I prefer not to exercise extra care
Though I admire Cronkite’s modulated disapproval
As he recited the DoD’s mendacious numbers
And I commend the Dragon Conner’s
Courtly mutuality in tongues Elvish Ewok or Klingon

I prefer to blunder through the kitty litter
Blust’ring iambickish pentamatroid
Blistered fingering of the electric guitar
A teeshirt and jeans over which laps
My balloonic oft-caressed belly

More Pollock than Seurat
More De Kooning than Pollock
More action than concept
Dirty diapers runny noses
And Pentheus torn limb from limb

Everything’s gotten just a little worse
Than it ever used to be
But in the light after the storm had gone
I saw a honey bee

The shuttle shuttles forth and back
Amniotic threads having tworled distaffly
Between thumb and finger that might have plied the tamboura
Antistabile discursor
Against the rotational force
Defining an ominous plane horizontal vertical or oblique
Two but two interpenetratively
Placental yarns having spindled plummetly
Or wound upon the wheel

Like all dreams they aggregate
To create a placket mass solid flexible and soft
Like an albuminate and foundational slab
Or the pleonastic bier upon which the corpse is displayed
Of one who has died in secret and alone
Or effluencing the uncanny smell of the birthing chamber
A there not there

A gown for Rapunzel
A house for a chimpanzee
The tale the spinny stars tell
Hera’s lactation or Hyades’ tears
The spider’s web spangled with dew
Both what has happened and what you will do
Evermore about to was
The warp of one and the weft of the other

More people should enjoy
The pleasure of resisting the urge

More people should enjoy
The pleasure of giving in

It cannot murrad for itself this oozy severance
Watery pause insubstantial
This patient denaturing
Bhle and again bhle
This pastoral glyph
Mundane pause artificial
This orange fulcrum
The one remaining flammantia
It cannot sairrup for itself this enveloping desire
Orange pause spindly
No face yet but only this yawpish howl
Suffering hold
Tormentuous arthold
Taking a step back from this precipitating softness
The registry of impossible narrative
Or practically pause impossible
This very refrainment
Amniotic threads
This quazi-salutary slackening
Wispy demonstrations from
Tortentious pause ergotacious
Distaffly for twirling
These vague pause tentative fingers
Photorealist protoindoeuropean
This insignificance that matters so intensely
Take from the dresser the cruelest month
Replace it with the merest party favor
The running dye that spoils the laundry
The fifth pause stage
Acceptance of terminal fabulosity
Sometimes brief
Sometimes simple
This leaking lacerance cannot murrap for itself
Declining pause conjugal
Pause quash pause
Bees to flowers flowers to bees

Coda
Beyond the flaming ramparts of the world
Beyond the flaming ramparts
No objects no entelechy
No need for further explanations
Who has the courage to speak the word reality
To say it is so and so it is
See the bells upon the cheetahs’ collars
Unencumbered by any tether to the chariot
From which Bacchus leaps
Does he rescue Ariadne from the fearful pards
Who seem no more threatening than the soft-padding tyger
Or seize her for himself
And cast her crown amid the tale-spinning stars

Foreshortened unreliable compressed
Distant rampant verdant trenchant
Critical serious lamentable guarded disproportionate
Exiguous parsimonious void impecunious nugatory
Rushed debilitated unfathomable deranged
Fair soft terse dim hot plush big curt hard cold great limp
Risible foolish pishworthy superfluous
Fractious fragmented fragile frigid feral frank fresh
Deliquescent delirious deleterious delapidated
Weak feeble helpless etiolated muzzy doddering
Cruciform xi crosswise chiastic
Mala dégueulasse furshlugginer fucked up baufällig
Crusty fusty busty rusty musty lusty gusty trusty dusty
Friendly deadly fiddly stately bodily burly beastly
Tangermane quintillious finipic tulgey bredest polterine terrinate villose
Bang on straight up tuned in rolled up turned out
Tall rich young rare strong best tart sure fit sharp
Sapient judicious wise sagacious shrewd percipient astute
Sanguine phlegmatic bilious melancholic
Numerous plenipotentiary fulminous Brobdingnagian august

She enjoys refrigerated plums or
A room-temperature peach
Avocado mashed with asian peppers
I don’t understand the bulbous olives
But it’s okay for her to like them

