only in the ecosystem of consciousness. These are always our creatures sustained only by the pastures and forests, the jungles and deserts of ourselves.

In the meantime we must work to domesticate our ideas. They are not alien even when new, when first formed in an evolutionary process all our own. They are always our creatures.

In my own mind the concepts are no longer cats I call without calling, the cattle, the cows which come at regular times for milking and food, grooming and shelter, for my care as they grow fat. They have their own needs beyond mere domestication, originating new ideas of their own, and familiars, creatures I recognize only as spawn of my spawn, a generation or two removed from my quiet farm.

At the end of any day I enter the great hall filled with raucous spirits, the things my mind made long ago, now crying for drink and meat, for music and diversion, and I try to accommodate their demands, my grown brainchildren and children of children I only half recall; and they give me treasures I only dreamed of, treasures for the dance I perform as I serve them without a chase.

Each night I wear a king’s ransom and the larder remains full.

KLK

11/26/12

Piso Mojado

                                    For Bill and Caroline

Do not despise the days of small things easier for

A camel to pass through than for rich men.

For the rich hire cars without thinking but

A camel would not be here or think much

More than a person not exposed to this.

For you find your mind where your treasure is

And follow what you value, thinking this

Is all but wanting more, wanting when wet

To be dry, ride when walking, to not think,

Not think at all when you feel disappointed,

Annoyed to be anointed, to be at all.

You did not choose to be here, not like this,

Not to be born, let alone baptized by

These random elements out of the air.

Where you are is where you are so be there.

Be here and pay attention, valuing time,

The sound of your soles on moist pavement making

This street a part of something more, a path

That leads by grateful steps to further doors.

If you were in a fishing village, shops

Filled with T-shirts and tourists what would you

Make of that if you find this nothing nothing

To pay attention to? See the trees if

You like, if granular details please you.

But what are these impressions without you?

What do you bring to forest this deserted

Road lined by dripping pines and poplars while

You walk alone in places others walked?

This is the place you must choose what you leave

And what you take away, where you are now.

Let this be the site where you make your church

And gather your associated thoughts,

A meeting place for revelation, or

Go on alone with only scattered notions

Which dry and fade like T-shirts over time,

This pavement left behind, beyond salvation.

Often the outside fails to keep the inside

Alive through shrouded moments when a veiled

Imagination lays too few bricks here

For a foundation worthy of attendance;

This congregation of missed chances sheds

Evaporating tears as petulant

Clouds thin and misty disposition clears.

Even if all is stone gray narrow as

A needle bounded by a nutshell you

Must not avoid these feelings of unease

But pause as with the roses for a reason,

And gather grace among the tiny hands

Which build the rainbow while they kiss your face.

How quickly senses flicker like a little

Ticklish instrument, a consolation

Of those impressions signifying nothing

Most of the time if you let them drop by,

But offer a key to Heaven's gate when you

Open yourself to something unintended,

If at the crossroads for a ride not taken

But wait, while wet leaves weep and tap

A coded dance among the trove of lost

Pleasures, a cloudy day viewed with clear eyes,

Where you find that delight from simply being

Rising from this wet pavement like missed

Syllables hissed with smiling lips in words

Unspoken in a language never learned,

And by chance ever after you may yet

Find under sunny dispositions more

Content than previously tended to

Shine from the noontime shadows sovereign

Shrined bliss, a ticket rediscovered in

The pocket of a raincoat with a dollar

Recalling long forgotten love returned.

                                                                                        

                                                                                                KLK 12/20/2008

    

Intuition

As the dexterous man knew this was good

Though asked to tell why

Could not begin

To winnow the right

Remainder from left of sin;

The obtuse woman has emotional response

But cannot expound

Why she feels so

Weighty-full and what causes

Her to sense so square or round;

So the consummately conscious one

Intuits a sense subcutaneously

Of a point past A though of A,

Short full aware of B,

Insightful of what he can’t quite see.

