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

Everything is horrible
Everything is great
Everything is as good as could be considering
The ignorance incapacity and perfidy of humans

Whatever your mother told you is true
It doesn’t matter if it’s true
You have to live that way
There ought to be an irony flag

There ought to be quotation marks or two or three
To imply bold disclaimer
What an heroic renunciation
Pages and pages without punctuation

H is a consonant you clowns
But clowns make such effective tyrants
Along with rock stars and super heroes
Ecdysiasts cowboys and trenchcoated makers of intrigue

Cartoon talking animals
Space mans
And naked glabrous berserkers
Sans eyebrows sans coiffure sans public hair

Who prop thou ask’st
In these bad days my mind
He much
Extravagantly inexistent deliverer

There ought to be a contradiction flag
Repetition
No repetition
Flags for echoes borrowings subterfuge and theft

So that’s what it comes down to eh
Pretty private problems
Euery early earwicker
Not in battalions but single spies

No banister
No net
No suspenders
No tool belt
No training wheels
No gun
No holster
No silencer
No ammo clip
No pocket knife with pliers scissors or tweezers
No cane to steady weakened knees
No accommodation for self-invited weekend guests
No floatation device
No motivational uplift
No encomium
No hymn
No trophy
No pep rally
No affirmation
No recognition
No honorarium
No roast for good sports only
No place set at the head of the table
No fee for services rendered
No sidelong glance
No finger laid aside the nose
No nod wink secret handshake or raised eyebrow
No grimace
No cringe
No wince
No rictus
No proofs of courage loyalty or capacity to suffer
No expression of approval or disapproval
No heroic wealth of hall and bower
No confraternity of elite intelligences
No panel of experts
No board of directors regents or governors
No licensing body
No council for the upholding of standards
No subcommittee for the maintenance of ideological purity
No convocation of the city fathers
No convening of the Sanhedrin
No meeting of the shareholders
No floor debate
No peer pressure
No written permission
No imposition of conformity
No denial of the patently true
No mollusk that is metaphorically an echinoderm
No abstract assemblage legally regarded as a person
No tabulation of quartiles deciles or percentiles
No program of twelve or more steps
No counting of blessings
No catalog
No manifest
No repetition
No log
No table of contents
No memorandum of understanding
No assignment of monetary value to works of art
No list of superfluous institutions
No power of attorney
No virtuosic performance
No troubled savior
No harlot with a heart of gold
No criminal who adheres to a code
No activist screaming at another activist
No king with an unhealable wound
No sighing lover
No scheming servant
No bragging soldier
No coincidental resemblance to persons real or imaginary
No polymorphous perversity
No encyclopedic knowledge of sports places or historical personages
No literal interpretation of scripture
No piety
No mythic origins
No trial by ordeal
No tablets of the law
No fear of the Lord
No propagation of dogma
No examination of conscience
No holy orders
No extreme unction
No application of chrism
No laying on of hands
No crossing of candles
No sprinkling of the fleet
No casting of bread upon the waters
No rubbing of ashes upon the brow
No bwairty thoiai spart chiagma prez eum
No shooting of fish in barrels
No auto of fe
No petition for absolution
No trans- con- or insubstantiation
No pro- re- or intercessional
No iron coffin with spikes on the inside
No sacrifice of objects animal vegetable mineral or artificial
No domesticated hominid gone feral
No litany
No requiem
No paternoster
No benediction
No sacred mystery
No closing of the eyes in holy dread
No vestment medal or scapular
No matin vesper or midnight office
No missal breviary or book of common prayer
No indulgence
No wages of sin
No just deserts
No retribution falsely identified as consequences
No punishment that fits the crime
No guardian angel
No vengeful nemesis
No well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state
No brand management
No modicum of snuff
No butt of sack
No hank of hair
No leash of hounds
No kidney of wheat
No glut of information
No update
No tip
No trick
No hack
No humble opinion
No snide remark
No private joke
No hidden meaning
No figure of Christ concealed within a cake
No sarcasm
No easter egg
No repetition
No special provision
No advice for the love-lorn
No scheme for getting rich quickly
No weird old recipe for losing weight
No dynamic tension
No pampered relaxation
No commercial product commended as decadent
No ordering in the next five minutes
No gift shop
No blurb
No testimonial
No left boot sent on approval
No documentation of author title or publication data
No décor featuring weapons armor or insignias of rank
No emblem of authoritarian policy
No invidious emulation
No universal apathy
No mass hysteria
No competitive exceeding of the speed limit on the public thoroughfare
No entrepreneurial spirit
No objection to adjectival insistence
No denunciation of split infinitives
No censorious commentary
No arcane allusion
No smuggled autobiography
No gratuitous display of erudition
No emotion recollected in tranquility
No spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
No mechanical operation of the spirit
No squeamish aversion to the gross grody or unsanitary
No caviling
No carping
No fad
No going viral
No smash hit
No trendy fashion
No cast of thousands
No stupendous colossus
No colossal stupendity
No one for the ages
No Procrustean bed
No sword of Damocles
No Euthyphro dilemma
No teasing enigma
No gordian knot
No insoluble conundrum
No repugnant conclusion
No sense of an ending

