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But here all is repealed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

How can people be so honest with each other
And so dishonest with themselves
Our artificial renditions rarely rise to this occasion
The dramaturg’s frantic pleading cannot obscure the fact
That the scene always has a telos
As it always tends in a particular direction
And this very tendentiousness is what we want
We want it all to add up more or less
To gratify roughly what we expect
Why would you ever seek out the unedited transcript
Even the deeply conflicted one
Of an ordinary conversation with the ordinary function
Of mundane interaction
Dad’s description for example of the vicious traffic jam
While he speeds unimpeded through the green lights
Lying more committedly to Dad than to Mom and the kids
Who no doubt harbor their suspicions
Of course some wide-eyed sampler from the avant-garde
Might do just that to showcase its own perversity
Fob off a surreptitious recording as a measure of everyday life
But a critical mass was achieved a while back
When not only did horror rise to unimaginable dimension
But the transmission especially of images
Became unimaginably pervasive
And nobody gives a shit any more about the perversity of a hipster
The transgressions of a servant
In the livery of Ray-Bans sculpted beard and special hat
The twentieth century is so dead
But the horror persists
And we tell ourselves that it does not
That some savior religious political cultural economic or technological
Has redeemed us
And new horrors accumulate
And in every room of every dwelling
People cannot refrain from expressing
All their strenuous efforts to the contrary notwithstanding
Their frustration their boredom their anguish their disdain and their dread
Despite their halfhearted wish to deceive their nearest and dearest
To convince them that everything’s fine
And yet they persevere in the fool’s errand of attempting
To deceive themselves
And miracle of the age
They often succeed

Okay I’ll tighten up on that too

A sea bird here in the piedmont
A good two hundred miles from the coast
Or at least some sandpiperish thing
I’ve never seen before around here
Long legs and prominent narrow beak
I thought at first it might be a roadrunner
Visiting from the desert
Whitman called a mockingbird
A visitor from Alabama
But that was the nineteenth century
When nature still spoke

The carpenter bees have supplanted the honey bees
All bees are industrious but those give no sweetness
And should be called excavators not carpenters
For they build not but only drill down
It’s not their fault
That they love porches

And was this a factor that contributed
To the nauseous vertigo
Or maybe just the inevitable consequence
Of absence from the training session
A toe box a risk assessment a prosthesis

The beauty of the cardinal
Red tinged with gray
A sex attractant

And the little subdivisions barbing off the main drag
With their similar logos and similar-sounding names
Compounded of a limited pool
Of coves glens chases woods closes meres dales groves squares and harbors
Again the nearest real harbor hundreds of miles aloof
And squares are shopping centers
I even saw a loch once in the deep south

And you really shouldn’t drive
With your head in such a spin
Or any spin at all
Watch out for the deer
That inhabit these suburbs
That leap so gracefully over the fence
And onto the road

Somebody’s horn at a stately
Fifty beats per minute
Until they find the fob apparently find the button
To shut it off
And the execrable two-stroke leaf blower
Audible even with the air conditioning on

Yes but the visibility is good
With only a little haze
If only there were some distinguishing features
The bird had a ring around its neck
If that helps

The telephone in my hotel room rang
It was the Czar calling
Apparently following up on the emissary
Who met with me some time earlier
To provide me with the report I had already published
Causing me to wonder the intent
Behind that superfluous action
The Czar expressed profuse gratitude
For the service I had rendered him
Though I could recall no such service
And he insisted that I pay him a visit
At the palace in St. Petersburg
I immediately wondered
Who’s going to pay for this visit
And as if simultaneously anticipating
And evading the question
The Czar assured me
That I would be well accommodated at his abode
Scrupulously avoiding mention of
The travel expenses that appeared to have become
My responsibility
Two can play that game I thought
And I in turn assured the Czar
That he would get my answer
As soon as my business in this city
Not my home was completed
Though I did not doubt
That having tracked me down on this occasion
The Czar would not fail to do so again

