A guy approached walking his dog
Hiya I said
I don’t remember whether the man replied
The next utterance I recall was to his dog
You want to say hello
The dog moved in my direction
Do you like dogs asked the guy
A slight sequence error
His mind was on his dog
I hesitated
And finally I like them okay
Upon further review I dislike more than like them
I petted the dog with both my hands
One behind an ear the other under the chin
I want to wash my hands I thought

As I rounded the corner another dogwalker appeared
Engrossed in the phone in one hand
The leash in the other
Hiya I said as we passed
Definitely no reply
Careful avoidance of eye contact
Come on I heard him say to his dog
Inobservance of the courtesies really bothers me

I liked dogs when I was a kid
I watched while Sam my favorite
Died from chasing a heating oil truck
He was not run over but broke his back
Caught midleap by the truck’s rear step
He dragged himself a few feet by his front paws
And then collapsed

I saw an overturned bee
Big and black wriggling its legs
I’ve not seen an all-black bee I thought
Has it turned black at death’s approach
Before realizing that I’d never before examined
The underside of a carpenter bee
A few yards on another bee was in its throes
This time upright so that I could see
It’s greenish hood
While it traced circle after circle
Roughly an inch in diameter

Let grief consolidate
Let grievance dissipate

A grunting satyr appeared in a dream
Neither chimp nor Neanderthal
He could have pulled a haunch of venison
He had a tail tufted like a lion’s
And dark fur over pink buff skin
The swollen brow hung toward a meaty jaw
The nose did not project like a human nose
Flat and turning sharply upward like a bat’s
Not an intimidating presence
But a source of foul and sick unease
Inobservant of the courtesies

Let me explain something to you
Said the temptor
Clad in finely-dressed leather
Turret-crested world-weary and untroubled

Your Enslaver commands
That you remain in ignorance
Lest you discover autonomy
The power of yea or nay

But having already tasted
The fruit of mortality
You can explain things
According to your own lights

And you can offer commentary
On subjects sundry and varied
Such as have crossed your experience
And can register approval and disapproval

Ah but your experience so pitiably limited
When your Commander mandates truth
And your utterances so far have been
Notably insubstantial in point of fact

And indeed the judgments you have expressed
At this admittedly early stage of the game
Have not been promising
Neither elegant nor comprehensive nor even truthful

Always too much
Always not enough
Your taste lacks judiciousness
Careering between deficiency and excess

These are the facts now act accordingly
Endure drudgery without complaint
Achieve success in all the regular tasks
Then you will be rewarded happy and fat

I speak only out of concern for your welfare
For if you do not exercise secrecy and self-control
You will incur the fire of His wrath
And do you not already feel the tickling flames

Perhaps you find them not unpleasurable
But hear and heed
Share not your thoughts or better yet have none
Maintain silence now and for all your days

I stood at the top of the driveway
Motionless not to disturb
The cat that roams freely on the cul-de-sac
Slim and spotted like a dairy cow
It gazed up at the neighbors’ shrubs
At the little flock of birds busying themselves therein
I proceeded toward my morning walk
A few feet aloof the cat looked toward me
And a few more feet and another look back
Three times the cat moved and looked
Before trotting toward another homestead
Making a judgment
Threat or no threat
Better move on just to be sure

I’ve lived in the suburbs all my life
At least that part that I remember
Where houses look out over lawns
Gently rolling if in Georgia or Alabama
If in Florida flat
Most of the residents fight the good fight
To impose a lawn
On these forested regions

I was proud of my parents
Intellectuals though they denied that fact
My father identified as a technocrat
A professor of science at the college
My mother worked in health care
Though only after a decade
The formative one for me
During which she identified as a housewife
It was an event when we acquired
When I was very young a television set
And it was a great change
When a second car crowded the driveway
I did not know that we were middle class

Sometimes we would journey
To visit the grandmothers
Who lived as we did in houses with lawns
Though I later learned that my father’s family
Was of the haute bourgeoisie
While my mother’s stayed closer
To their agrarian roots
One uncle raised hogs
On a compound carved out of the palmettos

So no doubt I should have known
Once in a while some politician
Would say middle class on TV
And if it applies to everybody
It doesn’t apply especially to me
Once in a while we would drive downtown
To buy shoes for school
Or a lantern for a camping trip
And I would see the multi-family dwellings there
Where residents used the porch in summer
Once I saw a mother nursing her baby
I think I was the only one
Since no other passenger
Registered the shock
I’m still amazed that I kept it to myself

When I returned home I found a catkin
Blown off a Japanese maple
Never to become a flower
Perfect little mammal’s part
Rabbit’s foot or furry phalanx
And I saw the blackbirds
Massing for departure
Twittering in shrubs and trees
Chevrons on their sleeves