Subject matter matters
Might I not therefore renounce the renunciation
That has seduced me into the untruth
That I am bad

Gluttony sloth
Disgusting evasion for fear of detection
Violence of unchecked passion and deceit and deadly pride
The sybaritic privilege of unrestrained ennui

I move uncertainly
I move self-consciously afraid of error
Bump the jamb as I pass
Drop the object in my grasp

Fear a self-fulfillment
Though Sensei Splinter advised
That courage is not the absence of fear
But the mastery of it

Granted no shame in fear
But the failure to master it
Is a failure pure and simple
And failure is shameful

Once I dreamed I knew the solution
To the problem of self-control
But if I knew it I’ve forgotten
How to make will the master of will

We speak of performing an action
As one might perform the cello part
As one might perform the role
Of a hero who moves decisively

Whether to perform is not a choice
No shilly-shallying or preferring not to
One performs well or badly
Or somewhere in the ambiguous middle

Actors hit their mark
Cellists control the bow and the fingerboard
Those who walk and carry things
Control their motions and their thoughts

But I have harbored evil thoughts
Thought the worst of those who love me
Wished that harm might be visited upon
Those offensive whom I’ve never met

And upon those I know not excluding myself
For I was taught that within me is a soul
An auditorium full of sins that remain seated
And a scanty faction of grace that heads for the lobby

If I could remove the bad
Soul surgery metaphysical demolition
Obtain the absurdity of absolution
But what’s done is done

And what if one is truly fundamentally
Congenitally and irreparably
Firmly and irretrievably
Intrinsically bad

Or bad fifty-one percent
Some good qualities sure
But inextricably involved
Hopelessly contaminated

I’m not as bad as all that
I know I’m not that bad
So why the unforgiving urge
To insist the contrary

What’s the metric
What instrument detects
What operation calculates
The proportion of depravity

An erroneous line of thought
Perfection a fiction
An abstract machinic construct
An immaculate conceptualization

I am not Hamlet not Prufrock not Bartleby
Healthy enough in body I can what I can
I can talk of Michelangelo
Strut the mold of form

So many addictions overcome
Or at least driven into remission
Save this one maybe the last
The indulgence in hatred of oneself

The irises overblown and drooping fade
Creepers invade the azaleas
Unease settles in the suburb
The nature of nature condemned to artifice

But I’ve heard a mermaid sing in made-up song
I’ve heard the blues walking like a man
The owl its welcome cry
The baby’s urgent announcement

What do I want
To punish or to recover
Or to grow and flourish and doubtless perish
In the inextricable soil

