The cure wasn’t worse than the disease
It was just another disease

Certain lavender durations less than a minute
Reckoned in secular time but who’s counting
And where would such registry be inscribed
Moments that like all moments deliberately experienced
Telescope but in which direction
A question that induces the familiar anxiety
Of loss of trickling through the fingers
The visitor from Porlock bearing tidings
Of mandates and trivial preoccupations
The moment seemingly inevitable of misgiving
Certain events of historical preeminence
Blacklit rich in motion in nudity
That expand into immeasurable extent
A farmer’s field a quiet meal
Smiles and earnest promises
But the woods decay
The woods manifestly decay and fall
And whose woods these are I think you know
Though you have held them in trust
For some little while reckoned in secular time
Inscribed in the public registry
Signed sealed and tucked away
And hard-won knowledge trickles through the fingers
Certain banalities difficult to dodge
As mixing incense and peppermint
Situating them in vague time of unspecified color
Let’s forgive each other darling
Let’s go down to the greenwood glen
And yet for all this nature is never spent
Though famine war and pestilence
Sweep the planet clean
It’s not the only planet
And cropping at right angles a nasty habit
Since plenitude obtains in an expanding universe
The microscopic and the macrocosmic
And of greater note some abstractions too are true
And haply of greater truth value than phenomenon
Though seen of none save perhaps
Some fortunate few
Or some cadre united in privilege
Or perhaps the congress of the willing
But how to cultivate willingness
How translate it
To the many enclosed in trauma
Spine wrapped in spiral
Or absorbed through no fault of their own
In the fine texture of command
Of unspecified color
Bent by coercion
Broken by discontinuity
Any of the many visitors from Porlock
But a small jet pierces the perfect blue
Every action even if its outcome be beauty
Occasioning risk and yet inexhaustible nature
And the number of numbers
Between any two whole numbers
And the transcendent grace of π

People generally wish to put a favorable construction
Upon those tesserae so seemingly seamless
But harboring nevertheless certain interstices wherein
Indeterminate processes take place often not at all
Conducive to either the specific or the general welfare
As for example those decisions you can hardly call them
Decisions made by individual drivers
On the busy highways and byways unmasterable
Or the endless streams of data that itemize
Their bodies their preferences their social niches
The vagaries and variations of the human organism but
Sometimes just sometimes as the late comedian had it
Impertinent to the exterior texture but eminently pertinent
To something nice notwithstanding the vitreous glazes
The plates of clay high roasted in the perilous kiln
The strong cement
How as even amid that ostensibly closed system called system
Physicians’ assistants doctors nurses nurse practitioners
And the manifold host of hygiene examination and procedure
Check-in discharge vital signs history and transportation
Not infrequently reach mutual understanding
With that nexus of vulnerability that person
Now systemically designated a patient
Or as a well-scrambled egg or Bacchus and Ariadne
Or a double play even if carried out by the opponent
So that like James Brown I break out in a cold sweat