How did they make those harsh sounds
Sound so good
In that musical composition
How do I accept the death of Nepomuk
Nepo who called himself Echo

Not the first proviso
Not the first proposal
The still life without ever lifting the pen
The plump fruits the glistening sea creatures
Their repetition on a flat panel
How did they trammel that infinity

Are we morally obliged to hope
To expect a Stuckey’s at every next exit

Children do not refer to themselves
In the third person
How do I accept the blunder of representing them thus
Or is it that at any moment
The world should cease to be the customary one

Problems are opportunities
Recited the motivational speaker
Opportunities for more problems
The eternal return of not quite the same

Why should the thought of tasty fruit
Make me sad
Why should a fairy tale put me in mind
Of the Berlin wall
The luscious pulp of tangled fibers
The beguiling juice
The sweet the sour the salty the bitter

A real artist uses sweat of course
And spit nail snot jizz and blood
Or crushes seeds in horse manure
Or mixes lampblack and petroleum jelly

I lied when I professed a Wordsworthian fear of vacancy
Hoping to be mistaken for the Mage
When in truth my cup runneth over
A surfeit of vile imaginings

I’m sorry Your Majesty
Death is not dusty
It’s moist sticky gelatinous and cold
Windex for glass so clean it seems to disappear

Invite the five women their bodies
Still glowing from their exertions
Let them join again their spontaneous celebration
Link hands and make the joyful round
Each adopt her characteristic posture
Upright or nearly falling
Neither nude nor naked for the fall of man
Has not occured

And why should your accompanists the men
Occupy a separate panel with their pipes
For melody has been invented but not
The world-drenching woe of sexual shame
Invite too the children their simple bodies
Of green and gold and blue and deep purple
And rose and cappuccino

The costume of the painting in which we live
When Hatshepsut afixed the beard of command
Was her rule more humane than that
Of either of the two Tutmoses
Piero’s stubbled penitents must leave their eternity
Pressing unceasingly their palms together
Like a sixties girl trying to increase her bustline

The corpse is richly attired
Reddened her lips
Her rings her sentimental necklace
Solemnly displayed
Incense enacts her immortality
And masks her mortality
Still she joins the dance
At last she drops the pretense of volition

Two boats the yellow and the blue
Are moored against the pilings
Behind them rises the great double sail
Which two little figures unfurl in greeny gold
Two houses stand higgledy-piggledy on the wharf
Their blue walls pierced by intermittent windows
A homunculus in an orange shirt strides
Or stands with legs apart
Never before did this image appear
Phenomenally on earth
Never will it grace the walls of MOMA or the Frick
The old lady who made it never tried to sell it
Never sought for fame

After he lost mobility my father
Diligently composed haiku
Which he regarded as five seven five syllables
No trembling plum blossoms or gathering snow
Just his dependency upon my mother

We who live will make the world
A decent place for you to grow up in

Aye neeteen ona pangyrone
Libera libera may
Neon wash rey gray fructless prorho
Galls in stevebreed petitio aye nnedeen

Not the full acebrace ealdrov
Never them glownering sprits agu
Gibt mick den panarones reg ratioale
Als needeen prey sammistid

Mundi spitifus dys array reyschau
Perseiu mayb flew hrose awloft
Ight la wills wishes melnchthoror tamben afor
Curr roar fewlowws demnae furlt

Canst thou fel low bract nels longtom sur la topas
Nal tumb la nues burgrather la newes
Case bain ace brae whe dreams may eggrum
The highest vwoel dethurst conamblulist

Verbal corrubtion as uns highhold burywares
Or the bugy ficks transputin
Nominus gravibus sere tolt mundo
Thaet waes grut kronloss ngrut forstol

Bad for stuff
Nought left of to complain
Plain pain
Notaye for woel for nadarons

In a dream I saw an eagle aloft
Struggling with some unseen prey
When in pursuit of the bird
Flew the great wingèd horse

As black as sculpture in obsidian
The sunlight gleaming off its glossy flanks
No need for galloping motion
The huge wings drove it forward

After a moment out of sight
The horse returned but now a radiant white
Was there then a team of chargers
And why the troubling opposites

The steed returned again black as before
I yearned to tell the people of horse and eagle
Of the miracle just overhead
The flight by now in a far corner of the sky

