Across the lawn they sway in threes and fives
Bobbing like ancient detectorists
Their excrement more harsh than other fowls’
Will wreck the paint job on Nissan or Dodge

They cannot amend nor did they request
The traits with which Natura furnished them
Nor never would species invade did not
Humanity their wanderings ordain

Chestnut-colored incubus lurking in the periphery
Did not design its own bumpy carapace its bifurcated whiplash tail
Peril peril peril peril peril
Warning warning
Alarm
No not circuitry just another gelatinous configuration
Dissolving congealing transmitting
Ductile like a circuit and like a circuit coursing into return
The paleozoic sensors must occasionally yield a false positive
The demon summarizes the sundry threats that infest the domains of living things
Apex predator to the subapical practitioner jaguar to ocelot coyote to chihuahua
Days of dearth stretching into months
Invisible incomprehensible contagion to the prehensile brain
Faulty brachiation and fall to the forest floor

Menace abounds for the survival consciousness
Unto the miniscule myriads in the green expanse
The experience of life is not all beer and skittles
Hence the yearning for a world of inert placidity
Oblivion
Of harps clouds lotus blossoms juicy grapes always in reach
But lotus grows from the ropy slime mucky and defiling
The fingers of the harpist harden
You don’t sit on clouds
You let them shed their merciful liquor upon the place beneath
The grape will ripen only in its season
And its trickling blood in due course metamorphose into
An elixir by no means unique that exposes the illusion of individuality
And grants consciousness thereby of universal joy

A woofy bass innocent of attack
A kick a ride a throbbing tom
A Stratocaster drenched in reverb
Picking rapid to melt a pick

Like Milton awakening I must be milked

We imagine that philosophy to flourish requires an interval of peace
But since peace has never obtained at any time the better to shield our incapacities
We employ a generalized first person and a generalized present tense
Like the interstate highway is now a local boulevard for our commute
And we prefer quiet for our meager lonely perilous moments of contemplation

Prophylactic fashions express docile compliance or untrammeled inconstancy
Sedate carousal or caprine bacchanal behind the fastened gates
Obstinately punctual observances of michaelmas candlemas and the feast of St Blaise
Bless this throat O Lord which thou hast created lest bone of fish obstruct it
Seafood platter crossed tapers ashes on the brow and silken hairshirt evening wear

And some think themselves brave enough to adopt theoretical postures
To convert to the third person under the aegis of deliberate oblivion
They say something or another or they’re trying to pull a fast one
Experimentally innovative only should you deny with merciless self-deception
The eternal return of the same that is of the same old shit the same old traffic jam

The old original original old
Ma’s home cooking with traditional dyspeptic seasoning for all your orobuccal manifestations
Painless [sic] dentistry home in one hour
Spare the rod and just don’t spare the rod
Kick your dog after naming it for your worst enemy

Or you can throw up your hands fuck all go for your own bad self
And linger upon the attempt to staunch the itch of self-interest
With purchases distractives exploitations impressions subscriptions likes and soporifics
The restless spirit of the age in mesmeric packets and hey there’s an app for that
And everybody knows if there is no mandated procedure then everything is permitted

Ballroom dancers have the right idea under the froward surveillance
Finding pockets of freshness in the interstices the featureless spaces between the bollards
Of the stale fermentative Solonic gestures the prescribed structures of affect
The brief exceptions that lurk within the reeking application of the fuller’s art
The jamais vu of contracting religious or commercial fibers the unexpected appositive

And yet problems persist with the exaction of for example the definite article
Those obviously arbitrary tributes of matching belts and shoes
The scoffing naysayers who insist upon the authorized pronunciation of pianist
Per-severing in their exi-gencies they too number among the ambivalent vulnerable
Move the passenger thrown from the car or let them bleed out on the concrete

I intended ironically my summary of the Treaty of Westphalia
How what began as conflict of beliefs became conflict of states dissolved with a quill
And show me the state where law and justice interoperate
Show me the ideal unsupplanted by the completely mendacious real
Show me freedom peace truth beauty love sense and decorum

But justice is no mere operation nor are beauty nor love nor peace mere functions
Truth must be something more than a state of mundane affairs
We perceive a medley montage of angry flux
A hurricane that drives pine needles through stucco walls
Please remain in your sticky seats for the duration of the horrorshow

And what of bitterness pain aching loss the wound that never heals
Hearing the beloved say I’ve tried but I don’t love you
Witnessing the grotesquery of a sweet aged one’s decay
In trouble at school in trouble at home
The death of a child

So the crux is this the question of volition
The hurricanes the wars of six days or a hundred or a thousand years the glioblastoma
These evils do not originate with our sole selves
Action always constrained but always dimly weakly possible
I’ve chosen wrong a thousand times but I hope to find the will to choose rightly

