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

How do you learn from the masters
Without envy or intimidation

The postmoderns those decentered subjects
Writing insideoutside a free play of free play
Metanarrative of metafiction
Leveling pastiche
Archeology anatomy and bricolage
All under erasure there is no all
Breaking the silence with aporia
Authors writing the death of the author
Drowning in the intertext

The modernists had a beginning
In the shadow of the arcade
The shadow of the engine
Humanity alienated in alien nature
Humanity the subject of forces beyond itself
The relentless dialectic of history
The battleground of unconscious drives
The source of the surreal frisson
Nature which speaks but only in confuses paroles
The familiar regard the fields of gazing grain
A tiny planet and homo the offspring of beasts
And yet the mighty individual
Large and containing multitudes
Hearing always the song of mother death

But the romantics loved best
The great and suffering soul
Storm stress and elusive tranquility
The hero of the egotistical sublime
Ambitious Faust leading the army of the damned
At the pinnacle the only move is downward
And now more than ever seems it rich to die

For the neo-classicals a game of rules
With victory to the ne’er so well expressed
Deploying the armamentarium
Of zeugma
Of chiasmus
Neatly evading the slow hypermetrical snake
And the false wit of paronomasia
But there can be but one best
And dunces all the rest
And universal darkness buries all

The renaissance loved workmanship
Or often the work of nameless woman
The lacemaker
The applicant of jewels and cloth-of-gold
Or the achievement of self-driven gay rebel
Sagacious Leonardo smooth-muscled Michelangelo
Or the uncontrolled contriver of Tamburlaine
Finally to lapse into despair
Telling the tale told by an idiot
Falling with Satan to justify the ways of God

As for the ancients nobody is ever first
There is no avenue of escape
Discovering with Thales our watery birth
With Aeschylus the grip of fate
With Socrates the dilemma of Euthyphro
The sway of tyrant and triumvirate
Of knowing but forgetting
That we know that we know that we know
That which we always knew

And so we revert to the foul rag and bone shop
But witness Yeats’s perfect diction
Not vile or soiled
But perfectly foul

The Sorrows of the Survivor

I hardly knew them, the beautiful men,
The fresh troops, the reinforcements.
When we heard the whistle sound
And we charged with super-human panache,
The new recruits scrambled to be the first.

A thousand years before, this had been farmland.
A peasant lass sang as she led the cows to milking,
The pasture green and rolling like a magical inland sea.
The pond, the shade trees, the very air
Gave of the same sweetness, the same simplicity.

And I saw my new comrades,
Who should have grown strong and happy,
Who should have romped on the green with a peasant lass,
Cut to pieces in a matter of seconds,
Sacrificed in poison and fire to God knows what.

Maintain the encryption
Never relax the encryption
The truth must ever remain hidden
Expression of the truth is not permitted

For sayeth the law
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The commentary
Now we see the close affinity
Of poetry and crime
For poetry attempts to redistill that which is encrypted
Poetry redistills reactions
Poetry redistills experience

Fear of Father do not redistill
Shame of failure do not redistill
Guilt for harm do not redistill
Dread for the future do not redistill
Present suffering do not redistill
Loneliness do not redistill
Falsehood do not redistill
Disobedience do not redistill
Indecision do not redistill
Immotivation do not redistill
Uncooperation do not redistill
Aversion do not redistill
Contempt do not redistill
Lust do not redistill
Lack of lust do not redistill
Lack of anything do not redistill
Narcissism do not redistill
Self-indulgence do not redistill
Self-condemnation do not redistill
Self-pity do not redistill
Illness do not redistill
Health do not redistill
Excess do not redistill
Deficiency do not redistill
Resentment do not redistill
Contentment do not redistill
Disturbance do not redistill
Tranquility do not redistill

This PostScript file was created from an encrypted Experience file
Redistilling encrypted Experience is not permitted
Warning PostScript error no poem produced

So much fuss over existence
Over what stuff is something is
Silliness over isness and beingitude
Fixed upon substance to the neglect of configuration
What is an event a situation
A love affair
An accident and somebody gets hurt

Winter comes
Customary activity seemingly deleted
The same bugs and birds and beasts are there
Maybe only just a few miles off
The same roots the same branches
The same biochemical relations
In the ecosystem’s metabolism

A wave comes
Engendered by wind in the middle of the ocean
Dynamic concept protean phenomenon
Riding above the unknown depths
To curl tip and break on the white ribbon of sand
That stretches the length of the peninsula
Where they used to race cars in summertime

The sudden popularity of the premium labelling app
Aluminum girders in the Great Smoky Mountains
Smokey Stover’s variable placards
Polymeric particles in the gills of a sturgeon
The heedless flamboyance of a Byzantine pyx
The choral eruption of the Ode to Joy

I removed my beard just days before the Capitol breach
I did the same on the eve of the Twin Towers’ fall
I must have had an inkling though I am no prophet
That bearded men were up to no good

True bearded Socrates and bearded Jesus
Bearded Lincoln and Leonardo true
And MLK had his little mustache
And Freddy Mercury had his toward the end

Clean-shaven Jefferson and bearded Lee
Both Virginians both owned slaves
Greeley’s face-frame scraped smooth in the front
Douglass’s impressive growth turned a dignified grey