Who never fails has never attempted
Knowledge and ignorance inseparable
And ignorance infinitely the larger share
Partial success a well-manured acre

The iris petals fade and fall but the rhizome does not die
The azaleas will bloom again next year
My flowers of evil will cease
And I will persist in ambiguous motions

You don’t deserve to see the sunset
You just see it
To have breakfast a pair of shoes and a place to lay your head
To hear the laughter of a child
To express yourself in words paint or a self-made bass boat
Plagsmir nelt spar zt pragsmil
Woflexiins terpst niy spar wavezun
To play the piano the computer keyboard or the sewing machine
To do nothing as if that were possible
To enjoy the thrilling comingling of bodies
To feel gratitude that the sun has risen
To hear the polyphony of birds
Those you can identify by song and those you can’t
On the last day of April
To see at last a honeybee

Stupid stupid Harold Bloom
Too goddam smart to leave me room

I’m in the uppermost decile probably
I imagine I could make a 91
A cheerful high school teacher
Or a charismatic salesman
Or a waiter with an entertainer’s flair
All honorable professions
But I set my sights higher
Conceited contemptuous asshole

A therapist once suggested
That I should refrain from calling myself nasty names
But it’s a reasonable reaction
For one raised to believe
That misdeeds should be punished
And who is to declare sentence
For secret crimes

I never read books until puberty
And then only the ones that stimulated my imagination
Science fiction mostly
Space ships and alien creatures
That I could play in my head like movies

I did like Jane Eyre
Probably because of the madwoman in the attic
I was fascinated by insanity
Bosch’s hell in the Time-Life picture book The Mind

I was well into adulthood
Before I ever learned to read a poem
I had written a song or two
For my teenage rock band
But there too my development was delayed

The current outpouring commenced
When I was 60
Turns out that mental illness and alcoholism
Are not the blushful Hippocrene
They’re cracked up to be

At 30 I embarked
Oldest in my class
Upon a serious study of literature
I was not inspired
But only intimidated
Not so much by the poems
As by the social pressure
To achieve in the art of criticism
For which I have little aptitude

And then I learn
From Professor Bloom’s book
That the poets themselves
Were the greatest critics
And I guess the sequence
Kind of jumbled in my addled mind
That I could become a poet
Without first learning to criticize

And worse
Without learning to write poems

Spontaneous overflow don’t you know
As if blank verse came spontaneously
To anybody other than William Wordsworth
Yeah yeah Milton was his covering angel
Poets are horrible liars
But they lie so mellifluously

Not intimidated
But despairing

I committed long ago
Well about 2015
To the proposition that it’s better
To be no poet than to be a bad poet
And yet I continue to write
Is it a poet’s lie or a coward’s
To say that I can’t help myself

Because when I write
The lines don’t go all the way to the right side of the page

And so I chose theft outright over silence
An overt admission of defeat
So why don’t I take my pen and go home

Despair is the one emotional posture
Forbidden to the poet
Of the American Gnostic school
Thanks Professor Harold Bloom
Anxiety is okay because unavoidable
In the Age of Anxiety
And guilt is great as the fount
Of the sickly but in some circles admired
Confessional mode

But despair is silent
And I feel guilty for breaking the silence
And I fear discovery
Like a guilty thing surprised

You don’t fear the future if there is none
No blank verse is better than bad blank verse
If only I could commit to despair

This work of fiction is for and from Jason

I pray the Lord her soul to keep
I pray for miracle to make me weep

I know the facts
I know that she is dead my infant child
I know that I loved her before she died
But I can’t for the life of me say what that means

The missing limbs on my left side
Site of constant pain
The deaf ear site of constant ringing
Why can’t I feel the pain of her loss

I know the facts
I know that the father is supposed to grieve
I have a great vocabulary
I know what grief means
But I don’t feel it

I know what traumatic brain injury is
I know that it has taken away my feelings
Along with some of the words in my immense vocabulary
Most of which remain on the tip of my tongue