How sad to spend a life immured in bunker
Mockingbirds or friend or foe strike together hieratic poses
The weediest weed breathes nobility
A toddler flinches before the thunderclap and waits at window for another
Both culture and nature ample earnest give of a receptive attitude

See these paltry muzzy numbers hear these wonky tuneless tunes
Taste these sourbitter dainties feel these breezes’ humid boons
Dream the smell of that location where that one event took place
Love yourself and love your neighbor shedding tears is no disgrace

It is a world of words to the end of it
But the world does not give spontaneously of
The molecular much less the atomic or the subatomic substrate
As of objects direct indirect or prepositional
Or the more exotic object complements or ablative absolutes
Or the phonological intricacies of diphthong fricative nasal and stop
Or even less of those vague pervasive interfluvia namely words generally considered
Which sometimes manifest themselves as complex atmospheric oscillation
Measurable as frequency amplitude and harmonic series
Or glyphic renderings in stone parchment paper sidewalk or the cloud
And sometimes as the occult synaptic tides of cortical exertions
Leopold Bloom’s The rol the roll involuntarily lilting
Silent occasion for modest embarrassment in necropolitan carriage
And is rol a word

Let us resort then to the analogy of a planet
Nobody makes a new continent ocean or mountain range
The attempt would erupt as the height of Nimrodian hubris
But oars might smite the winedark waves
Old MacDonald drive tractor and harrow over the north forty
The city fathers break earth for the new municipal edifice
Or capital rip the bowels from Mother Earth at Hambach
And thus mundane violations disturb intactness
But poetry is of the heaven

People have their conflicts
Nature’s peace is riven by predator and prey
Direst cruelty drives innocence into the wilderness
And all return to the one life that is their home
From which they only seem to have departed

We are the rotting flesh that the maggots eat
We are the buzzing flies that the fish eat
We are the leaping fish that the bears eat
And we creeping maggots love the bears’ putrescent meat

A child sat for breakfast at his grandparents’ table
Who served him milk in their own morning mug
This must be snowman coffee the child exclaimed
Delighted to shatter the categories so assiduously assigned
Since the germination of the australopithecine hyoid bone
And grandma brought forth no broom
For no shards threatened the three-year-old fingers
The holy communion intact of family and friends

Long years ago in good King Arthur’s time
All this fair land full filled with fairies was
Who caused great harm to milk and child ‘tis true
Unless the harm issued from priest or sage
Till weight and measure drove them underground
Where yet they dance and sing their fairy round
Still undisturbed by physicist or priest

So there is but the one great poem
To which all donate their mutational allotment
Prizewinners
Bullshitters
Con artists
Sighing lovers
Ruthless demagogues
PA announcers at the calf-roping event
Monks low-intoning Buddhist or Gregorian
Cantors muezzins and yodobashis
Yodelers carolers and trick-or-treaters
Nananana Nananana Hey Hey Good-byers
Singing waiters cabbies and costermongers
Participants in twelve-step programs
Preschool teachers
Bureaucrats compu’er says no
Harmless drudging lexicographers
Sparkling fairy princesses with their unicorns
Readers aloud of news sports and weather
Litigators
Speechwriters
Andean players on the pipes of Pan
Traveling salesmen
Debaters
Mrs. Paroo in the high school musical
Infielders keeping up a lively chatter
Shady characters who employ the argot of the underworld
Achilles and Dido and other shady residents of that other underworld who colloquize or refuse to with Odysseus and Aeneas and other sojourners there
Contributors let us grudgingly concede to social media
Auctioneers
Dalangs
Imitators of bird calls
Jump-roping chanters
Pointy-bearded professors mortarboarded and pince-nezed
Cheerleaders
Pop stars
Painted mummers
Baggy-pantsed comics
Garrulous checkers players
And crooning mothers to their babes
To say nothing of the sounds and sights of nature
The elegant murmurs of beast fowl herb fish and insect
Nurturing Earth her textures and her colors and her beneficence despite everything
The irresistible refulgence of His Majesty the Sun
The signs and wonders shining forth from air sea and sky
All that is sensible or imaginable
Each an intrusion
Each a violation yes but not such as breaks a bubble or singes a sleeve
Not charioted by Bacchus and his ravenous pards
Not even on wings as the curling falcon
But wafted upon such breezes
As from the heaven blow

The family trapped under the rubble in Antakya
The child starved in Sana’a
The little girl killed by a stray bullet while coming home from daycare
The father and child drowned while crossing the river
The businessman whose yacht is so large
It can’t be tugged out of port

People don’t know much
And they have little self-control
It’s not their fault
They didn’t create themselves