I Am Copernicus

I am Copernicus

having found by careful observation

the center of the universe is

not myself as the Pope

the Church and psychology

would have me believe

I never thought I was the center

The universe was more

a constellation of relationships by

which and in which and through which I

navigated actual time and space

I never thought I was the center

The universe was more

a constellation of relationships by

which and in which and through which I

defined myself the persons and place

I never thought I was the center

The universe was

more a constellation of

relationships by which and in

which and through which I

created reference points

benchmarks and bearings

Associated laws

I admire

an artist and eagerly

wait to meet and befriend this

crafty maker of items for

display and adornment

I enjoy the performance of

a musician and gladly

applaud the antics and music

am happy to chat at a reception before or after

as a friend and lover of the work

I despise the political leader and call him and

his followers names

regardless of any obvious

similarities I share with them

obvious trivial values coincident

in our behavior

from our actions

by our behavior

The artist is a fool and an abusively

antisocial creature happiest with an

inanimate medium whose very substance

bends to the childish will

The musician craves

attention and praise more than

the well-being of others

indifferent to the problems

outside the theater

The politician cares

about the problems of

the community if only a little

Why is my opinion

important at all in any of these cases

Who do I suppose I

am correlative to the artist

the political leader

the popular musician

I am their equal

I am sufficient peer

I desire acknowledgement of that

just so much and no more

Why do I choose

association with the two and not the third

I never thought I was the center

The universe was more a

constellation of relationships about which

I was mistaken

I am still mistaken and only in seeing

now the general condition of deception

and error

of miscommunicated

values from my childhood

do I now

know how

lost I am

Most of my life

had to go by

before I could have realized with certainty

things do not revolve around

me I never

thought I was the center

For I went around the whole matter and

found myself back where I began

discovering after all I was Magellan

knowing where I was

all the time knowing

without knowing anything in

the constellation of relationships glazed

with emotion I mistook

for relevance beside the poignant details

Evolutionary Corners

Suppose the human species will not make it,

That we shall go extinct, as odds would have.

Knowing so, we should think around a corner,

Preparing for the next intelligence;

Not just one corner, but a maze in time,

Like a mouse will run, a maze in time.

We should leave artifacts, time capsules for

The species which may naturally arise.

Be sure, it will have ears and eyes, it will

Have mental acumen like yet unlike

Our own. We must leave what we know for them,

Our evolutionary cousins, who

Will come when we are gone, so they may start

A further place along, an evolution

In consciousness, beyond biology,

A few hints in the maze of mammal feet.

                                                                                    KLK

De Rerum Obfuscura

In quantum terms the human mind

Presents a decoherent resolution

Concluding temporarily in a single state.

Is my oatmeal a whole grain or half life,

A leakage from inchoate origins

Out of an earless field resolved in breakfast?

A hyperstealthy cat in the mind moves

Here and there simultaneously alive,

Lacking that leakage and, entangled, dead.

The mind has two hands, using both to grasp

The cat, a piece in each holds firmly fur,

Entangled in a bird’s eye dream of grassy

Waves swaying silently while changing light

Into a human hand, mammalian touch

Which sets in motion such a steady purr.

The native state remains obscure

In its illusion of a present where

Sense makes sense of what may not even be there.

KLK

10/16/11

Blind Squirrels and Fat Pigs

When the cooks find their chili is not the blue

Ribbon batch they thought it would be in their

Kitchen the night before the cook-off, drinking

Tequila and reflecting in the window

Over the kitchen sink, what do they think?

Sell wind. The gift of gab outside the box

Sounds loudest and laughs last.

Jump under the bus, hide among the ruins.

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then.

Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered.

Who makes the terms we use

To tell and measure if we win or lose?

By what imaginary stretch is hope

The gap between desire and what we get?

I am not sure what I am trying to say.

Will anyone know the difference anyway?

                                                            KLK

                                                            12/30/2007

Blind Mole Poker

Is it true what we do leads us to this

Reflective moment of how we got here,

Sometimes reviewed as if from some high place,

Sometimes as if inside a tunnel where

Behind looks like in front? What would a mole

Think of that contrast, not as human eyes

View Earth but from below these surfaces?

So used to using different tools to troll

Through the familiar and new, between

Present and past, review the way we view.

By this act we see not where we have been

Nor where we are but something new, unknown

In either place, of both and neither, shown

Only in this reflective space alone.

