If it can’t be done well ’twere best left undone
Charge number 1 is it’s pretentious
And O To see oursels as others see us
Because I don’t see the pretentiousness
And would that it ’twere so simple
But you see the pretentiousness of Laurentz
Is to say both the it and the ‘t
Whereas my ’twere merely anachronizes
An affectation I admit
But not pretense to an excellence of which I fall short
But precisely since I don’t see it
And since I fall manifestly short of excellence
I cop a guilty plea to the first charge

And then I sin in envy
Which really shouldn’t stand as a second charge
But for the fact that I have confessed it publicly
Indulging thereby in the sickly confessional mode
Which will constitute the third charge
But that’s getting ahead of ourselves
But oh for Whitman’s self-confidence
Oh for Dickinson’s precision
Oh for Wilde’s intelligence
And the slope of envy slips right down to theft outright
And since I have once again blurted the truth
I cannot deny the charge of invidious emulation

The third is a charge of aggravated narcissism
For having gone all in on self-expression the accused has
That is I have
Made the choice to float his vices publicly
But choice is such a loaded word
And self-expression could offer a social benefit
Since some feelings stand to reason and others do not
So that the poetry of self-expression
Might enable contemplation of the difference
But only if one’s own feeling joins
In the general sorrow or celebration
So mark me guilty of number 3

For the pronoun one see charge number 1

And in what sense are these typings
To be considered poems
Nearly devoid of imagery
Lacking meter or even the vestige of rhythm
Deficient in both invention and rhetorical flair
Since I have no answer
I am guilty of 4
The charge of technical incompetence

The fifth charge is the most grave
A failure meet humanity’s moral demands
Hacking away for hours
The moral equivalent of Tetris
Taking moderate pleasure
With not one word for the suffering millions
I have nothing to say
I hear their groans
And who gets to enjoy poems even the good ones
Who gets to cultivate an appreciation of the arts
How am I wrong here
How are you wrong Dear Critic
Subject matter matters
What are my sad little sorrows to speak of

A French wit
Actually two writers in partnership
Wrote chapters about what in translation
They termed partial objects
An aspect of their espousal
Of the body without organs
A concept difficult to grasp
Obscurity being a charge frequently leveled
Against French intellectuals
Partisans of Nietzsche
Practitioners of an elevated Academic style
Cultivators of extravagant metaphors
Martyrs to the traduction of translation
Who might not have retained were they the translators
The current chain of appositives

Every situation can be analyzed
Every object is composed of other objects
Consider the circulatory system
Consider the blood alone
That albuminate collection of organs
Platelets and cells the red and the white
The work of nourishment waste-disposal respiration
Regulation executed through chemical telegraphy
What we in America call individuals
Are really quite dividual it would seem
In our organ-infested bodies
In a continuum to our divided souls

View a closeup of somebody’s face
And now we subject our sonata to modulation
Into the key of culture and morality
How some social environments require the young
To control the mobility of that expressive organ
Wipe that smile off your face the elders say
For each grimace and grin
Speaks of I me me the unique
But speaks it like all speech to somebody else
Nobody doesn’t want somebody to talk to
Nobody doesn’t want somebody to hear
Anatomy and physiology are fine sure
Willy Loman said A man is not a piece of fruit
A person is not an erythrocyte

Subject matter always proves a problem

The leaf on the stem of one apple in the masked-up produce department
Reminds the shopper that a world of Nature persists somewhere
But wait agriculture isn’t nature
Agriculture is almost the opposite of Nature
Apples come from grafts not from seeds
And new breeds like that one that was unusually sweet and tart and crisp
And juicy
None of that was what’s the word
That means something better than random or accidental

Or that title that accompanied that melody from that song
That turned out not to have the word glory in it
And now the melody itself is gone
Obscured by the palimpsestuous glory

And you rack your brain for that super-famous comedian
Who got no respect but ironically received respectful praise
From a younger comic now well into middle age
Whose name also does not leap immediately to mind

