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

I’m afraid and I’m depressed
As if hiding in a bunker after forsaking my friends
I frankly envy your stalwart guardianship

For you were there again today little phoebe
And well might you protest that you are not the same
That I encountered years ago in this my own backyard

But the glower I beheld this passing morning
Was witnessed in ancient days by mineowner and janitor
The same you fixed upon locomotive and data center

Back then I was hanging laundry on the line innocuous task
After seething in chemicals in the electromechanical machine
The cottons and the polyesters with their sweat dirt and dung

Feeling rather superior for declining to employ
The tumble dryer which still stood ready for rainy days
And enjoying the suburban breeze and sun and scents

And you flew full into my face
Beating your wings ferociously as if to claw my eyes
Luckily defended behind my spectacles

And for days thereafter you scowlingly perched
Upon side mirror fencepost and patio furniture
And the selfsame plastic chair as this morning

And this morning you also perched on one bamboo log
Cut to regulation size and protruding like its brethren
From the garbage can lacking one of its handles

For I had sallied forth armed with reciprocating saw
And machete and big paper bags from The Home Depot
And Levis and Toyota adjustable cap and T from a volunteer event

To do battle against the patch of bamboo
Which in its subterfuge sends rhizomes afar
And cull the standing dead

And like a seaman I heavehoed a great vine of wisteria
As if hoisting the sail on a voyage to new land
New to me and my governors

Wisteria like bamboo a hardy exotic
Irrepressible having been imported as decoration
Flowers clustered like grapes but empty and dry

And as I coiled the line I saw you
And I knew that like a colonial adventurer
I had disturbed your home

And I reached for a bag resting on the chair
Beneath your unwavering gaze and you gave no ground
Until my hand was close enough to touch you

And you flew away returning to the bamboo and invisibility
But when I looked up there you were again
Having resumed your post on the barrel and the logs

And bourgeois life is an iron cage
Not alone for fat beneficiaries like me
But for all who drudge in meek obeisance

For we have dulled our human brains so versatile and strong
And cloyed with sugar salt and fat
And sports and trends and media media media media media

The puppet shows
The puppet armies
The puppet regimes

Six kilos of salty snacks
That’s a bad start to your summer
Synthetic blend chafes and burns
And traps the sweat
A package of beers in various styles
While washing the aphids’ ooze
From roof and hood and trunk lid
The image of an animal
Generated by machine
A grinning emblem
That issues an invitation
Forcing the decision to accept or decline
A two-stroke engine announces the time
To wake and face the day
That’s a pretty low bar
In the kingdom of noise and faulty connections
I’m not accusing anybody
Just crying out in desperation
Maybe you think that’s something
A person should not do
The empties skitter toward the exit

The old horseman drops his lance
Undone by the garish displays
Of passionate intensity

The banners pennants shibboleths prayers and invocations
The bellowing orators
The audiences chanting their adoration

Partisan without portfolio
Withholding participation
In the drawing up of lines

Falls perforce willy-nilly
On the side where he’s been all along
Slack with melancholia

Ashamed of his impotence
Too sad to be powerful
Too weak to be gay

Why beloved don’t you find me
As fascinating as I find myself

I saw my father in the house of the dead
Who grieved for the loss of the living world

Overcoming my demurrals
Marian drove me to the hospital
Where the first doctor we saw said
If you had waited you’d be dead
And I thought for the first time ever
It’s not so bad the thought of death
Ignoring for the moment that they would grieve
Those I love
I’d had my three score and ten
And Socrates was right it seemed
Who knows but that being dead is not so bad
And maybe better than grubby life
But still I cannot bear the thought
Literally can’t lift it
That a child anywhere should die
And though my parents predeceased me long ago
I still grieve for them as they would me their child

Some neighbors paid to have their home improved
And a sign sprang up in the yard near the curb
The image of a window with sparkling eyes
And a smile that spanned a couple of panes
An arm raised in friendly greeting
Up the road jocular Royal Flush
Displays its mascot a toilet
Also smiling expansively
Who wears gloves and ballcap
Who wields a plunger and drives a backhoe
And then there’s Bib the Man of Tires
What was his childhood like
Who were his parents
Sprung fully armed
From the brow of that corporate committee
Charged with putting faces to brands
Visages begotten not made
Mulciber Moloch or Beelzebub
Who gain identity only upon their fall
Or oppositely Rumplestiltskin supernatural foe
Who disappointed stamps himself to nothing
At least HAL 9000 learned to sing at school
And my walk takes me past another neighbor
Garbed like me with sunglasses and ballcap
Presumably like me seeking
The salutary payoff of a morning constitutional
Returns not my salutation

Or the issuance of command
However innocuously intended

Or sumptuary display concomitant
With the demand for sacrifice

There in the middle of the road or street
Or what do you call it
Neither a country road nor a city street
The blacktop above the cul-de-sac
A fledgling lorn and stoical
In the morning sun before the sun
Had really begun to pound its anvil
I say fledgling it had feathers
But it could not fly
Else it would have flown
From its death on the scorching pavement
It bore the mottled fluff of a chick
But pinions fully formed
But tail feathers none at all
And on its wings I saw the white band
Like unto that on the wings of certain songbirds
Seen only when they take flight
Cherished for their improvisations
And I addressed the little displaced person
Are you a mockingbird
And Let’s at least get you out of the sun
For I believed then as I still believe
That the parents lacked the means
To return their child to the nest
And I cupped my hands on either side
And it peeped in alarm like any chick
Eluded my grasp however tender and ran up the gutter
Into the nearest lawn wet with dew
But still in the light of the sun
Though there was shade on every hand
And so I considered a second attempt
To give the little victim
A more comfortable death
Though sun is probably quicker than inanition
Come to think of it
To say nothing of predation
From crow raptor or fiery ants
Themselves concerned for self and progeny
When a pair of mockingbirds
From the utility line above
Buzzed me like biplanes
At the Arab encampment
In Lawrence of Arabia
And so I high-tailed it
I’ve been attacked by birds before
While hanging laundry on the line
Nonconformist ecologically superior
That salubrious stretching activity
Of fresh air and viper thoughts
For that task itself requires a little thought
But not enough to keep the mind
From drifting into grievance
There to rehearse devastating rejoinders
To put in their place those who have done one wrong
But a walk in the suburb
Before the sun beats with his fury
Requires virtually no thought at all
Of a more sapient homo erectus
The rolling gait of one overweight
Establishing the rhythmic sway
Conducive to consideration
Of the next poem or song or lecture deep
And while I hung the jeans and brassieres
A phoebe as I later learned its common name to be
Beat its wings against my face
Though mercifully reserved its claws
And when I returned to fetch the laundry now dry
Perched gloweringly on the lawn furniture
And for days took up various posts
On fence branch or side mirror
So now the avian cadre
Redoubled its attack
Upon one who means well but
And I don’t know what comes after the but
Instinct I guess
The same that makes us primates so sociable
Worry so relentlessly about how we’re coming off
And when I had completed my circuitous route
I saw no fledgling on lawn or street
And a single mockingbird
Mounted from one utility line
To slightly higher one