KLK

3/29/13

Alien Houses

I am alienated from

my life as we are from

the houses we lived in as children.

It is silly to visit those houses as an adult

and to stand outside a house that is

not a house one lives in, not even really the

house one once lived in, just a house, really

someone else's home now, not our own.

One visits those houses in dreams most appropriately,

a space of consciousness where they are

not the houses they were in life at all

always changed but still one's own though

appropriately alien as everything in a dream

is and yet remains one's own like the dream itself.

My own life now is like that, a

set of rooms I once occupied but

not the same rooms I lived in at

all, more like the rooms in dreams of

all the houses I lived in while I was growing

up and then moved from entirely visiting

less frequently and then only vaguely

remembered remotely and, finally,

only in dreams where it is not my life but a

jumbled recreation of the life I moved through

even in waking mostly dreaming the stuff of dreams

as the houses now I lived in then now a

place outside those places in another life illusory

which once seemed so real, alive now only in dreams,

accessible to me now only in deepest sleep.

Awake I find myself

not anyone I recall having been

in the days before but knowing

who I am then and now as I

navigate the recognized spaces lived in

dreams of expectations familiar yet estranged.

I tell myself this space is my room and

know with the certainty of waking it is so

as surely as I know the houses in dreams I

left in sleep though no house

ever the same as in my life now is still

my own life shifting unfamiliar but fixed in that certainty.

I am not remotely who

I thought I was or would be

so alien in a skin of me in waking life

dreaming of that other

no longer quite so clear.

I know the difference, this

inverted contrast of distinctions

between the dream houses and the houses I visit

only in dreams and the spaces in which

my life occurs to me almost as a dream even as I feel the pinch.

KLK

3/30/12 

After Hawaii

After Hawaii, it was oddly hot
And humid here at home, like after Austin
Some summer ago, as though somehow I brought
Weather with me, a souvenir not lost in
Transit between vacation and the job,
This climate in a locket on a fob,
As memories made manifest in things:
I pull it from my pocket to remind me
Better days wait in time, not place, which brings
A promise that another trip may find me,
However heavily institution tries,
Unfettered by these Lilliputian ties.

A longing follows with the memories

Which haunts perceptions of the place one lives, in

Surprising ways and, changing how one sees

All previous places, yearning, the past gives in

To that imaginary tension when,

Wanting long gone, one longs to go again.

                                                                                    KLK

                                                                                    7/27/06

Wind and Water

I have lived many places, traveled more,
Returning like this wind now to this shore.
Always I thought I would have each of them,
Not only in my mind but to visit again,
But no place ever returns quite the same,
And I found I could never go again.
This sand where I ran still looks as it did,
Reflecting sunlight where the waves retreat,
But the thrill that I felt as I ran as a kid
On the hard-washed sand is not in my feet.
I am happy here, and other places I have known
Please me still as I visit fully grown,
But haunting tones have entered my heart here
With memories of places year by year.
Even in it, I miss this place, although
I cannot say why, only know it is so.

KLK

2005

WHEN

When I consider all I could write, since

My mind like no one else's phrased, I sense

An apathetic silence perimeters my thoughts

Shrouding the voice in a wilderness, unanswered.

When all I have said rises to recall

Echoes of voices otherwise forgotten,

An expectation loiters like this haze,

Pausing commuters on their way or after,

Over a letter or through gaps in their gossip,

Those eyes beyond my speaking's wavering

Bound to hear untethered talk, maverick laughter.

They steeple-chase the moment, candle-flamed

Amusement's tune, and thronging shadow-like

Desire contrast from tedious tasks, heart-felt

Strangeness enphantomed in their muffled view.

Ticker-tape garbage, a trail of wick and tallow

Remain a moment after where they follow.

And mine, the applause of water. My bare feet,

Where earth ends, step testingly tentative

Where younger or, with more of afternoon's heat,

I plunged impetuously insensitive.

Degrees of fading light, this planet's motion

Visibly turning toward night, I am aware,

With upstart wind, abrupt shades on the ocean,

The spangling behind me in the darkening air,

That here, now, is the edge of a moment's choice:

Ocean speaks each to each impinging, receding,

Approaching modulations of a voice.

