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

The hundred hands that cover
Those silly eyes still missing
A glazy red wheel barrow
Down from which so much depends
The stripping of seven veils
Implicated in murder
The face bloodied being thrown
From vehicle’s velocity

Two hawks have hefted themselves
Surmount the selfsame thermal
With wings locked unmoving
To seek the scramming nourishment
Where commanding cumulus
Gray-bottomed and glowing white
Portend precipitation
And above streaky cirrus
How strange to see sharing sky
Clouds of warmth with clouds of ice
And higher contrail creases
Sky of pall and predator
Talking of technology
While woman extracts from trunk
Of car a vacuum cleaner
Pulls a great pack of supplies
To lay on the ground and looks
Upward under the routine
At the heavens charged with change

Live by sword and chariot
Die unto my majesty

Morning anxiety
Evening remorse

The serpent famously sheds its skin
So the arthropod sloughs exoskeleton
Oh for so thorough a reimagining

The flail that scours the field for landmines
Scours the flesh for pellets of pathology
No not the flesh
That comes later
Scrapes the vague flitting ghost
Heavy with particulate sandstorm
Only thereafter to gouge the wound
With raw stick to stir and mix infection
And displace the maggots
Along with their excrement
Those miners that might otherwise
Have consumed necrosis

To my great sorrow
And out of sincere contrition
I confess
That all poems
Like all people
Are good

I thought that my poems
Of all the poems
In the world
Were most thorough failures
And that I
The sublime sinner was

Hard work won’t do it
Vast learning impressive intelligence
Futile
Aim as low as you can go
Track that elusive error
Still it’s good

Get an image in there
Mr abstract
Control that uncontrollable
That appetite
That lust
That gravitation

Sneer
Sneak
Snag
Slither
Skulk
Still good

Noisy Dodge
Dangerous maneuver
At worst
Obnoxious dork
But really
Angel behind a mask

Wears the wastrel
A greasy garment
Dwells the deadbeat
In horrid homestead
But battens the beastly
On blessed breakfast

How pleasant
This tree-lined street
Albeit contaminated
With Windows 10 aesthetic
Black and white
And rectilinear

No red
Save stop sign
Regular octagon
Of corners clipped
The square
Sans serif

The whiff of skunk
Not unpleasant
If modulated
In concentration
By distance
By prevailing westerlies

A supper medley
A mixed bag
A congeries of objects
With transcendence material
With hope despair
With purity impurity

And suffering
Yes of course suffering
Some accidental
Some inflicted
Some sought and retrieved
Intrinsically bad

The toddler
Torments the cat
And bewails
The reactionary scratch
Neither party
Origin of itself

How arrogant
To imagine
In that I die
Myself must cause sorrow
Who am not cause of death
Nor origin of myself

No poem is bad
For nota
They are continuous
And proviso
Each overflows
With infinite depth

So too people
Pleasure
Joy
Kindness
Courage
Merriment in sociality

Witness the constellations
Zodiacal rodeo
Kiss and whip
Each others’ asses
Allegorical tableau
Masque of apothegm

Momently
Nebula
Supernova
Black hole
Matter and energy
The speckled and the dark

I too
Dynamic cosmos
And thou beloved
Lately estranged
Continuous
And of infinite depth

Scholastic colloquy
Budgetary negotiation
Discussion of statistics
In sport or election
Pitching woo
Consensus as to menu

There’s this cable
That keeps upright
A utility pole
Upon which guywire
Bluebird perches
Male blue and orange

In the nightblind
Green as gold
Seek the right kind
Shy or bold
Stay the tight bind
Quick or cold

No bad poem no bad people are
At bottom is not bad
For Bottom’s dream
Hath no bottom
And Ma Rainey’s black bottom
Shines

Even people and poems
Infected with
The ideological virus
Even the murkiest slop
The shamelessest bastardy
Teem with refulgence

All shines
With light
The electromagnetic
And the metaphorical
Nor can contain
Such ecstasy