She thought perhaps he had lost his mind
And was crawling on all fours in the dark
And we commit to an interpretation
Before we have all the facts
And how would you even know
That you have all the facts
And so she lay there in silent terror
Not for herself although the thought occurred
That the madman might prove violent
But oh that great mind o’erthown
And where did that come from
And he was pretty smart but not
Superlative in intelligence
And why the past tense since she was still not sure
But she had committed her life
To another’s life
They had shared a life together
Not that it had been all candlelight and candy canes
But sooner or later one of them would depart
Physically or as is this case mentally
And actuarially you know men
I found them he shouted in gleeful relief

He’s such a competitor always out there
Except when he’s hurt but even when
Such a complex mix of the concrete and the abstract
Arises or presumably already rests within or around
As for example an economy of attention of desire the profit motive
Which must strive for equilibrium or surplus
With the needs wants whims fancies
Sometimes spontaneous but usually stimulated
After immense research and programmatic anticipation
The spectrograph the paint chips and the floor samples
Trying to invent a light without a source of light
Not that internet crap but the establishment
Of real cause or rather since cause must remain indeterminate
As for example in/is the freeplay of the
Theory of choice theory of society theory of I’m trying to use the phone
The binary opposition of the binary and the non-binary
Don’t ever tell me the odds we are men of action
As for example can fall off a horse and dance a little
As for example illustration and obscenity
As of iron-clad correlation and character was never destiny
As of the rock-solid contender
And reduced therefore to the coin of the realm
As for example the players are the equipment
Or you can’t fool me there’s one born every minute
And the state lurches from crisis to crisis
And it all started with we’re looking for people with a passion for
It all started with be all that you can be
It all started on a dark and stormy night
It all started with footprints in the sands of time
It all started with imagine a world
It all started with piggybacking on what they said
It all started with a stepping stone
It all started with a slippery slope
It’s the very picture of a picture perfect pretty picture
And I’d like to get those numbers down
Or up or whatever
And you can or can’t pick winners and losers

A great beauty
An excellent dancer
Slim and full of grace
Capable of quick recall

Recollections slower now
Surrounded by love
Surrounded by something lost

Romeo and Juliet is better than mediocre

Three jolly jousting engineers
Friends from their youth
At the somewhat prestigious institute of technology
One tall the other two of average height
Each one puer aeternus
Having committed to a life of fun
Their profession routine enough
Not to require too much attention or application
Each family under the care of a first or second wife
They had invested their time early
In calculus and lab sciences
So they pretty much knew stuff
Unknown to the masses or even to the experts
And secretly they shared the belief
That they had it all over Einstein Obama and say Jefferson
Careers to support innocent amusements
As operating motorized vehicles
Rapidly over water or dry land
Consuming tumblers of bourbon over ice
Competitions involving modest exertion
Or inflicting upon each other the small pain
Of being messed with pranked and ranked
The rituals of homosociality
Proud of their neurotypicality
And indeed of their neurosuperiority
Though they would not have so phrased it
They were aware and they approved of the fact
That they were favored
In wealth social class complexion gender and achievement
Not unduly concerned about thinning hair
About bellies that fell over belts a bit
About chronic conditions easily controlled with medication
They didn’t care about politics
Except insofar as they
Who contributed
Did not enjoy taxation
To support a government of takers
And though they were not vigorous
In their exercise of the franchise
They endorsed those candidates for office
Who said aloud what everybody was thinking
Everybody who mattered
Everybody they themselves knew
And they cherished no intention these merry knights
Of relinquishing their pleasures
To the benefit of the slothful underprivileged

The purling ripples of melisma disturb the familiar lyrics
The stark theorems of the constellations
The crazy sequels of photosynthesis and manufacture
The latent tension that generates arguments
Regularly to chastise human arrogance
As arbitrary or superfluous
Shall we complain or refrain from complaining
That we’re not tuned in

A crab in its burrow shoots little bubbles
Out through the narrow aperture
An alligator cradling on the surface
Emits too a stream of bubbles
Impressive in their regularity
A strand of pearls piercing the glimmering duckweed
Universes might rise like ebullient foam
Adding their numbers to the rolls of infinity
While galaxies within exhausted collapse

Where’s the chaos where’s the savagery
In what gloom-slaked cell rages the lunatic
Up close the rough abstract expressionist gestures
A step back and the water lilies come into view
Another step back and the violence of plunder and transaction
And creeping like snail and sighing like furnace
And bearded like the pard
All furnished all in arms
All scripted all set