A worm writhes on the broiling pavement
A maple lost half its mass in a single gust
Flood fire shipwreck and madness
Events do not punish avoidable errors

And sometimes you do know and you make a choice
While the world proceeds with no guarantee
Except the promise of suffering
So love your neighbor and love yourself

Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras
Ars longa vita brevis
I was wrong about that one too but not too wrong
It’s not that an artwork lasts a long time but a life doesn’t
It’s that it takes a long time to achieve art or rather artistry
Longer than life lasts
And thus a lifetime is not enough to become a poet
So I’m right that life doesn’t last very long

We focus too much on things most of us
And not enough on actions
Consequently we lapse into anodyne truisms
In general
In sufficient generality everything is true
By a rough estimation a noted entomologist avers
All animal species are insects

And yet a little bluegreen fungus
Impels itself through the leaf litter in winter beneath the magnolia
I can’t name its genus much less its species
In general we know much less than we think we do
I can see the winsome pileus
But I can only imagine the reaching mycelia
Living network of communication
Suppositious to me I grant but beyond doubt as to their actual though viewless existence
Formidable in their intricacy
And the pretty fruit it may be more greenblue than bluegreen
Might not be called a pileus
I know it isn’t exactly a fruit like a pear or a walnut
I know that it vanishes in a day or two or three
But it occasions joy

Common knowledge rightly holds
That when the doors of perception are cleansed
All things will appear as they actually are
Infinite and holy
But a fact less generally acknowledged
Is that the world and the creatures of the world
Magnificently thrive by the immanent alchemical infusion
That transmutes world into word
Into that creating word that inspirits dull lifeless matter
And thus joy engenders
For all this comes to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment

I present a habit or perhaps a compulsion
A will to exhaustiveness
As these pages show
To try to rule the world or at least render the world manageable
By pasting labels on things
But despite my appellative reflex
The birds the machines the buildings the trees the consumables the fungi and the people
Continue to do their respective things
They do things
Despite the fact that as recently as April 25 2023
I identified the song of the towhee as that of the bobolink
As I had done for decades previously

I thought Mussolini really did make the trains run on time
So successful was Fascism in practical efficiency one was forced to admit
When in fact he merely terrorized the populace into silence
In respect of the regularity of public services and presumably in other respects

It takes a long time to understand things
Longer than anybody’s allotted span
Even the old magnolia
Already towering and prolific when I arrived at this place twenty years ago
Is mortal
But memory is collective and not solely individual
I remember because those before me remember
The bullshit role the magnolia played in the myths of history
Nor am I the first to enjoy the delicious spectacle of glossy leaf and portly bloom
The fair scent of citrus though the flowers have not yet arrived this May
The roughsmooth triple bole implicated with lichens
The deep cretaceous roots
And thus there is but the one great poem

With the sound of infra-blacklight speech
Drawn from the sunless depths of sleep
You answer in the affirmative
But what was the question
For God’s sake what was the question

Vague intuitive spectacles make up the logo
That supplements the site of terse revelation
The Pisgah sight of dividends bubbling impetuously
A wavering field gules with azure bendy
And the legend emblazoned bone-white
Woe ye who embrace chimeric phantasmata

The industrious neighbors build greenhouses
Doghouses swallowhouses and a subterranean cocktail lounge
Upholstered it was said in chlorophyll vinyl with poppy piping
Hot and cold running waxfruit and felt ventilation
While a billboard out on the drag rages in viscous animation
I make sexy teeth

The family reunion degenerated into commercial appeal
One-sided stereo sets
A scheme for harvesting underutilized skymiles
Left boot sent on approval
A book of quotations from the late great Al Jolson
Oh Joe you are a real man after all

Doc note I’d diet on cod
If I could cantilever the murmuring protoplasms
Greenfern Lane used to be full of toads
Wearing sunglasses as I recall
Sipping mai tais under the banana leaves
Beside the heap of CRTs

Euthyphro and the Apology

Gilly had taken a big hit of windowpane
Which was a bad idea because he was driving
But he didn’t wreck the car as far as I can remember
But I do remember thinking sequence doesn’t matter as much as people think
Especially in the middle of the proceedings
When the disco ball expanded to fill the entire colosseum

The drab little professor with his pointer and mortarboard
I was thinking he needs to get a hod to go with that hat
But he ended up saying some pretty good things
About Bismark and the banks and how earlier
The revolutions of 1848 were a turning point in history
When history failed to turn

But you can’t have a doughnut shop without grease
You can’t have an immune system without lymphocytes
Nothing is perfect in this world
That reference to the werewolf’s hair was a poetic hyperbole
Amanda said Can’t you ever talk about anything except the Gators
And Gilly chuckled and just kept driving

