The body part drunken with edema
Grotesquely enlarged with burning color
The stab of angry nerves deep within

So the lives of people inflamed
With impulse and resentment
Swollen with weaponry

Trauma or infection what does it matter
Who will offer help for pain

The birds did not attack Bodega Bay
They disappeared and so
These torpid sentences should be easier
Without all that cawing and chirping
Without Herrmann’s unmusical score
Seven years after Forbidden Planet
You can hear this year’s cicadas though
Not the 17-year variety
These sound a higher pitch
And rev gradually like a locomotive played at 78
A plastic motor winding up
And they make dirty dirty insinuations
About the acts you have performed in the past
About peril naked or fully clothed
That haunts about the uneven eddies of time
So it’s all just technical innit
All our irony and imagery and verbal panache
Imitation of the great masters
Unless it’s innate like the cicada’s oppressive chirr
Without pleasure without consent
To swink and to swive
To dwell underground for 17 years
Or even just one
To come out and cry
And remember the silent birds

Matchsticks meadows portrait miniatures
Snuff boxes and parasols
Bygone wisps of fragrant inspiration
Upon the platform they awaited the train’s arrival
And awaited the signal to begin boarding
The travelers the ones who could pick up and leave
Who could go there when here became a bore
They showed their expectancy
Prepared themselves to endure the smoke the cinders
Amid the leather baggage the slanted hand trucks
The carts with their metal wheels
The clothing that concealed the skin

Outside the carriages were pulled by horses
People worked as farmers as factory hands
As domestic servants in great houses
Interiors of polished wood and brass handles
Children languished in the schoolhouse
Site of punishment corporal and mental
Daily occasion of humiliation
Some quit school and went to work
And everywhere were the privileged
And those excluded from privilege
Everybody played their part
Including the strivers the climbers
Who paid a price for their ambitions
But most people scrambled to perform their assigned tasks
And had no energy left over to strive and climb
And sometimes they numbed themselves
To their unpleasant existence
And ingested supplements for their lack of vitality
And if those at the top or those
Who made great efforts to get to the top
Were good then the scramblers were not good
The ones who struggled not strove
Were worth less than the striding colossi

We go to museums to see the fine art
We watch plays and hear readings of poetry
How many had to suffer to allow
The creation of monuments of glorious beauty
Everybody suffers even the few in pampered wealth
And the many suffer more

Turn your milk a different hue
These additives are perfectly safe
Where the cows grazed contentedly
Are they really contented
Has anybody asked them or even watched for signs of discontent
And do they even graze
Or are they fed such pellets
As cats and hamsters and salmon batten upon

Who knows the difference between paste and pasta
Some kids eat them both
Maybe the difference is just the use we put them to
Is that what it all boils down to
Use

They broadcast a video recording yesterday
Of a horse ridden by a police officer
Trample a guy
This wasn’t 1819
This was July 2023
In a place where people recorded video on their phone

Sometimes people complain about regulation
This red tape is murder they say
The worst thing you can hear is
I’m from the government and I’m here to help
They say

Is there a rule somewhere that cops don’t ride horses over citizens
Probably not specifically
But if there is such a rule
It didn’t stop that cop from being an asshole
So yeah
You can probably believe that the stuff you eat and drink
The stuff you buy in stores is safe

I wonder where the gun that killed the teenager yesterday came from
Some illegal transaction probably you’re going to say
And you’re going to say that guns don’t kill people
People kill people
And there’s a rule against that isn’t there
So fuck all the rules and just let everybody do
Whatever the fuck the want
They say

I envy the cows
If they’re contented

A silvery carp treads the murky waters of Lullwater Pond
Undetected until some angler draws it forth
Unfavored in America it would be prized
In some land beset with famine

You might want to change course
No easy task for an individual or a small group
How much harder for a ponderous hoary world

A bearded serpent insinuates down the gilded hallway
Of a preeminent luxury hotel
Like empty spools strung together to amuse a toddler
The sangfroid the gelidity

Turning and turning in the tovish corkscrew
The hoop snake would not forestall the collision
The irresistible and unresisted reflex of contraction