The old war horses they’re easy to remember
In the old movies still shown sometimes the TV shows of childhood
But they were lame when they were alive
And the younger generation carving out new territory on the frontier of banality
No I want it to be a participle
New special effects to festoon the same old old shit

A crank a cranky old crank

Attention deficit grown to an attention bankruptcy

Here’s where you add the redemptive peroration
Not a bigot despite appearances
Just a bit disoriented in a world turned upside down
That’s just the sort of symptom to be disguised
And the attempt at disguise creates the impression of bigotry
The old conceal-and-convey you know

That new sensation might be cancer

It’s okay to be afraid or queer
But a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires
That you never
Never never
Let it be known
That you might be unhappy
That the thousand shocks have taken their toll
Soon dead soon forgotten

And now this
LEDs and a slow grey twilight
Dreaming of homicide Inanna
Dreaming of Mesopotamia

Science surely should explain into
And not just explain away
As in the case of dreams
Having established their basis in neurology

Does the origin of a phenomenon in nature
Deny therefore its significance
Would we say the same
Of tide monsoon or Vesuvius

An electrochemical process
An unintended byproduct
Every bit as casual as
The birth of Venus the death of Desdemona

For Charles Barrow

A treasury of tracks ripe for mixing
EQ compression panning delay and gain
Count for nothing unless they sound like
Woody before a labor meeting

What prices must the artist pay
What sufferings what wicked deeds
As all suffer all perpetrate
But the artist refines transmutes transmogrifies

And the world submits to this deception
Craving to luxuriate in seeming
And dares not peer into
The firehot fermenting cauldron

To everything turn turn turn
There is procedure turn turn turn
And a time to every purpose under system

The world holds the practice of alchemy in bad odor
The good or ill fortune of a fortune hunter
The transparent falsehoods of a confidence man
Knowledge owing to depraved demonic congress
Or if you like luck lies and license

Thus point by point
Any discovery any advancement
Will of necessity involve the element of chance
And success will come with the Aha! erlebnis
Success rare fleeting and never whole alas so far

What one seeks is gold that’s true
But mainly in a metaphorical sense
And metaphors are not quite true or false
But only apt or inapt as the case may be
And all we know is symbol

The pure the permanent the incorruptible
Require more than human hands
More than the skill to build a fire
Or the catalogue of those mnemonic contrivances
That we call spells

We humans live in the provinces
Of space and time and matter and energy
Which alchemy has deemed a hidden unity
Which philosophers have tried to excavate
To perceive a truth past all sensation

We should have no more contempt for humans
Than for hyenas e. coli or poison ivy
Contemptible though those organisms may seem

But humans so tantalizingly close to reason
Give reason for disappointment
If not for active contempt

But then a human cannot be responsible
For accidental miscalculation
For irremediable ignorance

But what of ignorance of the willful kind
Which renders the mystery of self-control
No mystery at all

But willful ignorance is knowledge too
From the elders the comrades and the holy scrolls
The word received from the collective fool

