You said you were dying
You promised
It’s not that we’re disappointed
But
Okay maybe a little disappointed
Guys like you made it hard to approve
Early enthusiasm for early promise

You retired at the height of your powers
Chronicler of that other Lost Generation
Your generation
Caught between the Greatest and the Boom
Obedient diffident resentful
Adrift in a world mixing certainty and ambiguity
Of Cold War and indefinite Korea

Before hippies and the ecstatic agony of Vietnam
You were there
In spirit
For the civil rights movement
But mostly you nestled with your jazz records
More Brubeck than Coltrane
Never Ornette Coleman

You displayed your liberalism and your piety
Your associate said Jesus was a socialist
But you never praised the open mind
I cannot speak about mind you said
I can only speak about experience
I can only speak about people
The people

Mostly you displayed your exquisite taste
No exquisite is too precious
Your selectivity
The modest images
The obligatory objective correlatives
The carefully curated obscenities
Offered without a hint of the personal

Sane and unhappy

Or

Mad and unhappy

Something about rooms and furniture
About open windows and delicate draperies
People diverse thoughtful and restrained
A temperate climate
Airy fashionable garments
A gettogether late in the day
Light refreshments and easy conversation

How dare I
They call poetry impermissible after Auschwitz
For how after such enormity
Dare I fret over finicky intricacies like an unspecified they
And numbers so large as to defy intellect
Horrifyingly defy empathy
Oppressing with horror

The numbers are smaller now so far
Only a million and a half dead that we know of
And who can conceive of a million
Biden won Georgia by twelve thousand votes
I’ve been in crowds four times that size in my life
But seventy million voted for the Pennywise
Who refuses to vacate the White House

A man with a long black rifle
Strutted about outside the facility
Where votes were being counted
Careful to get himself on camera
I guess embryos are endowed
With the right to bear arms
And government of by and for the pissants

Name-calling is wrong I admit confess and concede
But I fail to suppress my disgust
Over the cowards who chortle over suffering and death
I’m compelled to speak
I turn my back in horror
I don’t know what to say

How is it everything’s the same
Imitations of imitations of imitations
The bed on page three hundred sixty-five
Daily rest copulation birth sickness and death
The proportions of human life
Medium size and medium duration
Cast into immensity
Everything seems the same
In this medium fixture

Everything merely seems
So how is it everything’s the same
The layout of the bedroom
The indifferent arrangement of the objects
The enumeration of causes
The translation into abstraction
The sine wave of consciousness and unconsciousness
Giving vague intensities the go-ahead
Impercipient of the subtle variants

It would take many days to get to the bottom
But there’s nothing but time
So don’t do anything drastic
Like waste your time on insomnia
Don’t issue imperatives
Especially the prohibitive ones
You couldn’t disrupt the continuum anyway
Now is not a time for clever entertaining gestures
But what then is the time for

The label on the medicated ointment commands
Apply a thin layer to the affected area
But what difference does it make
To the cells of the affected area
How thick is the layer of ointment applied
For is it not true that
If a little does a little good
Then a lot must do a lot of good

It is not true apparently

The flagellated bacterium
Responds to stimuli
Swims toward pleasure and away from pain
Lucretius counsels that humans
Adopt this model of nature’s way
Accepting and exploiting the whim of fortune

But in nature humans have lost their place
Opting for the ecology of Tatooine
And how suspicious is that crude simplicity
Whole planets of logic or hostility
A world of winter

Air conditioning rapid transport
Fabrication in permanent polymer
A torrent of symbolic forms streaming and on demand
Suspiciously simple
Inequitably allocated
Universally hurtful
Second nature a vicious parody of the first

Swimming toward satisfaction
Often sublimated by art politics or religion
Observing therefore the golden mean
Murder most moderate
Conditioned by dearth only to gorge
Two thousand centuries of famine or feast
A thousand thousand millennia of fiction and fact

He best can paint ’em
Who shall feel ’em most

When Dan Quayle invades the zazen

I dreamed I traveled upon the famous boat
That crosses the river wide as St. Johns
Before the advent of buildings and bridges
Among the multitude though numerous
Yet not crowded like rows of corn
Or passengers in a commercial jet

