I prayed for madness and the madness came
And now I pray for madness to depart
Having indulged in cognizant superstition
In periods of stress the flights of birds
The magic of numbers twelve plus five

And I have chastised myself and worse for insults
To the body to the brain
Knowing full well that brain is body
But I was a materialist a crass instrumentalist
Knowing full well that birds fly for their own purposes

The division of I and myself was a primal error
Perhaps unavoidable and therefore not reprehensible
Perhaps universal or at least typical I don’t know
But I arrogated unto I the voice of command
The voice of control punishment and criminal proceeding

Long have I known that the tyrant must be quelled
But revolutions are bad
I can’t amputate a part of myself
And thus I propose to enter into negotiation
To render the theatre of battle as a play

Whereas wisdom learns from the past and plans for the future
Let us not waste our time debating the status of time
Whether it is an illusion whether or not it exists
Certainly let us not adopt the unreasonable attitudes
Of debilitating regret or paralyzing anxiety

Whereas each person must make decisions
And make them in the absence of omniscience
Let us apprise ourselves to the greatest extent possible
Of the facts relevant to the case
Remembering always that the world is infinitely interesting

Whereas in our limited knowledge and our weak perceptions
We make each decision in a moment of time
Let us prepare ourselves in each instance
To give an account to state reasons
And let us assess that account with patience and compassion

Whereas our knowledge and perceptions are ineluctably distorted
By desires long-standing harmful habits and unreliable memory
Let us not regard the errors that follow like ducklings their mother
With punitive intent for how is it just
To repay suffering with more suffering

Whereas many of life’s proceedings occur automatically
Let us cultivate those habits and routines that conduce
To reasonable and productive actions
Remembering always those principles that make things go best
Never confusing spontaneity with thoughtless impulse

Whereas each person is unique and valuable
And therefore worthy of respect
A worthiness expressed in the word and concept of dignity
Let us commit to acting according to this reasonable principle
Not forgetting that I am a person myself

Whereas everything we do takes place in a social context
Let us seek to engage with and not to isolate ourselves from
The wisdom of saints and sages of friends and loved ones
For our actions affect others who should have some say
And empathy is more-than instrumentally significant

Whereas dialogue epitomizes not only theatre
But also social interactions and the chorus of voices
That make up personality
Let us resolve to play our part and many indispensable parts
Regarding truly each part as a locus of manifold complexity

Therefore let us assert the nullity obsolescence
And unavailability of the role known variously
As Tyrant Controller Portable-Dictator Emperor
Super-ego Mini-Sovereign Overlord Judge-and-Jury
Final-Authority Absolute-Monarch Head-Cheese and Boss
Substituting instead Coach Consultant Producer-Director
Pathfinder or Master of the Revels

Performing a role differs from performing other tasks
And requires something more than following instructions
Macbeth falls dead for obeying too much
And while I have ceded too much to the issuer of commands
The play goes on even as I exit the stage

She spoke movingly of strange calamity and of her prophetic dream
Prophetic in the sense not of prediction but of a special enlightenment
Anciently ascribed to God but now to uncanny inspiration
That renders intelligible the world and its horrors

Famous devotee of form she was schooled in the immemorial craft
She mastered as well as anyone alive the fearsome curriculum
But fame or reverence come not to the one at the head of the class
Accolades accrue to the maker of beauty the herald of truth

A true poet and of the Devil’s party knowing or unknowing
Self-possessed confident and civil
Wielding legitimate credentials
Expressing truth despite her radiant thriving

Avoiding apparently the threat of deadly pride
For what is good for the poet might not be good for the world
Maintaining in due proportion her notable accomplishments
In what really matters to render pain into beauty

Illumination no doubt requires procedure
But from obscurity of the life or of the work
Beauty and truth may sometimes arise
As freedom requires the most arduous discipline

Accomplished fingers begin to play
–W. B. Yeats, “Lapis Lazuli”

Yeats was okay with social disparity
The artist here a serving-man
Roughly of a piece with plum or cherry-branch
Sweetening the task of climbing to the heights
Providing genteel accompaniment
Adding décor to the work of aristocracy

Heaney was great with one-syllable words
Slub and rump and a tobacco plug
Milton wrote English as if it were his second language
A guilty person is nocent
A river wanders with mazy error
Homicide serves as an epithet

Verbal terra incognita exerts an irresistible attraction
I am drawn to little-known words I can’t help it
And to display these arcane specimens I know is affectation
But then poetry is affectation innit
It’s not as if poems are natural objects
Waiting to be discovered

And so we need an agricultural not a geographical metaphor
And although agriculture was a catastrophe
Voyages of discovery were worse
Nevertheless writing like other skills requires cultivation
And a collection is sometimes called a garland of flowers
To be found not in a colony but in a garden

Prelapsarian Adam feared his cropland too fecund
And hence proposed marital separation
Rappaccini’s horticulture proved fatal at the last
And nobles executed poachers in their parks
I specialize in the rare the decorative and the easily grown
Wormwood dark cereus and sickly orchids

Truth in the world of objects is available to everyone
Theoretically and to the extent that it is known
But the inner world requires expression
And must be coaxed into being
Experience transmuted into words
As the farmer beguiles the yielding earth

The disaster has already taken place

Well he said
We no longer have a port on the Baltic
So we’ll just have to build a railway
And all applauded their youthful and enterprising king
But this meant austerity

All the luxuries
All the things that indicate kingship began to vanish
The court composer no longer
Hung around the little concert hall
The master of revels
Gone
The little bevy of courtesans
Now absent
That hurt the most
Pieces of furniture and gigantic paintings
Began disappearing
The little concert hall was converted into a print shop
Nobody knew why that particular transformation
Had been carried out

Eventually after much saving
And after much frankly injudicious borrowing
A few miles of track were laid
And before long the railway stretched
Across the little kingdom from frontier to frontier
A splendid locomotive was purchased
And richly appointed carriages for passengers
And baggage cars the size of houses

But nobody wanted to ride on the train
Magnificent though it was
For neither passengers nor goods
Found the need
To traverse the little kingdom from frontier to frontier

Soon the king fell into a profound melancholy
And seemed to age overnight
We never knew our port was so important
He complained to the workers in the print shop
How dare they take it from us
Whoever it was

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