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

My death means nothing to me
Who am absent to its regret
I had made and kept the appointment
To be that patient etherized upon a table
Not a simile not a symbol of anything
Just me or rather my mortal remains
Kept notionally alive by expertise
But paralyzed in body
Not the dreamy twilit vacay of sedation
But anesthesia general absolute profound
Neural processes tuned to the minimum
Far below the threshold of consciousness
Of anything
A rubbery cup held gently over mouth and nose
A voice gently intoning that I should breathe
Fully aware that breathing is among my capabilities
Who would soon be past all capability
And others would do my breathing for me
And we drift away from ordinary pain or extraordinary
Toward insensibility most thorough
Capable of pleasure in the gathering numbness
At worst a cessation of pain
If that is I am that individual told of in the civics
Rootless free inobligant decisive willing-to-power
Self-interest machine
Heartless bastard
For they all of them have reason to regret my absence
Not just the troop of beloveds
Who mercifully surround me in life
And squabble sometimes and make nice
But all of everybody absolutely categorically without exception
The loved ones know well the reasons
The material facts in flux admittedly of personality
The manifest charm uprightness vulnerabilities and recurrent falling
But reasons to regret too the deaths even of the charmless the crooked
And you can have reasons without knowing them
You can have a tumor that ripens silently for years
Until it crushes your auditory nerve
And you cry out I should have had that seen to
If only I had known
Stupid idiot
But how was I to know
Who am no stupider than the next guy really
So everybody should regret the loss of the charm &c.
Including the prime loser himself
Who might permissibly indulge in a little pre-regret
And thus general anesthesia is a salutary affair
Not lacking risks of course
Say I who rode to the hospital in an automobile
For life and death both give much to regret
But little enough to fear
Certainly for the fortunate among us
Given the privilege of drifting away
And some might find it instructive as I have
To be free for a time from the onus of personality
But be not so heartless
As to imagine death free of cost
Nor look upon death with fear and trembling
But with indignation

They put forth in pegs of light
And rights of gray paper ladderlined
And lists mouthworders’ footfalls
And chemicals cut orange and red
Blood of birth periodic blood even blood of death
Okay
But this acrid entrance
Metal shield and three-pronged sword
Pierce a dart so nigh to your heart
Your warble would be in vain
Pray for us Mother Mercy
Soul before soul
If you who know not nor need not know
Know us not insignificant

She walked between the road and the railroad tracks
And on the other side the swooping powerlines
And beneath them the telephone line
Echoing the swoop
The conduit of power above
The conduit of signal below
And with each stride she brushed the fingers
Of her right hand against the folds
Of her skirt the pleats the gathers the folds
Telling herself a story I think I thought
But come to think of it I think
The utterance was my mother’s
In the driver seat and I at her right hand
Feeling the rise and fall of the powerlines
She might have meant what a charming scene
But I understood her to have indicated
A sign of feeblemindedness
Of self-absorption at best
For I knew my own thoughts
To wander wayward
And worthy of reprehension
But what else are you supposed to do
While walking between road and railroad tracks
And if it was a story
It must have been told in song
And not a soul to tell of what she sang
The rhythm of the brushing
Matching the rhythm of the stride
Rhythm and repetition
Rhythm and repetition
And nothing can be wrong with that
And wickedness in song does not come naturally
So is The Triumph of the Will a wicked movie
Some might praise its production design
Geometry or whatever
And the work can’t help
The use to which it’s put
Which is to delight and instruct
But the content of the instruction
Is so atrocious that it yields little delight
And so it is when you give the people what they want
The people that matter that is
The ones with power and money
To see a maiden imperiled on a mountainside
Or on the Empire State Building
Menaced by giant puppet ape hand
Or the intromission of the penis
Consent or its lack be damned
Better to sing to yourself
While walking between road and railroad tracks
And the best picture makes you say
What the fuck is going on
And if you’re lucky
You might catch the earworm
Of an unheard melody

I know how ashamed of me you are
My greasy hair my halitosis
My considerable clumsiness
My incapacities and uncontrollable cravings
And I accept my punishment
As gracefully as I can
The drudgery the boredom
The worm of anxiety
And death ultimate ostracism
Either placeless animatronic
Or fallen ineluctably fallen
Well okay
But from what miniscule pigeonhole
Do I pull this document
However contemptible

A dusting of flour for rolling out the dough
Emollient cream on the rashy bottom
And where the clearing meets the forest
Poison ivy grows

I was wrong to steal the image of an iron cage
More a sugary proteiny sheath constricting yes
But also pliant to permit a certain license
Children at their play lovers at their ecstasy

Those irrepressibles
Learn the routines of compliance
Step on a crack and
Perform the rites mysterious and

Greetings my fellow sufferer
Susceptible like all things to the environment
And yet my pain’s asserting itself
Distracts me from yours the multitudinous