The Nameless House of Infinity
1954: Year of Destiny
What’s So Bad about Crazy?
Castanets
Make Your Bets (With the Horse You Rode In On)
The Red Hat of Nepotism
Marcie Bruckner the Private Invigilator
A Geometry of Decay
Cads Aplenty
A Youth Composed Entirely of Pastry
The Blessed Relief of Nonsense
If Fanne Foxe Met Lady Chatterley
A Strained Mercy of Low Quality
Convey and Conceal
Urogenital Day Vacations
Nihilism among the Activists
Peer-Reviewed Sex Tapes from the 80s
Parsecs or Terameters
Albert the One-Eyed Houseplant
The Shirker’s Bible
The Conspirators at Kitty Hawk
Bohemian Researches
Fud the Conqueror
The Epic of Liverspleen
On the Nose: Proceedings of an Invertebrate Senate
The Monstrous Diner
Ricky the Forgiven
Notes Toward a Supreme Redundancy
The Expedient Figleaf
Only Such Punctuation as Might Appear with Precedent in a Title
Pmisti: A Memoir of Effrentic Byways
Furniture Appliances Doctrines
Extortionate Valentines
Throw Wide the Gates of Jacksonville
On Wings of Vitriol
Apothegms for Divers Occasions
Impunity among the Feckless
Not That Jazzed by Flying Saucers
The Trump of Doom
Underwear Chronicles Volume VII: 1842-1910
Sounds like a Long Distance Call
Unalloyed Mirth
The Catbird Seat: A Decor of Fantasy
Pleas from the Indignant
Poppadoms and Tears
The Dessicated Bishop Exits Mobile
Eels the Imponderable
The Dylan Mondegreen, Part 2
Signposts for Semioticians
The Patience of J. F. Wallace
So Wan with Care
Moderate Excess: The Autobiography of Fred “RJ” Murphy
Cocktails and Arms Sales
Barkley’s Book of Disappointments
The Enigmas
Tang: The Beverage That Changed the World
Erotic Tetrameters
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Novel of Suspense
Katherine’s Prescriptive Sequences
In the Sea In the Sea In the Sea In the Sea In the Sea
The Digital Gastropod
Murders with an Onomastic Twist
The Nambiest of the Pamby
The Corporate Dispensation
Liliaceae
Paris in the the Spring
Visions of Sugarcubes
The Encyclopedia of Pain (Thirty-one Volumes)
Emily’s Adventitious Pigtails
Choose Your Belief: A Guide to Consumer Creeds
Here Come the Crabs!
‘Neath the Glowering Palms
Foul Tessellations
Everything Signifies and Other Moot Claims
Juliette of the Slime Molds
The Digraph Scandal
Keeping Tabs on the Converts
Confetti and Chromosome Damage
Strawberry Shortcake: Sources and Analogues
Stimulating Epithets for the Languorous
What Oft Was Thought
Anthropocene Fêtes
Scientific Biographical and Philosophical Digressions
The Lysergic Acrobat
Pigs’ Bladders and Mother-of-Pearl
Nights in White Flannel
Melodramatic Vignettes from around the World: Coastal Paramours
Gelatinous
Terrestrial Abnegations: A Confession
Termites for Truth
The Delusory and the Incomplete
Pastoral Delinquents
Slow and Quiet: Tales of the Ingenious Potto
Jokes and Witticisms of the Meiji Period
Name That Condiment!
Pasties and Pantaloons (American Version)
In the Dull Latitudes of the Doldrums
Pissants Elected and Unelected
Salubrious Incantations
What Became of the Lubricant: A Desecration in Five Acts
Mitigations of the Imperative and Other Social Buffers
Shucking
Lo the Bloomers: A Textual Revelation
NIMBY Maneuvers
Jude the Obsequious
Infrared Pas de Deux
Through the Transitive Nightfall of Diamonds
He Slept Sleeping
Tinct with Cinnamon: Imaginary Recipes from the Romantic Poets
Fissures in the Maxim
The Oil Changes of Emmit Joles
Frivolous Superfluities and Superficial Trivialities
Prevent Erudition
The Exsanguination of the Ponds
Algorithms in Cordoba
Ken the Diabolical Ornithologist
Blogography for Neophytes
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote by Greg Kelley
Hail Mary Full of Grapes
This Is Your Supervisor (Instructional Video)
Songs of the Lost Embroiderers
The Defenestrations of Prague: A View from the Bottom
Swollen Parcels
An Emperor, A Regulatory Principle
Refreshment No Mean Desire
A Catalog of Systematic Registries
The Woman Who Knew How to Declaim
Endocrine Theology
The Actions of Characters in Settings
Transcendental Journey: Surveying the Digits of Pi
Enmity in the Halls of Power or, The Kerfuffle
Topical Reminders
A Generation of Dik-diks
Sumptuary Display through the Ages
The Pale Debugger
Brain’s Nubile Candidates (c. 1750)
The Sea! The Stars!
Ferns in Hanging Baskets: Opportunities and Challenges
Pre-Baked Dinner Rolls
Slug
Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Pure Error
Habits of the Ineffectual
Protecting Children from Works of Art
To Say Me for My
Vanessa Bell’s Original Simulacra
Wriggling toward Bethlehem
A Brief Reconsideration of the Echinoderms
Nuclear Cuisine Part 3: Quantum Leavening
Tangents and Divagations
Whither the Centipede?
The Traumas of Anabel
Akkadian Stitchery
Eschew the Underscore
Gasse and Oyl: Elizabethan Petroleum in English Surnames
Is Self-Amusement Sinful?