Year by year, I move toward unacknowledging

You, universal other, elusive thing

Unknown still, my transient presence terminal;

But who else when I wonder can I question?

And you, a mountainous distance mimic mirroring

Disinterested spectation, overecho

The little all I know, will speak no word

On my behalf, nor after, say I tried,

Silence surging gently over footprints with the tide.

KLK

1989

Meditation on the Now

Our waking experience is mostly if not wholly in the past. In waking consciousness, when I focus on my mind’s experience, only on my thoughts or imagination, there is perhaps a synchronicity of experience and the thing I am considering in the sense that the clock of my experience is not a clock outside my mind’s sense of the passage of time. If I take the clock of my now to be the experience itself as it occurs with no reference to time passing outside the experience itself I can claim synchronized coincidence of a present, a moment of now, and my experience. I may claim simultaneity of my experience of thought and the thought itself, of feeling, experiencing the feeling and the sentiment as I have it if I use as the measure of time the sequence of sentience itself. Then perhaps I can say the present is what I am experiencing without a lag in time for the senses to bring perception to me for interpretation. Is it possible in waking life for that to be truly simultaneous or is it always genuinely always a bit behind the actual moment of now? Is there always actually a sense of outside time, a lapse between the synaptic moment and what the activity of the brain and mind considers? What is the mathematical rendering, the expression in calculus of that?

What about dreams? In dream time does that outside reference, that inkling of outside time disappear or at least narrow further, bringing closer the clock of instants passing, the distance between the thing and the thought, that gap of conveyance of information to the mind from the object considered? Is the stuff of dreams perhaps closer to a simultaneous experience of now, of the present moment? If we could put a clock on our dreams solely in the mind would there still be that same lag between the mechanics of the mind and the objects generated solely in the mind? Can we claim the only valid clock of a dream is the present experience of the dream itself and therefore the dreamer experiences the lapse between brain activity and the generation of dream content and the experience of those dream things as one and the same? Or does the waking sense of time impose itself there in the dream as well? Are the same chemical transfers in the brain required in the dream as in the outside world for us to respond to dream things which are things only in the mind? The mind works only with that lag perhaps. What is our subjective impression, even in a dream? Could the lapse in a dream be an illusion carried over from waking consciousness, even though in sleep the reality the dreamer dreams and experiences, the dream itself happen simultaneously? Has the dreamer in fact caught up with now, thereby gaining rest? Is it perhaps the lag in time when we are awake which makes us tired?

In the morning I wake and try to recall the dream moments, the recollected experience of the present, an experience of a now left behind, a simultaneity in the moment, a now now lost. I am always seeking a place nearer to now, approaching the moment, falling short, perhaps only in dreams achieving that place somewhere nearer to now.

What about the experience in the womb, the dream state in the womb, and experiences not wholly asleep, not wholly waking? What is the valid clock of those moments for consciousness? The mind is only forming and at the first moment of consciousness could there be a first instance where the lapse is less or nonexistent? Just prior to that could there be a true simultaneous moment, a now we experience even as it occurs, and is that similar to the actual act of conception itself, if only as a half remembered dream?

Now I search my mind for that moment of initial conception with the firm knowledge that as I approach it, however closely, even as I touch it, it is an illusion of now, an illusion in memory dissipating in a lapsed experience of infinitesimal time I can never bridge, the atom of my first self on my own eve of being, my spark of an essence once touched never to be reached, a snowflake, a light particle escaping my effort to grasp it by the very act of experiencing, melting away in the passion to regain its infinitely remote intimacy. 

Love's Labor's Lust

On Publishing

Last night, I introduced myself to an old

Whore, whose whole history is so well known

Her many lovers, for the record, sold

Themselves to know her, so I'm not alone.

Like them, I felt compelled to add my name

To the endless list of suitors, seeking favor,

Submitting to her whims, for possible fame,

Certain rejection, yet I wished to have her.

Why, I don't know. Success with her puts you

With shameless self-promoters and real losers.

For what? True, there have been good people, too.

She is, after all, a whore. All of us use her,

Beginning this affair, fools, thinking of

The unlikely, if lucky, she will fall in love.

