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

In the acolyte of medias res
All is toujours a comfortable même chose
Punctuated by occasional shudders
Rarely of recognition most often of surprise

It took centuries to make Copernicus cozy
And the scopes and the ships accustomed the bourgeoisie
To things just out of sight animalcules and satellites and tempting wealth
Until we felt at home in the arms of the Milky Way

And now the multiverse is never enough
Hemming us in with the edge
Of our local singularity
A glass cage of emotion

And we break the surly bonds with crummy rocket science
And leap about on crummy moon crummy Mars
And create ever more impressive telephones
And wonder why blurred-out mothers die of thirst

Must ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny
Here is no sonnet no trepanation
Until a short strand of DNA with lipoprotein sheath
Or loads of good old carbon 12 do us in

I’m on the upswing after a week in the dumps
A couple of cups of coffee though I’m trying to cut back
At least it’s not the 70s
With their stimulants and depressives galore
So I’m not consumed with grief for your departure
Which was quite a while back anyway
But maybe a little manic with the memory
That you poked up through the leaf litter
Those several rainy autumns ago

I wouldn’t mind a little toke of weed just now
Though forbidden by doctors family members
And my own censorious superself
To feel again the timefree drift
The mild spice of paranoia
So suitable for long improvisational jams on summers’ eves
The musty taste of arid lands
The fumy touch that scrapes against the throat
Girls ungirded in granny dresses
And borrow again the wayward boon of silliness

But here in this puritan land
You must work to display your electedness
Which means the requirement to own
A load of consumer products
Calculated to allay and compound labor save time
And create entertainment value
But also you must succeed in productivity
Lest you merit the fatal note needs improvement
And all your family and friends stressed to death
By attainment expectation and the commandment
Of a happy face

That’s enough
I will not reach your presence on curls of rasta smoke
And no effort of mine will carry out your return
But still I see though you are gone
The place beneath that magnolia tree
That drops its heavy leaves the year around
That accumulate in dark ungainly strata wet and unappealing
Beneath the sound of wind chimes and silvery metronomes
Where your tender fingers small and bluey green
Drove themselves through the weight above
And in the shadow of the tree shined uncannily
I saw them for a day or two and took a photograph

You rose from darkness into fleeting light
From where life thrives in density undreamed of
The visible and the microscopic
The detritivores your sister molds and the plants
That carry life and food in virtuous cycle
Thou wast not born for death immortal organism
Though we might say that death was born for thee
I witnessed your efflorescence through two sunsets
And neither before nor since

And Whitman was too modest for he contains
Not multitudes but infinities
And thus one cannot claim a greater largeness
For as you brief flower sprang from the spores
And gave them back
So we together bore our birthing in the stars
We do not sleep much less forget you and I
But with the brilliant stain of memory fly
And add our sighing note
To the one imperishable great song

