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

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