Guy Kettelhack

My City's Ars Poetica

You never noticed! Sidewalks!
Concrete canvas - faintest Pollock
patterns - streaks - degrees of

gray all over-lapping - splotching
softly - gently tossing you into
the sense this flat dimension has

a depth: its palette: spit, spilled
coffee, motor oil and piss - and
other substances about which

you can only guess: the least
bare swish of it a Japanese-
brush wash - backdrop: a focus

sweeps into your view, on cue! -
quick rip of windblown cardboard,
blinding noonday white - bright

message - caps - sharp black:
one word - ABSURD. The font:
Helvetica. My city's Ars Poetica.

After the Repast

Sex is it: Freud was right. There's little
written, sung, or played that doesn't call
upon the might and sway of this exasperation
and delight: but farther to the right, or maybe

left, another impulse pulls: more deft than
entropy - but close: post-coitally spent -
a key to creativity is not only the thrust of
an orgasm's birth - but also fondly patting

one's replenished (actual and metaphoric)
girth - after the slate and plate and sheets
are clean: gratified - replete - with everything
you've eaten, and been eaten by - sweetened,

and been sweetened by: hedonism's not
just getting jazzed - a subtler pleasure comes
when that has passed. Enjoy what's after
the repast. Comparatively, that's what lasts.

What No Angel Knows

"Ich ... weiss ... jetzt, ... was ... kein ... Engel ... weiss."
("I now know what no angel knows.")

Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders


Achieving a benign standoff between word and flesh -
perceiving choice as between compartments -
the angel flew.

We are angels, too - down because we couldn't keep
the ruse up: nothing could stay in the sky
thinking what we

think: we fall into color from blinding white space: to feel
and to taste and to breathe means to die:
that's why we're

in the odd place we've supplied. Mortal, immortal: same
thing. We’re cursed and we're blessed -
winged or un-winged.

© Guy Kettelhack