I never exposed the dream to myself as dream
But rejoiced in the impossible
The horse never struck me with its hoof
I never thought to wish for such a blessing

I fear the world is offended by
The symptoms I exhibit of bliss
When things are going right for a change
And all I want to do is laugh and joke
And play the frenzied clown
And the jokes fall flat
Because they really aren’t that funny

Safer to complain of horror suffering trauma tyranny neglect oppression violence coercion genocide deceit humiliation madness waste ugliness greed violation contempt ignorance cruelty manipulation insensitivity and the panoply of human inventiveness

But humans invented poetry
They invented jokes
They did not invent but discovered
Grief
The pang of loss whether reparable or irreparable
And the bliss of remembering the beauty of the lost

Nothing is 1
Everything is 2 or 3 or 5 or 9
Or sometimes π or the square root of 2
Or sometimes my love is like a red red rose

Disapproval is possible without hatred
Correction is possible without loathing
Acceptance is sometimes possible
Even without correction

Here’s the painting I would paint if I were a painter
Against a background in shades and shades of white
Fortified by a tiny tincture of crimson
5 shimmering bars in silvergray
None fully at the vertical
All well away from the horizontal
In varying degrees of obliquity

Why did you shoot me you son of a bitch

I want to make a thing of beauty
But instead I roll a dead log over
Or lift a big flat rock
To see the bustling community that lies beneath
Proverbial for that which should remain hidden
That which is too horrid for eye to tolerate

But I like
Those meticulous energetic crafters
The beetles ants spiders earwigs
Annelid worms and mollusks and nematodes
Roly-polies those terrestrial crustaceans
Egg larva and adult
Greater fungi and lesser fungi
Spores puffs powders and mycelia
The spun white cloth that disintegrates when touched
The xylophagous myriads
The salutary decay and soil aborning

As we remember January 6
Hear this defamation
Wrung by indignation and despair
You servile deceiving wretch

I’ve lived in this house a long time
Had the same profession the whole time
Though I’ve changed jobs two or three times
The children have all grown up
A couple have kids of their own
My wife and I have a lot of fun
Sometimes we get bored

Life stresses me out and I get depressed
I should exercise more cut down on sweets
I enjoy mowing the lawn
Pulling ivy off the trees
I could do without scrubbing the toilet
I enjoy reading and listening to music

I don’t really like travel or driving a car
Just a homebody I guess
But I like interacting with other people
I love chatting with my wife
But other than that
Somebody must come here
Or I go out there

Sometimes somebody tries to win a point
And it turns into conflict
I don’t recall blows ever having been exchanged
But that’s a sad way to switch up the day-to-day
It cannot be that one is washed in the blood of the Lamb

I’ve always been middle class
I have nothing to complain of

When florid May has slipped into torrid June
When exotic guano has been spread
Or the dung collected from steers
Or most shameful the fragrant swine manure
Breaking down into phosphorus and nitrogen
In the steamy currents wafting from the south
When baseball season chugs past Memorial Day
And robins persist in their brainless caroling
And cardinals their variations on a theme
And mockingbirds their manic vocal collages
And daffodils have long since passed away
To make room for daisies zinnias and impatiens
And folks have harnessed the erectile virtue
Of Jupiter Pluvius
That’s when I want to escape
The fresh air the sunshine and the humid breezes
Draw the curtains boot my ancient desktop
The size of a microwave oven
And compose commentary on the subject
Of flowers’ growing out of shit

Is the sickly confessional mode
More poetic than other more manly manners
As more sincerely expressing
The degenerative malady of the soul
And has not that sickness grown
Flower-like
Along with the population
And hence the opportunities for ennui and alienation
And ever more efficient wickedness
Perhaps there obtains a historical oscillation
Of freshness and decay
When the dirge of plague gives way to showers sweet
Ah but Aries’ engendering rain for so it continues
Cannot forestall the Gemini’s heat
That accelerates decomposition
Perhaps a straight shot to decadence
Since Bion lamented Adonis
And Moschus lamented Bion
And Roman preached the piety of the apiary
And Parisian plucked flowers grown in evil
And pornography in 31 democratic flavors
And massacre in story song and everyday life
And art that luxuriates in formal formlessness
A disciplined chaos
Driven by an energy unseen
A freshness sub rosa
Ditch flowers where once thrived rows of tulips

