Poetry is a political act
Poetry is an irresponsible act
Poetry is an indispensable act
Poetry is a superfluous act
Poetry is a lonely act
Poetry is a convivial act
Poetry is an amorous act
Poetry is an indifferent act
Poetry is a daunting act
Poetry is an easy act
Poetry is a sincere act
Poetry is a deceptive act
Poetry is a sacred act
Poetry is a profane act
Poetry is a simple act
Poetry is a complex act
Poetry is a significant act
Poetry is a trivial act
Poetry is a corrupt act
Poetry is an innocent act
Poetry is an original act
Poetry is a traditional act
Poetry is a sophisticated act
Poetry is a naïve act
Poetry is a purposeless act
Poetry is a purposive act
Poetry is a troubled act
Poetry is an insouciant act
Poetry is an artificial act
Poetry is a natural act
Poetry is a non-judgmental act
Poetry is a critical act
Poetry is a cryptic act
Poetry is a straightforward act
Poetry is a fresh act
Poetry is a decadent act
Poetry is an organic act
Poetry is a calculated act
Poetry is a creative act
Poetry is a custodial act
Poetry is a safe act
Poetry is a dangerous act
Poetry is an all-purpose act
Poetry is a limited act
Poetry is a moral act
Poetry is an aesthetic act
Poetry is an impressive act
Poetry is an unprepossessing act
Poetry is an invisible act
Poetry is a flamboyant act
Poetry is a jejune act
Poetry is a senescent act
Poetry is an expressive act
Poetry is a documentary act
Poetry is a formal act
Poetry is a spontaneous act
Poetry is an repellent act
Poetry is an accommodating act
Poetry is a profuse act
Poetry is an abstemious act
Poetry is a somber act
Poetry is a ridiculous act
Poetry is a frenzied act
Poetry is a sober act
Poetry is a figurative act
Poetry is a literal act
Poetry is an external act
Poetry is an inward act
Poetry is a studied act
Poetry is a hasty act
Poetry is a modest act
Poetry is an extravagant act
Poetry is a decorative act
Poetry is an austere act
Poetry is an efflorescent act
Poetry is an unnatural act
Poetry is an awkward act
Poetry is a graceful act
Poetry is a sketchy act
Poetry is a finished act
Poetry is a demonic act
Poetry is an angelic act
Poetry is a smooth act
Poetry is a bristling act
Poetry is a stabilizing act
Poetry is a disruptive act
Poetry is a frivolous act
Poetry is a serious act
Poetry is a general act
Poetry is a particular act
Poetry is a Dionysian act
Poetry is an Apollonian act
Poetry is a volcanic act
Poetry is a sexual act
Poetry is a demure act
Poetry is a confusing act
Poetry is a clarifying act
Poetry is an expansive act
Poetry is a diminutive act
Poetry is a nascent act
Poetry is a final act
Poetry is good but sometimes not so good
Poetry is over under around through gnarly parsimonious revolting affectionate irritating emollient stressful partial roundabout kind startling untethered inside unique generous frustrating rigorous yielding friendly beautiful

Those pale yellow butterflies
That fly higher than the others
Paired in pursuit or in love dance
But what’s the difference

That ghostly inverted moon
A mushroom cap open but not overly so
To sprinkle rain or spores
Upon the place beneath

The will will not suffice in this case
Not in an age when the primo condition
Is wanting badly enough
Debate rages over the requirement of passion
Whether fanatical longing in a single category qualifies
Or alternatively every object of thought
Demands the utmost in unrelenting zeal
Exploding like a meth lab in Tennessee
That’s because when you look at history
When you look at the winners in history
The fiercest lions the tallest trees the loudest cicadas
All the others imagining they had a particle
Of that high-corona magnificence
And throw their credit cards into fictive wells
Wishing upon stars when they should pray
To galaxies black holes multiverses
Something really impressive like that
Show a little self-respect for God’s sake
And let wrath flourish upon the land
We’re talking mission critical here
Diametrical gestures to intimidate the herd
Sure but how many could you have done answer me that
Competition and what’s the point
Or rather what is a point am I right
All the data sets reset at worst
While as the Uber rounds the corner
In a portly celestial arc
Compliant to the omnipuissant app
Which brooks no complaint
No sound is heard of murmuring motherhood
Wayward girlhood damning priesthood or lively neighborhood
Not even gibbering apes slobbering over their papayas
Instead only the low sibilance of suggestiveness
Of unsubtle and salacious hints
An obnoxious diffidence of affect
Like little trembling larval forms
Or monstrous little imps
That skate away upon seething lakes of bitumen
Or writhing wounded who gouge at their festering faces
And hissing curse their fates for they know not whom to curse
Diminished and foreshortened by their amputations
Where there ought to be a mouth
Only this large grasshopper its spiracles heaving
Like the companionable serial ports of cyborg and chimera
Or kids trading nightmares via the organs of remote interaction
Along the yellow gutters and out into the restless thoroughfare
Other cars other motor scooters
Ornamented with flames and crucifixes and birds of prey
Trucks of UPS Amazon FedEx USPS and logoless locals
Borne back ceaselessly into
Their reflexive originating nodes
The folly of their native instincts
For show me a start and I’ll show you the start before the start
Or rather what appears as origin is in fact intersection
A hiatus of the first order or of the second or the third
Remove the braces that shored up the ruins
Or don’t bother they’ve almighty disappeared
You can slake your thirst
But you can’t quench I don’t know
Where religions draw their battle lines
Where bankers arm themselves with skillets
Laundresses drape their theatrical membranes
Athletes cast their laurels into the dust
And poets relinquish the exercise of will