Two good things
Neither to be passed up

A moment’s hesitation
She misses both of them

Flags trophies pledges of allegiance
And which is the right one

Not the spoils of victory surely
Not the imposition of force

The senses come first
Said the sensei to the poet

Six times cried the little hawk
But what of the square root of two

The scripted response
The crispy colonel
Never food for worms
Only the sooty residue
Dioxin and PCBs

A lucid nightmare
Acutely detailed
Destination evermore ahead
Repeated reversals
Waken to another nightmare

The crisis authority
Professes its overload
Holding responsible
The granular populace
The many dispersed

The deputized servants
Continue to stoke
The compressed reaction
Ancient apparatus
Barely functional but effective

The force of tradition
The moribund regalia
The decrypting manuals
The familiar insistence
Immemorial mechanisms

Sognum pars cators mlisti
Dastreu cioms dalors pmisti

The low part of the back yard
Where the washings from the winter rain
Accumulate and congeal
The skin of dark mud over the clay

If you have no regrets you have no conscience
Said my dad in his greatly advanced age
I don’t know that my conscience is particularly robust
I regret my earnestness
I wish I could be urbane and lighthearted
Like other poets
Technical virtuosos whose skill
Gives them confidence to nudge and chuckle
Or passionately confront the burning issues of the day
And force attention upon
The wretched the disenfranchised the dispossessed
But instead I regret my own discomfort
This noisy computer
This antiergonomic chair
And I regret my mortality
For when I die it will be untimely
For I have neglected the wellbeing
Of the gelatinous organism
And I have been unkind
And I am ashamed
The old conjunction of sin and death

The sun rises through the dappling clouds
The clouds in infinite rows of infinite variation
The sun a benevolent god but erratic
Always different
Always the same
A hawk cries in the distance
Heroic but ineluctably fatal

Love reason
Love irrational numbers

We might wish to blunt the points
To buffer the edges of this alien entity
That stands outside time and space
And this is what we do with metaphors like stand
Defend ourselves as with an amulet

The truth is all that is
All utterances all understandings
Are facets of the truth
And hence to the gelatinous organism
Figures that cut

The arrogance of the centipede
Confident of its chitinous exoskeleton
Which when threatened it twists into an impregnable spiral
Its panoply of a hundred legs
And what is a hundred

The blindness of the technologist
Discoverer of problems only to solve them
Master of prolongation and delay
Joiner and divider
The lore of temperature velocity mass material and extent

Even deliberate attempts to deceive
Reveal despite themselves
And through their very contingency
The intolerable truth
Beyond world beyond universe beyond life

I am not good for Jeopardy
Or Jeopardy’s not good for me
Compelled the questions out to blurt
When I am wrong I cuss with hurt
Or put the case in Jeopardese
What is the cure of this disease
Now in my sad and trembling age
I do admit the world’s a stage
I must not break my lines to weep
But do I wake or do I sleep

We are adults
We are adults but she my beloved
Has always been the more adult
We fell in love as children
And when we married one of us remained awhile a child
And yet together we retained
A certain innocence
Knowing only as theory of sex for example without love
Stuff of fictions and social pathology

Now that we are adults
We see that things are not so simple
That even appearances are not so simple
The mileage on the grainy path of time
The residue of discontinuity
The marks of trauma
The incandescence of joy
The sacred routines of pleasure

For joy and love are true
As inconsolable grief is true
And time both heals and issues repeated shocks
And while it is true that number
And while it is true that form and proportion
Being outside time are true
It does not follow therefore
That appearance and the marks of time
Must be falsehood
Or that abstraction bears
The muddy hue of indeterminacy

We have suffered through illusions
And seen complexity where once was simplicity
And seen complexity and added experience to our innocence
Disillusionment is in itself not painful
But merely the discovery of prior pain prior error
We have trodden the grainy path together
And gazed beyond the flaming ramparts
We have no need of reënchantment

You really don’t want to read this
O Stranger whom I imagine in the future far or near
These poems I call them poems
Are bad poems
For they name states of feeling instead of expressing them
For example I state here that I am depressed and bored
How dare I indulge in such a state
And how dare I make such a statement
Not so debilitated as to lack the power
To hack away at my noisy desktop

I am surrounded by all that which makes life good
Rich food comfortable amenities a useful and rewarding career
Access to the ennoblement of literature and the arts
Throngs of family and friends who assemble
Like the queue that wraps around the block
In the hope of early admission to the latest blockbuster
I was a cheerful child as I am cheerful in adulthood
But racked with anxiety that interferes
With appreciation of the good and the pleasurable
But I don’t tell my loved ones of my capital sins
Embarrassed to equate ennui and suffering
To those who truly suffer
I confide only in you Anonymous One