I know that I’m to blame
They tell me it wasn’t I who ran the red light
But maybe they’re just trying to make me feel better
I wish they’d make me feel worse
Why don’t they understand
I don’t feel either way

I feel no guilt
I know that I am guilty
I was the one who put her in the car
Nestled in the shell of plastic
I was the one along with my former beloved
Who brought her into a universe of death

I know that no Almighty God
Could have allowed this death or any death
Does God feel guilt
How about sharing

Don’t tell me about her immortal soul
Baby soul drooling and gibbering
Squawking like a pterodactyl

I am no father
I tell myself
Maybe a regrettable state of affairs
But lots of guys aren’t fathers

I sin in envy seeing others insane with rage
Envy is sin not feeling
I just want what others have
I want a suffering more than physical
I want a life in my plastic shell

How unseemly
How gauche
Is that the word
Gauche
How gauche then
An unfeeling father

A Colt revolver showed
The Nineteenth Century’s machinic look
Even Dirty Harry’s Magnum
Displayed a brutal Seventies elegance

Today’s handguns exhibit
All the aesthetic qualities
Of a TV remote face-down
Or a switched-off phone

Say yes to meat to sugar to salty snacks
To drugs you have to ask your doctor for
To the fitness device nobody needs
Replete with video images

See the soldiers in their black armor
Going from house to house
See the public thoroughfare
Site of deadly games in blacked-out cars

See the culture of Death Almighty
Steering brains toward universal death
The little girls dancing in perfect synchrony
The Law to Like the regimented song

The neighborhood cats
Give obeisance
To Ancient Orange

I dreamed
The flower screamed
When I plucked it from the soil

Carpenter bees browse among the azaleas
Here and there a butterfly
But none of the beloved honey bees
Their numbers tragically diminished

The carpenter bees drill holes in our porches
No use-value no luscious honey
Their bodies plump and ungainly
But they have their beauty too

See one plunge deep into the petals
Wagging its rotund posterior
Hind legs swollen with the whitish pollen
Treasure for the tribe

And like every living thing
How apt how elegant
How far different from that of human contrivance
Which must please if it please the mind

How beautiful is one bristling black or yellow hair
It can’t be seen except in aggregate
Or with the supplement of optical apparatus
All in nature each is all

And nature not ideally efficient
The vestigial organs
The imperfect births
And yet for all this nature ever strives

The black beauty grinds it out
Petal by patient petal
Grain by grateful grain
Animal and plant in mutual striving

How beautiful is Oedipus’
Raking the broach across his eyes
This too requires aggregation
The drama does not begin with catastrophe

Before must come anagnorisis
Without which the self-mutilation
Is mere atrocity
But with which is the possibility of decorum

Not perfect efficiency
But wondrous decorum
As the bee’s round rump
Matches its humdrum task

And the bee fits in beautifully
With flower and sky
And river and field and ocean
And the richness of out-of-reach stars

You can see it at a glance
Not so the tragic hero
Who must guide us through the journey
From ignorance to knowledge which is sorrow

We must participate or there’s no play
Audience must take the arduous journey
While nature fits its puzzle pieces
With miraculous facility

But what matter if beauty be
Arduous or immediate
We see the striving of the setting sun
Of the hero and the carpenter

We see what remains and what departed
The king’s untempered pride
The soft flower’s embrace
The absence of the honey bee

Why are most of the memories
In my thousand-year repository
The sad ones the anxious and the angry ones

Bliss I remember as a fact
I was blissful several times
But torment is perceptually present

Driven upward on the scalding whirlwind
The agony of suspension
The inevitable fall

I feel my hackles rise
The tingling weakness at the back of my knees
The growing onset of nightmare

My hands a million miles away
My limbs ineffectual
Being pulled by mechanisms

But it’s only memory
The nightmare I really lived
The terror learned in my body

The cresting regret
The admission of defeat
The shame of cowardice

No angel to perform the annunciation
No bard no tale of mythic origin
No sphinx screaming into the darkness