She looked almost as she appears now
Not quite so emaciated
Still some glimmer of cognitive force
My mother sat in one of the chairs
From our old dining set

Bowie’s Let’s Dance began to play
And I responded to the song’s invitation
And my mother who had not stood in years
Arose and began a somewhat wild
A rippling somewhat reckless dance

Another dream of transit I thought
Move your arms a little less I said
And her movements took on a statelier pace
And we danced as people do a little space between us
And then my mother sat down again

Edy invvoidal scrawurdy bacerten mre atetmp
Paeri en ampeoessbol

Zemplaegrat 3 daemeas edye 2

More difficult to express than to state

Unknown modes of being
Probably an exaggeration
Or perhaps an ideal
Like living deliberately
And although no doubt variants obtain
In the way or form or mode of our being
Usually induced by some catastrophe
Moral or material or both
When the mode or form of our being
Takes on a new form
The upshot is usually unpleasant
Especially when one has not sought
Such novelty deliberately

But how eager we are
To escape from banal sameness
And how we yearn
For new experiences
Hence the appeal of fantastic art
For our own fantasies arise
From the ground of our own experience
A variation of the familiar
And hence the appeal even of mere
Apygerm te lauwrc en pmisti effrent
Valentino Kardashian or Zsa Zsa Gabor
And we need the mutation for good or ill
As bacteria exchange genetic material
In the sacrament of empathy

For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation

I don’t know how I write and for forty years
I have punished myself on that account
For when I lack a datum of knowledge
That I believe I should possess
I castigate myself and worse
And apply adverse criticism
Not to the work but to myself
The human in the background
Faulty and full of holes

One source of this belief is my prior commitment
To the myth of total self-control
And hence of total responsibility
But commitment to doctrine
Almost never turns out well
One thing to know right from wrong
Quite another to do right

Part of the problem is that I underwent
A lengthy formal education that required
A measure of self-control I never considered adequate
And so the outcome unsurprisingly
Was that I did not learn what I thought I should have learned
But I learned enough to know that I did not know
What I thought I should have known
Not that anyone would divulge what that was
My instructors really weren’t too helpful

And it doesn’t help now that I’ve chosen as my subject
Or did I
A question of know-how and continually drift
Into nostalgic torment concerning know-what
Or its lack
For example when I say that I don’t understand
How the verb to be works
I’m not talking about knowing how to do something
This problem exemplifies what I’ve called a datum
Simple objective fact
And I have long imagined
Wrongly
That Hugh is my brother and My brother is Hugh
Mean the same thing ignoring
The conventional sequence in English of topic and comment
And it is certain racial prejudice is like dark clouds
And not the other way around
Please don’t teach me friends and colleagues
What the true function of is is
I’m tired and I’m old and I want nothing new

I’d like to say I’ll drown my book
But I don’t have that kind of courage

We don’t choose to do the right or wrong thing
When we do wrong we have to convince ourselves
That what we know is wrong is somehow right
Unless we’re driven to do wrong by dire compulsion
Which still isn’t a choice