The delight of fumbling with zippers and hooks
The parkour of tumescing desire
Instructs us not to overvalue the main event
To recognize great but not overgreat importance
To appreciate trivial but not negligible pleasures
Necessary groundwork for eruptions of bliss
Yet worthy in themselves they take time
And thus the opening acts need not occasion tedium or onus
For in them patiently inhere various stimulating commendables
Not least the very awkwardness of their accomplishment
For though they may propagate the atmosphere of haste
And hence the conduction of anxiety
They nevertheless evince the charm of a puzzle
Not wholly innocent of a fillip of fear
The grace of a journey not unaccompanied to solution
And getting there is half the fun
Or some indeterminate proportion
And indeed a game need not be winnable to be pleasurable
And its importance lies not solely or even mostly in a goal
For nothing is but it occurs
And every object is a process
And every process an event
Intricating an infinite constellation
Of objects intricate in themselves

Peggy wore black socks
As she ran her laps before soccer practice
And during the school day
Her uniform skirt had a hem
Lower than that of the other tenth-grade girls
And unknown to them she filled notebooks
With twilit stories about the terrifying forest
And the Wild Girl who dwelt there
For it came to pass
That on the appointed day
As the most valuable of possessions
By virtue of her tender years and noble birth
She was brought into the forest
Even unto the farthest point
To be given back to the Powers
To purchase their placidity
That the people might earn their livings unmolested
At the edge of the forest
And even unto the farthest point
And sure enough after the people had departed
The Powers came
Hulking Glumgrim
And leafy Entriffid
And Gelida of the freezing touch
And the others willowy or round scurrying or slow
And collected her and harmed her not
But raised her as their own
For they pitied her small size and tender years
And vouchsafed unto her such lore
As to the people was unknown
And she grew and throve in the terrifying forest
And it came to pass that on a certain day
The people penetrated deep into the forest
Even unto the farthest point
For they had exhausted their stores
But their efforts to collect the forest treasures
Had availed not and they sat sore dismayed
For they knew that male and female alike
The ancients of days and those of tender years
Would perish here in the forest deep
And unknown to them the Wild Girl
The forsaken one
Filled their baskets and filled their bags
To keep them living for many days
Back in the world of people
And they were sore amazed
That this day when they had so lost heart
And grieved as never before
Should be the appointed day of bounty
And as I girded myself for practice in the other field
She caught my eye
Wiry not voluptuous
Slight not curvaceous
And she held my eye
That night before I could give in to sleep

To sustain the operation and deploy it
With ever-growing intensity
As if to forestall the inevitability of its desuetude
And continually to augment the seamless texture of regulation
Always adding offices and mandates
As the subalterns might proliferate under the podestà
Never subtracting the superfluous the ceremonial or the moribund
With which the citizenry lack the capacity
To monitor much less comply withal
And their impotence
Before this burgeoning and unmasterable register of imperatives
Does not excuse them from payment
In kind health blood treasure and lifespan
Anesthetized it is true by bread circuses and figmentary reality
The privilege of purchase and the consummation of convenience
And they are comforted moreover by the compensatory thought
During intervals relieved of superstitious avarice
That their pain does not originate
From the malefaction of any person
Nor from the wickedness of any
More or less ignorant and therefore fallible neighbor
But only from the state of things
Within the vast but fragmentary abstract machine
The mere apparition of a universe of death

Oh for the confidence of a criminal
Clever to outwit the security system
Patient to efface the foot- and fingerprints
Expert to dispose of the body

