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

Every event plays a role

The Nobel Prize
That pat of dog shit
Each of the supernovas

Season of memories unbidden and unsettled
The greens and yellows flecked with ruddy brown
Upon the tulip trees harbingers of change
Sudden unbidden startling every year

After the crazylong school vacation
Famously briefer each successive summer
Suddenly back to the scheduled regimen
Morning prayers and the pledge of allegiance

Images so vivid they might as well be memories
How you might wander naked through the forest
After getting bashed on the head
Untroubled about where you’re going to find a forest

Those general memories we call history
The cotton fields alongside the interstate
Their bony stalks supplicating the sky
A few ungleaned bolls clinging trembling to the fence

And farther south the sandy dunes
Dotted with oats
Blown into fantastic shapes
Like snowdrifts in Indiana

Everyone from the sixteenth century is dead
So why weep for Bruno the Nolan

Reality is a sprawling city whose tendril fingers
Reach from node to node across space
While people in cars immobilized
On limited-access highways
And in the gridlike streets
Hear and see confused words and images

The sounds of exhortations urging rapid action
Like that of a firefighter in a burning forest
Or encouraging the refuge of comfort
Restful furniture sweet foods
The downy relief of familiar performances
Familiar melodies in familiar keys

Some sounds harsher more grating
The sound of heavy manufacture
The building trade railroads and utilities
Transport of materials and burning fuel
The silence of surveillance
The silent weapon locked and loaded

Stands of woodland here and there
Wetland grassland frozen expanses
The creeping myriads alive or dead
A few bugs and birds in moderate altitude
No hungry griffins patrol the sky
No dazzling phoenix cloaked in flame

Mummy juice used to serve as panacea
A fifth humor a quintessence
Dietary supplement for the finite and incomplete
A role now played by hoof husk and umbilical matter

How uncanny is that which we consume
How wretched how far reaching
Imitative of the organ systems
Product of innovative research

Oh if Farnsworth had never existed
Or Morse Bell or Marconi
The myth of the inventor
The Arabic word and concept of the zero

Facts obtain in the universe
Oxygen to breath and food to build up tissues
For understanding to subsist facts must be transmitted
And that’s where all the problems start

Here is no place where all the knowledge
Incomplete fragmentary arbitrarily allocated
Botulism HVAC music theory
Resides

The liquified remains of the ancient immortal
The synthesized secretion of the pineal body
Dangerous dabblings with CRISPR technology
The Delphic injunction to know yourself

I am ready
In the months of my confinement
Not preparing for labor or delivery
Except of these jottings
Undemanding of the care required for a human infant
But yet objects of loving attention
I have resolved
Promised
Vowed
Committed
Pleaded
And dreaded
To renounce the sickly confessional mode
A bearded heavy man in his mid-sixties
In a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit
With a giant all-day sucker
And a lily on his round lapel
I’m sorry mommie
Or perhaps I’m thorry
But
My friend the philosopher once said of me that
Self-loathing speaks well of a person
And it never fails to surprise me
That the many friends whom I love so strongly
Exhibit such poor taste in their choice of friend
But
We can well castigate a poor character
We can acknowledge wrongdoing
We can insist that a responsible person own his mistakes great and little
But
None of this requires or even permits
Disrespect toward any person not even oneself
I have many faults
Perhaps enough to earn for my character the grade of poor
But
Despite the Christian doctrine that one cannot redeem himself
I exercise some redeeming virtues
I have done some service in the world of people
And though ambition cannot be accounted a virtue
I have aspired to some achievement
But
Achievement in my long life has been but modest
Owing perhaps to countervailing tendencies
Self-defeating proclivities
Such as Peewee Herman meant when he said that
Everybody I know has a big but
I’d like to give an account
But