Gay men capable of true gaiety
The steady-eyed spinster active in her milieu
Denizens of the demimonde who could take poetry or leave it
Wives of high-cultural celebrities
Phlebotomists and augurers of the sphygmomanometer
Workers in the convenience stores the warehouses and the fast-food restaurants
Decadent aristocrats
Heroes of social justice feckless dilettantes and scions of great families
Hipsters in their implausible garb
Gray drudges with a secret passion
Outsiders of problematic mental health
Neurodiverse entertainers who dwell in the ambiguity of gender
Executives of going concerns
Magistrates generals technicians attorneys obstetricians
Teenagers boisterous or withdrawn
Prodigious children who lisp in numbers
Rude mechanics and effete aesthetes
Sighing maidens born to blush unseen
Dowdy dour professors solemnly chanting through their pointed beards

What are we after here
Statements expositions analyses accounts
Songs laments jubilations libretti dirges cries of the heart
Architectonic verbal edifices spontaneous overflows
Sonnets villanelles heroic couplets blank verse
Ballads spenserians pindarics or poems in prose
Massive narratives in ottava or terza rima
Notes queries arguments
Limericks tongue twisters jokes puns and acrostics
Metaphysical conceits
Scurrilous attacks
Obscene broadsides
Minute renderings of the smallest and most remote county
Intrepid evocations of cosmic immensity
Arimanes seated on a globe of fire
A sparrow pecking at the gravel
Sweet serenades to ripening love
Sour cocktails compounded of ennui
Salty chanties of ribald fancy
Bitter denunciations of vice and folly
The lubricious umami of vowels fricatives nasals plosives and stops
The just representation of general life
The egotistical sublime
A thing of beauty and a joy forever

The forest primeval the Spanish Steps
The sounds smells and pace of the city
The field where man follows the plow
The field where woman binds the sheaves
The shop with its gear tackle and trim of all trades
The wandering clouds the looming mountains the restless seas
The leafy branch whereon the songbird sings
The soft earth wherethrough the tender flower peeps
The slender skyward fingers of trees in winter
The great bridges towers spires blockhouses roundhouses and vehicle assembly buildings
The wagons ships aircraft freight trains cars nuclear-powered submarines and oxcarts jogging on pneumatic tires
The virtual spaces defined by distance-obliterating media of transmission and reception
The hutches stalls and kennels of our brute companions equine canine or feline
The homes for the aged in their wisdom and cognitive decline
The church the school the place of business
The field of contention and the refuge of peace
The daycare redolent of paste finger paints and infantile effluence
The equivocal resorts of rage lust and melancholy
The granular details
The abstruse speculations
The daunting search through the universal library

Human persons treat of these subjects these places
Who have occupied some place of their own
Gelatinous organisms with the gift of speech
No different from anybody else
And everybody is different
All perforce take action in the world
And some shoulder the doom of squaring the circle
That is
Of wording the truth
Valorous endeavor
But is the particular compulsion
To cry to expose to disclose to overflow
Worthy of particular attention
It is not
For we must regard the issue and not the issuance as the matter prime
The progeny and not the gestation
The poem and not the poet
The life is not the thing
Except insofar as it looses the latch
To open the gate
To set out on the excursion
In the realms of immortality

What’s fair play in poetry
I don’t mean what are the rules
Inasmuch as for some time it has been the case
That the best rules are those unspoken
Those incapable of being spoken
And poets therefore have labored at the miserable job
Of reinventing the wheel

Or to shine a sunnier light
Poets have always had to exercise care
Lest they commit some blunder
Blatantly obvious to the world
Though entirely opaque it might be
To themselves

You should rise above concern about the world

You should probably insert an image from time to time
So the current exercise is already wanting
You should attend to the sounds
And try to establish some rhythm preferably subtle
So wanting wanting and wanting

And shouldn’t there be some sort of theme
I mean shouldn’t you have something to say
And is it a problem that stating and expressing
Never quite match up
And even so mustn’t a statement or for that matter an expression
Contain some content

And what of foul play
Aren’t some topics word choices images and attitudes
Self-evidently forbidden

And if the rules are hidden
Is there such a thing as cheating
Starting off a poem with a conjunction say
Or deploying an unfocused demonstrative
And yet a decent poem might begin
And on that day

. . .