The past the serial songsing and suddenly
The neutrino cloudburst that replenishes
The blasted heath with its geezer
Sedate under starry welkin
For pastoral Chloris and her beau
That refocuses without clemency or pause
The annoying claw absences mostly
Deflations and skurs in what you would expect
Redox reactions that never look back
Predictions and topographical broadsides
The great wheel that opens the ceiling
To the lethal and lifegiving lightning promethean apparatus
That drags at length its slow length along
A road where potholes are repaired and later repaired again
But still the trickling rivulet scampers along
With its purling innuendos
Adverbs and punctuation straight out of commas
Though no tears hung and certainly none fell
The keynote speaker haltingly waxed all non-fiction prosy
And shared her struggle with the celebrated 12-step program
With a family member she suspected of neurodivergence
With the attention paid to idiom at the expense of genre
And darkly with an incarceration that she strongly hinted
Had been a miscarriage
My struggle has been immense she noted keywise
You can’t erase the blooming conventional wisdom
The reckless punditry the scar
School supplies and candy faced with fentanyl
And how many have enlisted in this influential mission
Well you probably can but probably shouldn’t
And don’t claim you don’t know any better
You’ve read the news today O boy
As promulgated in the obsequious jugs and jars
In the barbershop and the church in the wildwood
And God help us all
Do you feel lucky punk
In the pulsating blue wave
Seen for the first time in a unique aerial view
The herky-jerky plather blue jeans and table cloths
Of the top 40 the bottom 40 and the medium 102
And the big new rebooted Utilitarian Monster with bold new aggressive styling
Represents an historic milestone in rugged non sequitur
Frozen TV dinners for cats and dogs
Because nobody dresses up or sends postcards any more
That’s not how I was raised screamed the legislator
You never were raised counterscreamed the kid behind the counter
Apparelled in the jerkin of a squire
The youth can’t pay attention for 30 seconds running
But they do get in some good zingers
And then there’s the cadre of sentimental fools
Who can’t or won’t let go the garlands
Of colony class and church
The harlot with a heart of gold
The melancholy Dane
The resourceful castaway
The children who escape with derring-do
The suicide adultress
The poor but honest plowboy later to become a hero in the war
As visible in our unique aerial perspective
A six-year old appearing at Walmart in his tee-ball uniform and spikes
The portrait bluing with age of a bespectacled girl
Studious in saddle oxfords and plaid skirt
Next to that of a handsome sweatered couple and their labradoodle
Proficient in the outdoorsy shibboleth
And here is fruit and bread and seven kinds of cheese
And a toddler who builds a metropolis of Duplos
And an old woman stumped at how to dispose of a lifetime of books
And a child working her fingers around the neck of a guitar
And a guy in his 40s trying to rebuild
After a decade and a half in the sales force
And a high school kid soon to graduate
Fussing over the documentation
Worried that the extra-currics might not suffice
Not quite sure how to annotate some of the categories
And the autobiographical narrative fuggetabout
Vaguely familiar with hideous ruin and combustion
And what of the naked mole rats
Who can’t get no satisfaction
Their penile form and subterranean habit
Spending their darkling lives down there
Seeking out the lush labia by their aroma
Among the roots and rhizomes and geological paraphernalia
We need more data you can hear them cry
Ask your doctor if it’s right for you
From your unique aerial vantage
And when you finally clamp down on terra firma
Do us all a big favor
Amble down beside the limpid pool and all its sweets
Where Laura lingered
Whisper to the maid amid her lambs
That the world has changed
That the earth has undergone
A revolution

Somehow the luxurious summer’s green
Conceals the red and gold that will emerge
Only as the days grow shorter and the green subsides
And night expresses its essential dominion

Is death beautiful
Is the world all things considered good
The red and gold are death’s harbingers death’s fools
The gray of death a neutral party albeit a powerful one

The emptiness that lets me fill the cup
The emptiness that lets me see a thousand trees
Overfull of a green oneness
The emptiness that lets me turn the page

And yet this world composed mostly of blank emptiness
Contains enough of force enough of will
To cause the leaves to flutter and twist
When they fall unresistingly to earth

Maturation is such an ongoing process
It beggars awareness
A particular tomato took forever to ripen
Which is this context means over a month

And when it did come into the roseate fullness of itself
It rose overfull in the rain and the heat
And divided in striae the easy confines
Of the peel encapsulating the gelatinous interior

The ambiguity of passage and closure
In the temperate zones of daily life
Which characterize the fragments of nature
The fissures into which to gain admittance

The tug of animism
Especially in relation to our devices
So biomorphic in their fecundity
So anthropomorphic in their responsiveness

More responsive than some people we know
Who though encapsulated for reasons of survival
In the rutted root of their neural pathways
Can but only sometimes do split open the rind of habit

And thus wontedly react to the world
As a congeries of fracturing or integrating forces
And not as the comely vessel
About to burst wide and yield its treasures

She answered with such an answer
As Miss America might give
I can’t take the stress
Every whisker defines a country
Every eyelash a continent
And all the whispering placebos unite
To promulgate the dream of yesteryear’s snow