My fellow voyagers naked unashamed
Aged crones most of them and dry old men
No loud wails interrupted our sorrow
But such low droning lamentation
As you hear on the losing side of a competition
The knowledge of never reaching a destination

Soft complaints for the lives we had lost
Our all-too modest pleasures
Acts of self-wounding wickedness
Our exhausting disabilities
Not one of us could call to mind
The grief of those we’d left behind

One woman a red thread at her throat
Token of revolutionary violence
That took place a century ago
Had devoted her life
To hatred of the perpetrators
Only now made she her embarkation

At the stern the pilot plied a single oar
Blind and deaf silent unreacting
Eyes and ears useless after so many ages
He had grown one with his craft
A part of the machinery
A strange vessel like a converted jet

A change of scene an abrupt epilogue
Like the tale of Pharaoh’s corn and kine
Men and women slashing with blades through jungle
Viny and seemingly impenetrable
Not one of them could recollect
The grief of those whose lives they’d wrecked

How came ye muffled in so hush a mask

You’re damned right it’s Semolina Pilchard

The inscriptions face outwardly
What need have I of scripture sign or petroglyph
Here within the dark narrowness
Of my succinct encouchement

Where decorous charactry decrypts
Before passersby corporeal and incorporeal
Both those who leave footprints
And those who hover ineffectually

While all are welcome to habituate the exterior
Not Moses nor Solon
Nor Confucius nor Jefferson
May gain entry to this exclusive precinct

Where music loops variously in my mind
The Who Live at Leeds
Boccherini’s mincing bow and curtsy
The noble askesis of Ali Akbar Khan

Sleep-a-bye baby
Fall into tender sleep and dream
Let your little muscles soften
Let yourself fall into blissful dream
Lulalu la-bye

Dream of the blisses of wakefulness
The softness of breast and heartbeat
The fulness of sounds colors and flowing fragrances
The thousand glittering lights
Lulalu la-bye

Dream of the blisses of dreaming
Take flight into the universe of softness
The universe made of caresses
The universe made of soft colors and lights
Lulalu la-bye

And yes they will come the dreams of fear
The scary shapes of beasts and people
Witches ogres mean little kids
The scary sounds the colors of death
Lulalu la-bye

May you awaken baby refreshed and hungry
May you delight to discover breast and heartbeat
The solace of sound and softness
The glittering lights the softly flowing fragrances
Lulalu la-bye
Sleep-a-bye sleep-a-bye baby

Never listen to man-on-the-street interviews
Like the woman informed that the logo
For Procter & Gamble the Man in the Moon
Was a Satanic symbol who said
I wouldn’t want something like that in my house
Or this one
Obama was born in Kenya
And nothing you say can change my mind
Or this one
My dog can read my mind
That’s not an opinion that’s a fact

Hence the necessity of poetry’s pseudo-statements
Calling a nightingale a dryad
Translating the words of a mockingbird
Telling all the truth but telling it slant
But can you call a mockingbird a dryad
A hippo
An oil filter
Can you call a nightingale a suicidal ideation
Can you call a metaphor the truth

And what about ambiguity irony effrentic neologism
Typographical innovations
You can do all these things
You can but should you
Is there a poetic law like the moral one
And are all metaphors ambiguities ironies &c
Created equal
And how slant can you tell it before it stops being truth
What about originality
Innovation is the blow of fate
Had Dryden in Absalom and Achitophel

And who’s qualified
Must you demonstrate your facility with the villanelle
Ottava rima the elusive alexandrine
Haiku quốc ngữ and the craft of the griot
Or will free verse do and if so how free
If so what regulatory principle applies
Who’s going to judge the audition
Is poetry the expression of self
And if so is it okay to fake it
Must the poet load and bless her creation with erudite allusion
Enough cried Rasselas to Imlac
Thou hast convinced me that no human being can ever be a poet

Sometimes it is necessary to paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa
Sometimes it is necessary to wake from the dogmatic slumber
To rouse oneself and hopefully others from the customary sedation
Not factual data but fitness of epithet
The nightingale somehow a dryad
The alexandrine maddingly elusive foo
The imaginary tail that wags the too too solid dog