Winding on the Moiraien bobbin until flax fragments

Don’t speak to me of the cigarette of chastity
The curling sidestreams
You mendacious opportunist
Who issue a turbid denial of the fragmentary exigency
If you want discontinuity you can find it aplenty
But why not seek out continuity you protest
That well-meaning and profitable virtue
It’s worth the cost of constriction

I’ve experienced the explosion of internal organs
Even pacifists must hook their sleeves to parry

And that things fall apart was ever a lament
A frowning diagnosis
But judgments begin in facts

In some respects yes life is a meatloaf sandwich

People suck at comprehending a spectrum
The subtle gradient
Safety belt to straight jacket

Fact against denial
Some things stay the same
And some things change
The problem is not so much into which category a thing might fall
But whether categories are subject to an imperative
Taxonomy did not create the viper
So what’s the problem

A butterfly ever in chrysalis
Boys condemned to lostness to boyhood
Girls never to grow into mommy’s high heels
The minifex ligature
The ultra-violet shift
The reptilian anamorph

I won’t be cool

Like a child to expose the shreddy tissue of corrupt aspiration

And so a stark choice is set before us
The cool emollient caress of security
Or the salt the shot and the lime

At least it’s not radio hits of the 80s

You enter through a nondescript portal
On the blank sidestreet
Only to be confronted by the big brass placard
Or plastic disguised as brass
Inscribed with barely legible slogans

Terrible sayings supposed to motivate and inspire
Appealing to the sense of inferiority
The sense of victimhood
Don’t wait
Take action now
Don’t let them get away with it
Or words to that effect

And the piped-in music
Too generously I call it music
More a redolent drizzle
Freezes you in the spot
The hard mineral container
And call it cause or effect
But one way or another
You are transported back to that
Humiliating event at the college

Surely the atmospheric devices
Cannot control your mind
And surely no force in the universe
Automatically provides
What you’re ready for

And is this what you’re ready for
Resentment
Hate the world hate yourself
Hate the well-indexed catalog

Gimme Shelter at the Atlantic Drive-In
On the bench front seat frustrating making-out
That would not lead to the conclusion I could barely imagine
Though imagine I did plenty
As I watched while frenching Tina fondle the microphone
The reckless boulevard on a Saturday night

A family car shaped like a penny loafer
And my mother feared my driving toward the beaches
Where she expected drunken sailors to cause mishaps
Or maybe I was successful though I doubt it in concealing
That Ripple was available at 7-11 and grass here and there
And sex as soon as I received an invitation

We quarreled over the distinction of miracle and wonder
You the latinate indicated the subjective tumult of the former
Against the more general curiosity denoted in the latter
And while I was inclined to concur as to the import of the flatter one
I held to the supernatural force of the sharper
And objected loudly to these spurious proofs
Of the existence of God
Well not quarreled exactly disputed maybe
Or disagreed mildly
Or agreed to disagree
But at that point we’ve lapsed into complete prune danish
And really my beef was not with you
But with morons who claim for miracles
Some epistemic significance
And unexplained equals paranormal
And who worse credit God with the achievements
Of scientists technologists and medical practitioners
And similarly people who claim to have risen from the dead
Are mistaken at best
And being declared something is not the same
As being something

I had a dashboard once that was split in three or more places
Early in the history of the padded dash
It lived in a frankenstein car an AMC product mostly
Compounded with elements of Datsun and Ford
With power brakes that I wasn’t used to
And which may in fact have been defectively powerful
And my passenger was browbeating me
In a habitual reenactment
About some alleged deficiency of mine that I cared nothing about
And the pavement was slick in the drizzle
And I smacked into a stationary vehicle that was turning left
And my former passenger tried to butt in
And tell the cop that the stopped car
Didn’t have its turn signal on
A claim for which I could not vouch
Whereupon the cop speculated that I looked familiar
People are always telling me I look like somebody
And he was going to run my license and check for outstanding warrants
That was a really shitty car

