True fact
They will embark upon a ship
All the dying mortals
The fallible humans
Ride upon E Ponce De Leon through Dekalb County
It’s all part of their lives of boredom joy sorrow
Excitement exaltation disappointment shame bliss degradation

How can it be though be it must
That narrowing that broadening out
Perceptions growing smaller and smaller
While this universe one among many imperceptibly expands
The tiny wavelength of red shift
The immense collisions producing gravity waves
Measured in light years

The irises strode upright among the matted understory
Spices restless stimulants adorned the facility
And people felt the stab of these impressions
How accessories sometimes overpower the utility

And the objective wasn’t really worth the travail
The mastery the achieve of six figures and a house in the burbs
Now wainscot carvers and the hardscrabble communists unite
To agitate against disjunction and critical lethargy

Athwart a ribald cloud of summer-indolence
The makers and the doers mass on the frontier
With their household appliances and their napalm
Death to all those who would whimper and cry and goof off

Throughout the public places the intimate gatherings the portals online
Red and green pigments loop amid the gray
Nonstandard swerves among the investigative accommodations
Subversive blueberries in the noxious privet hedge

But bongs go on the bonfire
Children are punished with organized sports
Efficiency experts infiltrate the gay bars
Naked pictures are enhanced with opaque reminders

The birds are largely quiet now
The heat wave burgeons though the drought has abated
And while the katydids recite their wonted chirr
Sundown offers scant relief from promises and goals

The television drones
The motors on the freeway wind out furious and fast
The sulking residents of the inbox ding long after the close of business
And the holiday has obviated tomorrow’s garbage collection

So let us shed a tear in silence
Let us lay off coffee for a day and sleep
Let us pay the cable bill a fortnight late
And let us luxuriate in our tranquil evanescent sexuality

It’s not that it’s less than sense
On the contrary it exceeds the bounds
Thus somebody can make a pointed reference
And whether by cause correlation or semblance
A mazurka might erupt
The dashboard might descend into darkness
The elevator caught between two floors
And still the regular experience
Of the eternal return of the same
The return of the repressed
That’s why children delight in elephants and unicorns

The slippered emperor in his nightshirt
Extends a trembling candle
The diva in her dwessing woom
Welcomes the the dandified gunslinger
The giant with his single eye now punctured
Howls in frustration and pain
Maybe the cyclops derived from elephant’s skull
Maybe the entertainer had her own dressing room
Behind the stage set’s flat simulacra
And behind that maybe another yet more real
Maybe the wavering potentate caricatures any timorous dad

The secular reductions remain unsatisfying
No mere functionality confines the fire engine’s romance
Odysseus as brutal as the brute
Wins the day with the advantage of technology
And perhaps along with the archaic banqueters we cheer
And slosh our mead or whatever
And perhaps we are relieved that we can
With the Strategizer the Splendidly Mendacious
Sink the sharpened pole into the blinking monocle
And savor like the gods the rising smoke
From the gouts of blood sizzling in the fire in the cave

Stimulants to horrid thoughts
A shirt caught up in a tree
Road litter of biomorphic aspect
A child’s falling behind the striding parent

Stimulants to beatific thoughts
The sunset after the sunset
An object made for its own sake
The cool of the forest shadow

Stimulants to ambivalent thoughts
A child’s exploration of pain and its causes
A pair of hawks riding the thermals
A child’s concentration at tap dance class

Don’t overdo sweetheart
You slip so easily into self-sacrifice
Those bushes needed trimming
Architectural features want replacing or repair

The nimbus-shaped arcade visible through the corrective lens
Fair ground to spend and lose the gray lion
You tell me you are an adult
You do what you want

Such ruthless determination let there be no misunderstanding
Such invincible will to truth within the compassed skeptical range
When all the soldiers have succumbed to the bivouac
All the climbers resurrected to base camp

But not so you my beloved
Who are so full of feeling and so tough
You will persevere in love for a rickety cricket
Who falls short and occasionally packs it in

Not conflict despite the images of contention
We have established a rhythm of porcelain forgiveness
The Sèvres trophy in the straw-plumped manger of decorous lives
The commemorative aftershock

Heroic exaltation dying into wakefulness
An unsteady equilibrium call it companionship transpires
Rubicon Acheron the wide St Johns
Crossings routine complex or disquieting