Agents of decomposition epitome of horror and disgust
And who detects the foul order receives a warning
Put distance between yourself and the object of contagion

Agents of mutilation epitome of wariness and indignation
And who witnesses the butchery receives a warning
Put distance between yourself and the object of violence

But some agents must return the elements to the earth
And some must cull the herd and nourish the generations
And death must follow disease predation and happenstance

What would be the best of all possible worlds
For the lamb or for the tiger
Neither is the end of the story

But some agents move toward those too close to the pipe bomb
And some intimately approach the patient too ill to speak
And others walk away the winners the end of the story

The end of one story one monologue
One dim blinkered Cyclops eye
But the epic journey continues

A hundred miles are now far less than a hundred years
Many centuries are required to build up justice
It takes only a day to tear it down

The Visitor
The Djinn

Comparisons add little to our understanding of truth
As for example of youth and old age
There’s no comparison really
Youth is better
Even with its engorgements
Its argyle sweater-vests
Its passions and competitions

Old age has its virtues true
The famous wisdom of the mountain-top sage
Marginally useful to those who intend
To return to the comfortable lowland
Corleone the dulcet don
How to be a man and take a bullet
Again lessons of narrow application

Mostly age is notable for crotchets and maladies
Chief among the engrained caprices
That things were better in olden times
When people used to use words like olden
When things were cheaper and infinitely more practical
Than a device bafflingly contrived to deliver
Commercial announcements to within inches of your very nose

A new world of bafflement
A new state of vertiginous doubt
A world in diametrical conflict
With matters of formerly universal certainty
Like what a sex is
How to make fair play
The proper disposition of a clown

The aches the pains the sicknesses
The complaints of indeterminate etiology
The expert healers who change their minds
With the accelerating seasons
While elders proclaim to their miserable compatriots
I’m showing up
Obsolete and in the way

Cranks whose memory fails
Along with that of everybody else
The first time fascism swept the globe
The last time plague killed the innocent many
The one time we rose to look out for one another
A few dry loaves
A few moldy fishes

I have the horn-rimmed glasses yes
Still not necktie or pocket square
I’ve never yet given a reading
But still I call these poor things poems

Cigarettes I renounced some years ago
Strong drink and wild carousal
I cannot write upon occasion
But still I call these poor things poems

These paltry slight improvisations
With their iambickish pentametroid
And rude effenticacious coinage
But still I call these poohaws poems

It doesn’t matter what I call them
Or that they languish here unread
As close to bliss as life provideth
As close to life when I am dead

At all times I see before me the warning
Stuck on the lawn mower
DANGER KEEP HANDS AND FEET AWAY
The image of a red wedge severing the silhouetted finger

And I remember my brothers-in-law
One the amateur woodworker
The other a pianist inattentive
As the car door slammed

And I remember those deliberate dismemberments
The beheadings and other amputations
And children cut off by war politics and disease
From parents and the ordinary sources of nutrition

Am I the sick one to remember the truth
Am I the sick one
Amid the compulsory suburban reaping
To remember the grim universal harvest