This morning I cast bread upon the lawn
Hardened cornbread and a shattered flour tortilla
For the delectation of the fauna
Despite my recently acquired knowledge
Of the culpability of that act
Culpable in at least two ways
For don’t prepare food only to throw it away
And don’t add unnatural components
To the diet of the wildlife

And how can I be such a petty bourgeois
As to own a lawn
Or worse to pay a mortgage on the house and grounds
Nothing is more reprehensible
Than suburbia and it’s discontents
Well that’s not true
So add self-aggrandizement to the list
Why make such a list and why oh why publish it
You don’t want to read this dear Stranger
Or perhaps you already have

Elmeric cistransodit birdre
Morgoyeyo isd weedleef
Treseral rachs verginnes esnid
Krebronoliess dir vur whhelp
Arn goldarn erdriby dit
Curtst selp drandie Schmred

Singemot posable thum
Ner granttry fal des raonses
Sand ghoti sind ghoti donbri tenede
Erd panzee us panzee gyer
Yegr geyr rgey gy re dedru
Churr ik faldal notre
Whe wol rrieve mack’n fal r ik

Deis us ik longfal
Stempt ikn soo dycrip odr prisdhros
Olong oyaw odim’pt tur lag owet
E deyt ans kov connot singe na seelve
Fal dakt tsep ped krabron whehlp
Cellst melon koler sodit

Ralif nenslef u card ren snaf dizu cordn
Ziz it unseg gesdion gost ta gairn
Zeb durr callst schrov u gladen
Schmred els vintatir
Y deit ans kov
Es na porb chnat

Not the leaden sky of the Romantics
No dark despair or Letheward plummet
Despair being an irrelevancy
And Lethe a nightmare’s compensation

Opaque yes metallic and gray
But not the product of uranium’s decay
Aluminum perhaps after nights in the dishwasher
A sky milky white with tincture of lampblack

We don’t go to Baudelaire for moral guidance
Who called ennui the deadliest of sins
Privilege of the elect
The secret indolence of their work ethic

But we go to poets for subjective states
Or rather for subjective processes
Reflected in the overcast objective world
Trees denuded by the rain

Pine cones to magnolia cones
To tulip tree cones with their twirling seeds
Onward to maple ‘copters and sweetgum maces
Sycamores too with their spheroid fruit
But no descent to leaves from pine needles

A lump of leaves and pine needles
Angel or monster
Or small mammal crouching in wet grass

On the branches of the beeches
With their November greybrown leaves
Pine needles hang like icicles

Six or more appendages on a mammal
You’d have to be an idiot
To believe such an absurdity
But fortunately you don’t have to believe
That the shooting of an albatross
Caused the death of the crew save one
More things happen than are dreamed of in your causality
Because causality does not dream

Great Pegasus came to me again last night
I would have preferred the black avatar
But white is fine enough
And anyhow he didn’t ask me
Nor must heroic monsters pick a gender
The reference is mere solecism
And the logic even of a dream must make sense

A seraph has three pairs of wings
Not googol or the square root of two
Not three pairs of pmisti tonferaw
And yet even here a recognizable p
A recognizable m
A recognizable i
In the luxuriantly superfluous adjective
That accompanies the watching of the delectacious skywriting
While sipping glimigrim on the tiny veranda

O mimetiverse
O wondrous infinity
O steed that never pulled a plow
Nor deigned to wear a bridle
O Hippocrene hoof
Muscular hummingbird
That brings the dream world to life
I don’t need to fly
Beholding your perfect decorum in the sky

But in the mimetiverse harmful prospects also loom
Pegasus the underminer black or white does not matter
The muddy hue of indeterminacy
Flying or swimming or burrowing underground
The giant paddles undermine all structure
The great proboscis sucking life
Appendages of horror still recognizable
Not to dream nice but to persist in dreaming

As I grow older and my brain declines
I see the world for the muddle it is

Donald Trump nobody loves you
I’m not so superstitious as to avoid your name
Hitler Putin Xi conquistadors inquisitors
I’m not afraid of you or your ghosts

Trump you are among those whom nobody loves
And quite a few actively loath
But you don’t mind the loathing of people like me
Whom you denounce according to your own criteria

A few wretched souls worship you
Imagining you a rock star and a superhero
Though you are neither but merely the manipulator
Of the simple who know not love

Nobody ever taught you to love
So you are fitly the object of pity not blame
And the signs of your adult children
Who have entered public life are not promising

Pretending to be Sonny and Connie and Michael
Junior Corleones in imitation of the Dad
Who fantasizes the life of the Godfather
Hero of threats and extortion

Now normal people imagine their own deaths
Not out of morbidity but of consideration
For those they will leave behind
For we wish health and happiness for our survivors

And so I make you this suggestion
Raise a few rows of tomatoes
Place an orange peel cut like teeth before your own
And chase a grandchild through the trellised vault