So words and things who knows
Who knows
What poet says we must read aright
Though no preceptor scolds us when we stray
A particular challenge for dumb Americans
Like me raised on Sugar Smacks baloney
The meat I mean
Though the rhetorical usage of the term might also be relevant
And the philosophy of Martindale
And if you can’t say something nice
You should have your brains splattered
On the back wall in the fetid peewhiff parking deck
The world is so full of a number of things
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings
I wish I could write like a gay man
Or a handsome young fellow with tuberculosis
Or a girl aged in the single digits confiding to her diary
But every moment and there are lots of them behind me
Is a fork in the road
Do you want to see the slides
Of my vacation in Majorca
Or shall we wrangle over some other trivial matter

You disarmed my cherished thesis
Concerning superlative degradation
It would seem that such a purpose
Requires descent from a primordial altitude

And so I revise my position
And massage it into the shape of a parabola
Granted shallow
But I will concede the primacy of ascent

If you will contribute
The grand finale of terminal decline
The edifice unimpressive to start
And not improved by its dilapidation

For a year or more she tap danced
Everywhere she went
In slippers sneakers barefoot or flipflops
Even at school we were told
She sometimes employed her favorite mode of locomotion
It was really quite endearing

And yet we worried
Is she stalled stuck at some stage of development
Or is this just a phase she will outgrow
And if she does does that mean we no longer
Get to enjoy her tap dancing from the kitchen into the den
Or perhaps we can content ourselves with the recital
That comes along with each turn of the season

In the event the outcome
Came neither expectedly nor unexpectedly
For other interests came along
And her attention was seized by botany and softball
But we sometimes can’t help but indulge
The sharp nostalgia for flappety-flap at bedtime

It’s an exhibition not a competition
As David Letterman used to say of stupid human tricks
Please no wagering
Except that it kind of is a competition
Or so we have considered it
In the milder the progressive version
The younger generation duels the elder
To at worst a draw but most often to victory
Because we stand upon the shoulders of giants
And hopefully add some height of our own
Hence the romantic heroes of Macaulay and Carlyle
But in the gloomier variety
The titans would rather devour their young
Than papa-like hoist them to view the parade
Or so we fear in our infantile vulnerability
This was the view of Dr Freud and Prof Bloom
So that history becomes a Marvel mash-up of Cronus and Oedipus
Now the Marxist survey represents a synthesis
A titanic struggle progressing to a blissful denouement

And which scheme is true unless as in so much else
The truth is an impenetrable muddle
And how do you find room in truth
For both horror and beatific vision
And what is the relation of Truth and Poetry
Of what is and what’s said to be
Queried Goethe the confident sage
And answered affirmatively by so naming his life
That they ultimately converge as one
So too his doomed contemporary young Keats
Ventriloquized through a piece of crockery
That not only were Truth and Beauty one and the same
But that we on earth needed this equation and nothing more
But when their boisterous and criminal siècle had reached its fin
Salome kissed decapitated John
And the way was laid for Sysiphus and Meursault
Offspring of Raskolnikov
The pathway to the verge of nihilism or past the verge

The twentieth century balanced at its midpoint
Upon holocausts nuclear and racist-industrial
And the twenty-first began with fanatical murder
Performed for reality TV
And image is truth truth image
And if earth is just a flat slip of video
Who gives a rat’s ass
About flood hurricane drought extinction fire famine and war
So yeah I lean toward the progressives
Get some Dickinson and Morrison in there
By which by no means do I intend to say
That progress is inevitable or even historically factual at this juncture
But that understanding begins with fact
And we can remember such facts as have been hitherto discovered
And can thus draw general conclusions from specific instances

And poetry is truth and beauty is poetry
For the one great poem subsumes
The eyes of Oedipus and the nightingale’s song
The Three Stooges and Sophie’s choice
And the ghostly beloved apparition
The drunken ecstasy of honky-tonks and maenad rave
Pop songs that sweep the globe as fresh and ephemeral as bread
And sure the Know-Nothings will burn it and crush it
And it will reignite just inches out of reach
We die but we speak our deaths
We joy and we sing our joy
And the world finds its redemption
In the language of generality
In tragedy comedy and romance