Images of things that creep that burrow that swim
Disk-shaped and glossy or cylindrical and pronged
Ropy fuzzy amorphous swarming solitary or chained
Of organ systems that function but badly or not fully
Of cuts bruises and amputations
Of earthworms writhing in the storm-swollen gutter
Of emissions from factories and refineries
The vague contours of a superfund site
The oblivious warning of an overdose
Of threatening plants oleander deadly nightshade and ricin-laden castor bean
Of animals that employ venom for defense or predation
Of large vehicles labeled with bullying epithets
Their disproportionate tires gleaming like tar
Their smokestacks exhaling opaque miasmic fumes
Gratifying the drunken spectators’ lust for destruction
Fury for transgression crush the weak and burn their books
Of megatherial corpses warming in the dry sun
Great hooked lips as lustrous as obsidian
Near which scavenger birds hop and squawk
With bald heads and naked necks and apathetic eyes
Their slovenly feathers in alarming disarray

Agents of law enforcement issued from the bushes
Like baby ‘possums from the pouch
The ice cream seller turned his head
But kept his eyes fixed upon the scene

And you start to wonder with your gambler’s squint
Who’s who in this scenario
Where did that haze of paranoia come from
Where are all those hovercraft going

A raft of individuals paid homage
In the steeple-storied compound
The liquid crystal palace fancied up
For the feast of St. Valentine

Jets and shoebills hang inside the museum
A child is separated from their parents
An official makes a notation on an iPad
We gotta find a gas station with diesel

The drummer didn’t make it back to the stage
After a break longer than usual
Death taxes and existential threat
On average every three minutes so say the statisticians

Notice a shortage of sodium benzoate
A blot on your scutcheon a trim on your safety
Or anonymous windchimes rotating ominously
Pat the hardboiled chum in your breast pocket

Excuse me could you take a brief survey
After the public execution
Now that you’ve seen the taste test comparison
Can you tell the difference between a groan and a scream

So many lies the rhetoric of derangement
Supercharged energy pills
It only had to last today and tomorrow
As homey and comfortable as death

The fan the archway
The cyclist careering between the two long poles
Compound it Browning there can be but one Sordello
A theft from the open carport the missing spacer
Theories of imbroglio to satisfy the vices

Back to basics the seamless denial
Urgent purposes amid the turgid filibuster
Oh this accretive logic this euphemism

Daily conquests recurrent deficits
Shuffle through the leaf litter
Kicking sand rife with coquina
Into the mouths of the aquacultural pools

Aspirins always aspirins
You can’t get away from the bandaid solutions
But friendship’s friction sliding into the afterlife
Regretful submission to the blind driveway
Puts one sharply in mind of

Because you know death

Surreptitious groveling
Beneath the sheltering tarpaulin
Of liens gables various financial instruments

Out some verbs in there y’all
Make out the sweet spot in the roiled edition
Smile your way through the seething imperative
And clever pages lift from the catafalque
Rose petals broadcast upon the portico
Behind which the sacrifice is taking place

A little snake dipped into a hole in the turf
Quicker than you can say
Does this smell like chloroform
The hole of perfect little snake diameter

Rainy holiday and a television set
Hoisted on its four sturdy legs
Before which two or three kids
Lounge on the carpet for daytime programming

The unctuous host inclines a long microphone
Like a riding crop before the lips
Of each flustered female contestant
To disclose the essence of their private lives

Which one will describe the greatest suffering
And for whose admissible pain will the genie disgorge
The dependable Maytag washer
The luxury range from Magic Chef