And pronouns sheesh
Some he or she or it gallivanting around
Performing actions unanchored random unimaginable
And don’t get me started on I

And what on God’s green earth makes a poem good

And adjectives so cheap
Onerous
Shy
Salty
Transparent
Uncultivated
Snippy
Malodorous

Wit wisdom sagacity discernment juice
Skill ease virtuosity flair sprezzatura
Peace justice compassion beauty truth
Fact
Nobody on earth can write a poem
And yet millions of poems have been written
Or maybe just one

So love a poem as you love your neighbor
Let it do its thing

The tears should have been golden
We could have shared a fond idea
Instead of wasting our reserves in theoretical consultation

But all of our expressions
Mere triangle-1 PETE
Spuriously interchangeable

The shapes of green soldiers
The Kevlar-coated gladiators
The ecstasies of tactic and kill-ratio

Can we not weep together
Can we not agree on that much
Or are we prevented by the iron-clad doctrines

And what lies behind the seeming-durable exterior
The soft metallic-looking plates that corrode
But never fully dissipate

Enamored of the armatures
We neglect the gelatinous organism
The permeability of a frog

Dazzled by our tower of plastic
That stretches to the highest heaven
And strikes not dumb but glutting in spoken cacophony

Thereby drowning the opportunity
For a single instance
Of the aha-recognition

One party devoted to the mechanisms of history
Another devoted to the mechanical operation of the spirit
Both confusing numerals with infinite number

We tread upon far planets because we must
We must employ the latest invention
We must sustain the lust for dominion

The genie’s out of the bottle again
Another genie another bottle
Another bout of deadly wishes

And thus a universe of unmasterable indeterminacy
Of a lonely neutrino
Amid the one life within us and abroad

No ideas but in things they say
But what is a thing
What somebody says it is I guess

This magnolia casts up offspring
From its sickly fecund roots
Which tree is the tree

Or maybe I’m wrong
And seeds sprung where they fell
And root and bole alone but never soil

I cannot justify this paltry mumble
In the plaza of great actions
And innumerable speeches

I cannot bring myself to formal exercise
Nor can I bring myself to weep alone
And thus the silly unintelligible madrigal

The tears should have been frankincense and myrrh
We could have forgone the histrionic polymers
I should have clad myself in blissful silence

heer natur lgrime
sori tumbilt

sef

weedsea sperless
woi cirtus slazoubt

ciivs alto lrgrime

Fastzu Gaiesy pue dimn

Back in the days of VHF
An unassigned channel would fill with snow
And helpless not to see patterns there
You would register a circle a spiral
A sliding past of tectonic plates
The alpha beta chi omega of an unknown script

The boattail flew to the ground from overhead
The cardinal made one hop to his left
Without leaving the branch on which he perched
A squirrel decomposes at the molecular level
The nucleotides refuse to pair
The helix doesn’t stack up

Centaurs and Lapiths contend in London
While their home crumbles on the Acropolis
Tourists at Lascaux get to see paintings of paintings
Most of silent film has evaporated or burned
A thing of beauty is a joy forever
Only because joys not things can be conserved

How do you throw a pot without clay
First trash the equipment
Then forget everything you ever thought you knew
About pots clay and throwing

A battle ensues every time
A person encounters another person
Other events take place simultaneously true
But an unavoidable concomitant of meeting is battle

This discomfiting truth results in part
From the inability of people to state the truth
Baldly nakedly without figure or embellishment
The word every for example is a metaphor

As are life truth person nakedly and metaphor
All metaphors
And metaphors do not conceal truth but on the contrary
Represent a mundane gesture toward revelation

Nor are figure or embellishment necessarily blameworthy
Participants potentially in a decorative decorum
But people do not typically content themselves with beauty
But demand instead such truth as they themselves possess

Ask her some suggestion
That the same as that
Can could would be knocking
Cat pulled a little stone
Every on
Left a snog for her
Repellent but handsome
Shoulders too near but nice color
Trinkets for the lawn lady
Cloud of toss
We would have some harms
Lively people in the ground
Place yourself in another room
Who talks long left
Key told us pick out a broom day
Curd
All guests in the fall the road
We’re we’re goggie gone
And the ma and the pa stitches
Left arm pre-reader
Test tube on Friday
Treble master
Last out in hilarious
Sigh called to delete you
Transitive crank
All religion grizzles
Miss the first huddle
Tickles in the brave you’re
Next up on the leap
They mouthed a school approach employment
Sticky sugar cup
Would junk up the mike to backstroke his’n
The haunt and the grease popper
Is are purse to go
To better gaslight otherwise make Mac attack
Man nan touch embargo
Unless it’s mechanical or something
Justice don’t need me
To suck where the rectangles grow
Dry rattle
These locations he
Ban-dance out of focus
Someone’s gotta laissez-faire
Stirrup
Beside the world into sheet and woad
Him the rains [or reins or reigns] betold
That’s spacebob
Ur punt mean lay tube
On the bamboo knock knock
Sob galoot
Lancelot to go home
They Strongbad filed a picnic
Towel mall the
Bloom links pard election
Tom hearly rang rum
Crash gobs of teddy resort
No lodge call raisin
Rube so many rooms away
Old old tile
Car perpetual Haitian
Best guest sol removal
Epsom consider a tool
Ab sat so
High terror
Ketch praybills stock a meme Roth
Gam blast t’ward the seeker
Durst
Comment
Sares are born tweak a text
Hum hare [or hair] the hero
Tom’s reign [or rain or rein] the telephone game
Trumbull’s a sackbut
Representing the most of one day
Art end tick the city
Test