The Mills Brothers
Busbee Berkeley
Bessie Smith
Nicky Hopkins
Hillary Mantel
Pablo Picasso
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Lucretius
Geoffrey Chaucer
Lenny White
Bob Dylan
Harry Smith
Charlie Parker
Jonathon Swift
George Frideric Handel
John Keats
Oscar Peterson
George Clinton
Booker T. Jones
The Commodores
Giacomo Puccini
Victor Fleming
Federico Fellini
Joel Cohn
Jasper Johns
Ennio Morricone
Ahmet Ertegun
Dock Boggs
Wes Anderson
Sandro Botticelli
Louis Armstrong
Roy Lichtenstein
ZZ Top
Fats Waller
Pink Floyd
Olivier Messiaen
Brian Jones
Luke Jordan
Tito Puente
Jimi Hendrix
Brian Eno
Howlin’ Wolf
Burt Bacharach
Thomas Hardy
Dave Edmunds
Bob Marley
Mark E Smith
Jimmy Page
Gallileo Gallilei
Keith Richards
Martin Scorsese
The Velvet Underground
Homer
Hayao Miyazaki
Buck Owens
Derek Parfit
Igor Stravinsky
Aubrey Beardsley
Johann Sebastian Bach
Christopher Nolan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Jackson Pollock
REM
B. B. King
Scotty Moore
Duke Ellington
Art Tatum
Roz Chast
Nirvana
Ravi Shankar
Leon Russell
Mary Pickford
Cocteau Twins
Francis Ford Coppola
Mick Taylor
Alla Rakha
Richard Pryor
J. M. W. Turner
Richard Wagner
Talking Heads
Steve Cropper
Mark Rothko
Robert Johnson
Alfred Hitchcock
Wilson Picket
Herbie Hancock
The White Stripes
Muddy Waters
Gustave Mahler
Marcel Duchamp
Sonny Boy Williamson
Stephen Spielberg
Vincent van Gogh
David Melnick
James Tate
Kurt Weill
John le Carré
Sophocles
Richard Lester
William Wordsworth
Giuseppe Verdi
John Adams
Leonardo da Vinci
John Peel
Robert Schumann
Franz Joseph Haydn
Mary Cassatt
Ringo Starr
Franz Schubert
The Comedian Harmonists
Sonny Rollins
Bill Monroe
John Coltrane
William Blake
Mick Herron
The Gap Band
Wayne Shorter
James Joyce
Bill Irwin
Elaine Pagels
Portishead
The Doors
Cannonball Adderley
Allen Ginsberg
Martha Reeves
Stevie Wonder
Thomas Grey
Buster Keaton
Gene Wilder
Ella Fitzgerald
Richard D. James
Tina Turner
The Gorillaz
Mary Shelley
Dizzy Gillespie
William Butler Yeats
Charles Dickens
Henry Fielding
John Lennon
Robert Fripp
Jean Cocteau
The Isley Brothers
Mark Rylance
Alexander Pope
Mick Jagger
John Paul Jones
Django Reinhardt
Thomas Mann
James Brown
Robert Frost
Sappho
Rembrandt van Rijn
Big Mama Thornton
Henryk Górecki
Elmore James
Count Basie
Robert Rauschenberg
Cream
Frank Oz
Ethan Cohn
Aretha Franklin
Galen Strawson
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Claude Monet
Andres Serrano
Raphael
Samuel Johnson
Charles Baudelaire
Dolly Parton
Gustave Moreau
Judy Dench
Jan Hammer
Ingmar Bergman
Willy Nelson
Andy Warhol
Oscar Wilde
Paul McCartney
Miles Davis
Billie Holliday
The B-52s
Socrates
Kool & the Gang
James McNeill Whistler
Stanley Kubrick
Gioachino Rossini
Sally Cruikshank
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Walter Benjamin
Gene Krupa
Johnny Cash
Joe Zawinul
Dick Dale
Emily Dickinson
The Kinks
Pixies
Ray Charles
Lou Reed
Chick Correa
Gustave Flaubert
Franz Kafka
Lester Young
Billy Preston
John Milton
Stéphane Grappelli
Ogden Nash
Jimmy Reed
Doc Watson
Buddy Holly
Epictetus
Dick Justice
Theodor Adorno
Jane Austen
Titian
Toots and the Maytals
Kraftwerk
The Grateful Dead
The New York Dolls
Denzel Washington
Ian Stewart
Willem de Kooning
The Pretenders
John Ashbery
Iggy Pop
The Hollies
Oscar Wilde
Leo Tolstoy
Laurie Anderson
Mel Brooks
Walt Whitman
The Jefferson Airplane
Philip Kerr
The Chemical Brothers
Lewis Carrol
Henri Matisse
George Martin
Elvis Presley
Madeleine Kahn
Jellyroll Morton
Jürgen Habermas
Jeff Beck
Nile Rodgers
Tom Jones
Anne Carson
Frank Zappa
Gladys Knight
Steven Spielberg
Yoko Ono
Charley Patton
W. H. Auden
Patty Smith
Ernst Lubitsch
Davis Bowie
Thelonius Monk
The Ramones
Björk
Billy Wilder
Mike Leigh
Will Durant
John McLoughlin
Ludwig van Beethoven
Heironymus Bosch
Etta James
Jimmie Rodgers
Yukio Mishima
Maybelle Carter
George Harrison
Preston Sturges
Ian McKellan
George Miller
George Eliot
Willy Dixon
Jim Henson
Édouard Manet
Toni Morrison
Thomas Pynchon
Seneca
Camille Pissarro
Jason Thibodeau
Nino Rota
Eurypides
Rem Koolhaas
Lefty Frizzell
Ali Akbar Khan
Werner Herzog
Wallace Stevens
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The Ohio Players
Arthur Rimbaud
Charles Chaplin
John Corigliano
Patti LaBelle
Desmond Dekker
Harold Lloyd
Merle Haggard
Frances McDormand
Charley Watts
Francis Bacon
Elvis Costello
The Specials
Al Green