So
Prose that lacks punctuation but does display
Lines that fall short of the right-hand margin
But a variable meter I tell myself
Swingy contemporary rhythms I offer as defense
No I don’t know what I’m doing
And invocation of those great whom I regard as predecessors
Would be most unseemly
And it would overstate the case to say
That I have wasted my life
And how dare I scorn those who care about me
But these pages have paid off only modestly
And only in the coin of my own occasional bliss

Safety third

I dreamed that a poor fellow in a film
Was required to go through the ordeal of a dream
Wherein he must not see much less set foot in
A great room where some terrible event had taken place
Narrative of cold war or middle eastern conflict
His jolly friends watched him and shepherded him
For half a year
Across the city and the football pitch
But in the end could not prevent his exposure

And I watched as my own field of vision
The walls the door the furniture that I could see
Swung open to reveal the blinding white light
As reflected from a bare projector bulb
Through colorless celluloid
Token of annihilation
I shouted an open syllable at the top of my lungs
And then muttered apologies to the beloved
Peaceful beside me

I spoke the formulae of ordinary life
The planning train
The retrospective revision
Such as the jolly friends had used
With the man in the troubled middle east
While he inscribed the text in childish pictographs
But when I tried to decompose the garbled words
They plummeted with thudding banality
For the poor fellow
For me

Everybody dies and leaves the world behind to grieve
Life is worth living until it isn’t
And joy which enters from time to time
Lacks the definiteness and certainty of death
And so we swaddle death in mythology
Buffering what we know with what we can imagine
Now you’re speaking in generalities said Carmine Sabatini
Knowing that many facts of law custom and nature
Apply universally
Everybody dies along with every other thing
That has ever lived

What is life people used to ask
But not what is death
Homely familiar
But people place too much stock in is
As if the world were composed of objects
Without event process or situation
Life no doubt is process
And death merely a state of things
And for whom
For the living
The grieving

And people place far too much stock
In their little identities
From which they can’t bear to depart
Self-preservation instinct in the merest bacterium
We can probably outgrow or at least control
That primitive configuration of will
But reason exclusive domain of persons
Requires that we love one another
And therefore requires that we grieve
And experience the fullness of the loss
Of any in our universal family

Observing my habit of remarking on various topics
A friend once characterized that practice as pontification
A word that ridicules papal pronouncement ex cathedra
Surely my friend doesn’t suppose that I imagine
My speech as otherwise than fallible

Are we not obliged to speak the truth as we understand it
Or perhaps a better policy is to keep one’s own counsel
And while honesty might be best
A safer second best might well be maintained in silence
That’s all that can be said for safety first

People hate it when you tell them what they already know
They hate it worse when you test their knowledge with a pop quiz
Often their actions remove the lion’s share of any doubt
Don’t they know not to blow people’s brains out including their own
Don’t they know to prevent children’s starvation in a proxy war

I don’t know what you don’t know
And no doubt I err when my recent discovery
Serves as prize to be displayed with pride deadly pride
But perhaps I could use knowledge to build a bridge
That I might cross to offer aid humbly to the afflicted

Why are there stabilities
Why are there continuities
In this mostly discontinuous world
Why the C in MC²

I dreamed that I was caught in a dream
And in my dream prison I dreamed I saw
A different house a different family
But not all that different

I did not travel by bus or boat
But remained in the house that was not the one
Where I had lived for twenty years
Although the style was nearly the same

I struggled to recognize the halls and terraces
That should have been familiar
I tried to remember the names of my new wife and kids
The birthday of the youngest

I gazed upon a plant
Tall and broad of leaf
Curling around a wooden slat six feet high
Reminiscent of the one that grows fallingly to the floor

Suddenly the space was filled with people
An assembly room or food service facility
A troop of young priests in Roman collars
Entered marching in double file

Young women played exotic instruments
A lute held upright on the lap
I saw my guitar case lying open on the floor
Empty

