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

The dark intricacies of loneliness
That many lovers many friends cannot untwine
Sleeplessness beyond drugs
How has the traveler grown so foreign
How retrace the itinerary
To the primal transparency mythical no doubt
Which made visible heart lungs fear and expectation
And made visible the pulsation of the blood
The cartilaginous appendages of an embryo

Moving through the multitude in a plexiglass box
Miracle acrylic that withstands bullets
The surface a miraculously transpicuous mirror
And many in the throng express concern
How are you they ask
And What are you doing in that box
And you answer in the most appalling cliches
Referencing evil clowns vicious bunnies
And exercise apparel that is not what it purports to be
And you wonder why you resorted to irrelevancies

But you know the true cause
You hoped to invoke matters of general interest

But you further know that hope
Is merely a shade or covering or compensation for fear
Appareling anxiety in the logic and the freshness of a dream
When finally you know that you know nothing
About clowns bunnies or apparel
Except insofar as these antic costumes
Conceal and thereby reveal
The lineaments of ungratified desire
Horror in the casket of reflections

Dionysus and Apollo of course
But also Hephaestus and Aphrodite
As flint copper and iron precede the farm
And the drive to reproduce precedes all

Comically mismatched couple
Or perhaps more punishment than joke
Small wonder she preferred the dashing knight
To the ugly stolid artisan

She the force that drives hydrogen toward oxygen
He the understanding to break apart ferric oxide
She the drive to create
He the will to carry out

She the mother of Eros martial demon
Herself with no mother save the sea
Compounded of semen of parian hue
And water yes but also the salutary sodium chloride

Venus with her boy’s name
Not lacking in warlike virtue
Who drives like her virgin sister
All to join the hunt

Goddess who divides the double helix
Who smiles when it joins again
Haply with felicitous or baleful mutation
Within the firm receptive flesh of her mons

He hero of the iron age who dwells within mountain
But not without antecedent and descendent avatars
The robust and the gracile early hominins
And later wielders of the steam engine and the binary code

The god with his tools for that which works
And hence of the proprieties
Artificer also of those prostheses
That make human life possible

Thus the halting deformity
Fabricates the autonomic tripod
And jewels and radiant chambers and toys and weapons
That make immortal the anthropoid immortals

She the drive to create the same anew
He the will to make the same again the same
She brings liquid to fruit
He goes after hard earth hammer and tongs

To construct architecture of curious detail
But the roof must keep the rain out
She doesn’t mind the rain
Washing the car in her bikini

A good blade a good coupling
She smiles upon spontaneous intermixture
He frowns above the daunting assemblage
He the clay she the foam

Take digital audio for example
Of course the promethean theft of theogenic electricity
A configuration really of volcanic fire
But worthless without the application of skill

Worthless without the daunting assemblage
Of equalization gain compression and delay
The marshaling of tracks of thirty bellows
Worthless without the caressing liquidity of the voice

Or lyre pipes or fiddle
Or for that matter blocky earth-born sculpture
Or flickering firelight
Or all-absorbing tale

Or the beat of the drum
Descent of the malleus
Song of the beaters of flax
The marvelous saltire across the beating heart

A million mutations obtain ranged in field indeterminate
From geometrical perfection for measuring twice
To rowdy drunkenness that dismembers
The lightest caress the blow upon the anvil

She of flamboyant display
He of patience unseen
Deviser of the apparatus that shows
To advantage her irresistible breasts

Miles Davis
Lenny White
Aretha Franklin
Ray Charles
Buddy Miles
James Brown
Gail Ann Dorsey
Louis Armstrong
Patty LaBelle
Count Basey
Jimi Hendrix
Big Mama Thornton
Wayne Shorter
Mississippi John Hurt
Art Blakey
Ray Brown
Lester Young
Billie Holliday
Blind Arthur Blake
Bessie Smith
Any portion of infinity
Is pathetically finite

To reduce the American flag to a single blue line
What a vile desecration and not just of the flag