Fuck ownership
Of things in general but especially of works of art
I’m sorry to initiate the proceedings with such an aggressive word
But poetry originates in the expression of feeling
Now obviously there’s more to it than that
I’m not saying that infants and toddlers cry in poetry
Or that fifteenth-century Henry spoke blank verse
But when we put into words our hunger discomfort or shakenness
And especially when we trouble deaf heaven with our song
Then we have crossed the line into poetry
And poetry is the best of all arts especially when we sing it
For then it becomes as infinitely replicable as video
Poetry is portable
Memorize it and take it away with you
Not so the masterpieces in the plastic arts
Now if you can get yourself into the National Gallery in London
Take a look at Bacchus and Ariadne
Certainly Titian’s technical achievement is a marvel
I can appreciate it but I’m not an expert
I stood there many long minutes trying to drink in the details
But the brain is not a camera though the eye is built like one
And the retina merely begins perception
The rest is interpretation and indeed creation
Others around me took photographs
But images abound far superior
To any that I can achieve with my Android
The work of art in the age of its digital reproduction
Yes we lose the facticity of oil and canvas
But we retain the profounder fact
Of the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music
The encompassing of blind barbaric will
Within the decorum of art
The brandished haunch and the circle of stars
The pipes and timbrels and the abandoning ship
Though to be honest I see trumps and cymbals
And an anguished woman gesturing toward the receding craft
And full disclosure for about fifty years
To me the most important phrases in all of poetry have been
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards
But on the viewless wings of poesy
And now I knew what Keats apparently didn’t
That cheetahs goddamighty cheetahs pull the car
Perfect indisputable cheetahs with black tear line

And now I know since the image has entered
The digital that is to say infinitely replicable realm
That the pair of cats who turn toward each other saying what’s up
Display jinglebells on their Titian-red collars
I pretty much knew that Keats knew
Of the association of Bacchus and wild beasts
But that he should link chariot and pards plural
Strongly suggests that he knew this picture
Though I don’t suppose there was a National Gallery in 1819
I could look it up if I were a scholar
But what I love and I can see in the picture and the poem
Is that artworks are living things that reproduce like living things
And their offspring change and evolve and take on a life of their own
Thus Titian’s cheetahs become Keats’s pards
I doubt that many in England in 1819 knew from cheetahs
And the most bizarre aspects of Bacchus and Ariadne
The horns the fur the exposures the dismembered animal
The well-muscled giant enwrapped in serpents
Came not from a painter’s fevered brain
But from reading in Catullus and Ovid
Mere transcription in one sense
Titian perhaps invented the vessel engraved with Titian
And maybe the annoying little dog tormenting the adorable little faun
But then the artistry is as always
In the arrangement of the materials
It’s nonsense to claim
That Titian stole from Ovid and Keats stole from Titian
And that I steal from Keats here and elsewhere
Nobody owns a cheetah not rightly
Although the decadent Duke of Ferrara
Must have kept one or two in his menagerie

In the sixteenth century people were burnt alive
For possessing a copy of Tyndale
It’s pretty much the same if you search for and save
Minecraft or Across the Spider-Verse
But texts are replicable that’s what makes them texts
Nobody owns them or can be blamed for using them
Textuality infinitely reproducible
Manifest as medieval uncial or binary code
Deconstructs the flimsy unjust law of supply and demand
We can’t reproduce the molecules of paint or canvas
And so the unique impression of Titian’s hand is priceless
And must be conserved
But let’s let everybody access
Alex and Peter and Bacchus and his pards

Remembrance happens but we must remember
It’s not just rewindplayback
Think of it that way and it’s just degradation
It’s really more like rebuilding the buried city
The great fragments of stone scattered randomly
The connective wooden members having disappeared completely
Majestic dome fallen through the floor
The colored tiles long past delivering
Image of bird or dolphin or lovers entwined
Which is why old home movies seem gritty documentaries
Of unfamiliar social aggregates in distant geographies
And remembering a second time
Means allowing the temple the houses grand and minor
The shops and thoroughfares and premises of artisanry
Again to decompose and again to reconstruct them
And each successive reconstruction begets
A form ever more diverse from that of the original metropolis
Ever more sketchy schematic and stylized than any predecessor
An alchemy of novel configurations neither accurate nor inaccurate
For the mind will supply the lost details or generate them
In the superb guesswork of lively simulacrum
And we might regret the inevitable distortion that follows
Or celebrate in our pride the artifact ever new
Cubist impressionist abstract expressionist

Little boy in battle fatigues
Hurls himself to the ground
Having taken or eluded
Imaginary machine gun fire
Played out in muted tones

Bob the Committed and I cannot
Live up to that single-issue voter’s impatient waiting
The fleet surmise of maladjustment in the progeny say
Or the ad hoc committee for the observation of sundries
I didn’t mean to slip in that pretty slough of extras
But once the genie’s out then commences the automatic mazurka
Like numerous other toothy orators or their replicant surrogates
Stout carols about the shortages
Brief missives teeming with options
The open-ended narrative of victory and conquest
The shackles of alternatives
The awesome plenitude of the big-box store
The notes and queries of sneaky racoons and ‘possums
Investigating the darkling realms of elusive success
Deploying the materiel of Google Translate and viral rumor
While the tumid vessel slumbers sideways in the canal
The NDA applies even in the case of apocalyptic revelation