What avails invoking the spirit
Of Ashbery Dickinson or Wordsworth
Those feckless aesthetes
In the estimation of the practical
When folks conveniently believe
That poetry butters no parsnips
Butter apparently a superb commodity
The outer limit of mundane value
Who chow down perhaps on raw root
Who attempt to hold as true
The most outrageous falsehoods
Who condemn pellucid metaphor as lie
While garnishing with fruit the idols
Of god and priest and king
Heeding the austere word of the father
The garbled antediluvian word
Demanding sacrifice
Who could know if only they were willing
That all the force of nature
Gives us to feast and not merely feed
Yet even their lowly obeisance demonstrates
That culture will persist
As long as does the human species
Culture a genetic trait of homo
While earth stands at the verge
Of a great extinction event
And no clever father to build an ark
No Ararat to offer the mooring of destination
No Aeneas no Paul no Chingachgook
Already having entered a phase of extinction
And who knows which species will be elect
And which cast into perdition
The canary or the toad
The redwood or the daffodil
And someone must find a language
No
Survival not a necessity
But quite the contrary
Extinction is the norm
And so someone merely should
Find such a language
Find not devise
Or first find and only then devise
For device lends decorum
To the natural materials
In this case socioneurological
For culture is if anything is
The stuff of nature
The nature of humans
Social beings convivial
And who will find the words
And find the woven sentences
And find intelligible utterance
Like Heaney to speak
The shocking but unsurprising troubles

Around eleven in the evening the moon
About a quarter past the full
Hovered serene above the city horizon
The city with its come-ons and competitions
Its trafficking in vehicles and souls
And the next morning in broad daylight
Again the great one hovered
Above the ridge lined with trees
At the opposite horizon
And I thanked the moon for its craziness
Or is it her
That she or is it it
Should cycle through ceaselessly
And make appearance at unexpected place and time
As one might take up some accidental vantage
To behold in a single glance the mountain
And the skyline metropolitan
But address even unto some blithe spirit
Ever must bear the stain
Of cold deceit or ignorance
Or selfish want unrequited
In the brief interval between the lawn-mowing
And the drive to the liquor store
Absolutes might well flourish
In some platonic realm situated no doubt
Beyond the flaming ramparts of the world
But serenity rarely or never
Upon sublunary plane
And discontent might well stand not unmixed
With gratitude or joy
Or the exaltation of high achievement
Those fragile monuments
Those retrievable analgesics
Truly safe and effective
For temporary symptomatic relief
Bastions of freedom from envy
And thus the enumeration of pleasances
Quite rightly applies
Must quite rightly apply to somebody else
Our own pleasures salted with sorrow
Poisoned with history as the thoughts occur
Of Columbine the flower the dancer and the school
We hear a voice from heaven
Precisely a voice from heaven and not from earth
Which we catch and plant
Here in this well-manured soil
Here and everywhere a mad Ireland
To hurt all the world into poetry