The Braves won 2-1

Stop bashing me with that shillelagh
Said the brazen dancer with a rose in her teeth
The foils the ingenues were wrapping up the audition
While the administrator burst through the pasteboard set

O for the house that Jack rebuilt
O for an age so sheltered from annoy

You just can’t do that the dancer continued
I say that like you know what I’m talking about
And when she said that she wasn’t talking about
A stroke from a cudgel a walking stick
Or any other blunt instrument
I don’t know what she was talking about
It just seems people don’t talk that way any more
I just don’t know

The photo on the drivers license was a poor likeness
I say the because I refer to a definite image a definite document
More definite than the famous dish the fabled spoon
And that likeness as I say was a poor one
In that the sitter looks more hostile more fatigued and disheveled
Than ever in life
Oh sure the identifying features were there
Though they would be easy enough to fake
The eyes and hair of average color
The white and bristly beard

Don’t do me any favors I hear you cry
You’ve got to believe
I beg you to believe that none of this
Has gone according to plan
O for some object something real
Like a tiger and not the image of a tiger
And not the photograph of a plush toy tiger
Though the image might be a real image
And I know you don’t know what I mean by this
I don’t know but I can definitely say
Oh the difference to me

Or we few we happy few
Or conceived in liberty
That’s a weird one how do you conceive in something
The Lincoln quote I mean
Is the one that is weird

The director set the warm remnant
Of a canned beverage on the table
And disparaged the reading of Shakespeare
In the National Geographic
Especially in a room like this one
With its low ceiling and fluorescent tubes behind frosted plastic
And gazing grimly across at the shadowy crowd
Especially in a room like this one

My little brother who is taller than me
Said quite a number of years ago he believes in ghosts
And I’m sure at that time he thought he believed that ghosts exist
I wish him the best of luck with them
Assuming he still holds that belief
About ghosts I mean
I love my brother and our dead parents
Who weren’t yet dead when he said that thing about ghosts

But why does it always have to start with violence
Or end up there
Or touch upon violence somewhere in the middle
If someone were really bashing her the dancer I mean
Surely she would have protested more vigorously
I guess she was speaking through clenched teeth
But she could have just spat the rose out

And conflict is the soul of drama
And violence is the emblem of conflict
And in (a) play we configure the intractable world to ourselves
More pixellated turn-based RPG than mirror
We that is who have the DNA of homo sapiens
My memory seems to be entirely short term
And seem always seems to precede be
And there’s the emperor and then there’s me

A fly ball to right field might not necessarily descend
With necessity in its logical and not merely physical sense
Hence the Braves’ interleague game tomorrow with the Rays
Might be called in the fourth inning on account of anomaly
What nonsense you might cry what brash inattention to universal law
Why would a baseball you might protest behave so perversely
And I would retort that your problem is to consider behavior only and not motive
Nor is the ball in question the only participant in the situation
Note also the earth and its atmosphere and Tampa Bay and this humble scrivening

Gasoline engines operate internally combustionwise
And such two-stroke models as leaf-blowers annoy intensely
It’s what they do
Now no necessity obtains to assign blame in this scenario
Any more than the physical body must necessarily descend
But hear the motorized garden implement’s hum this very moment
More whine than hum more screech than whine
Its distance and hence the attenuation of its sonic output
Effecting no assuagement of its offense

You can’t very well complain of the current display of balderdash
When you know the world the manifest emphatic world
To be compounded of precisely such stuff and nonsense
And how we have enjoyed together you and I admit it
The immense ranges of stress and conflict and dishevelment
Punctuated by instances of absurd if delightful coitus
And all the other hectic and significant interactions
From the zany bosons to the erratic galaxies
And all frumious black holes and the fractious microbes between

In ce sic such salub

Tral mons tau do

Fraises timea mchrain

Ce sechen asl tway ar
Se wan zvicaire

Thusueio

The flaws were accidental I assure you
Except possibly in the sense
That one must perceive an error to forebear rectifying it
So don’t give me so much credit as to assert
That I am successfully avoiding perfection