But we lack an idiom or maybe it’s aborning
To bring into its precious body
The epic paradigm of competing agendas
The word known to everyone to address
The coalition of the vaguely willing
Enlisted to construct the astronomical ziggurat
Which toppling completes the confusion of the tongues
Another hod carrier lost
Another gangly crane suspended

Somatic cells insist upon action
From systems afar remote
One way to conceptualize
The advent of hunger horniness or pain
The interval of a wistful minor second shifts downward
Its customary position atop the tetrachord
A young celebrated artist Billie Eileish say or Janelle Monáe
Adorned with a harlequin mask and wooden toy sword
Relinquishes from time to time the customary popular tone
To adopt a more declamatory style fit to evoke a heroic age
So shaken as we are so wan with care
Find we a time for frighted peace to pant
Rebel and usurper Henry would-be military dictator
Constantly harried as such guys are
By others who would rebel and usurp
Never really spoke like this
Nobody spontaneously erupts in blank verse
Certainly not verse of such exquisite precision
Such tender flexibility
Wordsworth’s proclamations to the contrary notwithstanding
Memory is an act of artifice
A reconstruction of a reconstruction ad infinitum
And by nature art must have its materials
Travel far enough or merely long enough
Even in some desultory Brownian motion
And you will reach the indistinguishable frontier
A concept not a feature
That famous dangerous liminal state
More situation than state
More inclination than situation
That seemingly voluntary semitone
Despite the raging of the mob
Who deny the obvious fact that there are limits
Though granted limits often consist of looming or covert indistinctness
Does Henry sincerely express his exhaustion and fear
Or does he cynically employ rhetoric as an instrument of use
Warfare by other means sub rosa tactics of command and control
The wonder of drama that never explains
He expresses the truth perhaps without knowing it
His sadness his depletion no doubt his feeling of guilt
And what does a fictional character know
Albeit a character drawn from history
And declamation has fallen from favor as fakey rant
But how else to manifest reality but in fakes and fictions
The made-up marvelry of wist and word
Reality that is that transcends the outward and the in
An assailant on high can effect much harm
As can boots on the ground
As can a virus invading an unready immune system
But woe to the innocent predator that does not feed its young
And wrath is squandered against the tremblor and the whirlwind
And woe to the traveler engrossed in a podcast
Who approaches at speed the pileup on the foggy interstate
Who never intended an inattentiveness
But hear the keening of the pipes
Witness the weeping of the hero
Who at last has acknowledged the truth
That he could do no other
The best of intentions or the worst
The sad song that tells the world
Amid all this one great woe
All this insuperable ignorance
All this implacable need
That somebody understands

So I was saying to my old buddy Aristotle the other day
I think you’re kind of missing the boat there Stot
Nobody seems to remember that we fought a big war
Well our fathers did and they supposedly won
But a lot of them didn’t come back
And there’s been skirmishes pretty much once a week since then
And you have think about well I guess you don’t have to
But think about the other side
A bunch of dead and they lost their country
And then the plague happened
Happened here and it happened there and where’s your victory
Nobody seems to remember this stuff
And you’re supposed be looking down at the earth
Not like Plato with his finger pointing up to the Forms
But you you look around and you see motion
And you see virtues and spontaneous generation
And don’t you see that people have forgotten their feet and hands
That like three years ago everybody was in a panic
And thousands died
Well I hope your great Alexander’s going to fix everything right up
He does look good on a horse

I posed for that picture long ago
That’s me the little boy with goat legs
See how stout and taut the rope is
With which I drag the head of a deer
The pale blood pooling behind it

The little dog with mitten paws barks vigorously at me
Its back is not up but I feel the hostility
Toward my shameful appearance my shameful essence
The grownups some horned and furred or sleepy and fat
Seem to be having a jolly time

This wreath of tiny white flowers on my head
My red mantle like that of the god himself
As if to say what a dear little faunlet
But parted lips and cornered eyes turned toward you
Say somebody get me out of here

