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

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