Reports contend that the winds out of the west
Blow moderately today
But I reckon their force to be stiffer than that
More than mere breath of springtime’s being
More like the panting of an old man out of shape
If that panting could be steadier
A pressure of uninterrupted force

The clouds move as if self-propelled
In the more blue than cloud
Much more
Evenly spaced though irregular of shape and size
And the shapes transmogrify before the very vision
And the ragged edges dissipate in delicatest gradient

One them passing nearest the sun
Almost directly overhead
Displays a spectrum from corner to corner
Green lavender orange and pink
Reading from left to right of course
I must put it into words
I can’t just enjoy the comely phenomenon
The clouds were unusually satisfactory today

Did I forget to mention Wayne Shorter
Did I forget to mention Bacchus and Ariadne
Did I forget to mention that dream in which the bridge keeps rising and never crests
Did I forget to mention The Ode to a Nightingale
Did I forget to mention Bessie Smith singing St. Louis Blues
Did I forget to mention Louis Armstrong’s accompaniment to Bessie Smith on St. Louis Blues
Did I forget to mention the harmonium player on St. Louis Blues whose identity remains I believe uncertain
Did I forget to mention On What Matters
Did I forget to mention Django Reinhardt playing St. Louis Blues with his brother
Did I forget to mention Jimi Hendrix
Did I forget to mention a child’s utterance ah swimming pool I swim
Did I forget to mention a child’s utterance upon seeing a picture of an ostrich a goose
Did I forget to mention a child’s response to being wished a happy birthday happy birthday to you too
Did I forget to mention the Buford Highway Farmers Market
Did I forget to mention the births of my children and grandchildren and the range and intensity of feelings that have attended their growth
Did I forget to mention Huy Fong chili garlic sauce
Did I forget to mention the printer’s apron Tom gave me
Did I forget to mention P90s
Did I forget to mention Herbie Hancock
Did I forget to mention Chick Corea
Did I forget to mention The Rolling Stones in Norfolk in 1972
Did I forget to mention Stevie Wonder in Norfolk in 1972
Did I forget to mention The Grateful Dead in Miami in 1970
Did I forget to mention the one life within us and abroad
Did I forget to mention Fleetwood Mac in Miami in 1969
Did I forget to mention Led Zeppelin in Jacksonville in 1969
Did I forget to mention heedless intimacy in 1972
Did I forget to mention Weather Report
Did I forget to mention the Mahavishnu Orchestra
Did I forget to mention The Harry Smith Anthology
Did I forget to mention Big Mama Thornton
Did I forget to mention The Beatles
Did I forget to mention the Lion’s Club barbecue at Homewood Park
Did I forget to mention my mother’s allowing me to add the milk to the cornbread mix
Did I forget to mention Smokey Robinson
Did I forget to mention James Brown
Did I forget to mention Ray Brown
Did I forget to mention Kinderszenen
Did I forget to mention The Apology of Hephaestus
Did I forget to mention Ma Rainey
Did I forget to mention Mississippi John Hurt
Did I forget to mention Dock Boggs
Did I forget to mention Nevermind
Did I forget to mention Dick Justice
Did I forget to mention Hank Williams
Did I forget to mention Kid A
Did I forget to mention Johnny Cash
Did I forget to mention Scotty Moore
Did I forget to mention Euthyphro and the Apology
Did I forget to mention Aphex Twin
Did I forget to mention the cartoons of Tex Avery Bob Clampett Friz Freleng and Chuck Jones
Did I forget to mention Ron Carter
Did I forget to mention Miles Davis and each musician who ever played with Miles Davis and every note Miles Davis ever played not that I’ve heard every note but all the ones I’ve heard were unspeakably beautiful
Did I forget to mention Bob Dylan
Did I forget to mention Mike Bloomfield
Did I forget to mention Aretha Franklin
Did I forget to mention Ahmet Ertegun
Did I forget to mention Mad magazine
Did I forget to mention Quincy Jones
Did I forget to mention The Chemical Brothers
Did I forget to mention Martin Scorcese
Did I forget to mention 2001: A Space Odyssey A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon
Did I forget to mention Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Did I forget to mention The Godfather and Apocalypse Now
Did I forget to mention the crust of Athens Pizza
Did I forget to mention Silas Marner
Did I forget to mention David Copperfield
Did I forget to mention Monty Python’s Flying Circus
Did I forget to mention Dashiell Hammett
Did I forget to mention the eagle’s nest in a whitened tree beside I-95
Did I forget to mention the Smiley novels of John Le Carré