Don’t say can’t we tell the children
You can do anything you want we say
But why would you want to

You could call this rare bird a freak
Of nature and you wouldn’t be far wrong
For art and nature link like the fission of gametes
As the urn began as marble in the ground
To be conceived in artistry
Only to be lost like a foster child
In undiscovered archeology
And at last cherished like a bride
As a museum piece
So poetry accordingly originates in nature
Its marble the stuff of language
That freakish endowment of homo sapiens
Shaped and sculpted into
What
Perhaps a framework
For the contemplation of the mind
A poor formulation due to pesky of
Something contemplates mind
Or mind contemplates something else
Or mind contemplates itself
Or mind contemplates intransitively
So we emend vigorously to say
For contemplation by the mind
An attempt poorer still
Redundant pleonastic tautological superfluous
For what else contemplates
The liver
The chair
Polyfluoroalkyl substances
But here a glimmer of hope
Somebody contemplates and why say mind
And indeed contemplates something
And perhaps poetry supplies this object
As a box score or Wikipedia
Or ordinary perception might
For language refers
To furniture and bodies and such
But often to griffins and space invaders
And airy abstractions’ metaphysical ontology
But if so what could distinguish poetry
From these mundanities
And here again the glum allure of definition
Nailing How to the cross of What
Gradgrind demanding the definition of horse
And every word but names a category
Claim implicitly the definitionists
And what unique homologies
Establish the clade of poems
And what is this
The twelfth century and we nominalists
There are things to which words refer
This is a hand sorry about the shadow

Yes of course a picture of a hand
And not of a pipe
The picture refers visually to my real hand
I can invent captions that would push
The image or image + caption
In the direction of poetry
I could say this is a paw
Or a mitt or a paddle or a fan pusher or pipe
I could even say this is not a hand
Each of these entries sidelining
To some extent referentiality
Even as they depend upon it
So far from abolishing referentiality
They veer away from it
No that’s too strong
They slant into the territory
Of those features of language
That need not advance
Its referential function the stuff like sound
Rhythm rhyme patterns of vowels and consonants
And images and figures of speech
Figures syntactical or tropical
In short the armamentarium of verbal artistry
Most especially those features that conduce to tone
That seduce to emotional attitude
And more especially still
That notorious tone namely irony
That deliberately distorts value
Hence Dickinson’s Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Season the truth with sufficient irony
To make it perceptible
As Lightning to the Children eased
And Dickinson exaggerates splendidly
For what person or what poem
Can tell all the truth
But beauty is its own truth
And there’s more to art than beauty
There’s the sublime and the ridiculous
Tragedy and comedy
Passion and tranquility
And poetry delights in maneuvering proportion
What I callously call distortion
Lilliput and Brobdingnag
Freed from what it has to say
As Mallarmé would have it
In another fine hyperbole
For only rarely would a poem
Cede entirely the referential capacity
But rarely is not never
Witness Melnick’s akcorn woi cirtus loqvump
But even here reference hovers dimly
In the arboreal resonances of akcorn and cirtus
The dimness of the pinnacle in the intense inane
Make it madness
Make it new
Make it dirty
A road trip into fastidious squalor
Thus might I quote in its entirely
As an autobiographical fragment
The 1964 telephone directory
For Jacksonville Florida
Put a boot on a pedestal
Nail banana to museum wall
Adopt a nasal intonation to recite
The instructions for getting the wifi going
Or better cast a boot in bronze
Silkscreen a banana to adorn a record album
Arrange sentences that aptly refer
To my happy childhood tinged with anxiety
My equivocal age shaded with regret