October
November
December
January
March
April
June
July
August
September

I demand blue moons
Azure skies
Mood indigo

DK & The Hoop Snakes
Downstrokes
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kcP2JZLz1Le82gisZhri8F7SYxPrudWkw

Sunlight
I’ve been away for fifteen months
Feels like it’s been fifteen years
As my head moved forward felt my heart falling behind
But in my hour of darkness I’ve not been as I was blind
Let the sunlight in your eyes
Let the sunlight in you rise
I got on the bus to neverland
There’s a reason why they call it neverland
Frozen in the winter of the everlasting no
At last I hear the voices of the springtime waters’ flow
Let the &c.
In olden days a madman would be shut inside a box
Treatment for a head case would be darkness bars and locks
Nowadays the night police mad passions up in heat
Blow away the naked guy found wandering in the street
Praying for your body as they drop you in the hole
What they call asylum is a tomb built for the soul
Let the &c

Most Perfect Jewel
My oh my what have I done
Carelessly cast away
The only woman I ever loved
If she falters let her fall
‘Cause even the most perfect jewel is flawed
Day and night you work and toil
To make accomplishments
Something you can be proud of
Deady pride that twists your heart
When even your most perfect jewel is flawed
It’s a disappointed feeling
When you get just what you want
No pleasure is both permanent and pure
You want it make it stand still
To turn to stone
It’s a disappointed &c.
On the night I cross the bar
To meet my Maker
Will I have the courage to stand tall
And say take me in Almighty God
‘Cause even Your most perfect jewel is flawed
Even the Lord’s most perfect jewel is sadly flawed

Velvet Sleeve
Why my beloved did you abandon me
Why did you leave me my love
That’s when a hot seed
Burned through my fine velvet sleeve
Hostility perfidy insanity malignity
Incivility impunity dishonesty duplicity inanity banality
A swarm of a thousand wasps
Pursues me to the very brink
Of the ancient city cesspool
Deputy seeks revenge upon me
For the death of the sheriff
Whom I never shot

The Valve
I had a valve installed
In the back of my neck
Guilt worry and indecision
Making me a nervous wreck
I got all kind of symptoms
I got invisible pain
The Doctor said I need an implant
Keep me from going insane
Oh the valve oh the valve
Oh the valve it doesn’t shut no more
It’s all crapping out it’s not keeping down
Stuff coming up through the basement floor
My head is my house
I got a window eye
I got a hole in my rooftop
Open to a stormy sky
I got a chimney facing downward
I got a padlock in my mouth
I got danger on the outside
I ain’t never going out
Oh the valve &c.
I prayed for madness
And the madness came
I tried to halt that delivery
But it showed up just the same
I thought it’d help me write a letter
I thought it’d help me write a song
I’m not feeling any better
I’m feeling bad that I was wrong
Oh the valve &c.

Pretty Fire
Fade to black but see the image frozen on the screen
Takes me back to the dirty forest to the dirty playground
To the dirty primal furry scene
I want to turn back the line that I crossed
I want to be obliterated buggered beaten maimed
I want to watch at the keyhole I lost
I want to play the old familiar game
I’ve outgrown the stupid tricks I followed where they led
On my own I learned to scratch the pebbles
On the uneven pavement
I learned to scratch my skin until it bled
I want to drown in the creek in my backyard
I want to take a boat ride with my old vacation friends
I want to find where that dark river starts
I want find out where that river ends
Down my throat never kiss me any other way
Skin the goat let the blood go running
Let the blood go streaming
Burn the fat and throw the meat away
I want to sulk where the grape tangles grow
Light my cigarette upon the sacrificial pyre
I want to write words that nobody knows
Throw my paper on the pretty fire

I Can’t Go On
Sleep who says sleep
Someone who gets no sleep says sleep
Peace who says peace
Someone who gets no peace says peace
And it’s all I do to make peace with you
I can’t go on
One who says one
Someone who’s got no one says one
Love who says love
Someone who’s got no love says love
And it’s all &c.