Did I forget to mention the kimono my beloved wore on 27th Street
Did I forget to mention the Bernie Gunther novels of Phillip Kerr
Did I forget to mention all the novels and stories of Thomas Mann
Did I forget to mention Cannon’s Jug Stompers
Did I forget to mention about a third of the sonnets and plays of Shakespeare
Did I forget to mention Sonny’s Blues
Did I forget to mention my heroic parents
Did I forget to mention the beauty of the human form
Did I forget to mention about a quarter of The Canterbury Tales
Did I forget to mention about a tenth of the poetic output of William Wordsworth
Did I forget to mention The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Frost at Midnight and the Dejection Ode
Did I forget to mention about a third of the poetic output of WB Yeats
Did I forget to mention about a sixth of the poetic output of Wallace Stevens
Did I forget to mention Ulysses
Did I forget to mention Anna Karenina
Did I forget to mention The Crying of Lot 49
Did I forget to mention Midnight’s Children
Did I forget to mention Song of Solomon
Did I forget to mention tiny dried flowers that Janice place in the vase of a vanilla bottle
Did I forget to mention Slaughterhouse 5
Did I forget to mention Ann Carson
Did I forget to mention about nine-tenths of the poetic output of Emily Dickinson
Did I forget to mention Jean Cocteau
Did I forget to mention Blind Arthur Blake
Did I forget to mention Marcel Duchamp
Did I forget to mention The Firebird Petrushka and The Rite of Spring
Did I forget to mention Édouard Manet
Did I forget to mention Andy Warhol
Did I forget to mention Brian Jones on guitar harmonica recorder vibraslap or mellotron
Did I forget to mention Robert Johnson
Did I forget to mention the invariably lovely poetic output of Walt Whitman
Did I forget to mention Born Cross-Eyed
Did I forget to mention that dream in which the flying cyclist one of five ignited and the charred bones fell rattling to the ground
Did I forget to mention DK & The Hoop Snakes
Did I forget to mention George Martin
Did I forget to mention Mood Indigo and East St Louis Toodle-Oo
Did I forget to mention a Guinness or a gin snowcone with a fat joint or the Vermont Maid and a 7-Up the day after before I got sober
Did I forget to mention Oscar Peterson
Did I forget to mention Martha Reeves and the Vandellas
Did I forget to mention Art Tatum
Did I forget to mention Joe Pass
Did I forget to mention Ella Fitzgerald
Did I forget to mention Calvin and Hobbes
Did I forget to mention R Crumb
Did I forget to mention Smarties
Did I forget to mention Lester Young
Did I forget to mention Marian who companions me not without pleasure apparently
Did I forget to mention Billie Holliday
Did I forget to mention Lida May Tucker
Did I forget to mention Graham Nash
Did I forget to mention The Doors
Did I forget to mention Charley Patton
Did I forget to mention the Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Did I forget to mention The Kinks
Did I forget to mention Mayfield ice cream
Did I forget to mention The Animals
Did I forget to mention the noble achievements of those who suffer defects in their private lives
Did I forget to mention California Dreamin’ and Monday Monday
Did I forget to mention 96 Tears
Did I forget to mention Psychotic Reaction
Did I forget to mention Time Won’t Let me
Did I forget to mention Venus
Did I forget to mention Be My Baby
Did I forget to mention Don’t Worry Baby
Did I forget to mention Crimson and Clover
Did I forget to mention the memo from Richard Ellmann requesting to borrow my copy of The Divine Marquis
Did I forget to mention Spirit in the Sky
Did I forget to mention Mechanical World
Did I forget to mention Marvin Gaye
Did I forget to mention Pegasus
Did I forget to mention The Pixies
Did I forget to mention the Rolling Stones records produced by Jimmy Miller
Did I forget to mention Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen
Did I forget to mention Lou Reed
Did I forget to mention David Bowie
Did I forget to mention O
Did I forget to mention Mick Ronson
Did I forget to mention Jeff Beck
Did I forget to mention Disraeli Gears
Did I forget to mention Koko
Did I forget to mention The Miami Pop Festival
Did I forget to mention the time I watched Monterey Pop while tripping and wearing a dress
Did I forget to mention the Blind Owl
Did I forget to mention Howlin’ Wolf
Did I forget to mention Franz Schubert
Did I forget to mention the 3rd the 5th the 6th the 7th and the 9th
Did I forget to mention Tannhäuser Tristan und Isolde and The Ring
Did I forget to mention The Marriage of Figaro the Magic Flute and the Requiem
Did I forget to mention Claude Debussy