Some relative of mine waves the haunch
But below his furry legs are human feet
And I just have these little hooves
I have a boy’s intelligence
But my mind is contaminated with goat

He never had to learn these arcane tools
The patient farmer of long ago
Beyond the hundreds of devices
Carefully curated over generations
The lore of their meticulous use
Beyond shovel hayrake bag basket bin moldboard and share
The accoutrements for the beast that pulls the plow
The implements for reaping and threshing
The apparatus for building and razing
The lore of cottage industry pottery textile and childrearing
Instruments of the homeliest ancientest sort
But the wisps of metal etched into maps of circuitry
The armatures of artificial energy the stubborn polymers
Bore no emphasis nor held no sway
When the barley ripened and the chickens browsed

We embarked upon an irreversible progress
Like a king in a small kingdom
Encompassed within its hostile frontiers
We traverse the narrow countryside
Upon both the recent and the obsolete roads
We tune to the familiar radio station
That emits as-yet unfamiliar programming
The music and the scenery impose novel responsibilities
That may or may not comport
With the norms that church and school inculcated
In the days of local television and the exclusivity of gasoline
Of domestic animals and household appliances large and small

We discovered new efficiencies new sources of power
We effected a revolution in transportation and communication
Conscripts complied with the command to serve
Other served with more complete volition
And all obeyed the mandates of traffic light and turn signal
Of income tax and compulsory education
Or suffered retribution when they demurred
We are freer now we deign to imagine
Now that we flout with impunity these old morose compulsions
Or have we replaced them perhaps
With compulsions more diffuse if more variable
The expensive intoxicant the garish consumer product
The aggressive vehicle the garment aggrandizing a brand
The antagonistic haircut announcing an alliance
And all vociferate their respective tribal shibboleth

Death death to our adversaries
Let them suffer whom we have designated as beneath our remark
The foreign the ugly the weak the abnormal the secretive the impure
Who threaten us with their peculiarity
Who betray us with their lust for survival
Who victimize us with their mutterings of peace and justice
Let them bathe in tears themselves their families and their compatriots
Who do not fulfill our expectations of them
Death to those who do not espouse the doctrine of our superiority
For we are the best ones according to the criteria
That we ourselves have established
We defend our ancient rights with merciless assault
To lay waste all we survey even our own possessions
As overt demonstration and gentle persuasion
And none are safe until our demands are met
And even then they will be subject to our decree

Who are these coming to the retail establishment
What apartment complexes and single-family homes
Are emptied of these eager shoppers holiday happy
Toward what shelves and display units are they tending
Will they park their cars in the broiling lot
And unfold their strollers in the pitiless sun
Will they read labels and compare prices
Or are they simply seizing the opportunity to visit the emporium
Museum of vendables shrine to the commodities
Before it vanishes in the reeking fumes of about-to-be

And for all the expertise that sustained him into adulthood
The farmer died of a disease now curable
And never enjoyed the benefits of compulsory education
And therefore never knew the world beyond his acre
But the thought never arose that he might want to know
When the barley mysteriously failed to ripen
And the chickens fell before the wholly recognizable fox
And let us who are ignorant forgive the ignorance around us

The crown of eight stars
Bright at gentle sunset to shine recedes
But at such a demure pace
As to permit the grateful falsehood
That something in the universe persists

That child with caprine leglings and flowery diadem
Who drags the venison head
Murmurs the opposite tale
That all all proceeds in mere flux
That all is swept away

And who stitches these rival truths
Would not profess to understand their unity
Or to render them unto the cincted manner
But only to effect the slender mantle
Red against the deepening blue

Something prevents your carrying to completion
That procedure that in theory should be quite easy
Some viscosity in the atmosphere
Some unlucky combination in the texture of volition
Drags down the devout pursuit of a goal
A spot of mustard on your shirt front
Awakens sirens bells klaxons pulsing tones in minor thirds
The thoroughgoing panoply of blame
Waving flags flashing yellow lights and the hoisting of placards
Inscribed with a twelve-step program
Step seven
A dab of detergent on a damp rag
But you hesitate or rather take action
With an uncannily deficient celerity
You momentarily indict the usual suspect anxiety
Imagining some aversion to the watery halo
But the very convenience of this provision
Vitiates its credibility
And you are impaled upon the dilemma’s feisty prongs

