Naturally annoyances obtain
The bugbite’s itch
Vertigo in the recovery room
The fuzzy drone of two- or four-stroke engine
Wound out to the uttermost
Discomfort pain yea even unto suffering dire
O my beloved humans
Endorse pleasure
Surrender unto pleasure
Build skill in sensual enjoyment
Elicit laughter from a child
By pulling a goofy face and making a silly sound
For a person’s mind strives to express itself
Expression feels good feeling good and feeling good to sing
As the tree strives upward toward the light
As the nearly sphere is driven by the scarab
A happening a work in progress
Poetic frenzy a kind of nourishment
That expresses like milk a community a species
Its understandings inclinations follies and fears
In sprightly song and lively paint
Calling to the past demanding the future
We bear witness to the world and its wonders
The wonders of the fluxuous phenomena
And those wonders too never bottled up in phenomena
Those transcendent facts moral and mathematical
And who knows what else
Though the phenomenal part of the world
Offers wonders inexhaustibly aplenty
Products of infinite striving
Much and overmuch crowding in upon us
How the green lizard sometimes brown extends a red pennant
From his white throat and bobs acutely the head
Expressing the drive of sexual dimorphism
The will to life of the mantis fierce predator
Mariticide to nourish the offspring
Virgin mother if no husband comes available
The butterfly’s colorful panoply
The katydid’s droning ka zikka zik
The near-instantaneous chemical reactions in the cochlea
That permit the discrimination of intoxicating pitch
The low the midrange and the high
The harried parenthood of the avian nation
Nest-builders incubators retrievers of nutriment
The blustering displays of beasts and fowls and flowers
Who might envy the serenity
Of sponge or jellyfish or horizon or moon
When I inform you that from early childhood
I have been enamored of prismatic corneal effects
Of the ravishing juxtaposition of a major triad with the minor
Of the fragrance of combustion
Of the textures of bark river-rock and exoskeleton
Of the flavors of foods the sweet the salty and the hot
Don’t tell me I forgot umami
You pedantic hall monitor
For you are reading for your pleasure
In this my dithyramb
Not an exhaustive survey
Though it may seem exhausting in the event
And you might want to open a tab to Wikipedia
But a single hadron in the galaxy of the one great poem
And you too emplace them there
A single poem cannot be great
Since no object is truly single
No work of human hands is of itself great
Although Machine Gun and the Ode to a Nightingale and Bacchus and Ariadne and the second movement
Are in fact pretty great
Together they overwhelm
As the world
Merely the phenomenal part of the world
Overwhelms with its overmuchness
But all participate in greatness
Indeed their very modesty can stand as virtue
In this overmuch of variegated world
Witness the refreshing triviality
Of Music Man and Mikado
Though their trivial intent does not excuse insensitivity
Sensitivity to feeling the highest virtue of art
Nor can a work be chastised as overexposed
Afterlife not of its own choosing
The Brahms e-flat major intermezzo is a warhorse
But who can resist even on the thousandth hearing
Such a melancholy lullaby
As lullabies are melancholy
The weary mother urging the babe
Who restless resists blissful rest
The overwhelming sorrow
Of its ominous modulation to the minor
Some of the selfsame cadences of the magisterial Requiem
Now the Coventry Carol
Also a warhorse also a lullabye
Begins in the minor but ends in a Picardy cadence
Sonic emblem of hope
Bathetic uplift
For hope is not the cardinal virtue it’s made out to be
Surely we hope for the newborn that it’s life will turn out well
But we must know albeit with rue that everything that stands
Or rests blissfully in manger or crib
Or bawling resists blissful rest
Takes a few halting first steps
Utters a few lisping first syllables
And tests with transgression the normative limits
Falls
And again falls
And must fall again
And bear witness especially to our joys and our pains
To our pains most especially
That assert themselves with distinct preeminence
And bruit their grievance
And we palliate with hopeful platitude
Decorative denial
They are not gone those we love we say
For they dwell forever in our heart
While in fact they also dwell beyond forever
Before time
Beyond the regiment of personality
The straitened condition of identity
That stony composite of objecthood
And we who live attempt deliberate forgetfulness
The anodyne metaphor
Aggrandizing the busy motor
Of the sanguineous humor
But in unexpected eventuality by luck or skill
The cry of pain beautifies and beatifies
The pain that gave it cause
The cry of pain transmuted into song
I cannot bear it and yet I live we cry
Oh to flee the weariness the fever and the fret
Away away we cry
For I will take flight
Upon iridescent wings
Such as nature never knew
Whither we know not
Beyond the perilous demesne of grumbling elves
Beyond the grim heroism of ignorant arms intoxicated with honor
Beyond the sighing horniness of healthy youth and plump
Beyond the overmany dissatisfactions that gnaw the flesh
And having soared to the pinnacle
Descend but half a step
And the sorrow of a thousand thousand years
Precipitates in a torrent of tears
A fragment of which might linger in the eye
To transfigure the broken world
In a regress of refraction
And those who yearn for a life of sensation
Should open their eyes
Or at least enjoy the show of the half closed
All is sensation
Clamorous emesis in the crowded recovery room
Gazing in awe at the bighorn sheep
Drinking in the vision of the beautiful companion
As she doffs the kimono
But all is not all
And nothing is all or nothing
Memory so slight so diagrammatic
And yet the kids pursue their projects
Chivalric architectural scientific in the yard
The pavement marshals scintillating points
And I in joy in lust in drunkenness in concentration in nakedness in compulsion I
In expressive delirium
Poetic frenzy
Do I expose myself
Well then I expose myself
I am large no vestment contains me