I am self-conscious
In both senses of the term
Diffident though I love to be on exhibition
An exhibitionist
But unsure of himself always second guessing
Always craving approval
But
Also always attending upon
The prompts of consciousness
Nay of conscience
Hence self-aware but not in the Delphic sense
Of knowing oneself
But
Rather in the mundane sense of hearing always
The interruptions of the chattering critic
The portable peanut gallery
The assembly of the naysayers
The homuncular prosecutor
The tyrannous implant
And hence self-castigating self-condemning
Self-loathing self-abnegating self-destroying
Self self self self self self self
But
Not self-correcting or self-denying
Never got into that mortification of the flesh jazz
Though my thoughts often turn to the mortality of the self
And often of a deliberate mortality
But
I feel great compassion for others
Castigating myself for the self-aggrandizement of that claim
Nevertheless I believe it for I am struck
At how I wince at the signs of suffering
Even as I tilt toward punishing myself
As I would never wish another punished
Even unto death
One time a petting zoo landed
In the parking lot of the supermarket
That many years later turned into an immense bar
Where I used to perform
And I was a bit old for a petting zoo
Maybe eleven or twelve
But
I loved animals
Or more precisely I loved animal species
And I had the excuse of my little brother
Seven or eight
And I saw a little boy with black curly hair
Addressing a pygmy goat
And when I looked again
The boy was on hands and knees
And crying and I felt so sad
That the little goat had assaulted him
Not resentful of an injustice
But just that one little guy
Had knocked down another little guy
And then I saw the braces on the boy’s legs
Polio was still not eradicated
And Jerry’s kids on display each Labor Day
A parent came by and helped him up
And my heart ached for the little family
And people need to think I thought
About those who are small
And in my self-absorption then
I took the thought no further
But I remember thinking or rather feeling
I want to care
Not I do care or I know I care
But
To cause suffering as by punishment
That is a bad thing
Than which perhaps none worse
And it’s a good thing to take suffering upon oneself
That another might be relieved
But this urge to punish oneself
That’s bad

I am pedantic
Not in the sense of fastidiousness
But more in the etymological sense of the pedagogue
Not in an insistence upon correctness
But that I am correct
And not so much correct
As amazingly effortlessly dauntingly erudite
As a child I played the teacher
With the Time-Life series of picture books
In Nature and in Science
With little brother
I six or seven
He three or four
I point to a picture
And he must identify
The primate feline echinoderm or monotreme
Ocelot brittle star or echidna
When I was ten big sister’s Girl Scout troop
Called me Human Dictionary
I corrected them
For while it is true said I
That my vocabulary is impressive
You should be more impressed
By the range of my general knowledge
Bolstered by recitations of
State capitals Hellenistic and Nordic mythologies
Recent mayors governors vice-presidents and presidents
And the theory of evolution
Forward to Pithecanthropus
Downward phylogenetically to zooplankton diatoms bacteria
And viruses many in those years merely suppositious
And later to the minutiae of the Rolling Stones
Their influences mistresses and psychotropic dabblings
But
As much as I love the display of knowledge
Which action I perform regularly like a rookie amateur
I am well aware that knowledge is limited
And therefore ignorance infinite
And I am ashamed to play the peacock nerd
But
I love knowledge also for its own sake
I played Balder the Brave
On the playground in second grade
In the 1980s I drank in
The free-play of the signifier
And the arbitrary and diacritical nature of the sign
And the dialectical image of Utopia
And I drank in huge quantities
Of pinot noir Jack Daniels Pabst Blue Ribbon and gin