The winsome among the sages
The feminine lore of healing and textile
And retail politics on the Avenue of the Umbrellas
Resplendent in their variegated hues
That under normal circumspections
Would have withered shelled and derided
The romance of la cosa nostra and the ruling junta
But here all is repealed
All is maternal

Do you remember the president Nixon
His mother who was a saint
His wife who wore a cloth coat
His faithful dog who stuck by him when the going got rough
His daughter who married a president’s son
His other daughter who married that other guy
All passed awry like the thawing slush

He answered with such an answer
As a guy ready to be crazy might give
Top off the tank before hitting the highway
Note the code of the Emergency Broadcast System
Stock up on the beverages the red and the blue
Why is she so concerted about hair and nails
Rotate out the ephemeral procedures

They who are doomed to repeat our errors
Sins of the fathers
Despite our decrepit hearing our pitiable knees
But of course we can only act upon what we know
And what we know best are those knotted formulae
That have stood the test of time
That have gathered their rosebuds
And made hay while the sun shines
That seized the day so many long years ago

The ayes have it no more cakes and ale
No more dirty jokes while standing at the urinal
No more urinals in the ladies’ room
No more miniskirts
No more bell bottoms
No more nehru collars
No more paisley
No more love beads
No more peace symbols
No more ankhs
No more painting of any part of the body
No more electric guitars
No more saxophones
No more bongos tambourines or those pieces of wood that go tick tick tick tick tick
No more beats
No more MTV
No more top 40
No more comic books
No more video games
No more pop culture
No more globes
No more science
No more reference books
No more geography geometry or algebra
No more French
No more heathen perversions
No more drag at patriotic celebrations
No more energy efficiency
No more sustainability
No more coral reefs
No more jungle
No more orangutans pandas or polar bears
No more fish birds or bugs you never heard of
No more unnatural acts
No more getting high by any method
No more rights except those of states smokers and husbands
No more sex except procreative with the lights off & in the missionary position
No more graven images except on coinage marked In God We Trust
No more taxation except of persons to be designated
No more flags except the stars and stripes
No more limitations upon the display of the stars and bars
No more limitations upon the display of the coiled snake not to be trodden upon
No more limitations on the display of Judeo-Christian culture and heritage
No more employment of objects implements or instruments otherwise than in the use for which they were intended
No more nonconformity
No more noncompliance
No more noncombatants
No more disobedience
No more delinquency juvenile or otherwise
No more insubordination
No more dereliction of duty
No more conscientious objection
No more drag at the public library
No more public library
No more public broadcasting
No more public accommodations
No more public displays of affection
No more public opinion
No more post office
No more regulatory agencies
No more regulations
No more due process
No more presumption of innocence
No more trial by jury
No more habeas corpus
No more inspections of meat fruits vegetables motor vehicles or carnival rides
No more interpretation of historical fact
No more interpretation of holy scripture
No more interpretation of movies television or live performances
No more live performances
No more interpretation of the second amendment to the US Constitution
No more abrogation of any oath or contract for any reason
No more naked pictures
No more idle hands
No more lazy bums
No more fiction poetry or drama
No more criticism
No more debate
No more investigative journalism
No more newfangled notions
No more sins violations misbehaviors transgressions trespasses vices or faults
No more foolishness
No more excuses
No more drag in the presence of those under 21 years of age
No more addiction obesity or mental illness
No more pronouns
No more privacy
No more democrat party
No more art for art’s sake
No more familiar address
No more tattoos
No more lovers’ lanes
No more sexual deviation
No more sexual orientation
No more sexual innuendo
No more sexual frustration
No more sexual anxiety
No more sex education
No more sex therapy
No more references to sex
No more impure thoughts
No more casting of one’s seed into the dust
No more activity on the sabbath
No more organ harvesting
No more stem cells
No more confusion of men’s and women’s clothing
No more short hair on women
No more long hair on men
No more theory of evolution
No more critical race theory
No more theory of relativity
No more color theory
No more music theory
No more theaters saloons motels or gambling dens
No more displays of wealth
No more displays of poverty
No more displays of distinction
No more diversity equity or inclusion
No more denial of miraculous cures
No more spicy food
No more losers
No more failures
No more sob stories
No more bleeding hearts
No more dirty diapers
No more free lunches
No more acceptance of anything less than excellence
No more toleration of namby-pamby shilly-shally pussy-footing
No more communism vegetarianism feminism secularism activism relativism historicism socialism autism naturism disestablishmentarianism pacifism defeatism internationalism satanism pantheism atheism or unitarianism
No more tree-hugging
No more cooperation
No more Mr Niceguy
No more mercy
No more women’s liberation
No more gay liberation
No more animal liberation
No more foreign customs
No more foreign goods
No more foreign people
No more taking kindly to strangers
No more popish knavery
No more anti-Catholic speech or sentiment
No more terms of endearment
No more expressions of fondness
No more expressions of desire
No more expressions of fear
No more expressions of boredom
No more expressions of feeling
No more expressions of dissatisfaction
No more expressions of pessimism
No more expressions of optimism
No more expressions of solidarity
No more solidarity
No more expressions of recognition for any prohibited object or action
No more expressions of approval for modern times
No more expressions of disapproval for modern times
No more expressions of pleasure in the tricks and pranks of my cat Jeffrey
No more suggestions that the good old days were anything other than good
No more insinuations that the trains are not running on time
No more purely decorative details
No more petitions for redress of grievances
No more grievances
No more questions
No more requests
No more disagreements
No more denunciations
No more complaints
No more society
No more wry observations of current events
No more tired poor or huddled masses
No more persons standing or sitting upon themselves
No more doing anything nice for anybody except in exchange for cash