As if defect were an event to be recounted
Like the grilled eggplant objectively underdone
But neither is it a state of mind
It wavers there in the moiré nodes
Shimmering in the space between waves and particles

The opposite of failure is success
But a flaw is a something while a perfection is not
What do you make when you don’t make a mistake
And I don’t mean a neutrality
These are issues of vital personal importance to me

Our universe no doubt one of many
Presents itself in extraordinary flux
Which in turn our massive social brain
Having been devised over millennia of problem solving
Reconstructs as simple cause and effect

We calculate trajectory
Defining incomprehensible unknowns as bodies
We compass the planets
Configuring all change as story
Even the pretty lie of agency

Normal normal normal normal normal
What do you expect in the age of Proud cowardly Boys
And vehicular homicide and fascist jurisprudence
Weaponry elevated to a religious icon a sexual fetish
Disease for profit and torture of children deemed guilty of misbehavior
A ruling ideology ranging from insanity to criminal insanity

What do you expect from a vox clamantis
Heroic couplets and rococo filigrees
No you’re going to get this
Photoshopped vomit flavored with rosewater
The disemboguements of an wet organ
An anatomical feature called a brain

A natural that is to say non-artificial intelligence
Because you see poetry is the living thing
That never dies
And beauty being truth is rarely pretty
And beauty can never die despite the best efforts
Of the furiously brutal party

Dual Sally breaks each problem down
Into manageable chunks
Folds them in plastic wrap about a plastic tray
Like hard meatballs or those circular items
They concoct in Japan

In the seventies a seismic shift occurred
When Charley Watts cut his hair short
After Viet Nam and Watergate the sensitives
In America knew that idealistic times were over
Like McCarthyism and the Kennedy assassination were ideals
But it wasn’t all bad
More people were willing to try
Cross-cultural foodstuffs of various shape

The client needs longer arms

When the revisions were published
The revanchists rejoiced
And their jubilation persists to this day
A provocation to the partisans of bygones
Folks continued though to burn fossil fuels
Data they say is destiny weak disclaimer
They said the same for neural pathways
Until the transmissions registered purple

What are you some kind of Edward Lear
You couldn’t come up with nonsense if you tried

Most were unimpressed by nostalgia for
An analytical way of life
Strangely though it wasn’t as if
They were swept away on a wave of spontaneity
Hurled headlong flaming from th’ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
Until I wake to find show business
To be as futile as all striving

Milton had more in common with Allen Ginsberg
Than with Calvin Zwingli and Knox put together
Ty Cobb’s success as a base stealer
Was not impeded in the slightest by his poor character

Whisper cuddle make lubricious sounds
Grant consent to behave in unorthodox ways
The senate must waive its immemorial prerogative

So here’s where we are
Choreography continues as an important form
Headlines continue to drum technological threats
Hot fusion and the oracle of Robbie the Robot
Lighting strikes continue to spark wildfires
In Tempe Arizona and the dales of Arcady West Virginia
Litmus tests have sold out time and again
You continue see them in the peremptory sentences
Eenie meenie chili beanie the spirits are about to speak
People just can’t accept apparently that the brain is an organ
Wat Tyler and Jack Straw laugh at the rebellion of the 1640s

And discontinuity just as tempting

I want to live I want to give
I’ve been a libby jibby blibby glib
I miney bine grime it’s finely chyme crime
That keeps me smirking on a cart of smut
And I’m in a rut
Mere deer deer deer

Okay so John Milton served as propagandist
For a psychotic nightmare
Which is not to say that Divine-Right Charles
Was a Massachusetts liberal
The name of the river notwithstanding
But as a poet Milton never held back
Find a poet of greater power
And he never held back for a second
That’s how it’s done my tender ephebes

Sibylline leaves line the hall of fame
Pterodactyls the old school mascot
Descend upon the cursory playing field
A thrill of terror rockets through the old and the young
The catalogs menus syllabi manifests chapters and verses
Coalesce in and at the prom whose theme
Project Gemini the triumph of Americanism
Raised our voices in abject anthem
Hallelujah brother I am here to comfort the wicked
And punish the weak

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