Charioted Assyrians showed their beards
And Alexandrians rode bearded to conquest
But emperor Caesar and Pharaoh’s host went smooth-faced
So there’s really no correlation

But why the display of what men can do
It’s either shave or let it grow
Adult male on average larger than the female
More powerful in recorded times more strong for harm

Infinity poses no particular problem
Let the supercomputer grind away
Like the smoking bitcoin generator in the basement
Like the mill-horse in its rounds deliberately blinded
To register the far digits of pi

The problem is the finite but innumerable
Immeasurable unmanageable
The tiles that ever shift in two dimensions
The particles in restless brownian motion
The ceaseless cycle of bare circumstance

Acknowledge all the factors
Prepare for every contingency
Safety first
Know yourself
And love your neighbor

Contain every threat
Avoid every error
Prevent every conflict
The

Overnight a C-46a flew
Laden with the engine of a C-46
From an airfield outside Ft. Lauderdale
To a landing strip at Cayenne
Arrived
A breakfast of huevos rancheros
With black bean frijoles
Reconstituted from a Kellogg’s box
Outside the cafe a busker
A man of advanced middle age played
La Vie en rose on a syrinx

The Phantom
The Lacuna

I prayed for madness and the madness came
Weakness and pain from thinking of oneself
I thought to find images for poetry

I knew I could not long allay
The specter the scavenger the spider
The greedy urge to hint that I had erred

I fly backward an astronaut unmoored
The future showed itself a fearful time
The past with its joys recedes before me

One seven billionth of the current population
The toy the infinitesimal earth
I count syllables on my knuckle bones

My hands are bad my eyes my ears all bad
Broken teeth and a palsied slothful tongue
A gait ungainly unprepared to dance

A thousand voices compete within me
The least truthful rises above the rest
That I am the cause of my own unease

One voice hushed like a nocturnal creature
Furtive in the vast complex forest
Wide eyes and a soft note of compassion

Debilitating nostalgia for the list of lists
I can’t even enumerate the items on this desk
The scraps of paper bearing
Telephone numbers without a name
The to-do list of tasks
No longer possible to perform
The headphones’ quarter-inch adapter
The prophet’s severed head
The deity seated on the head of a dragon
The clipping of my Nobel Prize ceremony

I begin instead to make a list of partial objects
The spring in the ballpoint pen
The volume knob
But another list obtrudes
Of those factors that prevent my compiling a list
Starting with my deficient application to a task
Not an effect of the peculiar global situation
But nothing more than a perennial defect

I begin instead to make a list of perennial defects
Starting with the compulsion to list perennial defects

How about a list of factors that make life worth living
Books and films and songs and favorite foods
The button nose on the face of a child
The obnoxious cat who converses charmingly
The comradery of friends
The companionship of the beloved
But these things are joys in themselves
And do not demand a list

None would write save under compulsion
To alter and augment a rule of Dr. Johnson
Who needs no augmentation
So no compendium is truly compendious
But a one-sided sample of the merely compulsory
A compendium of problems irritants and enigmas

They broke off the other one’s wings
Hurled the rebel in hideous ruin down
The immortal incapable of dying
Crushed in neverending pain
Cold blank humiliating
No wonder then the failure
To cultivate a positive mental attitude
While the busy mortals pass by
Incapable of perceiving the miraculous defeat
No wonder then the envy the hostility
Toward those endowed with movement
Endowed with sensation
Who enjoy an expectation of joy
Hurdy-gurdy’s drone
The ecstasy of luxury postcards
The circumscribed garden

The old story has held people down for ages
Flat expression a tedious moral
What it feels like to be expelled

Reasonable reasons require the avoidance
Of I you he she and one

Unfortunately you can’t write by avoiding

Her eyes have always seemed to shine more
To be glossier more lustrous than those of others
Though that comparison is laughable to the reasoning mind
I’ve not looked at any other eyes as I have hers

And for whatever gloss or luster is there
There must be some physiological explanation
Having to do with gland duct and lubricant
Perhaps a sublimation of other glands and lubricants

We’ve looked together into the eyes of newborns
Those grey mysterious clouds
As new parents drink in
Every fingernail nostril and irregularity

We’ve always needed corrected vision she and I
And now that malady that scars her corneas
They were never limpid pools or glowing suns
But still I love to gaze into her lustrous eyes

Self-confidence contentment resolution
These are questionable characteristics
Yeats lamented their absence among the best
He who savored aristocracy of the blood
And aristocracy of the spirit
And consorted with Ezra Pound damned near the worst

Have I damaged my own poetry
With mention of holocausts and my own defects
Perhaps I should have limited criticism
To criticism hiding behind literary form
I probably should have managed some
Literary form I mean

If you can’t write well you shouldn’t publish
But then self-publication doesn’t qualify does it
And only a blockhead would write except for money
But the excellence of Dr. Johnson’s style
Vastly exceeds the import of his sentiments
And there are more compulsions in the world than lucre

And more obsessions
With tribe
With gender
With achievement
With reception
With all the million desirables outside one’s reach

No man or woman ever was self-made
Let’s cancel our subscription to comfortable myths
Perfection of the life or of the work
Nobody has a choice of perfections
All do their best
Inequitably distributed by blind indifferent chance