O for a clarifying agent ranging cheerfully abroad
Touching with its magical fingertips
Upon the manifold variety of things
Delicious repugnant or ephemeral
O for some benevolent power to relieve the turgor
The objects are clouded obscured by occult substances
Presumed events on distant continents
Impose their butterfly repercussions apparently
The landmarks the points of reference recede and seem to decline
Venice is sinking and Manhattan descending
Beneath the hubristic weight of thousands of intentions
Spoken and unspoken aspirational or invidious
The wayward highways the inscrutable lines etched upon the globe
Of transport of cargo of passengers
The denials the evasions the effacements
Of space time and activity
The ever-mounting catalog of remaining tasks
You turn the corner and suddenly behold a mass movement
A vast assemblage of stasis

Evbleb sartor
Cagret tms sroa dimind
Slaysion muild gars
Tansmot
Sobsmot

They move down the entrance ramp along the emergency lane
To the traffic light where the exit meets the overpass
We cannot see their pleading gestures
Nor hear the demand for redress
Of a grievance so strong it has withstood the heave of death
And even if we could see or hear them
We still could not understand the burden of their entreaties
We do not know you O Spirits we would say
Impatient of their impertinence
We have not seen into your private lives
Nor can we estimate what purple intrigues
Have branded themselves thus upon your consciousness
But despite our protestations we do know them
And we have intuited their presences
As familiar as the reflections in stagnant gutters
In the public places and in the places emptied out by neglect
As familiar as walking into a strand of spider’s web
That clings invisibly to our eyes
We have heard in the darker chambers of our ears
Their despondent sentences their desolate orations
We have tasted the bitterness of their indictments
Of nameless injustices that persisted throughout their lives
That linger now that they are dead
Of maladies deprivations and above all injuries
Likely invisible even in life
We have read their regretful sonnets
On the labels of tiny thrownaway liquor bottles
In the colorful fonts of fast food wrappers
Sodden with rainwater beside the darkened road
We are startled but not surprised
And we feel a little thrill of superstition
When they insensible but insistent
Accost us at the traffic light
And require that we confess our resemblance to them
Forgive us our recognition O Spirits
As we forgive you who recognize us

Everybody harbors naïve ideas
About objects and their extent
That an object is an object
That extends no farther than it does
But measles grits bowels exists only as plurals
And we love the commas and the semicolons
Delimiters that don’t exist in nature
Various openings defined by the geometry of negative space
The stoma the vagina the eye
Especially those interior spaces
Those mental objects memories wishes responsibilities
The tulip tree with its straight columnar bole
Which I view now only with my intellectual spy glass
Its outlandish box-shaped leaves
Its cones cousins of magnolia cones
In turn cousins of pine cones
Its leafy greeny flowers streaked with gold
Shaped like tulips and in turn like verres de vin
And what of those stomata
Does the tree begin with their molecular edge
Or perhaps with the tubular extensions of the root hairs
The tree breathes the very air I breathe
And drinks in the nutrients that nourish me

In my dream the alarm clock sings
Love love love love love love love

I was afraid of airplanes when they flew overhead
During the summer of 1962
The missiles of October had not yet been deployed
I knew that America was at war with the powers of darkness
Who trained ungodly weapons on our beautiful land and its people
And I had learned at Our Lady of Sorrows
To duck and cover under my sinfully messy desk
Despite the manifest evidence of the black and white footage
That showed a house blown like dandelion in the vengeful wind
I should have realized the futility of evasion
What I did realize was that I was scared
Of Piper Cub and Boeing 707
Which wanted to drop so I thought an atom bomb
And so I would run into the house

I should have realized that we lived
In the most segregated city in America
I don’t suppose I knew what segregation is
I should have known but my reasoning powers
Were rudimentary at best
And have they improved all that much
I asked my parents why a drinking fountain labeled Colored
Was mounted next to one labeled White
At Parisian’s downtown
But I don’t remember the answer
I used to ride my bike up to Ray’s house
To play with him superheroes on the brick barbecue
I once picked up a cigarette butt from the gutter
And brought it up to my mouth
Ray said ooh a nigger smoked that
You’re a nigger he chanted several times
Like I’d caught some vile disease from the recognizably filthy refuse
I don’t recall any resultant breach in our relationship
But I knew that I had been bullied
I think I knew the meaning of a bully’s word