On the other hand there’s a feeling of freedom
In having nothing to say
To which the unsympathetic critic replies
Must you impose your freedom on the world
Well yes we must
Note the plural
White cake with pink frosting
Or yellow cake with chocolate frosting
Or chocolate cake with pecan frosting
Or bundt cake with a sort of drippy glaze
Or avocado on toast
You know like the kids

You see it never occurs to me
To use words like purity
Or correct or efficient or effective
A big big butterfly so dark
Almost black
Alit upon a sunflower
Slowly opening and closing its wings

I’m not Pollyanna
Of course it’s not all sweetness and light
An unpredictable distribution of pleasure and pain

But it needn’t be heavy or pointed or bringdownish
And there’s pleasure to be found in tragedy and comedy
In confession and bemused observation
In monuments of unaging intellect and day-old bread
In rowdy guffaws and mirthless chuckles
In female cardinals and plastic figures of Boba Fett
In tears of sorrow and tears of joy
In draildrig shir pmisti effrent
In tender sentiment and righteous jeremiad
In lazy Sunday and back-to-work Monday
It’s super easy to find pleasure
Even in the town where everybody thinks pleasure is bad
Or they think that’s what they should think

The prismatic sunlight through your eyelashes
This much persists surely
The powerlines that swoop along the railroad tracks
The many varieties of threshold
In the overwhelming diversity of buildings
Each to its purpose each concealing secrets
Behind the doors made to be closed

Every barrier is an image unto itself
Every loss a compensation
Not necessarily equitable
Some doors require authorized personnel
And authorization is hard to come by
Nevertheless sunlight opens the carnival of colors
Even when you’re too distracted to notice

When I was a child I was happy to play alone
And happier still in the company of others
Either way was fine by me
There was always something to engage with
In the visual auditory or social field
And even now I’m rarely bored
Though the nameless hours fill with fear

And the faceless future fills with dread
And everywhere I look is beauty
In the colorful forms of our plastic age
Green and red and golden orange fields
And somewhere to the side
Just out of view
The vacancy threatens to intrude