3/2/05

On Earth As It Is

I want
my final cigar of
the evening to
draw well

I want
the pen I use to
give its ink
smoothly to the page

I want
the feelings of the day to
flow effortlessly out of me
with each puff

with each stroke of the pen and
the connections of ideas to
occur easily as
though the purpose were

clear in the context of a
night sky
crisp and clean as
the wind and the stars against

this very moment of
my evening presence


KLK
11/12/13

Oars Across the Water

Not a crowd man loud full of empty shouting
Nor a caveman lone in the distance shrouded
But a singular man of experience
Walking through chaos

Not a now man half can apathetic wimp
Nor an old Greek cannibal half man half ape
But always a being a situations
All generations


KLK

Nowhere Man

What am I here for

After all I have gone through

to arrive at now starting only

say with this day at the end of it

as I turn the key and open the door

finally entering a room where my

presence is in fact slight and

everything simply something

the ambient sound created in the greater

world unrecorded at last

anonymous and immanent

The place appears to be as I

left it in spite of the innumerable differences

just the light for instance

shadows now misplaced

from where I left them this morning

What am I here for

The tip of a

machine-made pen on paper

applied with purpose spurs my vehicle

moving outside myself on a ride

an ancient animal still smelling faintly equine and

requiring maintenance not unlike the primordial

animal I rode in on some while ago

evolved to a mechanical beast like and unlike

similarly familiar to

mass produced others but

modified from the factory

specs to go just a bit

beyond one small

step of envelope distortion

The arrogance of ordinary persons

renews itself like hope among the hapless

Apparently no awareness of insignificance

gains admittance to their party

No shadow of a cloud so much

as threatens to dampen their spirited parade

How can I tell them except through my own acceptance of insignificance

I know that I am

nothing waiting for the

return of my nothingness

that my thoughts

noble and otherwise are

confabulations of dust and wind

something the breeze whispered in an empty place

water folding on sand miles from

anywhere or anything

nothing

nowhere

Even here longing to be

abstracted from myself as if my presence

my being were

an accident

the vehicle no longer

running and I

descended from it

crawling a short ways away

not so much tired as

desiring a distance

not so great

a small infinite

spacing from the eternal

questions of who are you and

why are you here and the

tediousness of constant sentience

the tedium of daily life

an exacted toll for passing this way like

filling up at the gas station in order to

drive to work

to earn money

to pay at the pump

more efficiently

I find myself in this bubble of utter clarity

If only I could think myself away

no longer having this sense of

being what I think of as me

of what I believe to be good or bad or indifferent

ashamed of the great and the trivial

of need and of volition and of acquiescence

obligation freedom indolence

of being involved or merely present

in this heavy freeway traffic

  What are we doing here

   all at this time going where

    where are we going

When next I enter a room

I would like to

be there and not be there

coming unnoticed and then

not noticing myself like

the movement of air as a door opens and

a change in the audibles

we tune out even as the door shuts and we

continue in the room as it was

After a day to arrive at now

starting only with this moment at an end

as I close the door finally

entering a room where my presence is

in fact slight and everything simply

something the ambient sound created

unrecorded in the greater world

at last anonymous and immanent and

the room appears to

be as I left it

in spite of the obvious

differences

of shadows for instance

the light now

misplaced

from this morning

when I left it

here and there

and nowhere

in particular

Casting the keys aside

putting away the thoughts of the outside impertinence

of expectations and obligations I seek

the solace of separation from a self

I cannot accept in my solitude

an identity not the me

I see without looking

Chewing a salad I find myself

apologizing to the lettuce

an evolution of saying grace

apologizing for the microbial

holocaust of my own usually ignored symbiosis

the imperialism and slave trade of my corporeal being

the collaboration of component biology

which allows the complexity and cooperation of organs

the underlying biological and chemical interchanges

resulting in this

the experience of so many moments

education

impressions

reflections

distilled and still

not strong enough

to remove the sting

the pang of essence

There is pleasure in the familiar