We lived in Birmingham
Because my father was a scientist at a research institution there
Who would achieve some measure of fame apparently
Receiving letters from around the world
For his work on life-saving medicines
He had a black scrapbook that we saw on rare occasions
Dad thinner than now having drinks with a pretty woman
Not my mother
A yellowed newspaper clipping with a photo
Of an aircraft carrier billowing smoke
I didn’t know until I had kids of my own
That my father had been torn apart his face mostly
Behind an anti-aircraft gun on the deck of the Saratoga
The kamikaze keeps coming even after you’ve killed the pilot
And when it strikes the flight deck the flames and the shrapnel fly
I’m poor at putting two and two together
The messy desk and the shredded house
The cigarette butt and the drinking fountains
The yellowed clipping and the facial scars
Not noticeable to me I knew no other
But the reconstruction must have been masterful

I’ve had traumas in my life but nothing like that
Now that he’s gone I wonder how he escaped
Being eaten alive by post-traumatic stress
But he claimed and I must believe him
That after the war he wanted nothing but to build a life
To forget about politics and foreign affairs
So he and my mother also a navy veteran
Took Uncle Sam up on the offer of education
My mother by consensus the stronger in science
The story was that she had carried him
Through the labs and the math in junior college
Though he was said to be gifted in language
So when the time came to matriculate
At the state university
And to enter into the state of matrimony
My mother had babies and suppressed her dream
Of becoming that rarity a woman scientist

Her childhood had been an ordeal of grinding poverty
On the northern shore of Lake Okeechobee
During the worst of the great depression
Wild country that left her with scars of her own
The screech of the panther
Made her phobic of cats her life long
She hid she said from her numerous siblings
By climbing a tree to read books of science there
Left home and finished high school in a bigger town
Well in a town
She hadn’t lived in a town
Jumped at the chance to rivet aircraft wings at Curtiss-Wright
And served as corpsman in the big hospital
At coastal California that received the wounded from the Pacific theater
Not my father
And once her children were in school
She went back to college and earned a degree
In medical technology and worked in that field for decades
But I always had the feeling
That a talented women remained in the shadow
Of her husband

When I finished high school
America was again at war
My father had not resisted or resented America’s command
To fight the Japanese
Who had wounded the navy
In which he had already enlisted
And sad to say he endorsed the war’s horrid end
Like most of those with his experience
The nuclear option that made me fear commercial aviation
We don’t make inventions without using them apparently
And thus when I registered for the draft
I did so with trepidation like others of my age
For America had on this occasion not been attacked
But had instead intervened in at most a civil war
And the cold war had evolved into a proxy war
And the nuclear threat continuously loomed
But when my turn arrived a lottery had been instituted
And I had the shameful good luck
To score a number that spared my call-up
I attended two of the great rock festivals
And in my hometown coliseum heard the like of
Led Zeppelin and James Brown

And
After 1961 it was all Ray Charles
After 1962 it was all Johnny Cash
After 1963 it was all R&B and sweet soul music
Whole stables not just labels Motown Atlantic Stax
After 1964 it was all the Beatles
After 1965 it was all the Stones
In 1966 I got a Gibson acoustic like Johnny Cash
After 1967 it was all Jimi Hendrix
In 1968 it was totally weird and I was just starting high school
In 1969 I got a Wurlizter piano like Ray Charles
In 1970 I played in fish camps and enlisted mens’ clubs
And in 1971 CYO Knights of Columbus fratty boys and sorority girls
And in 1972 I got a Gibson SG like Clapton Townshend and Santana
And after 1973 it was all a rush a mostly-pleasant multicolored blur

And
Contraception was if not readily available
Then certainly with little trouble getatable
But we didn’t bother and relied on more primitive methods
And the Beloved and I became sexually active far too young
But we survived the experience and enjoyed ourselves quite a lot
Though we have found some awkwardness in more recent times
Explaining responsibility to our adolescent children
And anybody into music especially Black music
Got into pot as I did years before beer
Although the taste for alcohol grew and grew and grew

