Poems

  • Melnisi FURNESTAL

    heer natur lgrime
    sori tumbilt

    sef

    weedsea sperless
    woi cirtus slazoubt

    ciivs alto lrgrime

    Fastzu Gaiesy pue dimn

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  • Disjunctive

    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

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  • The Decorative and the Truthful

    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

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  • Did I Her You Right

    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

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  • Clouds in May

    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

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  • Did I Forget to Mention

    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

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  • Immortal Departed

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

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  • More Birds

    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

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  • John Ashbery

    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

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  • Emergence

    Billowing billowing the rise of light
    After days of darkness

    Quit talking about triggers
    Don’t ask why I’m depressed I just am

    And grateful however brief
    For momentary relief

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  • From the Suburbs

    Out here in the suburbs with my daughters my grandchildren my wife
    My sons who come to visit often
    Wealth beyond the imagining of a Keats or Chatterton
    Poets broken by poverty appreciated only posthumously
    Out here with the internet and cable television and streaming services
    Trying to raise a lawn from the recalcitrant clay
    Because neighbors and culture and self-appointed authority demand a lawn
    Trimmed clipped tamed mowed and manicured
    While all the time the mocking clay shows its ruddy face
    I should import a ton of soil from prairie Illinois

    But the azaleas go nuts all on their own
    Immemorially planted by a real estate developer’s contractors
    While a towering pine sprung all on its own before the front porch
    Before my eyes a pine grew towering
    And down the street the spreading oak majestic in its symmetry
    Sliced open for the power lines but thereby revealing its own powerful limbs

    And the birds go nuts the bobolinks robins cardinals mockingbirds phoebes
    And the many birds whose songs and colors I cannot identify
    That one delicious song five chirps and a trill
    The soaring buzzards and the soaring raptors
    And the languorous crows skilled and cunning
    And the bluejays the call of a crow cranked up an octave
    Birds that feed on death like all in the kingdom of the animals
    And two versions of the barred owl’s cry at night
    Six or eight regular notes or the wild arpeggios of the mating frenzy
    A phoebe attacked me once when I was hanging laundry on the line
    It too thought me eccentric for hanging laundry on a sunny Sunday

    The little white cat with black spots
    Timid but a little braver now that its larger rival has gone
    It still retreats when I make an overture
    They say a coyote mauled a chihuahua
    Who nevertheless survived the ordeal

    You have to drive a car to get into the city
    You could take a bus but the schedule is erratic since the lockdown
    Or you could drive to the train station
    The suburbs assume an automotively equipped populace
    And we have driven a car to many great cities Philadelphia Chicago Jacksonville Orlando Charlotte
    To visit family and friends in their respective suburbs
    I want to be of the people and not of the populace
    But demographics are destiny
    We do not create ourselves
    Except beloved reader in these dear pages

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  • Sea oats pierce the salmon clouds
    Sky touches the land
    Sunrise at Fernandina

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  • Centrifugal

    The tiny rocket lifts off with a quick fizzing hiss
    And parachutes peacefully to earth
    In a move favorable for entropy
    Propellent’s release of energy irreversible

    But what is entropy
    Something like a gorgon I think
    You never see it
    But if it sees you you die

    Gravitation they say is a dimple in spacetime
    An artifact a momentary subtraction from mother earth
    Perception an illusion more or less
    This poem another Mad poiuyt

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  • A Dear Fantasy

    I burst into a room and yell
    What is this crap
    And the multitude in unison exclaim
    It’s crap sir

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  • Retraction

    I made an error several days ago
    The human population seven billion
    What do I think this is 2011
    Well one seven-billionth is not a large number
    And one eight-billionth somewhat less

    And yet this little life seems so immense
    The drapes the window the magnolia
    Its leaves shivering with raindrops
    How could I have wasted so many days and hours
    Condemning the little permeable self

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  • My Life in the Gush of Boasts

    It seemed so impressive at the time
    So thoroughly suffused with significance
    That imitation of indigenous behavior
    The profiles of the demoiselles
    The enigmatic gesture
    Its innate meaning lost
    Spontaneous according to plan
    The attempt despite itself
    To avoid expulsion from light
    By seeking crepuscular refuge

    But we took up residence in the landfill
    And made continents our kitchen midden
    We decorate with detritus
    The former umbrella its spokes all bent
    The dresser of deal lacking the three glass knobs
    The rinds of melon and pork belly
    The Mosrite down from six strings to two
    The timid peroration
    In iambickish pentametroid

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  • Those Who Prevail

    How many James Bond movies have there been
    Batman John Wick Ethan Hunt
    Thor the god immortal
    Successes nobody can fail to expect

    I saw a hawk carry away a chipmunk
    They say nine attempts out of ten are doomed to fail
    I saw another chipmunk carry leaves into a burrow
    Preparing I guess for the spring arrivals

    My mother would be 99 in June
    If she hadn’t succumbed
    To years-long decomposition of body and brain
    She shouldn’t have had to suffer like that

    But sometimes you can allow yourself to wonder
    How will Oedipus accept the truth
    Maybe it will be different this go-round
    Will Tom Jones settle down with his Sophie

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  • Micropanpsychism

    Bacteria exchange genetic material

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  • Spring (Dejection)