simplicity of a still life

a piece of bread

on a plate

and a bowl

half full of greens

I place the three-tined fork

where it should have been

    and where is that

and it occurs to me like a regret

regretfully as if it were something

uncompleted that no

work of imagination I have known

no composition

music movie performance or score

has been

abstract

enough

to satisfy my

rare appetite

Who can sit easily in fire itself must

serve as intermediary

water for the public bath and yet

I find in my own pot

stains requiring a stern brush and

fortunately a stern brush at hand

KLK

12/17/12

Nocturnal Animist

Gaps in the clouds, these canyons of the sky,

Deepened profoundly in the cool night air,

Syrens among the shoals, call to the eye,

Seductively unveil a country where,

Unknown by day, exotic creatures crowd.

Half animal itself, this countryside

Shifts, as a herd before a drover's prod

Evolves into its future space, a mood

That shapes the landscape, as in a dream.

True, it is only wind, a breath of air,

That moves these forms, and those within the mind,

Always with us, but seldom tended to,

Always with us, but often reticent.

Only at night, the animals call out.

KLK

2/22/05

New Tenants

I watch as the new tenants,

A young man and a young woman,

Move in across the street, third floor balcony, directly opposite mine.

I am on the second floor. They moved in two weeks ago, I believe, and

So they have not yet become fixtures in my associations of the place.

I am not certain what to make of them.

I do not see them as I write. Although they are

There across the street over the balcony rail, through

The plate-glass sliding door, I am looking at myself.

Although I am seated in a green plastic chair stacked in a second

Green plastic chair factory-molded to stack thus for easy storage,

What I see derives from other earlier places and previous points of view.

How many tenants have I known?

I look up across the street, thinking back.

I recall ideas of persons.

I see the associations I made.

I am looking at myself.

The immediate specifics

(the dark-haired man wears a painter’s hat over his hirsute mien, dark T-shirt, faded jeans; and the paler woman of womanly build, long light-brown hair, pale belly exposed by her too-small shirt above the hip-hugging sweat pants with slightly flared leg-bottoms)

Come to me on the page, only to the page from memory.

My eye turns inward in order to describe them, and

What I choose is of myself.

I am here on the balcony.

I am also looking back, at

The page, and back again. In that place, where

Am I sitting, over

What rails and through what

Glass am I looking?

I do not know what to make of it.

KLK

1/11/2008

More Soup, Less Cook

So many poems read like a thin soup tastes

Leaving a slick film on the mental palate

And a vast hunger in the heart that begs

The question, Is there no more in the poet's

Kitchen, that one understands how cheap fast food

Songs have become so popular no one

Can stomach hearty words, preferring to

Associate emotionally outside

The greasy fare, to ruminate select,

Prechewed ideas, conveniently procured

From out of air, the cupboard bare, at home

As is in heaven, daily bread forgotten

Amid the daily grind, call it a day.

Original song like unground seed grain

Lives underground in cellars of the brain.

Now is the night of discontent a spring,

Frozen above, below a living thing,

Until the sun returns diurnally.

Imagination turns internally

Upon itself as in sleep, dreaming when

A loving maker awakens hungry again.

Breakfast is served.

KLK

12/23/13

I Reflect on Past Reflections

         A Meditation

Running along, I think of once before

Here on a dimmer day, waves at my feet

Made the sand shine, a mirror for sky, more

For thoughts about my life ahead, complete

As my reflection dimly on wet sand

Running on to finish school, find work, or go

Some other route; for nothing goes as planned

I knew from experience, the way I know

Life worked out like a run along the beach.

My body runs on jogging thoughts far places,

To where I never quite go, till I reach

That turn-around place. Now my mind retraces

Solid steps taken before, plans mere projections

Recalled when I reflect on past reflections.

                              KLK

                             1985

Lament

If I could just have you back again, here,

Not in my arms, but merely near, where I

Could know you were at hand, I would hold dear

Those things I criticized and did decry --

Smoking cigars, your bourbon on the porch,

Your little smirks and snorts at my remarks,

Your laziness and lounging on the couch,

And all your crankiness and common quirks.

I would be satisfied and let you be

Yourself, would let you sleep and snore, content

Just to have you around; and you would see

I can be happy, this time apart well spent.