The traumas have not proven fatal yet
Not yet fatal for me
But settled into festering malaise
And cloud themselves in layers of putridity
Sweet and iridescent as rotting meat
The light latent in phosphorus
The exaltation in giddy oxide of nitrogen
Charism of cloud charism of fragrance
Wormwood and poppy and estival song
Too impatient to wait for equinox
Bursting like battlefield corpses warmed in the sun
Erupting like corals when the moon
Calls forth their nebulous gametes
And all corruption blossoms
Iambickish pentametroid and effrent
Luz se luzes inay tirniyebris
A swirly medley of carol cadence and collage
The cut worm still grateful serves
As fertilizer
If I pity myself I pity all
Who join the big decay that all might live

Probably 20 good years remain to me
If family history holds
But that account abounds in clean living
Cleaner than I have ever maintained

And history abounds also with counter-examples
Uncle Kermit a heart attack at fifty
Though not conspicuously overweight
More like soft and dainty and not even a smoker

Uncle Len lasted longer
Though a teeming barrel of vice
Loud obese and wildly impulsive
Unlike my well-tempered mother

Who made it nearly to a hundred
But the last years were bad for her
So maybe 15 good years left for me and 5 less so
Or 10 and 10 or 3 or 2

Two more uncles bald and roly-poly
Spent time in the pen for working the bolita
Not noted for longevity
Nor for much else that I know of

I don’t know why I’m on about my uncles
Except that my mother
Second of fourteen siblings
Outlived them all

My father was flayed on the deck of the Saratoga
Skin cancer the year of my birth
Colon cancer at 70
That killed him twenty years later

Maybe I have 10 or 20
Or 2 or 3 or next to none
But I’m in the home stretch way past halfway
I won’t make it to 134

I was living in twilight
The sun having set but the sky still bright
Darker now
And in the streetlit city you can’t see many stars

It’s harder to do math now
Harder to climb the stairs
Harder to watch my grandchildren
As they trudge unwillingly to bed

The last quarter of my life or whatever fraction
Learning how to die
Having shed my skin for the last time
My protective shell ever thicker and hornier

Harder to drop defenses and tell the truth
I fear this
Thinking back on 20 and 20 and 20
Pop of a flash cube and the last quarter turn

Truth is obvious but hard to tell
I wish I could give you birds
In ambiguous undulations
Misty mountains or ragged claws

I could maybe give you the salt marsh
The smell of the salt marsh
The fructifying decay
The gravid putrefaction

I gradually deliquesce
The Dorian picture of greedy gravitation
Meet my sisters Phrygian Lydian and Mixolydian
Who will long outlast me

The picture of the downward pull
Of repeated insults to body and mind
The picture of most everybody
Who lasts this long

My friend Steve refuses to grow old
Works out eats right
But I’m not body-building
Quite the contrary

I can handle the physical collapse
It’s the mental rummage
That rattles me
That binds me fast to the dizzying wheel

Everywhere I looked I could not escape beauty
The big granite stone with a single spot of lichen
Its faces looking at me with bemused expressions
The jogger who smiled
As we each feinted to let the other pass
The six cactus flowers one still a green bud
The giant oak that stretched its many arms in exultation
The side facing me cut away to let the power lines through
The late sunset a blazing gray in the clouds
The flitting bat every veer and cut
Evidence of the keenest rationality

All this on the day of another mass shooting
This time of children
Again

Stomach
Cheery
Morning
Angellock
Going hunting
Hither love
Love
Choicing tree
Trees for shade
Above
And to the left
Cheery
What’s the best
Rivals hence
Stomach
Alight
Fl-irt
Feed me
Stomach
Trees for shade

On the reverse of the imperial coins
Emblem for the road rules’ backstory
A story of coercive force
Arcane munition tightly bound
In the servile unyielding rods
An origin in burning blood
And warrior’s cry
A destiny in cold command
And silent control

A surface molecularly smooth
Without gloss
Soft to the touch
Without the gleam of reflection
Here there is no light
Here there is no breeze
Without the power to see the truth
Energy contained
Here there is no life
Only the merciless drive of passion