As Moses carried shame within
Substituting consciousness for
The mere pejoration of the assembly
So we have called to order
In the bright corridors of wakefulness
The sessions of efficiency
Importing the policies and procedures
Of this spectral instrumental assemblage
Which we perceive in our meals
Our dwellings pastimes and transportation
A process that begins with conception
And continues through all the evasions
The ambivalence including death
How the youthful strivers hone
The apparatus of expansion
The aging functionaries adopt
The defensive posture of prey
The senators employ the last strength
To erect the gantry of dwindling possibility
All blocking out the scene
Of lurid transfiguration
Upon the backlit stage
Vision not sight
In living color
Willingly all too willingly
Our colloquy the vessel
Of a new and ancient covenant

The prevalence of atrocity
The tyranny of mere accident
Indeed the unexpected advent of beauty
Of the sublime that shatters preconception
Misconstrual inappropriate response
The cavalcade of error
Most fatal lapse
Of self-control
I refuse

The road of anxiety
Leads to the palace of shame

Locked in
To not being locked in

We should imagine
The suffering of others

The usual walk that germinates these pages
A ways ahead a young man shirtless shouting
The repeated word became intelligible slowly
Fuck
Fists clenched he crossed the street
Fuck god damn
A short while later a woman
Shouted presumably his name
And since he was tens of yards ahead
She most likely could not keep pace
With his fury
I old could not sympathize with these troubled youths
Not exactly sympathize
I knew them much less well than those
Near and dear to me
Who never reach perfect understanding
Perfection apparently not a thing
At least not in the phenomenal world
Much less even than myself
Whom I misunderstand so thoroughly
So I did not place myself above them
Though I yearned to mediate
And mediation being by invitation only
Thwarted in my yearning completely irrational anyway
But on the contrary knew just enough to know
What trouble is
Though precluded from this particular trouble
And since I could not feel with them
I felt for them
Pity famously futile
And by reputation demeaning
But the best I could come up with
Under the circumstances

No you don’t see neat tercets
If that’s what you’re expecting
Just some smeary blocks and daubs
Page after page hour by hour
A cassette unreeled in the island gutter
Atop the exit off the interstate
Halfway there and still no propositions
Or halfhearted attempts at definition
One man’s phoebe another’s nemesis
Or some such histrionic gesture
Better to gaze at debris than nothingness
I don’t even know who I’m addressing

The piper at the gate hails the dawning
Of a new day a new dispensation
As occurs each day and in every moment
The gate stays not open perennially
Nor is its sequacious beckoning seen
Save by them who train their optics upon
And cultivate the sweet pleasures of sight
If of biotic eye or more endeared
Through the living spectacles of the soul
And each moment so slender and fine
Serves as asymptote of mere nothingness
And hence of what amounts to the same thing
Unspeakable infinity sublime
But let’s not speak of that for we have more
Pressing business in this fluxuant world
With gracious plenitude of sight and sound
And hence we act as scratchers of surfaces
And make rubbings of headstones of the past
Amateurs and dilettantes deliberate
To take delight and love the world of things
And wield tools of conviviality
And all on our lonesome to sound our bar-
Baric yawp the yawp conventionally
Regarded as in the barbaric manner
Firm civilization’s mannerism
The lore of the grandmother’s grandmother
The witchery of herb and ballad sad
For nought is new but all is renewal
And me and thee might disagree on this
If theft depletes what it battens upon
My claiming the charge of plagiarism
A publisher’s cudgel wielded for gain
And Joyce reduce tales of brave Ulysses
And Dante hire Virgil as Passepartout
And Carson rifle mournful Catullus
As Mantuan rifled deep-browed Homer
For lo the regicidal bard exploits
The quest of sad Aeneas for the tract
That will assert eternal Providence
And justify the ways of punishment
And should we then adopt arbitrary
Stricture against an unstressed syllable
At the end of a pentameter line
Who serve iambickish pentametroid
For whom verse can never be blank enough
Decorum is all and propriety
And the mot juste and the well-tempered tone
Finely calibrated connotation
Rhetoric appropriate to trouble
To triumph to unappeasable loss
The right volume color taste and grit
Ma très cher semblable ma très belle sœur
Our stockings are boldly blue it’s true
But easily capacious for roygiv
And ultra and infra who knows how far
A sense accommodating sensibility
A world in which punishment fits the crime
A world that is of imagination
In which a hardheaded Yankee
Prognosticates in mythic court eclipse
And Stonewall Jackson’s ghost can suck the souls
Of news teams ganged on sacred battlefield
And chords for the Banks of the Ohio
And the recipe for fruitcake cookies
The nourishing bosom that is the past
And you can bend the shape of the recipe
A line one beat short of an alexandrine
And break a chord into arpeggio
And probably invite dismal failure
And wrack your brain in frustration dire
And cry in indignation ‘gainst the walls
That block our progress toward who knows where
The library of Alexandria
Gone
Do we need the lost book on comedy
Since Aristotle is known as mostly wrong
Well yeah we kind of do as it turns out
For the worst book ever might hold a jewel
The passing show of the fluxuant world
Frustrates not so much as ephemeral
But as obstacle to comprehensiveness
As resistance trains mind and muscle
And if no wall then no gate to pass through