But it is not so. You are gone for good.

Only by absence now I know I could.

                                                                             KLK

                                                                             04.07.04

Little Did I Know

for Sarah B.

Little did I know when we met how much

You would come to mean any day we meet;

Your presence such pleasure a gentle touch

That no day now without you seems complete;

I can’t imagine how I lived before

Having heard your voice crow out “Knob Creek neat!”

And watched you walk across the patio floor,

The way you hold back smiles as our eyes meet.

When we met I had no idea how

Much you would mean in little ways, each day

All these things, growing larger to me now

Than anyone before, in every way,

That so much I know certainly is true:

This life means more to me since I met you.

                                                                        KLK

                                                                        03/20/2008

Keep-Sakes

Are we the leaving or that which gets left

As we depart this port, the place they call

Puerto Vallarta, and by that act of calling

Believing we got the place, but not at all?

We only know a part, meandering

Mariachis, cheerful vendors, smooth tequila,

A feel that fails to hold even as this ship

Slips out to sea, monotonous wave-sounds

Lull us away, and where are we? What is it

We keep, once we have gone, of this brief visit?

It slips in strong relief from our own words,

And what remains of trips becomes like clothes,

A garment picked up but replaced where we

Found it, ethereal fabric on our skin

Woven from fragments of these places we have been.

In other places, we will wear the cloth thin

While adding colors that reveal even more

Of ourselves than mere words, confessing parts

Less noticed more than on this very shore,

Realized through other strands recovered by tide

And time, worn flotsam, feelings made to hide.

These trinkets, washed and reviewed over years,

Make of us traveling ourselves' souvenirs.

                                                                        KLK

                                                                        2/6/05

Keep-Sakes II

                        For Victoria

Places and things and people come and go

Throughout a life: we keep their memories dear.

But what do we keep when we go from here

And even memory is no longer there,

Without objects or the words and such

A means to know, so knowing now too much?

A chair is just a place to sit but where

You sat I see you there, though now the chair

Sits empty, as I write I see you here.

Will you see me this same way as you play

At the bar each day when you sail away,

A memory held so dear, but only a word?

Like saying “chair,” an echo overheard,

These recollections hold all we would cherish

Removed from objects loved, now only sound,

That person met, this place, a friendship found,

Echo of other places till we perish

And, holding nothing, silence all we know;

Your face a word that echoes other faces

Known, see here, hear it, calling far off places,

The sound of waves upon some foreign shore,

Remembered memories till know no more.

If I have failed to show my feelings when

You were near, failing to express again

A stronger feeling here, truly I have failed,

Better unsaid my love, better never sailed.

KLK

2008

Completing the Equation

for Paul

This much is true. Someone decided to make a comedy series pilot from the Geico insurance ads, featuring the cavemen. Follow me now. The response is the same inclination that I had as an adolescent, reading a story or a book and, having internalized the characters and the related concepts of the fictional representation, I wanted that world and its personas to persist. Follow me now. Whole series of books are published based on the continuing adventures of a character. Whole series of movies are made and released, based on a set of reworked premises. What prevents me from making a monument from the momentary pleasures of my sandbox, the block castles and glory of pillow forts? It is a joke for a conversation with friends and not a tome on which to base a civilization. Follow me.

There is a saying in Arabic: Your story has no bottom and no top. A story has to have a basis in truth which makes the other parts resonate. The parts themselves must be tuned to the truth. There is a saying in French: The empty barrel makes the most noise. If you do not know the difference between the resonating story and the noisy empty barrel, I can try to tell you, but it may kill you.

If I am not happy in a place in myself, I am not happy wearing leather. I ride a motorcycle in order to cover my feeling of inadequacy. I did not move to Paris to be a product of my environment but, seeking camouflage, chose to associate my inadequate self with something someone told me somewhere was adequate and, by association, hoped no one would notice at this time what was missing in my skin, once the leather was laid away.

I am a billionaire now with a beautiful boyfriend. What my mother thinks hardly matters when there is champagne. What my father thinks hardly matters when statues that resemble what someone else says he thinks of me make it clear what I am here. I have a mirror that shows me who I am. A plastic surgeon gave it to me. I have people around me who tell me who I am. I try to hear that voice all the time but an opposite and equal voice grows louder with every laudatory roar. The Ides of March approaches.