The rain had all but subsided
It adopted the posture of decision
Grow my beard down to my chest
Inform the multitude of their infirmity
As if I knew better than they
Or raise another grievance before the council
A ring of wayward pennants
Semaphore back to the finale of seem
Across the blended landscape
And a new chapter wraps aside
A predication effecting a suave unraveling
Of the native construal which nevertheless soft repulse relinquishes
Give me another labyrinthine turn they cry
Another prospect of the Trylon
We shuffle briskly under a break of day
A caesura of indistinct dimension
Narratives of insistent cause
Poems of intense desire
To bring the broadcast to its bending point
A decorum of plenitude
An embarrassment of rises

The disjunction of disjunctiveness and primal unity

The extinction of homo sapiens
Is coming in under budget
Behold the feline fungal or human blueprint
And people impose their own design matrix
Onto the deeply textured material of matter
With their gifts of person number tense voice and mood
Their genius for speculation and apt analogy
Especially upon the organic compounds
As octane acetone Mylar and polystyrene
Ambien to make you sleep alcohol to mess you up
And microparticles with the duration of a planet
Proliferate like a flourishing clan
And oh the phosphates and the nitrates
Algae bloom and sudden boom
Outside a sheared building in Oklahoma City
A firefighter grips in one hand the great work glove
And in the other cradles the dying child

Two dictators console our future
First the bishop with his cadre of inquisitors
Specialists pledged to alleviate the burden of moral judgment
By posting clearly and comprehensively the obligations permissions and prohibitions
And by providing forthrightly the reassurance We watch what you do
With an energy mobilized by reward
And by transcendent punishment above all
So that the scales never fall out of balance

And second the furniture man
Who directs the ledgers of credit and debit of chattel and real property
On an earthly plane from a skillet to a frying pan
The suits and pursuits civil and criminal
Who banishes ambiguity irony and complaint
Of tort and damages punitive and compensatory
Who supervises the paperwork that is the duty of the citizenry
And who signs off with a hearty Finish them

Our prospects have greatly improved with the discovery
That below the layer of turf and the layer of tar
The soil consists of corned beef hash
The jellied pink meat flecked with sage
That situated upon these inexhaustible riches
We need no longer concern ourselves with conservation
With doubt as to illness hunger choice preference or fear
Or doubt as to whither and wherefore

Somebody might express an intention
To bring the ruffians to order
To cause them to lower eyes afire with intensity
Though method for this fool’s errand does not forthcome
Toward tough guys who enjoy reputations for clothing of hide
For compact weapons of filigree
Customs arcane as their elaborate facial adornments
Their fashionably barbaric markings of the skin
Their impossibly advanced tonsorial achievements
Which precede them with the magical exudations of an Oberon
Nay the glamor of a Lucifer
And they claim not without precedent
For theirs is no newfangled efflorescence
To proceed through the world according to their own lights
Assigning to themselves the winners the right to appoint
The obligatory the permissible and the prohibited
Inscribed in their extensive and abstruse code of comportment
Their shibboleths and esoteric gestures
Calculated to mystify the uninitiated
Though never would nor could they proselytize
To stir envy in the hearts of the conventional
For the unimaginable grace of such sophistication
Product of a lifetime of study and discipleship
Unmistakable token of election
Which grants the facility to assuage all awkwardness
Toward their noblesse
And to foster the cult of display
For nothing is so powerful as the image of power
Nothing so rich as the exhibition of wealth

Δεν μπορώ να το κάνω αυτό

Roil
Spoil

Ah my friend you blow my mind
Not a consummation particularly
But nevertheless devoutly to be wished
By me and my self-indulgent generation
Except that my adult life
Has sited a series of disillusionments
As for example the vast swath
Of my generation who do not wish
Their minds to be blown
But instead prefer to hunker down
In the convenient neural pathways
Of immemorial prescription

As for example the duality nature and artifice
All is nature tactfully you suggest
And my mind is blown
And forgive my naïve summary
For I am grateful for your graciousness of thought and word
Or productivity and acedia
Or the imperious dissonance of mind
And a culture of crass acquisitiveness
The hectic race to the bottom
Blind to the irony of an infinity of ignorance
Enlarged somehow by self-deceit
And by the tyrannical deceits of power
And of power that does not bother to conceal its perfidy
And of an instrumentality that leverages illness incapacity weakness and death

And though ignorance is infinite
And understanding elusive of subjects hard as Greek
Complex as quantum mechanics
We gain glimpses sometimes of knowledge
As to remember the glorious facticity of a hand
And appreciate the immeasurable value
Of beauty truth and love