What enmity has the mockingbird for the squirrel
That it should chase and harry and again chase
And yet the cardinal couple mere inches apart
Peck and forage together
But why does a woodpecker also browse the ground
And move to eject a young robin
From the adjoining little plot
Only to fly fast like a woodpecker
To take up its customary vertical perch
On the bole of an ancient pine
That has survived a great gash near the root
Well it’s all the same
Pass those genes on to another generation
No culture
No choice
Subject to eternal fate
Better this than to enjoy the comfort of culture
The privilege of choice however straitened
Who ravage and hoard
Who dream of liberty unbounded
For they can dream
But pay for imagination
In the coin of certainty
The advent of brittleness in limb and spine
Of cancer in the guts or brain
Of foul misadventure
Or the passing of the near and dear
Who cherish proud faith
In the capacity for redress
For procedures to arise to avert crisis
Frenzied to find the technological fix
Upon which they depend in any case
Trust in the schematic
No objects only categories
No subjects therefore
To suffer dream die and delight

Wow
Those are cool-looking clouds
That for a moment carry me away
And they could have that same effect
On anyone who happens to see them
And so much depends upon the word could
I wandered alone as is my wont
But never lonely never truly alone
I made eye contact for example
With the guy I’d seen once or twice before
Who tends to the neighbor’s landscaping
How are you he said to me good I replied
How you doing fine he said and we both smiled
Albeit without showing any teeth
The driver of the big car carrier
Blasted his air horn in thanks perhaps
That I should let him pass at the crosswalk
I made the oscillating hand gesture
Both thumb and pinky finger extended
I figured it was easier for me than him
To wait a couple of extra seconds
And the beloved a few yards away
Or half a mile at the greatest extent
Toiled away at her work-from-home
The thousand glitches that software is heir to
The software too delicate too moody
Too quick to make covert accusation
Or outright of operator error
The operator an eminent practitioner
And a human person patient to pursue
Work that conduces to improvement
She had given my back a little rub
Before I departed
Each time I return my gaze to the sky
The clouds have changed a little or a lot
The same that dapple
Above the whole neighborhood
She cannot see the clouds just now
And even if I had never seen them
Even if nobody ever sees them
Still would they be looking cool

