Michael Harris II gets another base knock up the middle
And I remember Ernie Johnson’s
Or maybe it was Skip Caray’s dictum
That You have to be pretty good to be that lucky
And I’m damned lucky to be alive
So I guess I’ve been pretty good
If Money Mike is any indication

I’ve tempted fate a time or two
And maybe I’m tempting fate right now
If I permit myself to suppose
All the filthy habits safely behind me
For ubiquitous is the opportunity
And lavish with permission have I been
The solid sidewalks of my leafy suburb
Cannot efface the squalid lights
That reflect in oily iridescence
From midnight streets

True to some extent one can remain
Aloof from the path of perdition
And healthy habits can nudge the foul ones to one side
And one can somewhat conveniently forego
Those pleasures requiring cash payment
Arbitrary deterrent
But indulgence in this or that substance
Or this or that pleasurable activity
Stands not chief among the skills of self-destruction
For life is suffering
And nothing hurts worse than the desire
Never to suffer

In dreams we are each an artist
And how I have dreamed to sojourn with the gods
And enjoyed an endless bliss in lofty place
Only to drown in wakefulness
And thence to feed those rich addictions
The habits of defeat self-condemnation and despair
And crushing ennui deadliest of sins
To drive myself yet lower
To approach the misty substrate of the atom

How strange that to feed the craving never satisfied
Induces only further craving
Misty thickets
Briars sticktights and beggarman’s patches
Ticks with their viral subterfuge
Phlebophagous mosquitos
And the nightmare worm
That burrows through the auditory nerve
Cousin to the penetrant of coffins
And to salamanders that batten on the pyre
To speak in language of damnation

And yet they are but rare
These monsters that burn upon the night
That brand their lurid images
On the retina of the soul
The green ones red
The blue ones yellow
And yet enfeoffed and affiliated even they
With the indigo the orange and the violet
On rainy sunlit afternoons
As the brain invents refractions
Upon the closing of the eyes
Even so my restless consciousness
Never without a song gliding or surging
Or rattling in my head
Perchance to supplant the voice of dire chastisement

To replace the voice that had been implanted
Parasitic worm
The psychotic nightmare though never forgotten
Of horrid hell demeaning torture universe of agony
Foisted by priests and nuns and their lay accomplices
Who in their delight at inflicting pain
Devoted their awestruck humility to Him who would inflict pain
Forever and ever world without end amen
The God who will torture interminably for masturbation mortal sin
Burning pain imagine they insisted the pain of fire forever
The pain of flame licking and flogging a child without cease
True there was this little heaven they promised
For the price of a minute’s humiliation
Inventing sins to report to the confessor leering behind his screen
A heaven peopled by little saints with their ridiculous little miracles
The virgins the martyrs the canonized bishops never any humans
Humans with their meals their slumber and their deaths
And their songs of joy of sadness or of nothing in particular
Songs of a world where humans eat and sleep and die

The caroling boy and why are the cousins
Never called upon to sing at family gatherings
To stand and render the show tune
With its extensive lyrics and complex modulation to the bridge
Willing no doubt graciously to receive applause
And next the frolicsome youth self-conscious and perplexed
Too involved with pleasure for rage or resentment
Relieved to discover the mere falsity
The emptiness of that hellish deathscape though never forgotten
In favor of three chords and two-part harmony
The luckiest boy in Jacksonville at home on the stage
In love and loving the desirable and desiring
Well aware of what came naturally and others called talent
And next the journeyman entertainer
Caterer to bikers sailors stewardesses suburban adulterers and drunken spring breakers
Proficient in drunkenness and worse
And the bourgeois school teacher
But hey did you know that songs are poems
Paterfamilias and the last to leave the faculty party
And the artist with the expensive gear typical of the century
While what can be accomplished for no cost
These pages must show
And this morning with babe blanket-wrapt
Fetching the paper as I had done with her mother
I display my fair round belly and my hearing aids
And I smile misty skyward with fewer teeth than previously
And the compliant girl who loved the lucky boy
Loves the geezer with the white and bristly beard

And Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
And Bacchus and Ariadne
And The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up
And The Shrimp Girl
And Miles and ‘Trane and Monk and Cannonball
And the hibiscus-bedecked singer of Strange Fruit
And Shorter and Hancock bent in prayer at Hiroshima
And the Stones and the Beatles and Smokey
And Aretha and Dylan and James Brown
And guitar and bass and drums and horns
And Billy Preston at the Hammond
And doomed Keats and Hendrix and Cobain
The poets who died too young
And Wordsworth who died too old
And Blake who limned the images vouchsafed to him
And Vertigo and the Wizard of Oz
42nd Street Apocalypse Now and Space Odyssey or Oddity
And enigmatic Richard D James the Banksy of audio
And troubled Silas Marner and vacillating Hans Castorp
And Mood Indigo heliconian fount of beauty
And the slow movement of the Seventh
And those gorgeous works of art with nasty accessories
That you can’t deny or erase object how you will
The joy and dread and gross disrespect etched in a lump of lapis lazuli
And Whitman and Dickinson Americans who spoke the truth
Who invented a new language for speaking the truth
As had Shakespeare and Wilde
And David Melnick woi cirtus cvmwoflux
And Louis Havemercy Armstrong
And I won’t tick off the list
For completion isn’t a thing
The finish isn’t a thing
And I could make a list that goes for miles to catalog
All ye know on earth and all ye need to know

Nearly seventy and still singing the madness song
Still showing up for work
Three square meals and more
But who are these approaching
So splendidly appareled
Are they not the dear ones the fine-fine ones
Who make life hard to leave
The living and the dead
The old and young and in between
The singers the philosophers the scientists
The readers of books and the writers
The experts and the amateurs
The stitchers the menders the makers of buttonholes
The wearers of masks and those who go barefaced
The toddlers devourers of knowledge
The small children contrivers of sentences never before spoken
This must be snowman coffee
The elders capable of no more than a smile
Come to share to celebrate
The holy communion of family and friends

Amid the hundred maladies
And the thousand shocks
And the disorders dyspepsia disabilities and dysfunctions
Bad stomach
Bad heart
Bad central nervous system

A work of art
A few friends
A warm bed
And thou beloved

I really don’t care any more when I might die
But silent universe
Great power that replies not
Or if it speaks speaks in a language I cannot understand
Let no sorrow or suffering enter the lives of those I love