It comes in from the west
She can feel the pressure drop she says
Sees things smells things I just don’t know
Like how to behave
I know it
But why don’t I act like it
I don’t know
Raising my voice to express incapacity
An uptick in wind velocity
She sensitive to atmospheric pressure
Its ascensions and descents
I only feel it rise and from inside
In the somatic sense
Until it bursts through the fissures
Shearing the wornout rivets
That might have been placed there
By my mother at Curtiss Wright
Or by my father on the flight deck
Of the Saratoga
But Pete why don’t you leap about
As you used to do
Something about the monitor placement
Something about the incongruity
Of The Who in Duluth
Where they never rode horses
The remnants of disheveled intentions
Moldering on the faulty floor
Willful commission of error
Like a single spike-like limb
Planted in a tuft of turf
The abbreviated head
Falling forward hurled headlong
The simple fact that mental derangement
However objectively harmful
Entails a kind of suffering
The issue is not that they’re all the same
Quite the contrary
But unless they announce their differences
Those obscure facts remain
But obscure means not imperceptible
Then the question of instrumentation arises
Am I a sieve
A repository for browning documents
An archive of miscalculations
In the theater the costumed personae
Deliver fluently their tailored orations
But the organic apparatus
Or the technical flowering
Groping toward a rhetoric of plenitude
An ikebana framed of tropes
At the cost of integrity
Of sepal ovule anther and stigma
Whither is fled

A dark pond in Pissarro
Delicate highlights and what rough beasts
Patrol the interior beneath the opacity
Furtive carp and disenteric amoebas
And God knows what
So we say vaunting aloud
While silently we intone the lament
That we fear not the unknown
But the known the likelihoods the probabilities
Of infections of violence of howling winds
That can displace a dwelling
The innumerable assuredly real displacements
The ceiling lightens somewhat
But only momentarily
And with the effect only of heightening
Rather than relieving the discomfort
Is it even possible to renounce exaggeration
Theoretically yes
But I mean as a practical matter
Among the facts as we know them
We speak of dark clouds threatening
I mean
To experience one’s own bowels
Like the earth’s tumultuous exhalations
Or the dopplerian whine in the flickering hallway
Unfolding in the warped recesses
Tapering to a finitude
Darkening again
Must we then conclude that everything
Has become just a little worse
Despite the ardor of verticular administration
Which proceeds according to its own procedures
For the rank and file seem oblivious
From where I stand in their very midst
While the storm remains in abeyance
The suspense killing me softly
And even I old and insensible
Worn and indecisive
Can detect the barometer’s shift
It’s a bit of both isn’t it
A subjective apprehension
And a secular mutation
That may well amount
To a rend in the fabric of the world
And to a discontinuous self