O English how I love you
Gritty grubby grungy garrulous and gross
Language of the conquered conquering
Of the conquerors conquered
With your indefatigable bioluminescent polysyllables
Your pellucid expositions
Your labyrinths of bewildering chaos
Your homely provinces
Your grand gestures of imperial hubris
Coffee bagels chocolate barbecue sugar tea and taters
Hamburgers hot dogs popcorn ice cream and soda
Swich licour of which vertu engendred is the flour
Sew hem seam thread pin spool weave yarn knit purl loom warp and woof
Manuscript print radio television and internet
Typographical turned nuclear error
Ecclesiastical liturgies
Republican virtues
Proletarian comradery
Piratical swashbuckling
Bohemian rhapsodizing
Glorious sunsets
Steaming road apples
Melancholy twilights
Neonatal ululations
The willy-nilly shilly-shallying of well-to-do ne’er-do-wells
And their flabbergasted fathers-in-law the attorneys-at-law
Newly-reaped sheaves borne on the bier with white and bristly beard
Duck and buck and chuck and scuk and cluck and fuck and luck
The jargon of trades
The argot of the underworld
The heptalk of hipsters
The evanescent slang of gum-popping teenagers
Pmisti effrent
The schwannoma situated in the jugular foramen
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards
Oh could I lose all father now
Let slip the dogs of war ruh-roh
Baby got back
Papa’s got a brand new bag
I got stones in my passway
Obsessive compulsion
Manic depression
Up and down
In and out
To and fro
Back and forth
Left and right
Even and odd
Death and taxes
Rise and fall
Salt and pepper
Duck and cover
Scattered and smothered
Pass and stow
Friends and neighbors
Knives and forks
Tables and chairs
Bacon and eggs
Liver and onions
Cornbread when I’m hungry [and] corn whiskey when I’m dry
Beans and franks
Biscuits and gravy
Lock and load
Cut and paste
See and sing
Bottles and cans
Bricks and mortar
Pen and ink
Lift and separate
Jacket and trousers
Bra and panties
Vest and pants
Coat and hat
Shoes and socks
Shampoo and conditioner
Shave and a haircut
Stars and stripes
Sun and moon
Song and dance
DJ and MC
Sex and drugs
Sex and violence
Sex and the single girl
Labor and management
Labor and delivery
Labor and leisure
quivering and Chill
Oil and gas
Gas and oil
Supply and demand
Hammer and nail
Hammer and tong
Tooth and claw
Command and control
Predator and prey
Please and thank you
Question and answer
Call and response
Hear and obey
Hug and kiss
Bed and breakfast
Room and board
Pots and pans
Time and tide
Clean and jerk
Ketchup and mustard
Milk and honey
Tea and sympathy
Ducks and drakes
Hens and chicks
Needles and pins
Sixes and sevens
Roads and bridges
Guns and ammo
Cars and trucks
Records and tapes
Adam and Eve
Cain and Abel
Abraham and Isaac
Jacob and Esau
Joseph and his brothers
Batman and Robin
Laurel and Hardy
Romeo and Juliet
Holmes and Watson
Siegfried and Roy
Tom and Jerry
Punch and Judy
Tarzan and Jane
Tweedledee and Tweedledum
Mom and Pop
Cat and mouse
Cats and dogs
Cat o’ nine tails
Will o’ the wisp
Peg o’ my heart
Victims victorious
Basterds inglourious
Nobody rule over us
God save the thing

Hostel yyuot
Yuef hôtl


Hew asn ‘tt hat ba
Joly tpewiter

Comdrome

Traphilm sdulus msdrutiolna
Pmist mdrajon weir Aluluun

Gylph trandon co

Mroze t empar cor


Cunj&cion dreever dhalgrene
9Apygerm

Ezntin froofptot miage trendon

Lusstrof menzies
Freyfrel smetwotcies

Angramwot lcyric cvmwolfux
Asmetw bwildaiwign kaos

Pmisti

Effrent
Lusstrig lec tionluss rebust douloc

Cvmpuile meom-c

Scowling dog
A snubnose a pug

Ethnic stereotype
Spoiling for a fight

Wild heroic beast
Predatory idol

Pthe rtminor
Puilse eoaro threft
Crdgam nstruf

Rift Dauid melnck tminor
Effrent spin’tluss
Nameom sylmetf

Saaz qv
Tremon tni
Ghest mnglor
Acat freful sylmerg]

Dlimenor d’evil
Vergibt stebass
Cjord dakrieol ff
Treminis cim

Will it be willful negligence
Climate change or toxicity
The locust-plague of microplastics

Will it be active malevolence
The run of the murderous mill
Nationalism ideology fanaticism greed

Or will it be what nobody ever thought of
The portents obvious after the event
Butterfly breeze whipped to annihilation

Let us take as our point of commencement shortages
Caused by disruptions in the supply chain
The backbone of the globalized economy

The armamentarium of medical practice
The distribution of agricultural bounty
The provision of vital and luxury goods and services

The seamless texture of the law
The welfare state with its national defence
Regulation of health safety education and the environment

The mundane duties that fill daily life
The mechanisms of information and persuasion
The inspiration that intrudes from who knows where