The signs that give warning or information
That announce sales or lost pets
The sumptuous eddies of smoke from a cigarette
Or the promise of passage to mystic lands
The issuance of commands just or unjust
The harbingers of nectarean spring
Or the gentle arrival of balletic autumn en pointe
The princess swaddled in Byzantine finery
Or the soccer player pulling off her jersey
The audible itinerary to death dark dry and cold
Or the grim wet past repeatable or not

It was all Virgil
Of course there were other ingredients
It wasn’t one of those made-with-real-chocolate deals
Like a few milligrams
Here was the heroic effort
Of transposing all the gravitas
All the supine virtuosity
All the instantiation of a noble theme
Into the key of a doctrinal purity
More regimental than even that of the pontifex
The more imposing for its insult
To the hard-won intellectual achievement
Of for example the Tuscan artist
That bursts into the light of day
And yet the cunning little mammals
Scurrying through the crepuscular understory
Persisted in their program of harrying
Eden’s empire’s megafauna

They looked it up
The fragrant places on the calendar
Scented with rosemary
Tinct with cinnamon
Charged with sage
Rank with fermentation
Or peppered with peppermint
As with sapphire amethyst ruby topaz or diamond
But also those arid stooks of wish
Wherein the factory line
Added BHT to the as-yet empty packaging
And online ordering seemed to correlate
With the lustrous unstocked shelves
Whose voices activated the middle air
Though you never meet them in person
And wonder do all dualities collapse
Smoking or non-smoking
Paper or plastic
Pass or fail
Silence or dialogue
Light or heavy
Sickness or health
Resistance or resignation

Hours passing time to distract from
The inner pangs of a tremble
And the possibility of delivering the baby at term
Exercise resilience toward the political grist
A cat trots across the road its tail aloft
Tinsel shines
The dapper salesman suitcase full of samples
Stops in at a bicycle shop a corner bar
The bar at the corner of the terrace houses

Would you like a pie
Would you care to wait at the bar
Play a double play six-four-three
Play guess the sex of a cardinal
Awaken on the ocean
Dial the panic back to resentment
The cardboard gangster white tie pinstripe suit
That group of guys who get laughs
By inflicting pain on one another

The upsetting fact that a particular thrush
Native to America is neither a robin nor a redbreast
But why not call it a robin
It’s not like anybody’s going to confuse it
With the British species so designated
No doubt the brutal colonists who named it suffered nostalgia
For their own native land and its songbirds

Some things come into being just by naming them
Thus a strand of hair or a cigarette butt becomes a clue
Or when the sovereign dubs some schmo a knight
This is particularly true of mental processes
The hackneyed light bulb of a new idea
The premonition occasioned by
The robin’s ominous caroling

Apply liberally to the affected area
Was ever my motto
The fly in the urinal
The ferrule securing the eraser
Small objects of smallness
Never had much to teach me
But I liked how the mythic river
Twisted and turned more than any river could
And hated the reduction of myth to mundane causes

Gratitude
For plenitude
And what’s a little brain damage among friends
And they must be possessed by gods or demons
These poets
To say nothing of the fiddlers and guitar players
And the women who throw pots
It held little of what the future would call value
If there ever was a devil without any horns
Must have been a furniture man

The sage decreed we must tend our garden
Bourgeois fuck
I say go to Kroger and steal a tomato
Take two pieces of bread
And several thick slices of cheddar
Melt a bunch of butter in a pan
Eat a hot grilled cheese and tomato sandwich
Where the cheese is all melty
And the tomato still holds some cold
That’s what we must
Not that there’s anything wrong with growing tomatoes
Which probably turn out better
Than the ones at Kroger
You’ll probably want to chill it the fridge
I’m a bourgeois fuck too

A griffin was never a psittacosaurus
A minotaur was never a thing
Although the one in Picasso sipping a martini was pretty cool
So don’t lose sleep over
Whether the front half or the back was bull
I imagine grabbing the tail
Of subterranean Pegasus
Furiously plowing under the St Johns riverbed
While tout-Jacksonville wonders at the source
Of that terrifying thrum

