The band leader embarks on a new campaign of glasnost
Nebuchadnezzar he reasons was a straw man
Memorialized by his adversaries pilloried as Lucifer
Let us be truthful about about our intentions
Virtue is well enough but we must be competent
To manage affairs to anticipate the aberrations
We can’t afford to play the schoolgirl’s lamb
When push comes to shove the aldermen are atoms
That join in accidental compounds but with a touch collide
Fusionously
And the director does what he does to direct
And bids the bugle sound reveille
Courage is the mastery of fear
But what’s that word for the other thing
We do not claim plenipotency
The man with no regrets has no conscience
But sentiments must be held in proportion
Even that of uncertainty
Let us no more conceal the imperatives latent in the maxims

One might resort to coinages
Effortthrow or innuent or ose or heedsnarl or het or mer
Or one might insist like the magisterial egg
That whenever I say liberty
You must remember to construe it
As the gearlike structures in the latch of an automobile door
One might critique the legitimacy of extent
As when asking when have you employed too much typography
Or one can invent new forms of discourse such as effrent
And claim that hours of speech are really silence
A move theoretically feasible in post-Euclidian dialectics
Or one might deploy a spurious cryptography
Of which nonreferent initials are a well-known example
If B fails to make the k then we are left
With nothing but a lot of h
Or deny the rigidity of subject and object
As Ned loves Nancy loves Ned
Or the formulae of etiquette
Pardon me mentioning it sir
But you know I believe how it stands with the er
Would you please at your earliest convenience
Or anytime convenience should haply befall you
Could you be so kind and it isn’t too much
As to eviscerate yourself
Um disembowel in the vernacular
You know cut yer guts out

Calculation is one of those skills you use or lose
And sophistication is no defense
Programmers nurse their marigolds
And for centuries bureaucrats have husbanded the gametes of ferns
And yet they with their dividers their retorts and compasses
Do little more than the common flagellate instinctively
The recuperator weeps over accidental medication
Like a doctor’s prescription a combination of ingredients
We no more often than in the past
And if anything perhaps a little less

3
Evasions evasions
What once were drugs have now become merely sex
I say that I know you think something
But I also iron my shirt and sing
You are my sunshine
It’s not that my captain thinks I’m lazy
It’s just that he doubts my comprehension
Of the justice of our cause
When I think of John Searle I’m reminded of Gene Wilder

In the imaginary city
They still have thunderstorms and garbage collection
A comedian once riffed on his immersion
In a nest of red-hot fire ants
So it’s difficult to generalize
The most that can be hoped for is identification
And even that wilts before wretched contingency
Abstraction pushes equally and oppositely
And who can catalogue a mote
Behold the hunter as he squashes
A beetle upon his arrowhead
Or his brother oceans away with the toxic frog
Similarly impaled
The band leader vows to be truthful
In his two-tone shoes and neon suit
Not as a gesture of evenhandedness
But to disarm resistance
His implac his compulsion to volite
But that too is an oversimplification
The optimist spoke of the finale
Now I know there can be no doubt
It’s a gift
And gifts are pricey
Not only for the giver
Some songs end with the blare of trumpets and the crash of cymbals
Others die meekly away