Somebody says something
This is why poets themselves say they dislike it
Not all poets of course but it’s been said
I’m sorry
I actually apologize for poetry
Which the Houyhnhnms would no doubt dismiss as an elaborate procedure for saying the thing that is not
Though the manifest truth obtains
That somebody says something
But oh these indefinite pronouns
Okay somebody could be anybody
And we might even say albeit with somewhat less confidence
That something could be anything
But I just don’t know what it means to say something
I mean there’s something and there’s saying
But there’s something weird about saying something
Okay
Somebody cracks
No wait
I crack a nut
So this nut is a thing that receives my action of cracking
I can perform all sorts of actions upon this nut
But what is the nut that I say
Somebody says a nut
Just no
I know I’m sorry
This must be just me and not poetry
Surely nobody could be that stupid
You probably think it’s just a pose
That I’m feigning ignorance
And I think you’re probably right
I might well have employed this problem or neurosis or whatever
As a method
Now I could get heavier pointeder bringdownisher
I think I will
Humpty-Dumpty is not merely wrong in his definition of glory
But wrong in the particular way of arrogant bastardy
And Lewis Carroll surely knew this in his satirical irony
Being of the devil’s party probably quite consciously
For the pompous fragile ovoid is such an apt figure
If only Tenniel had tinted it orange
Similarly the expression Confederate Air Force
Is no innocent absurdity
But expresses the wish that the Confederacy
And its armed forces had persisted
Into the age of aviation and beyond
So poetry does not state much much less claim
But expresses value
But since value dwells in objects
Poetry expresses evaluation
Or more precisely transvaluation
Therefore
Since I’m completely at sea with saying something
And since I seriously doubt that you can say nothing
Except perhaps nas corbort greg pmisti effrent
I just say

A concert took place in Severance Hall
The moldering edifice since renamed Hall Hall
And some ruby conjunction was established
Between the nascent jurisprudence
Of countries far distant in place and time
And the fans with their pennants and caps and merch
Calculated to forestall the virtus dormitiva
Sister Mercy hawked upir stimulating jams and jellies without
In strategic alliance and seeming-meretricious folderol
And bitter melodies circulated
Redolent of the mushrooms and butterflies
Of an alien cuisine
The apotheosis of the minor second

Get your cornflakes r r-r r-r

Even the slate of a neonate
Having swayed with the gait
Of the heavy stick-to-itive mother
And heard her proleptic crooning
Is not entirely blank and by two and a half they’re singing
Lmnop together
A threnody of throbbing thrum
And the single senator that makes up the 2nd amendment
For example
Means one thing to one guy and something entirely difficult
To those charged with interpreting it

Skiffs glide upon the windy river
Aircraft pierce the hardy cloud
The carpool line creeps after its unassuming fashion

Like the ones who came up during Korea
Liked to play it cool like flatted fifths
But the Viet Nam kids
Favored dayglo heat
Passacaglia in the blacklight pastoral
The costume confers the super power

And so to the green pills
Described for the fulsome illness that it was discovered
Responds somewhat optimally to the little green pill
A time-release capsule really
And the reckoners of cultural decay
Stand upon ceremony as they have immemorially done
Something to do with the immortality of the soul
I’m quite careful of stigmatizing myself thank you

Where have all the madcap zanies gone

Am I inoculated against decadence
If I proclaim my own decadence

Must I ask a rhetorical question
Or must I ask
Canned foods tout the level of mercury within
What they think this is some kind of
Two-neutrino double beta decay
The advertisements on the taxi cabs
Having been replaced by the lack
Of advertisements on the gig drivers
But the slippered emperor still shills
For nighty-night beddy-bye protective devices
Guaranteed to secure your drowsy numbness