My contemplations have ceased their gentleness
My thoughts have turned instead to roughness
The end of the century came and went
And left behind the turbid multitude
Of which I am a part
And all their venal motivations
All those smarmy smokes
All those vehement vapors
Of course lovely people still exist
And beauty still invests the trembling planet
But the blinding competition
Of salt against bitter sweet against sour
And some wiseacre don’t forget about umami
So evidently a new age has commenced
I am not alone nor crowded into silence
And thus how selfish of me to be ill at ease
Haploid The Dysthymic Quadruped
Balancing unevenly on splintering hooves
Though I try to conceal my symptoms from the world
With byzantine syntax and recherché epithet
And nary a semicolon to be found
But as Wilde intuited a mask
Only works to amplify the truth
And I feel shame both for the impulse to disguise
And for its manifest failure

I don’t understand what people mean by rights
To petition for the redress of grievances for example
Nor do I understand this compulsion to express oneself
Which seems mostly animal exigency
The supposed necessity of success which amounts to
Survival in a hostile environment
And though many factors contribute
One source perhaps of the reflexive biomorphic artifact
Not touched upon in the office of emergency preparedness
Pain is nothing more than a neurological signal
And anxiety a hormonal response to threat
And perception has grown more sensitive
Because technologically enhanced
Even as threat has grown more grave
And who therefore can register objectively
The gravity of a threat

You’d be a fool not to be afraid
Given the facts
But perspective is out of reach
Information as hegemon
We fear the known not the unknown
Or more precisely what we think we know
What we think we should expect
What we imagine
And the light in the darkness
Might be a fucking tiger
Especially for one suckled
In the outworn creed of faith and good works
Total responsibility for one’s own fallenness
Work your way from damnation to salvation
And the capital crime is indolence
A modern distortion
Of a medieval distortion
Of an iron-age distortion
Of bronze-age ignorance
The sorceries of agriculture and metallurgy
Therefore anxiety already implies courage
A refusal of cold dry fatality
And though my neocortex sends messages of exculpation
And my rational understanding extenuates
The reflexes of fight and flight are not listening
And since I regret more the world’s response
To my depravity than the harmful effect of it
I worry that people might think that I am exactly as I am
A baseline therefore exists that I take to be insoluble
As I have learned never to expect a transfiguration
In the outward show of dread
Through joy or commitment or altruism or any other affect
Hence my contrition is imperfect
And better termed shame than guilt
And hence I forbid myself the relief of exaltation
For the inherent taint of self-congratulation

Pithy warm concise expressions of affection
I’ve got ‘em but they are having technical issues
Due to circumstances beyond our control
The straw snap
The ivy chaplet
The irretrievable grove

Threats are amplified by our technology
Enlargement without discrimination of truth or noise
And the overt threats nobody worries about
There must be something more secret more exciting
More worthy of our indignation
The influencers those mythic beings
The sophisticated ones have grown weary of shame
Sophisticated in their awkwardness
Divergence being the new opposition
Silence swathed in sound the new critique
Knowing glances and stark reminders
Everybody knows or else should know

I don’t run away from fear
But dwell with it as with a roommate
And bruit it abroad
Gone are the days if they existed when horror
Did not progress across the county line
Nor do I look back upon some golden age of security
I feared airplanes during the cold war
I feared getting busted during the 70s
Of sex drugs and rock and roll
I feared failure when in the 80s
I went back to school
I feared retributive justice in the 90s
When I went to work and only outcomes mattered
And now it seems I fear the random detritus
Of a culture of fear
Of people armed against fear
Of people armed against people armed against fear
Of those grown wealthy
By the inducement of fear
And oh how I resent their wealth
And I hate myself as a patsy
Much of what I here refer to as fear is a kind of pre-grief
For the suffering that must befall those I love
For a generation twisted and exploited by lies
For a beautiful planet heedlessly harmed
But plenty of more immediate dread remains
I fear the state of my health
I fear that these pages will prove a failure
Though I don’t know what success in poetry would look like
Probably not confessional expression of the paltry self
And I fear beloved that you will cease
Through my fault to love me