I’m going to do the bad thing he said
Head for filters scab together the not-rough
And nature then forever clambers out of reach

Young love in their masquerades
Fades until finally one guise fuses and there you are
And forever foisting feinting and gay deceit

Forces extract a groan from the abyssal hollow
Swallow particles that collect somewhere the charged surfaces
An imaginary organism in the byways of spacetime

This consciousness that separates
Berates the soggy of course enterprises
Ravelling the red-thread demographies

The czar pursued in scrambling climb the rebels
Leveled-up in the capital’s subterra
A sunless shape an amorphous modality

Compelled to carry out the luxe revision
Reversion playful and sad to the fretful stacks
Borrowings and actions muted and serviceable
He said he would all the sharpened pyramids

Free your hand
That holds five screws while twisting in the first
The eye that expects the looming hazards
As sequence density momentum fortitude simultaneity responsiveness duration elasticity and fit
Directioning of them at the cost of running an operation
Around the circles that resume in a trickster’s repertoire
Or a rigid festival as hard as Greek itself
A dance as reckless as an impassioned infantry
Where did those rhinos come from
Who knew there would be chrysanthemums
Drawn out into the flasks of aromatic substance
Decorated with cherubs and peacocks
Gnomes and parasols
Birds of song and birds of prey
A war car from which the god leaps to attack or defend
Watch the intersection for the roll calls
The shakers and the retorts the cylinders and the armatures
The bubbling aerators
The phantasmagorical prohibitions
The bread crumbs carefully arrayed
Ransom the proverbial poor player
While a dog bays for the leftovers
Of the cheap suit the needless anxiety
A ragged participle hovering on the brake
But that was just talk just idle nattering
Nestling in the plump refractory twilight
When did the benighted ever secure a cockerel
That would sound the tocsin of an embryonic chord
Play the hand you’re dealt or the frigid break room
New sources of energy or wealth
Why do it twice or do it right the first time
Pay for an expressive goad a triple bypass
Ruin an appliance if you must
Give attention gratis to the gathering clouds
That might portend another languorous loss
Coincident with a brisk sleight of hand
Or sometimes elusive surreptitious obscure and underhanded
I wish I could catalog simplicities
Decorative shrubbery child’s play a worker’s meal at scorching midday
We nominate our humilities which pass in dumb show
Like the silhouettes of ancestral victims
Whose frantic whispers in the hours before sunrise
Careen through hallways clad in mirrors
Long accustomed to the routines of futility
They wanted for years to purse the luminous dial’s gleaming
They worried they wanted to name the numerous features
Name the restless regard
The burden grasped
The fist relaxed

I think I saw it shit out the butter
That gave the frolicsome insect its name

The troubling dualities insisted no doubt ultimately
By the ineluctable episteme of subject and predicate
As of ultimate and proximate
Self and other
Pompous and modest
Spontaneous and calculated
Tranquil and angry
And the spectrum states such as mature and immature

Or just the rowdy chaos of a number of things
As the many voices that clash and jingle in the mind
The ill-configured effects of perception
And is life therefore entirely a technical process
It involves technical processes
As mowing the lawn scooping soup into bowls
Showing up every day for another round of intolerable drudgery

But these of course are 1st world problems
That is to say middle class
And thus there must be some triune precariousness
As transparent translucent and opaque
Or as a three-wheeled motorcycle is said to be less stable
Than the conventional bike that requires speed to remain upright
And is life therefore the technical process of establishing stability

The binary opposite of life is either death or lifelessness
And regrettably there seem to be degrees
And what is our metric of determination
And is there any reason to expect some non-dual ground of being
And how to tolerate life above ground
In the glare of blank misgiving
The roiling darkness of despair

A big zebra swallowtail
To my eye perfect and easily within reach
Leisurely browses the still-profuse flowers
On an August day cooler that the one before
I could grab it and carry it away with me

Raining in late afternoon as it does
Like clockwork in south Florida
Upon the boulevard flanked with planted palm
The ancient railroad that runs alongside
The nearly as-ancient federal highway
Boon and danger for racoons armadillos and airborne raptors
That scan and patrol beside the canal

But here is no tropical clime
Though the environs are lush with life
The drought only a memory
Succeeded by gusty winds flash floods and lightning
That buzzed a neighbor tarrying on the patio
And here too the interstate the golf courses the big box stores
To drive by force and fraud nature into obedience

