And he that Attis’ image hangs between
            That staring fury and the blind lush leaf
            May know not what he knows, but knows not grief.
–Yeats

I spent a sleepless night vacillating
In the name of art for its own sake shall I let it stand
Like that guy who took a bullet to the arm
Or delete it in the interest of public safety

For I fear the inexperienced will get the wrong idea
And I feel guilt for my fears as cowardice the greatest sin
And I feel a humbling pang that I express myself inaccurately
And I regret my taking the easy way of self-expression

And I know full well that it’s more than expression
That there are no bright lines and that’s a good thing
As cuisine is art not medicine
But the anemic patient enjoys a meal rich in iron

And writing for some people is compulsion
And therefore a sign of psychological distress
Especially the compiling of lists
Though any genre can sustain humor pathos eros and attack

And in this you resemble me Dear Young Reader
In this all are hypocrites and hypocrites are cowards
For we pretend to believe in the efficacy of disclaimers
I’m a decadent but at least I know that I’m a decadent

When I was young I was completely daunted by Jimi Hendrix
I could learn nothing from such a prodigious monster
But Clapton no lesser artist alluded to Blue Moon
A jazzy humorous trick you see in the preceding stanza

And I spent a sleepless decade and a half
Berating myself as not Hendrix or Clapton
Or Keats or Yeats or Dickinson or Whitman
Or George Eliot or Shakespeare and four lines can’t contain them

I am good but not great and that’s okay
I’m okay
Because good in the aesthetic realm is beauty
And good in the realm of states of things is truth

But good in the moral realm means doing right by persons
And when I think of the persons I know and love
I think first of their suffering
And then of the suffering of absolutely everybody

Including I daresay myself
And one can get past grieving for natural causes
But the world of people is horrible
Because people hurt people with malice and neglect

Including I daresay myself
I am a rather elderly man
And I have committed hostile and neglectful acts
But mostly against myself let it be said

And so I break the fallacious bright line
That separates art from therapy
And I have believed that the expression of true feeling
Would through alchemy become beautiful

And I here confess that as a function of a therapeutic regimen
I have aimed to suppress or otherwise attenuate
The coercive voice implanted in childhood
Of the Portable Emperor

And so yesterday I imagined that by giving the PE the podium
He
For he is masculine would expose his own incapacity
His own ridiculousness

On the other hand
I fear that the inexperienced will get exactly the right idea
That the imperial voice is omnipotent albeit with an ironic disclaimer
But why should I present as the right idea such a blatant falsehood

While in fact the only emperor
Is the emperor of ice-cream
You see what I did there
I mean beauty is truth and truth beauty

Good like math facts is beyond space and time
Good like beauty and truth feels good a by-product no doubt
Pleasure is good ice-cream is good
Though richer in fat than in iron