My contemplations have ceased their gentleness
My thoughts have turned instead to roughness
The end of the century came and went
And left behind the turbid multitude
Of which I am a part
And all their venal motivations
All those smarmy smokes
All those vehement vapors
Of course lovely people still exist
And beauty still invests the trembling planet
But the blinding competition
Of salt against bitter sweet against sour
And some wiseacre don’t forget about umami
So evidently a new age has commenced
I am not alone nor crowded into silence
And thus how selfish of me to be ill at ease
Haploid The Dysthymic Quadruped
Balancing unevenly on splintering hooves
Though I try to conceal my symptoms from the world
With byzantine syntax and recherché epithet
And nary a semicolon to be found
But as Wilde intuited a mask
Only works to amplify the truth
And I feel shame both for the impulse to disguise
And for its manifest failure

I don’t understand what people mean by rights
To petition for the redress of grievances for example
Nor do I understand this compulsion to express oneself
Which seems mostly animal exigency
The supposed necessity of success which amounts to
Survival in a hostile environment
And though many factors contribute
One source perhaps of the reflexive biomorphic artifact
Not touched upon in the office of emergency preparedness
Pain is nothing more than a neurological signal
And anxiety a hormonal response to threat
And perception has grown more sensitive
Because technologically enhanced
Even as threat has grown more grave
And who therefore can register objectively
The gravity of a threat

You’d be a fool not to be afraid
Given the facts
But perspective is out of reach
Information as hegemon
We fear the known not the unknown
Or more precisely what we think we know
What we think we should expect
What we imagine
And the light in the darkness
Might be a fucking tiger
Especially for one suckled
In the outworn creed of faith and good works
Total responsibility for one’s own fallenness
Work your way from damnation to salvation
And the capital crime is indolence
A modern distortion
Of a medieval distortion
Of an iron-age distortion
Of bronze-age ignorance
The sorceries of agriculture and metallurgy
Therefore anxiety already implies courage
A refusal of cold dry fatality
And though my neocortex sends messages of exculpation
And my rational understanding extenuates
The reflexes of fight and flight are not listening
And since I regret more the world’s response
To my depravity than the harmful effect of it
I worry that people might think that I am exactly as I am
A baseline therefore exists that I take to be insoluble
As I have learned never to expect a transfiguration
In the outward show of dread
Through joy or commitment or altruism or any other affect
Hence my contrition is imperfect
And better termed shame than guilt
And hence I forbid myself the relief of exaltation
For the inherent taint of self-congratulation

Pithy warm concise expressions of affection
I’ve got ‘em but they are having technical issues
Due to circumstances beyond our control
The straw snap
The ivy chaplet
The irretrievable grove

Threats are amplified by our technology
Enlargement without discrimination of truth or noise
And the overt threats nobody worries about
There must be something more secret more exciting
More worthy of our indignation
The influencers those mythic beings
The sophisticated ones have grown weary of shame
Sophisticated in their awkwardness
Divergence being the new opposition
Silence swathed in sound the new critique
Knowing glances and stark reminders
Everybody knows or else should know

I don’t run away from fear
But dwell with it as with a roommate
And bruit it abroad
Gone are the days if they existed when horror
Did not progress across the county line
Nor do I look back upon some golden age of security
I feared airplanes during the cold war
I feared getting busted during the 70s
Of sex drugs and rock and roll
I feared failure when in the 80s
I went back to school
I feared retributive justice in the 90s
When I went to work and only outcomes mattered
And now it seems I fear the random detritus
Of a culture of fear
Of people armed against fear
Of people armed against people armed against fear
Of those grown wealthy
By the inducement of fear
And oh how I resent their wealth
And I hate myself as a patsy
Much of what I here refer to as fear is a kind of pre-grief
For the suffering that must befall those I love
For a generation twisted and exploited by lies
For a beautiful planet heedlessly harmed
But plenty of more immediate dread remains
I fear the state of my health
I fear that these pages will prove a failure
Though I don’t know what success in poetry would look like
Probably not confessional expression of the paltry self
And I fear beloved that you will cease
Through my fault to love me