Settembrini’s cold September
A Mediterranean shivering on the brink of Davos
Norkay might’ve had a suggestion
But he never got the byline

The rendering plant cascades into the saltmarsh
The burrowing worms carouse in the windfall
Or shall we say waterfall
Or shall we say fatfall

But the little copepods can’t cope
With the bounteous boon
More adept at particulate matter
Than at semi-emulsified globules

Boileau would have hated that
Semi-emulsified
But simultaneous beauty and truth
Is a tough act to swallow

The Encyclopedia of Suffering
Never completed scarcely begun
Knowledge unstoppable
Goes without saying

The obviously obvious glut of sorrow
The arcane allusion
The pictures in the media
The secret silent injury

Or is it just that one breath
Cannot accommodate
Both the genetic behavior of low places
And the hyper-cognitive high

Little Hans must go down
Go down and die
In the trenches of war
Dug out to evade the lofty projectiles

As I absorbed the adulation
From the smallish multitude
I thought in words
Words that I adjusted as I thought them

This is the peak of my life so far
Careful to add the optimistic qualifier
But the peak represents the inflection point
The moment of inevitable decline

Barzun claimed what we call free verse to be merely prose that does not reach the
Right side of the page
Frost called it tennis without a net
I know they’re right and I blame the times that we live in an unpoetic age
I refer to the period from 1954 to the present
Which our critic-poets would style the apotheosis of decadence
And I have written approvingly of decadence in these pages
And decadence is a moral category
The carnivalization of history in which norms are overturned or at the least relaxed
And what can be the obscure effect of moral morbidity upon aesthetic deliquescence
No doubt some softening would be salutary when culture becomes hidebound and
Ossified
But you can’t justify the unjustifiable
You can’t give reasons for the unreasonable

Condondu pmisti effrent beliosic
I’ll give you decadence

Stevens was still around and Chaplin and Keaton and Lousie Brooks
Memorials of an earlier age true
But Toni Morrison and Dylan and Ginsburg and James Tate and Melnick
Anne Carson a baby in ‘54
The Beatles the Supremes Coltrane Miles and Aretha
Muddy Wolf and Willie
Dr John and Billy Preston
Otis James Brown and the Wicked Pickett
Scorsese and Campion and the Brothers Coen
Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson
Julie Taymor and Rauschenberg Warhol and Jasper Johns
A lot of great poems are lists
I dream of a Borgesian comprehensive list of lists
And dreams are never fully realized alas in the world of causal reality
Horrible beautiful Francis Bacon
Matisse made it to November
I’m still not ready for the later James Baldwin
And Dr King asked when will white liberals ever be ready for the scintillating stars
And Barzun himself nearly a centenarian when he raised his lament
And of course Robert Frost
But then Ezra Pound so there was some putrefaction at the banquet

We seek permission from the greats don’t we
Whitman’s operatic meandering
Dickinson’s slant
But all the persons we know of are human
Every hero some disreputable affiliation

The poets of now with their writing-program credentials
Their university appointments
And universities not exactly bastions of incisive criticism
The chancellor of the University System of Georgia
An arch-Trumpist who stood by the Leader when lots of other rats were jump-
Ing ship
Who ascended to the gubernatorial palace by promising
A referendum on Georgia’s Confederate-spangled banner
A promise he failed to carry out after having achieved his goal
I have a faculty position
But will I survive the next post-tenure review
The next round of show trials

Vladimir Putin has a goal
To return to the halcyon Soviet Empire
All the rest is technical process
Systemic function
Strategy tactics and the will and materiel to carry them out
And the Empire must have its Emperor
Frederick the Great who knew a thing or two about monarchy
Stated that the duties of the prince are two
First self-preservation
And second the extension of territory