And
I never lost my childish fears
But on the contrary my anxiety grew
As I became aware that the future was a responsibility
That I was inadequate to bear
And the disillusionment that lots of folks didn’t particularly get off on music
That on the contrary they cared about control victory and suck-cess
And I saw through the porthole of my yellow submarine
A world submerged in violence hatred and selfishness
A culture that cared about winning about profit about consumption
An America where the president could be gunned down in a car
Where beautiful people old and young could be gunned down day after day
And high and dry and here we are as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night

America potentate of folly
Empire of extremes
Sybaritic spaceflight hobbyists
Hungry children nodding off during Zoom class
Missile silos long guns hand guns and Bowie knives
Arming the populace many times over
Methane coal gasoline and plastics
Atoms for peace and physics for war
Romance of bloodshed
Theater of meretricious wealth
Technology of alienation and baleful fantasy
Apotheosis of meanness and greed
Boundless hypocrisy of religion and command
Heedless depletion of humanity and nature
Lust for power celebration of enslavement
Shameless defilement of the oracle of freedom
Crushing the life out of the man on the street
Impaling with lead a woman at bedtime
A reality of false images screaming for attention
Promise forsaken
Decency forsworn

And yet
And yet
My father wrote poems in advanced old age
And in similar age my mother gave me a squib of cookie dough
Though I long had kids of my own
And good music never dies
A good movie a good meal with family and friends never dies
Truth justice peace and love never die not completely
And though harried and wounded insulted and robbed
Glorious nature never dies
Birdsongs radiant flowers rising clouds pregnant with rain
This too is reality my skeptical friend
Horror irrefutably abounds
There is no restitution possible for the crimes of millenia
Though we might take steps for repair
The kamikaze pilot died that very day
Mere seconds before he wounded my father grievously
And set the ship ablaze that never sank
And no rescue for those below deck
And was it he
Spirit of the wind
It wasn’t only he
He did what he believed hateful falsehood
Was right
Obeying the unquestioned mandate of his culture
And let us ceaselessly question the mandates of this culture of America
For no day has gone by without some horrific violation of personal dignity
Some horrible mistake
And yet
The eternal glow of a child’s fear and sorrow and delight
For children too experience these extravagances
Bird flower cloud moon wind rain and star
Mountain river refreshing forest teeming saltmarsh
America does not own them but drinks in their beneficence
The Beloved her tender immortal kiss

When some occurrences increase in frequency
And others diminish
More independent of thought and preference
But more dependent upon younger hands

The lush ambiguous spring advances
Bird and flower make their subtle alterations
Or unobtrusively depart
The barred owl impatient cries at midday

Formulae pilfered from that site secure and triply impregnable
Take on the mellow glow of untroubled dispatches
Three no four boxes in front of the referenced restaurant
Distributing announcements gratis of articles for sale
Promotions of upcoming or already accomplished events
Notifications of opportunities for civic engagement

The comedy club next-next-next door looks downcast at noon
Or rather completely inexpressive as one anesthetized
Windowless
Its massive wooden door sealed behind great deadbolts
Only two newsboxes instead of three or four
A slogan emblazoned above promising mirthful diversion

These establishments have each earned a certain number of evaluative tokens
Since certain persons have weighed them in the balance and made judgments
Lackadaisical or eager as the case may be favorably disposed or unfavorably
You could try to employ your own unsavory downloads to hoist a mean opinion
You could drop the preconceptual bomb remotely from a safe distance
Has anybody ever been in one place at one time

They style themselves social critics
Who proffer rote sophistication in apparel cosmetics and decor
As anciently did dancing master milliner deviser of coiffures
All strut like fey aristocrats evincing an otherworldly worldliness
Patch on cheek pinch of snuff tiny sword by side
Translated immaterially to prefabricated fantasy land

Nor are the pirates absent the blackguards the lacy gunslingers
The ostentatious flouters of dour conventionality
Wearers of the uniform of nonconformity the petticoats the eerie belts
Inventors so they claim of strange sensations unknown modes of being
But might it not well be the case that others have trodden these paths before
Your undiscovered country long inhabited like your evident fancy dress

Who doesn’t enjoy a dream of flight
Or yearn secretly to witness miracles of appearance and disappearance
The exercise of uncanny powers impossible knowledge
The mystery of instantaneousness
Unless perhaps you’re the one on the ground
Gazing upward at the fall and across to the fiery terrestrial crash

The car in front of you at the red light
Does not react to the green
Still not reacting
Still not reacting
And off they go flights of angels
To sing you to your rest