In the quiet hallway at night every night I hear my mother’s footsteps in a house that is not this house but every house. There is a light under the door. It opens just a crack, letting light into my room not where I am but where I will always be in that space. She whispers, “This is who you are. The mirror lies.” I hear my father’s snoring, or is it my boyfriend, who also resembles my wife?

Am I happy, am I gay? Whose bed did I make? Whose memories are these? Whose leather jackets have I worn? Where the hell is my windbreaker? Follow me now.

An idea occurs to me and from it I make a prayer wheel for a rivulet of water, running down the street in a town I lived in as a child. I place the wheel in the water with its dowel firmly fixed on either side of the flowing water and the wheel begins to turn in the flowing water. I go about my business, feeding goats and braving traffic jams on freeways. There are no goats but as I do various urban things, I might as well be doing chores on a farm. I have never lived on a farm. Perhaps I do not know what I’m talking about. There is an equivalence of what I do here and now and what all of my species has done.

The comedy of the cavemen appeals to me as I peel an apple, not much longer. Adam Sandler’s limited short-duration skit talent does not appeal to me, being suitable for adolescent boys. I know all about Eve but could never accept an award for information like that. I was in the garden when God spoke to me. I was in the shower when God spoke to me. I was stuck in traffic when God spoke to me. I was naked before God and could not hear my own voice. I waited a moment. Then I heard it again and made coffee. I was drinking coffee when God took up the previous sentence and made me laugh. Someone else may have been there or not. We shared the voice of God with the coffee.

Why would I refrain from making a monument from my imagination, when the world rewards the false prophets? Get yourself to a radio station, the high mountain. Read the news and spin the discs. All the power and the glory of these kingdoms can be yours. Then, in a moment of vast syndication, declare the truth, “God speaks to me!” The engineer shakes his head. My producer rolls her eyes toward heaven. “God speaks to everyone.” Whose voice is that?

I am on the freeway without my leather jacket in a Honda. I never had a leather jacket. I have never fired a handgun. I do not own a man who owns one and therefore have no one to ask. My barber knows nothing for sure but he has prayed for flutes and received them, and plays the trumpet fairly well. He plays sax and guitar. No one really cares about my barber, but I tell people anyway, as I am telling you now. Follow me here. I grew up in one place and have lived in other places, all of them equally interesting to me because I happened to be there. I went other places, all equally interesting to me because I happened to be there. I find myself periodically, repeatedly, all variously interesting to me because I happen to be there, where I am, naked under whatever clothes cover my body, irrespective of whatever food keeps me alive, my body more than clothes, my life more than food.

It occurs to me to pull over and get the other drivers’ attention. I should let someone know God talks to me. I am not on the freeway. I am in front of a keyboard and a flat panel display. I am awake and the door to my room opens. My father says, “God talks to everyone.”

David Geffen behaves like a junior high school girl. His values are those of an adolescent. His emotional stagnation is that of an adolescent. “There are no higher values than that of a spoiled high school girl,” says some feminine-sounding man on the radio, on the TV, in the latest book by a Ph.D. In the background, Oprah is nodding and no one hears the voice of the man’s parents, except in his own head because it is the voice of everyone’s parents whom everyone chooses to ignore, having been promised a spot on American Idol and a chance to win a BMW Z3, a gay car if ever there was one according to my girlfriend – no, wait: lesbians like them too. “Hey, Mikey: She likes it. Guess no one is really gay after all.” No one is happy. This is all there is for them: “I used to enjoy it, but the reason I did it seems to have gone away, now that everyone thinks I am Van Gogh.”

Rock star, rock star, what you gonna do? What are you going to do, when they come for you? “Kill me! Kill me!” That is all there is for them.

No, there is more. Follow me. This is more. The inversion of the equation is the correct direction. Why would I tell anyone I hear the voice of God, unless he also hears it? If you do not hear it, you will not believe it is the voice of God. We can talk about goats, if goats is what you know, if we have goats in common. If you do not like coffee, why would I offer you coffee?