I have tired of envisioning a time without trouble
No help that we’re stuck with metaphors like heart feelings abstraction
Sorry about the lack of enjambment
Legs always get stuck at stopsigns
Waiting for them to change
Get up and dance to the dm dm dm bmbm dm dm
Pocka donatad errearsement
You might like an item or a quality I recommend
Carrying the corpse of his daughter and saying howl
I hardly think multiplication is the problem
Logarithms maybe

Nature just does its naturey magnificent thing
And the accomplishments of genus homo seem paltry
One does stand above however
Communicative reason
And yet people continue to blend hate and desire
Violence and love
Oh well, that’s just a bunch of pretending to know what you don’t know
Like what will pay off in the end
Or that you can control conditions
Ultimate superstition the pathetic fallacy
Camouflage for a taste for pain
When there are so many other tastes to sample
For consensual sex for example
Or learning from children
I’m 611 in guru years I’ll be 612 in October
So I’ve seen the meretricious incitements
But you seek pleasure elsewhere than in the hurtful
Beethoven, van Gogh, The Ramones
And six hundred eleven others one for every year of my guru-life
Starting with my father
Hero of war, science, poetry, sport, and the arts of private life
And moving on to mother’s laugh
I almost wrote mom
Who’s mom she’d intone
And next my lifelong lover
She who says yes at the right time
At three o’clock in the morning and I’m singing my song for you
Say yes now and I’ll shut up
And I wish to keep all those selfish thoughtless people away from you
And my other friend who taught me what a person is

And then I return to that other truth
So often blamed on inert physics
But is really a deliberate attainment of many maybe even most
A commitment to unreason justified as belief
As if your believing it makes it true
Or that the highest and only attainment depends upon my believing
I can’t concern myself with pasterns or return merchandise statements
I oscillate between confusion and ennui
More ennui really for there are resources for confusion
Ennui is as frustrating as confusion
But it’s not like you don’t know what up
So you resort to things of beauty
And you try to transmute your feelings into a thing of beauty
But I suffer a thousand annoying maladies
And most of the time the very trying
Obstructs a full achievement
And to ask what’s full is a copout if you’ve ever had a good time
Which I endeavor to do as often as possible

Sing a song I heard you cry
I sing a song I heard you cry
Wounded me to dying to hear you cry
Ain’t no use to seeing ‘em cry
I ain’t going to fling no tears
Out on the dusty ground
Viva happiness Viva
Not something that happens one morning
Kinda sneaks up on you
You gotta have virtue and know-how mostly virtue
But you really can’t do without know-how either
But knowledge is always limited
While virtue being simple never ends
But what exhilaration what spice in complexity
Such as contradictory advice
Or how such a slow movement after such a fast one
Kinda like you meant it
But that’s the trick
Hide the seams make it look effortless
Hoodwink the crowd with humility
No credit to me
But don’t suppose that there’s one truth for the rubes
And another for the cognoscenti

The artist has two convergent responsibilities
Personal and cultural expression
See the flowers the moon the triangles the misty forlorn rooftops
Pare the pickle Weezy I’ll have another bassoon solo
There is a logic to buffoonery as there is for melodrama
The human capacity for self-deception that ricochets off other people
One thing I do know something about is fucking up
And the tricky task of recreating it er them in material intelligible form
But ah the achieve of the mastery of the thing
When it happens
When somebody makes it happen or allows it to happen or gets it to happen
As it has about a jillion times
How do you account for the effect of a voice rising an octave
Or any great interval
Or the friction of pose and suppose
Or a painting of a brushstroke
Or of a wheatfield with crows
Or of a group of people maybe family members
And maybe they’re having troubles
For there is no time without troubles so far as I can see
Which isn’t far
So since troubles are already there don’t add to them
The modernists scorn the didactic
So I guess I’m a damned decadent post-modern
But people were damned and decadent a long time before the modernists
And there were moderns long ago

Distorted mental states and pathological discourses alike
Would be reprehensible if one knew how to recognize them
Much less prevent them
So if the river was whiskey and I was a diving duck
Well I would dive to the bottom
Then would I come up
It’s bad enough to have a false belief
But to act upon it to the harm of another
Nope
I got so many troubles I don’t know who I am
I feel that jumping on me and out of me
Some people say them oh these blues ain’t bad
Well they are
Worst damn feeling I most ever had
The blues is a part of a philosophy of life
As big a part at your pleasure
If it takes rubbery devil masks
Or unh hit it on the one

Talking ‘bout DK’s faves
DK he like good music
He like to have a drink
He like to have a good time
Every chance he get
The machines grow like a hedge
I used to get from here to there
You can’t tell me those possessions don’t hem you in
But I’m hacking on my telecaster
Note the lower case it’s a variety not a brand
Even so an idiom or an accustomed variant sexual position
Bridges rivers and copilots
Put back on your headphones Charlie
I said what I have to say
But I’m glad you turned me on to this groovy tune
Now’s the time for headphones
That cost seven dollars
Living cheap but good
Cook for yourself roll a fatty

I want you to know
What makes me think I know so much
I don’t know art but I know what I like
And I like a lot
Blow your horn
Meanwhile back at the chicken shack
An organ and a lesley and a guitar and an amp and a PA
Pour some liquor on the floor and dance in it
Honor the dead with a monstrous party
Drown your sorrows in insensibility
In the right light my bod’s Herculean
What’s the opposite of irony
Straight-on-ity
So yeah when remembering the dead drink heavily
Shine on the one that said goodbye
And enjoy the living
Live a little
Take it as it comes roll with the punches
And again with the red rubber mask
Provision yourself for the long haul
With skill and competence
But make it through every moment with virtue