I will not read Pound
Why would I
The man was a fascist

Whoever said The Triumph of the Will was good
Nazis mostly
This is not just name-calling

And truly if we reject every work
That arises from a belief we disparage
We will reject so many

And denial
As so often
Tantamount to confession

Like other actions
Poems are motivated
And not just for art’s sake

How the leaves on the tulip tree
Fail again to tremble
Unmoved by the inspiriting wind

The wind surprised
By the jutting skyscraper
A momentary Bernoulian tumult

O the times
O the mores
O the lost simplicity of grief

Cause effect and a melancholy syntax
Effecting morose retreat
A window closed to the elements

Here might be no dispute at all
That lies are ugly
And houses not geometry merely

The sailor sails
And having made landfall
Walks for some time on sea legs

And perhaps displays permanently
The anchor tattoo bendy
Athwart the pierced heart gules

Is there a character here
A plausible embodiment
A laconic integer

Moves are not movements
Strategies not faith
You don’t believe in cartoon jalopies

It’s more fun when you compete
The legend on a gaming machine
Knucklebones and physics engines

No verbs in the carnival of abstraction
No resonant vowels
K-k-k-k-k-k-k

The frogsong of accomplished facts
Ascends with the ascending melody’s ascent
The fool’s fire of cynical history

Is more time past or yet to come
With so much anterior action
Hard to imagine a vivid future

Like seeing the lines
Of longitude and latitude
From space

The errors were necessary
An ineluctable stage
Toward clarity

Take the pledge
Carry out the commission
Project your ragged testimony

Project your old blue cloth
Emblazoned with the true icon
A circumscribed mimesis

The story of Rachel and Jacob
Or Sam Spade ill-shaven knight
And the quest for fittingness

At least in potentia
That’s how it is
With mad pursuits

A modest enthusiasm
A rapprochement
A negotiated settlement

Having committed long since
To certain predictable regularities
As of force particle genre manner and belief

Consequently most folks accede
To the unavoidable consequences
The rank and file ennuyeux

Defense of inherited error
Doubling down
Lest mere chaos be loos’d

Everything signifies
All is symptom to the medico
To the sybarite all is treasure

Once it was a simple pleasure
This tobacco
Once it was a doctor’s advice

Emblem of genocide and enslavement
Drugs and comfortable clothing
Comfort for the masses

Ah yes and stodgy food
Fats and starch
And plenty of salt

Cancel the subscription
Put the boxes in the car
Casually drop the forwarding address

The rotating chair
Sweeps across the urban landscape
Perched on one leg an axis

Defining a rectangular prism
Straight back flat seat
And legs nor stout nor spindly

Mounted atop an unseen vehicle
Rotating like a radar dish
Or the summit of a periscope

No expansion no contraction
Turning and turning
In dynamic stasis

There are only reasons for
Never reasons against
As for example reasons for definite omissions

Should one feel at home
Like Virginians in Virginia
Or adopt the outward vein

The poet called himself scumbag
Or his thinly dramatized speaker did
Was it from shame or from fear

The village has no voice
The times are declining
We fear what we love and loath what we dream

The melancholy long withdrawing whimper
The placebo requires commitment
Taking on the wonted anatomies

Pound Eliot Yeats alas
Modernists sickened by modernity
Invoking further atrocity

Calling in the air strike
Conjuring gorgon and minotaur
Denouncing the placidly rotating chair

They grasp the memorial katana
Replay the corrupted ceremony
Laugh over the popular solecism

The monsters enjoyed martinis
Everybody else was forced to slalom
Between the hash and the small robot fingers

The apotheosis of manhood
The leaders the innovators
Westcoast promo Disneyesque lemmings

The angry laughter of men with writing desks
A raven for a familiar
Pegasus a totem

Fake frivolity
Denial of the senses
A lie-revealing lie

The empty shell
The discarded horn
The exhausted magneto

The picture on the motel wall
A fantasy of pastoral embarkation
When in fact the shepherd’s life was really hard