I’m sorry Honored Reader to have bored you
Nobody wants the narrative of another’s dream
Sorry to have imposed upon you
My sadness at the empty case

During a visit once to a physician
I complained of the consistency of my stool
And the medical man expressed indignation
That I had broached so foul a topic

And you Honored Reader may feel
A similar offense at my oversharing here
In this palace of the muse
And you may deplore this age of disclosure

All bruit their dirty secrets about
As for example points of anatomy
As for example certain bodily functions
And the sad malfunctions of the spirit

Vertebrates possess an alimentary canal
In worms and mollusks too a one-way street runs
From ingestion to excretion
So different from the coelenterate cul de sac

So different from vegetable placidity
Alchemy of earth and water and sun
To generate the life-giving air
The life-giving food for those incapable

We animals embarked upon a different course
The course of cunning
To brace together to defend against attack
To strategize the charge of the predatory band

The fear of death seems a childish indulgence
For humans the brainiest of the bunch
But this perhaps explains our coprophobia
That I in time will be no longer me

For Jason

I dreamed I rode upon the famous bus
That scuds along the interstate highway
That never takes up a space in port
Like the albatross at home in flight
The bus at home on the highway
But not its passengers
I knew myself to be an alien

I knew myself away from home
Unimaginably distant in outer space
Such that the term outer space
Seemed wholly inadequate
For my presence here on the determinate bus
And I felt elated for the privilege
To examine the fine details within

While the external world swept by
Meaning nothing or less to me
So absorbed was I with minute particulars
Within the hurtling enclosure
It was then that I realized
That I dreamed again of transit
The alien the scudding the hurtling

My mother was there with me
Along with one or two of my kids
They like me fixed upon interiority
So I determined to play the dream again
Since I knew myself to be dreaming
And among the throngs of details
There must have been many that I had missed

But I miscalculated
For rewinding to the beginning
I saw there was no beginning
I saw that the bus always sped one way
Without origin or destination
And I always an alien
Who failed to register the precious details

When I was a teenager it hit me
That any thread could unravel
The great sock of the universe
Take the word motivate for example
What is it that moves one to action
The social nexus
The simple the totalizing answer
But nexus fairly begs for unraveling

I was less interested in knitting
Than in disassembly
So nope
No transcendent aspirations
Only the mundane inclination
Toward a thing
The form inseparable from the object
Like the vertices of a square

Possibly something worth a damn
First tear down
Then build up again
But I
Deficit in attention to sequence
Often got stuck in step number 1

The artist the maker of something
Must have materials near at hand
Fortunately I was inefficient
And never completed the program
Of creative self-destruction
And I learned the hard way
The futility of comprehensiveness
And resolve in old age to step in number 2

Do you have a speed dialer
Brisker than the Haribo
Employed by the boys outside
Stimulant gum for brigands
Friskier than the runabout
Th’aquatic raceabout
A getaway over the cove

Do you have a speed dialer
More entertaining than tumblers
Than barebreasted roundbreasted women
Who leap and handspring over the bull
More entertaining than crystalline salts
Ignited t’illumine the night

Do you have a speed dialer
More ancient than the strata
Than the striae that streak th’upturned earth
The rings that wreath the Methuselah tree
Older than the parched-bean dance
That drives the demons hence
And ushers good fortune in

Do you have a speed dialer
Wiser than philosophers
Devisers of lucent enamels
To blaze on façades of Bagdad
Wiser than the alchemists
Of dyes and tinctures
Ornithopters and sublime retorts
Pyromancy geomancy gloss and cosmopaedia

Do you have a speed dialer
Stronger than heroes
Half gods and quarter gods
Who lay low the monsters
Of many heads many appendages
Stronger than Orphic travelers
Conquerors even of death

Do you have a speed dialer
Higher than a satellite
Ma Bell and Pan Am
Higher than a scimitar
Hurled twisting into the Gemini
Eviscerating the Twins
Composed of and dwelling in
Star