The aspiration of an upper middle-class male
Merely to remain upper middle-class
Like a rosicrucian mystery
Understood it seemed by everybody but himself
The sunrise exercise the fashion imperatives
Knowledge captured in the main
But deficient at the critical periphery
Or so he felt and was aware fitfully and in doses
Epistemic homeopathy
The great barrier being the masculine code of silence
The rule that all is competence all is consensus
What everybody knows everybody can
As to brand quantity currency use and value
Consumer products mostly
And play it off above all
Play it off
Casual
Everything falls into place
Betray to no person the roiling anxiety
Occasioned by career education and above all sexual behavior
He accepted the mandates
But his execution of them lacked authority
Or so he felt
Sure he was straight
And he knew that he was required
To woo and win a woman
At least one although maybe more than one
And he feared
That all around him knew
Or any of them or at least one of them
Had observed the slippage of his faith
In the preeminent doctrine
That you can get anything if you want it badly enough
And if you don’t get what you want
You didn’t want it badly enough
And he feared
That he did not want anything that badly

It’s a bit like generalizing about biological kingdoms
Plants are like this animals that
Ignoring the impossible diversity of paramecium and giraffe
Presumably every culture every language has it
But it’s one of those concepts that elude general definition
And distinctions exclude
But the byproducts of inclusiveness
Include some loose and extensive catalogs
I see no reason to exclude for example
Words set to music
A category to which belong the cheesiest pop tune and the Ode to Joy
And so our question must be
Not what is not poetry
But what is
Nor should we be deflected by the question of quality
None more boring than
Is it art
So to make our church as broad as possible
Something made out of sound is music
Something made out of volume is sculpture
Something made out of color and line
Though these might be unrecognizably muted is painting
And we don’t seek likeness in music
Nor necessarily in painting or sculpture
And something made out of language is poetry
None of the arts need refer
To the actual facts of existence as we know them
And certainly it happens every day
That things get pleasantly muddled
Hence novels are narrative poetry
And plays are dramatic poetry
Regardless of whether they employ the armamentarium
Of inherited convention
And jejune graffiti Kevin loves Alyssa loves Kevin
And in one circumstance music
Is handmaiden to the fine art of dance
Something made out of movement
And sculpture serves the interest of architecture noblest of arts
And though we need not beg just yet
The judgments of taste
We might as well acknowledge
That all poems all works of art
Are made by humans
Mean fallible humans
And no other pleasures match those that nature makes
Sex and clouds
Infants and ditch flowers
Oceans and rocky crags
Predators and herds that graze
Plants that reach the sky or hug the ground
The lovable little recyclers
The splendid array of teasing stars
Nature is completeness all in perfect decorum
We take delight too in the things made by human hands
But the various artforms are subject
To various defects and thus
Poetry tends to be pedantic didactic stilted arrogant and obscure
Not to mention adjectivally insistent
But one particular provision covers a multitude of sins
Namely that announced by saintly Oscar
Namely the provision that all art is useless
And language is the most useful
Of human endowments
Inconceivably the technology by nature made
Hence among its other odious characteristics
Poetry in which things are made out of language
Always tends toward the misuse of language
If we restrict the proper use of language to reference alone
And fal drairdrig pmisti effrent
And yet poetry is among the most innocent
And therefore the most dangerous
Of achievements
And thus like other innocent and dangerous
And therefore thrilling feats
To which humans are addicted
Especially those that imitate nature
In her generative operation
Poetry gives pleasure
And there’s an end to it

It’s easy to be hilarious if you start with say Stimpy
The kind of guy who’s not afraid of being stupid
Who’s completely at peace with letting Ren
Slap him ‘til his face twists and call him a worm
And we euphemize these lowlife scumbags and perpetuate them
As a fat cat and a chihuahua you can do that with drawings
Or as Ren would say with Puppets and Stew Meat
Though they speak with the voices of Larry Fine and Peter Lorre
And we presumably cherish respect
For even the lowly and the scummy in the human community
But laugh our asses off when a mandrill in a flash of incorrigible speed
Strips Ren to a skeleton with beating heart and heaving lungs
And we secretly wish a little bit
With a silent but deadly wish
That such things would happen to people we know