When Mick Jagger took the fall
Mick Taylor saw to his Les Paul

A slender youth scoots by
Mounted atop
A small electric
Vehicle

Two young girls rehearse
The dance that
They themselves
Have choreographed

A four-year-old steps out
The back door
To inform the world
It’s spring

It’s not the tedium
It’s the futility

What we’re trying to do is insanely complicated
First to comprehend a world of objects
The infinity of things and events
Of states of affairs always in flux
And I admit to a persistent anxiety
Provoked not only by overwhelming plenitude
Nor by incessant fluctuation
But more prominently by indistinct extent
That is by the manifest fact
That things and events and states of affairs
Want boundaries or rather
That such boundaries as they exhibit
Are fuzzy blurred ill-defined nebulous unfocussed
And to be frank
As if I’ve been lying up to now
Distorted as if concealing themselves
From whom
From me
Who bear the responsibility of defining of focussing
Tucking things into a procrustean bed
Herring boxes to serve as sandals
All of which might simply owe
To feeble powers of observation
Or what amounts to the same thing
Feeble powers of inference
So that secondly we might respond appropriately
To the facticity of things
Or God forbid put them to good use
This is a craziness that drives me nuts
Because unless I’m much mistaken
Absorbed as is probable in solipsistic mirage
Most of the time reality is unreal
Even as I trip over a chair
Again
How do you trip over a fucking chair
I know that from time to time
I do the right thing the responsible thing
But always with this underlying fear
That I just don’t know
That I might have missed something important
Bad Chef Inspector Clouseau impression
Becoze Ä dent wahnt to foal
And don’t get me started on sequence
The firstlies and the secondlies
I got started on them myself long since
Quoth the raven evermore
Perched upon the bust of E A Poe
No brandy and roses for me thanks mourners
I’ve substituted that drug
Registered in the pharmacopia
As facile self-condemnation
To say nothing of manual dexterity
Or rather its lack
Or rather its precipitous deterioration
And yet nevertheless I do seem
To find the wherewithal to indulge
This sickly confessional etude
Or perhaps the wherewithal merely befalls me
Or has merely befallen me
Long since as I say
Do I second guess myself
Very well then I second guess myself
And thirdly and fourthly too
Anyway I generally get out of bed
Unless confined to the infirmary
Did I mention that I sneeze too loud
Doesn’t really help us plan our project
Does it
All the while the world is on fire
Okay some places are cool
Let’s not sweepingly generalize
But seriously
The world
Fire

As certain automobiles display alliances
With emblem logo trademark or motto
Or an assailant might hew to a modus operandi
Challenging the authorities to recognize a style
Murdering with characteristic stroke and gesture
And inveterate avenues of disposal
So our facial expressions glances and tone of voice
Betray us in oblique volition
And distorted revelation
Did your smile mean to say that you love me
Or that you regard me as worthy of contempt
Or perhaps some tertium quid
Whereof I am thus far incapable

When certain things
That shall remain nameless
Join something denser more secretive
Bach arranged in bop
An ice cream cone with scoops pink blue and yellow
That overflow its foamy cup
Pat Boone covering Tutti Frutti
Animals their esoteric media
A bluebird female having found
A tasty meal in the grass
And beats it to death on a pine bough
Before consuming it
The puppy’s famous eyes
The cat’s famous upright tail
The horrid lamprey of circular mouth
Switch from tenor to soprano
Skipping over the alto
As usual
The boat that crosses the dismal river
Does what
We don’t see
Fuzzy edges fuzzier
The closer you look at them
Symphony of pixels
Or cacophony of shards
Or mosaic of shattered tiles broken tones
Scales whole tone and chords diminished
Wilting in the humidity
The ad hoc resources exhausted
Hanging indent and superfluous coda
This process resembling
Or approaching
Or amounting to crime
Greeny gold daffodils
Nodding in the sunshine
Belie their somber etymology
Monotasking or trying to
In a world of responsibilities
Too clever by half
Risking exposure
Wears man’s smudge
And shares man’s smell
Redolent not at all of complexity
But of density merely
Stratum upon stratum
Door behind door
What have we gained beloved
And what lost
What broken if only even
This and this and this
Porous and inconstant
Regulatory and fragmentary
What we and everybody know of hell
Fade to black
Fade to silence

Travel outward little heroes
Until you reach the dull periphery
That gray frontier of halftones
And what does it profit to wish
For gay color and dancing bendays
You reach a limit denial notwithstanding
Resistant to furtive calculation
While at home there might reside
Seven cats and seven jackals
A sage cross-legged under a fig tree
Here only the buzzing attributes
Properties without object
Inflections without rationale
True you can always summon tech support
But they will require a description
A catalogue more or less comprehensive
Of a state of affairs