Bourgeois life is an iron cage
Trying to raise grass where a forest should grow
Hence raking up autumn near the solstice
Of tulip pine and the many species of oak
Accompanied by my nemesis the phoebe
Or no some gray thing with yellow belly
Foraging where the implement has scraped
When I myself turn up a specimen
I thought at first you were a night crawler
With wriggling and thrash
But when you formed a figure 8
Like ouroboros twisted to infinity
I recognized you as fully yourself
And I grasped you with my White Mules
And imprisoned you in jelly jar
Like I’m authorized to do that
But your sentence is not a long one
For I will display you to the younguns
Or rather display my rectitude
When I return you to the wild
My pal my emblem

So this is what we’re left with
The polemics of unhealed wounds

Pasis upgrath sind douef mars denob
Gotarb ver ted bi arc sey went wird cray
Fant vre u stemb fra fraytet parse za brint
Unt blehthe chrendvinket swerna bas untarr
Zo bere condice fe strontks ufar remohve
Ne mayr shold frastor rez fstir ganaid
Frastora trak zvesdo meetra dist
Bed botless gor tase trendam fettor hest

Some guy in a podcast keeps asking
Like week after week after week
What does it mean to be human
It doesn’t mean anything to be human
James Joyce one of those pithy Irish satirists
Went on and on about how the Odyssey
Was so much more human
Than the Iliad or The Divine Comedy
But human means nothing more
Than the genome of homo sapiens
We don’t say or maybe we do
Chasing a feather that’s so feline
Begging for a treat that’s so canine
Clomping up to the rooftop that’s so caprine
And what do we mean by that’s so human
Probably something like vulnerable or fallible
Maybe something like persistent in confronting adversity
Well every organism every object is vulnerable
And you don’t even need a brain to persevere
Witness the phytoplankton’s frenzy
To swim toward lifegiving light
It does however seem rare in nature
To be able to fail to fall to commit an error
Now sometimes we see in pal pooch’s eyes
The pang of regret of sorrow of guilt
No doubt an effect of our species’ long affiliation
And what does Puppy mean to express
With this lugubrious facial expression
That she has broken some commandment no
Merely that she desirous of pleasing has fallibly failed
To comply with the Commander’s wishes
Perhaps we humans too fail
When we fail to obey
But everybody knows that we labor under no compulsion
To carry out a wrongful order
And that to do so is itself a wrongful act
So it would seem that wrong precedes command
And in any case we distinguish between
Obeying the Commander and obeying the command
And we humans in our inventiveness
Can devise a thousand atrocities
Not proscribed in the tables of the law
And how can we fall if we can’t do the right thing
What is this doing the right thing
Maybe doing the right thing
Is doing what you think is the right thing
But if so Hitler Dahmer and loyal-feeling henchmen
Are right
And that can’t be right
It can’t be true that fulfilling your own little motive
Is right even at the cost of the innocent multitude
Regardless of the prestige of him who prefers
The destruction of the entire universe over his own hurt finger
When we happen to do right
Assuming that such a thing is possible
We doubtless do what we think is right
But we can think wrongly
About what is right or anything else
So how then might we think rightly about what is right
Since merely thinking something doesn’t make it right
Any more than merely commanding something does
How can we make a good judgment
And more specifically a moral judgment
Flipping a coin is not a judgment
Nor is preferring chocolate over vanilla
A judgment worthy of the name
Is a response to a reason
That is to a kind of fact
That is to one or maybe more than one of those facts
That urge us in a particular direction
That urge us to take an action
Or to assume an attitude
Or to hold a belief
To make a moral judgment means
To represent a moral fact
For there are moral facts
Which are just as real
As the facts of science of math
Of history of what you had for breakfast
And thus moral facts remain uninfluenced
By our preferences our attitudes
Indeed our attitudes and preferences
Should derive from facts and not the other way around
And thus humans can act as moral agents
That is why not just say as persons
And thus we humans enjoy or suffer from
A dual character animal and agent
And all the persons we know are human alas
But it’s a spectrum innit
As the repentant dog’s hangdog look implies
And who knows the neurology of a whale
Or of a phytoplankton lacking a nervous system
Or what other moral agents populate the universe or universes
So we certainly shouldn’t be ashamed
Of our humanness our animality
Our hair sweat blemishes smell
Exudations of blood and phlegm
Body horror is madness
You ask me why I have lost my wits
Oh Celia Celia Celia shits
But if our bodies give rise to some noxiousness
They are much more the site of pleasure
Sensory pleasure the epitome
Though not the sole variety
Of pleasure generally
And pleasure is good
And we can know and participate
In the pleasures and pains of others
Their covetousness and noble aspirations
Their exaltation and ennui
Our fallibility our capacity for failure
Makes sense only in the light
Of a capacity to do the right thing
Those who try to ascribe
More or less humanity to things
Are responding dimly perhaps
To our responsiveness to reasons
Nobody knows or understands everything
Or much of anything
And to err is human
To forgive only reasonable