The times are always changing
The customs remain the same

That’s the problem isn’t it systems and their goals
And the people who set as their goal to profit from system
To gain the world
And systems collapse and new systems take their place
Poets don’t seek office Václav Havel notwithstanding
And Johann Wolfgang von who never held a witch’s sabbath in the
Halls of Weimar
And the Weimar Republic that gave way to what we dare not say
The unspeakable that must be remembered
And memory grows dimmer unless somebody speaks of it
Technical processes of millions murdered and ballistic missiles
And who used nuclear weapons first

I quite enjoy tennis without net well at any rate badminton
Without a winner
Where there’s only one rule
Keep it moving
A sentiment that would make Alexander Pope cringe
The pope of poet-critics
But Pope didn’t cringe he attacked
But he lisped in numbers and poetry came easy to him
And he scorned the slobs who had to count syllables
And what kind of prose has eleven clauses and nary a period
Poet-critic is redundant or in pedantic parlance a pleonasm
Or more accurately every poet is a critic
But not every critic is
Well you know

A poem is not a goal to be won
You don’t get there by trying real hard
There’s more sense in trying real easy

Are you a thug
Which way do you want me to answer
I’m just trying to get to my car
Why approach me thus with questions

Do I affiliate with thuggery
Not that I know of
I’m not even sure what the word means
Why don’t you explain it to me

Everything’s a judgment call
Is this a neutral encounter
Or a street hassle
Or perhaps a confrontation with madness

And which of us is mad
Why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself
I know myself to be other than
The picture of mental health

I demand facts that I might make a judgment
Who you are
Who I might be
I demand facts

Is it a gambler’s gambit
Or the crux of a dire endgame
Is it an ongoing grinding conflict
What game would you like to play

Ah a quiz
Who are my parents perhaps
Concerning the mother is little question
The father makes the case cloudier

We find ourselves then in a relationship
Which need not have a goal
Or perhaps you have a goal in mind
But you do not tell me

I am not the same as I was
Before you spoke to me
I remember I was headed for my car
Is there something else I should know

In our interplay must be a liturgy
Some gesture some script to follow
Open to improvisation to be sure
Why do you approach me thus with questions

The pine thrusts itself right through the branches
Of the straight slower-growing sweetgum
Deaf to the suit for peace
Bending and striving to achieve the light and winning

Trees do what they do
Fruit kernel pod and tang
They don’t put too much thought into it
They can’t help it if a sweetgum gets in the way

Too fast and too slow for dull-witted perception
One character yoked in conflict with one other one
The serene aggressor the serene victim
No gathering momentum or dissipant entropy

So no we need not pick at the memory
Of the originary primal trauma
No obscure onset no indistinct outcome
No finale no particular overture

No heroes aloft in their fragile balloons
No perpetrators brandishing their arcane munitions
No saints bestowing their tender succor
No busted gamblers cursing their losing hands

No tree of knowledge tree of life
No quick crisis or languid denouement
The pine twists into a question mark
The least bad answer triumphant death

The pine neither demands nor assumes an answer
Straining in patient striving
One dead limb hanging idly
Lichens festooning its powdery skin

The sweetgum does not sue for peace
But exercises a subatomic mutuality
Or subsubatomic or suprauniversal
Careless of the epiphenomena of life and death

The same strive energy that drives the pine
Sameness not to be misconstrued as oneness
Where does that tree begin and end
The miracle of stoma the mystery of root hair

Nothing is separate
There is no one to remain
There are no many to change and pass
All is flux without monads swept in flux

Only the illusion of individuality
Only the illusion of objecthood
Makes no feel like denial
Makes empty feel like deprivation

Only the self-serving narrative of oneself
Only the faulty grammatical dilemma
Of singular and plural
And what is the number of zero

Hail world without things
Life without a self
Life without life
Being without being

It stops with zero no more than with one
Nor rigid needle nor trembling leaf
The sweetgum also pierces the pine
Nor outside nor inside but through and through