Cathy Ann
I got an invitation to go out to a funeral
From the mother of my old girlfriend
Cathy Ann died of leukemia
I never loved her she died for love of me
I never loved her she died for love of me
She died for love of me
Now what am I supposed to do
I really thought really I loved her
Till I met you my love and off we ran
Found out I’d all along been telling lies
Fell out of touch with Cathy Ann
I never loved her &c.
I never listened to her heart’s love
Heart’s love heart’s love
And then sickened in her heart’s blood
Heart’s blood heart’s blood
I know I’m a conceited asshole
I know the cause of death was cancer
I know I don’t know what effect I had
I know I’ll never know the answer
My friends say I should get outside myself
Like try some charitable giving
And Jesus died to save the dead from hell
Who’s going to die to save the living
I never loved her &c.
The mother of the Virgin Mary
The virgin martyr St. Catherine
Heard of a billion babies named for them
But neither one protected Cathy Ann
I never loved her &c.

Message of Love
Hear the rhythm of love
Hear the rhythm of love and justice coming down from all around
Dreaming back to Eden nowhere and everywhere
The land of peace and freedom
To save us from the burden of
These endless days of restless rage
Hear the rhythm of love
Hear the rhythm of love and justice coming down from all around
Hear the rhythm of love coming all around
Hear the rhythm of love and justice coming down from all around
Keep away from cowardice and don’t give into fear
Don’t be intimidated by
The selfish ones those long black guns
They want frighten everyone
Sometimes they shoot sometimes they score
They buy their courage at a store
Something’s living in the sunset
Something’s living in the ocean
Something’s living in the mountain
Something’s living deep within us
Hear the rhythm &c.

Residue
You left me with a residue
A wasp-colored stain that I cannot forget
A frank expression everybody gets
You left me with a residue
You left me with a residue

I Will Signify
I’m overcome with depletion
My plenty hoard I have all spent
I’ve spent my wisest hours sleeping
My waking hours on indolence
I’ve turned my palace into wasteland
But in the place where castles rise
To such a height on so blank a night
That tells me I will signify
My jealous guardians make proposals
I should forgive I should forget
They designate my word and promise
And style them each a petty jest
The gov’nors threaten retribution
My poor weak case to charge and try
To such a height on so blank a night
That tells me I will signify
I will signify
Can’t be satisfied
While I live or die
I will signify
Somewhere is form somewhere is meaning
Just where remains a puzzlement
The hell is heaven’s star a-leading
Lately have you seen Bethlehem
No more will peace sustain the nations
Where all the bloody passions rise
I’m going nowhere somebody help me
To know that I will signify
I once had fame I once had friendship
A cross of gold upon my back
But fame and friends and gold are fleeting
Things I’ve forgotten fade to black
Ahead the endless road of freedom
Above the endless lonely sky
And in my head an endless song
That tells me I will signify
I will &c.
John Keats abed he lay a-dying
A Roman pillow neath his head
Unknown unwept and yet he whispered
I’ll be among the poets when I’m dead
I am no Keats I am no poet
I have no skill to prophesy
But to such a height on this dark blank night
I know that I will signify
I will &c.

The Glory of the World
Let’s all say goodbye to Carthage
Rome Troy Paris Moscow Washington and London
Say goodbye to Ankgor Wat
Goodbye Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Goodbye mining manufacture
Wining dining software tycoon’s billions
Thus passes
Thus passes away
Thus passes away
The glory of the world
The glory of the world
Goodbye White House goodbye Kremlin
Goodbye Moe’s & Joe’s and Mary Mac’s Tea Room
Goodbye Hamlet Mona Lisa
Abbey Road and Exile on Main Street
Goodbye Hustler goodbye Playboy
Goodbye Penthouse and every image of the birth of Venus
Thus passes &c.
Say goodbye to every being
To every animal and plant that ever lived a day
Say goodbye to every concept
Every consciousness every word you ever heard a wise man say
Say goodbye to every star to every planet
To that tender little flap of skin that ever made you stay
Thus passes &c.