Reconstruct that rainbow in your head
For myself I get to choose from among
The one that flew over Dublin streets
Or another at Clairmont Road leaving Decatur
Or the one that hovered faintly double
Over spongy south Florida
Others fictional or less vivid of recall
But equally and productively schematic

Now you can begin to work the changes
Starting with the apex around which
The opposèd and theoretic ends might wibble wobble
And enjoy the fleeting pleasure
In a point of no time
During which the arc stiffens
Into a perfect disposition a perfect line

Pursuant to other fleeting perfections
In an operation that requires
But scanty details such that
Now the options are limitless
As they have been all along

The Romanesque arch expanding into vault
The wealth of spheres cylinders and conic sections
The interwoven textures of braids knots
And serpentine involutions
Diagrammatic representations of salt crystals
Polymers and proteins
Matte landscapes and sensitive portraiture
And foam of solar systems galaxies and universes

Gig employee making delivery
Sprints to the porch while I stand
And enjoy the pulsing bass
The sparkling chords the Latin language
When he returned I asked
What are we listening to
I don’t know he said and smiled and departed
An effusion of the algorithm
I sadly surmised

In the leafy backyard overcast and moderately cool
A chatter bursts through the freeway’s rumble
And through the jet’s descending whine
Woodpecker I instantly inwardly intone
Before the sound has even ceased
And just as instantly I regret
The compulsion to denominate
But still the bird had given me pleasure

How could I have neglected those manifold variants
Daunting in their recession
Perplexity yes but also defiance privilege stature and self-regard
The head thrown back the eyes steady
The face that says it all
And thus more that can be registered
Lips parted lids straitened
His mincing step that tends ever-westward
A chimera an indolence
A brief hiatus
An image arises not particularly vast
But recurrently unbidden
Dragging a gutload of anxiety juice
Pastoral terpsichore
And who will reel them back in
These meandering periods
Those that alternate between deliquescence and nuggetry
And those that rest inert
Until you start to yearn for any event
Any unforeseen cataclysm
To narrow the space
Its trajectory nearly exhausted
Worlds have been projected and indeed
Some of them
Their programs fully transparent
Clamber into that distance
Where limbs and organs beckon
As the sky streaks and races
Conscious of his pranks and preferences
The trancelike state the aureole
Has one found at last the mind capable
Of such self-control as to empty itself
Of all motive all deceit
Walls again and fortresses
A strategy of depletion
Tactics meanwhile of accumulation
Martial cognizance
And who’s to say
And is it right this deliberate forgetting
Even assuming that it’s possible
This posture of unconcern
Toward the past the future
Those dubious specters
The masquerade of innocence
More comprehensive and more approximate
Stature yes but diminutive to be frank
And in our moment of richest achievement
Real things obtrude

Seven hundred years of peremptory gesture
Of examinations administered
To the unwilling the ignorant
No thought but to comply
Ignorant of the shame they have incurred
Treatment delivered elsewhere than where it needs to be
To say nothing of diagnosis

Ellen Dean crepuscular cousin
Custodian of the secret vicarage
Dispatches the fabula
Her duty to render
But the generations alone and disoriented
Schematize their forebears
The Penistone Crags the Fairy Cave

My beloved Chlamydomonas reinhardtii
Its tiny whiptails propelling it
Toward the lifegiving light
Sans eyes sans taste sans nervous system

You think it’s easy parrying
That globular self-portrait
Well so it is after a manner of speaking
Lazing as it does exposed near the bracket-end
I’ve had dreams like that or not dreams
The harsh gravitation of hypnagogia
Where a hand is the size of a sow
Or I feel my face stretch from wall to wall
My toe in the distant dwindling distance
Approaching or receding
Can’t tell which
I think of that when I hear
Of special revelation
How this kid one time claimed
That a message from God
Had commanded him to run for class president
How do you know but that your visitation I thought
Be but a visitation from the devil
Did you think about what somebody else
Thought about what you were thinking
And what we perceive most dearly
Or remember most fondly most anxiously
Turns out to be a pile of clothes
In the street light filtered through the blinds
When we were five
Or didn’t turn out at all
For the moment had passed
Or more likely he was just lying
And the audience responded
Fully as enthusiastically
As he wished them to
And we count the body language
And reckon upon the faint pursing of the lips
And one day the new paint job looks great
The next it’s terrible

Brood less on the disposal of remains
Nature will eventually prevail
Find a plot of ground to scatter acorns

Nothing is changed
Changed not even a little
Still as ugly as ever
And as beautiful

The feral talisman
That could dress up as mechanism
The talking taking
Of man and mankind
And other puffy tinctures
Gargle and spit
Luggage and salad dressing
Wilson and Spaulding
Make haste while the hay mates
Sing and sailors
Naps and springtime and loss
Keep picking at it
Until the fissile meter blossoms

Fie and fuck and fee