    Some work of noble note
    No none
    Why should the world note
    The work of one among seven billion

    Fame resides where the ghost ones go
    It rises and falls upon the currents
    Of a pear-shaped globe
    Trickling the edges of a four-cornered circle

    Tracing the frantic oscillation
    Of an algorithm
    Shooting in waves
    From a senile tyrant’s workshop

    Warm wet days lurch from lull to crisis
    Cumulonimbus blitzkrieg
    And mornings absorbed in drainage
    And the settling of timbers

    As it fled the robin made a cry
    That I had never heard it make before
    The barred owl called in broad daylight
    Cars raced loudly on never-yet trodden streets

    Licentious gnats
    Gathered in their nebulous swarms
    Barely conscious alive and dead before sunrise
    Their inert eggs overwintering in the sand

    This sickly Spring
    This April fossilized in song and tale
    Flowers that look like pictures of flowers
    Spiky waves of generality

    Remnants of flowers
    Gelatinous corpses
    Curtains for secret ovules
    Trees and shrubs festooned with roadkill

    Who’s to say and who knows know
    Who understands intelligence
    If the work were noble
    You wouldn’t care about note

    And thus the busy sulker introverts
    The ghostly paradigm
    Enacts the immemorial script
    Devours the indigestible vague procedures

    Not bile more like phlegm
    This apathetic phantom cramp
    Resinous vaporous accretion
    Cooked in a dun tar spleen

    These fragments serve no structural function
    But only establish the interstices
    Wherefrom waxy roots
    Draw insufficient sustenance

    So keep yourself to yourself
    Do not expose your hollowness
    Discretion is the better part
    Or keep babbling in the rain

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  • Damaged Children

    I feared the blast of the atom bomb
    But I never held my classmates’ hands
    Making our way to a nearby church
    Our parents waiting to collect
    Those of us who survived the shooting

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  • Two Questions for St. Patrick

    The mystery of the Trinity
    That’s the crucial item
    In our doctrinal curriculum

    And doesn’t your feast day fall during Lent

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  • An Anxious Child

    Here’s me at seven years old
    I’ve adopted the habit of running indoors
    Whenever a plane flies overhead
    A frequent event in the suburb of a city
    It seems I spend a lot of time outdoors

    Grownups claim though they offer no evidence
    That I have nothing to fear
    But I have seen the pictures
    Of the planes and the atom bombs
    And I know that I must duck and cover

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  • Of Decadent Poetry

    The poem in the act of coping
    With a glut of depletion
    In the act of collecting residue
    To assemble into a new
    Something

    For our newness is assemblage
    And not the creation of objects from nothingness
    So was it ever but now
    Standing atop this repository of corruption
    The hoarseness of a howl
    The vagueness of a vision
    The weightlessness of a sensation
    And all mass surrenders to abstraction

    Seen of but few
    Concealed from the Goat King
    Who smokes a cigarette in his Audi

    The play has wound down
    Done the denouement
    Finished the epilogue
    The usher sweeps the plastic cups
    And we stack them in pyramids

    The voice of a decadent age will be decadent
    Though some custodians of the regular style
    Will persist
    Graduates of the programs
    But despite their noble efforts
    They will not serve as voice

    Our memories are distorted
    Our expectations small
    Though we know a lot of things not taught in schools
    Of urges and delights not spoken of
    Of violence and disgust not spoken of
    We know next to nothing
    But there is so much in next-to

    Pompous no doubt
    Pretentious assuredly
    But redolent of a certain askesis
    Amid the parasites and the copulating monkeys

    Democracy morality aesthetics
    These are ideals
    And those who speak of them idealists
    And we live as you know not in an age of ideals
    But of successes
    And we who fail can see more clearly
    Than whose whose sight is veiled
    By little luxuries little appetites little tyrannies

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  • Syntactical Perturbation

    I react anxiously to modal auxiliary verbs
    The preposition of gives me the heeby-jeebies
    And about is no picnic
    Pronouns present themselves as a constant source of danger
    With relative pronouns among the worst
    And don’t get me started on I

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  • A Sinful Child

    Here’s me at eight years old
    I’m going to hell
    That’s the way it is
    But I can avoid this terrible thing
    By just confessing my sins
    I know I have lots of them
    Grownups people who know
    Are always telling me
    To stop being bad and start being good
    But I can never think of sins to confess
    They tell me I’ve done a bad thing
    And I see what they’re talking about
    But when I examine my conscience
    I can only remember getting yelled at
    So sometimes I pad my time
    In the confessional
    With fictions
    Delinquencies thefts acts of violence
    Such as I can imagine
    And they are more or less true in a general sense
    No the real catch
    The real damning provision
    Was slipped into the Act of Contrition I recite daily
    A firm purpose of amendment
    I wish to amend
    But I fail at firm purposes
    And the fear of condemnation
    Albeit an already accomplished fact
    Exceeds both the conceivable pain of punishment
    And the conceivable relief absolution would afford
    For eternity cannot be conceived
    Nor the shame of one condemned
    Some time in the future I will ask
    Why does God who loves me
    Send me to hell

    And the answer will return
    Ah but you send yourself to hell
    With your unrepentant depravity

    Oh but I do repent
    I do repent

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