Is it possible to compose the dirge of renunciation
To forswear cleverness and adopt
The brutality the mere aegis of fact
And how deeply must our askesis plummet
To the word the syllable the phonetic twilight
The wolflike Assyrian rode a horse
Unmentioned in the text until the cold foam of death
The moon that the cow jumped over
Was in reality some stolid distance away
And is there no reality in a hundred
Golden Books and what of the images
In the minds of the children who heard those gingery lyrics sung
And what of the feelings unabashedly evoked
By a buoyant diphthong a digraph a melody
Played sweetly or sourly in tune or out

Thou beloved art like a faery chant
That beguiles the wide-eyed child
To forsake the nursery tread into the unkempt undergrowth
And name Adamlike the kingdoms and duchies
Of the creatures frisky lacy fierce slender gooey slithery or straight
The quick brown fox
The willow abandoned to tears
The nymphs and larvae
The molds and fungi
The predators parasites and prey
The animals that suckle
The animals that fend for themselves
The watery moon clothed in variability
The untempered sun naked in terrible majesty

We are to understand the mythicality
Of consistency’s hobgoblin
But the qualifier foolish would appear essential
And how does one widely distinguish
Which smooth aggregates might be the stupid ones
A splendid waterfall that appears in spring
The retrograde of Venus
A languorous nude ensconced in a profusion of flowers
Domina Harlequin hully-gullying with Freddie the Freeloader
To leave the onlookers feeling buzzed and complacent
The one wren to rule them all
In a world in which humanoid beings
Possess innate powers unknown to mortal men
As the ability by virtue of certain organelles
To stay on target stay on target
And airliners are furnished with sword holders
Those other meteoric appurtenances
As the violent the transgressive the erotic
To an abrupt work ethic askesis
To renounce punctuation orthogrphy or self-regard
Commitment to stultifying routines
Precisely to jettison at length and with unbearable irony the 9-to-5
Semi-consensual capitulation to tautology
And Gradgrind wanted Facts-cts-cts-cts deracinated denatured
Detached from buddy-buddy integument
But an endurant cohort has emerged
Well accustomed from role-playing
Big small fuzzy bear fat frog
Or influencing or being influenced
Cooperating with the nature-like excrescences
Image soundtrack and fillable form
Hair product or cosmetic oral fixation
Tinkering with the hereditary car
As once qualified for legitimate résumé enhancement
But not all Baby Boomers loved peace and love
Real estate seminarians and the Amateur Aviation Cadets
The cadre militant of the casual diffident
How do these adumbrations differ
From the luthier’s diminutive purfling chisel
The long and grinding rotor that snakes the pipe
The horticultural emendations at the country club
Not a day goes when the emptor
Is not called upon to observe the caveat
To drink the acrid wine of disillusionment
To endorse the refusal of ambiguity
To parrot a parody
But they knew the job was dangerous when they took it
For the peril is part of the charm
And the sun rises on all alike
To strive to seek to find and Not-t-t-t to yield
And it is the privilege of privilege to relish a challenge
Red flags white flags flags of retraction and dispersal
Flags of couple color as a brinded cow
Demonic commination or emollient settlement
Choose a side or a side will choose you
Or not
Maybe that’s what votive lassitude means
Earth has not any Thing-ng-ng-ng to show more fair
Except in the fields in the mountains the oceans the forests the starry sky
Seasons of mist and seasons of conflagration
Loving together suffering together
In the holy communion of family and friends
In weddings funerals contentious Thanksgivings
In our wishes our fears our lusts our joys our angry outbursts

She deploys the regimes of daily light
The ablutions contact lenses shoes on the kid
Snarky putz Buck Mulligan made it a joke
But you don’t have to be a naysayer to register the superfluity
When you install distraction and call it forget fullness
Adopt oblivion like the calls of a life coach
Take up the position of the broken butterfly
Who flutters by as if to say what you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you

But once you start down that path you’re locked in
For you must insist upon insensibility not only to your own pain
But also to that of everybody else
Because contrary to popular nihilistic belief
It hurts when you see somebody suffer
So as quickly as you can
Before they twist the wheel another notch
Cry pineapple pineapple pineapple

A big tiger swallowtail its right wing mutilated
As if a bite had taken away the teardrop process
That gives the bug its name and plenty more
And yet it moved across the flowers with apparent unconcern
As if what you don’t know can’t hurt you

Is this butterfly less beautiful than its kin
Will it be less successful at attracting a mate
Still it pursues its useful business
But does calamity trouble in silence its airborne memory
Even an insect avoids threat and thus expresses its will to life

And thus the dread terror for a child
Born insensible to pain
And do people on the ground know their damages
And therefore adopt the futile routines of endless healing
Or deny them with phantom compensation