Did I forget to mention A German Requiem
Did I forget to mention The Three Penny Opera
Did I forget to mention The Mikado
Did I forget to mention La Bohème
Did I forget to mention Camille Pissarro
Did I forget to mention Muddy Waters
Did I forget to mention Jason Thibodeau
Did I forget to mention Augie Meyers
Did I forget to mention Sergei Prokofiev
Did I forget to mention Booker T and the MG’s
Did I forget to mention Wilson Pickett
Did I forget to mention Tom Jones
Did I forget to mention Tom Jones
Did I forget to mention Steve Stewart
Did I forget to mention my hot-rodded Twin Reverb that burned up in a van fire along with the Japanese Stratocaster now lovingly displayed on my bedroom wall
Did I forget to mention A Love Supreme
Did I forget to mention The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838
Did I forget to mention Elvin Jones
Did I forget to mention Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Did I forget to mention birds
Did I forget to mention bugs
Did I forget to mention The Fall
Did I forget to mention crustaceans
Did I forget to mention molluscs
Did I forget to mention Max Roach
Did I forget to mention mountains
Did I forget to mention peanut butter sandwiches with raspberry preserves
Did I forget to mention Manhattan cheese cake
Did I forget to mention Jasper Johns
Did I forget to mention a soft soft steamed reuben with real Russian dressing
Did I forget to mention oceans
Did I forget to mention lakes
Did I forget to mention the St. Johns River and the estuary at its mouth
Did I forget to mention Fernandina Beach
Did I forget to mention Vilano Beach
Did I forget to mention Jenson Beach
Did I forget to mention the wild violets through which my father strolled while singing Violet and lapsing into a whistle after a brief groan when he forgot the lyrics
Did I forget to mention the greasepaint mustache WC Fields wore while juggling cigar boxes
Did I forget to mention trees
Did I forget to mention flowers
Did I forget to mention fungi
Did I forget to mention bacteria
Did I forget to mention the chili d’arbol sauce at Willy’s
Did I forget to mention John Ashbery
Did I forget to mention mammals domesticated and wild
Did I forget to mention Mrs. Farah’s hummus
Did I forget to mention the artistry of sunsets and sunrises
Did I forget to mention Son House
Did I forget to mention skies cloudy or fair
Did I forget to mention stars and planets
Did I forget to mention rocks stones pebbles and sand
Did I forget to mention intricate tracery of mycelia
Did I forget to mention artificial objects that imitate nature
Did I forget to mention natural objects that imitate artifice
Did I forget to mention the meteor falling alongside I-75
Did I forget to mention The Importance of Being Earnest
Did I forget to mention Dmitri Shostakovich
Did I forget to mention Jellyroll Morton
Did I forget to mention My Cat Jeoffry
Did I forget to mention the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath
Did I forget to mention PCOET
Did I forget to mention James Tate
Did I forget to mention the equivocal bliss of effrent
Did I forget to mention Etta James
Did I forget to mention Ray Charles and the Raelettes
Did I forget to mention The Ode on a Grecian Urn
Did I forget to mention Thelonius Monk
Did I forget to mention how Matt secretly attached 20 clothespins to the shirt I was wearing
Did I forget to mention This Land Is Your Land which Karen and I used to play as an improvised piano duet while our parents were trying to listen to Walter Cronkite
Did I forget to mention the musicians on Cheap Thrills as which Hugh told me falsely but generously that I was as good a guitar player
Did I forget to mention Mighty 690 The Big Ape and Station 60 WPDQ between which Hugh and I used to switch in search of Satisfaction
Did I forget to mention Mr Smyth
Did I forget to mention coffee
Did I forget to mention the holy communion of family and friends

For David Melnick has died
The angel pcoet of apparitional words
O weedsea
O sordea

Did I forget to mention
Forget to mention woodpeckers
Who crank up their chatters like a Willys Jeep
Exuberant to drum the roof rain gutters
For bird does not live by wood alone

And you just have to wrack your brain
What the hell is a votive lassitude
I know what lassitude is
And I know that votive is an adjective
Related to devote

That’s the thing about poetry
The words can be more or less normal
But they’re going to bump up against each other
Peculiarly
And suddenly cvmwoflux and a hail of pmisti effrent

And you click the link and again and again
Credentials not recognized
And you don’t wrack your brain at all
You just accept your impotence
At least John Ashbery gave us something to work with