I am addicted
But oddly
I guess owing to the laws governing the drinking age
I became a regular user of marijuana
Available only sub rosa
Before a regular user of alcohol
Publicly traded
I spent the night at a classmate’s house
Once in the tenth grade
And we dipped into the parental cabinet
My first experience of real intoxication
After a few tipsies sacrilegious in the sacristy
But
That summer I started playing
The youngest in a fine band of twelfth-grade rockers
I had a Wurlitzer electric piano
And rode as a passenger in the GTO
Hauling a trailer emblazoned with the legend
The New Calibre Jacksonville Fla
Joints in the back seat and Santana on the 8-track
The enlisted men’s club at Glynco
With bikinied girls in go-go cages
The sorority party at the Hilton
On the beach in Clearwater
I totally peaked in high school
Spent a fumigant year in college
Dropped out
And really learned how to drink
When I got a house gig in ‘75
The rockingest Holiday Inn in America
I had beer on the way there
Beer on the way home
Beer on stage beer on the break
And beer to send me off to sleep
Marijauna all day long
And in really fat times a line or two
To keep me up all the damned night
I hit the road and later
When kids came got off the road for a day gig
Went back to school and drank
Before during and after everything
Had the best rock band in Tallahassee
Midnight to four Friday Saturday and Sunday
Read Shakespeare aced chemistry
Fell in love with the British Romantics
Beery early morning chats
And a wretched hangover on the sabbath

I am overweight
I can’t give you the figures
But I can give the facts
That I have a redoubtable belly
And a full-body-enveloping layer of flab
Interlarding some pretty impressive musculature
I have always inclined to stoutness
Although the lean years of the early seventies
Made me lean
When I drank and smoked more than I ate
Huge intake of alcohol
And it’s not like I didn’t like food
Which predilection I heartily indulged
Once given the chance
And from that time a crapulent way of life
A boundless uptake of nourishment liquid and solid
But
I lost a few pounds after the inauguration
For years I’d had the thought that I must quit drinking
I fell up the stairs and puked myself
Late January 2016
And I’ve stayed sober
Save for sneaking an occasional toke
And when came the time of confinement
I gained the COVID 15 or maybe 20
But
To speak of my physical complaints
They are legion
Many traceable to my corpulence
And so tracing from bottom to top
The soles of my feet are subject to tormentous bouts
Of itching painful neuralgia
A single needle from base to foot’s crown
Coated with mosquito’s saliva
But
This false signal of uncanny injury
Responds quickly to analgesic
And apparently indicates no malady more vicious
Than a single nerve trodden upon by enormous bulk
And thence moving upward past the clattering knees
To that bottom we call the bottom
Four decades of hemorrhoids have humbled me
And brought me low
Recently many weeks of painful and repeated ligature
Effected with the warning
That the rectal demons possessing me would probably recur
Resulted only in the doctor’s sigh that
Well
Everybody has hemorrhoids one time or another
Which is exactly equivalent
To the wisdom of the old woman in The Ladykillers
Who observed that the world’s got two kinds of folks
Them that’s got piles and them that’s gonna get ’em
And the wasp-colored residue
Which I must cleanse assiduously
Frankly expresses perennially and painfully
The body’s fallibility
The cleansing itself an injurious procedure
And moving up to the stomach
Site of the gastro-esophageal reflux disorder
About which little need be said
Since it seems well-manage so far
For thirty-five years with acid blockers
Though left untreated it can kill
Unpleasant thought
And into the heart muscle
Whose atria like to fibrillate
No treatment for this one
But you better reduce the clotting factor
For with all that churning and agitation
The embolisms will aggregate
In an expeditionary force
Headed straight via carotid to the brain
There to cause apoplexy
Traditional demise of the old fat and angry
And so upward we go to the pulmonary apparatus
And especially the naso-pharyngeal region
Locale of also-deadly sleep apnea
Strongly implicated with obesity
Though impinged-upon cranial nerves no doubt also obtrude
So I treat the cessation of breath with pressurized nose hose
But
Here I point to some discipline
Some powers of application
For the schnozz-inflating appliance
Took considerable getting used to
And lots of folks can’t do it I hear
So I’m a good boy
With seasonal allergies for all seasons
And onward to the jugular foramen
The pièce de résistance
Where dwelleth the glomus jugulare
Or is it a schwannoma
The experts remain at variance
Cancer and non-cancer more a spectrum that a binary state
The large mass I heard about in a phone call
Following an MRI
In 2006 I noticed lingual symptoms
And it’s amazing how poor one is
At knowing what’s going on
Is my mouth dry
Maybe from the prescriptions or non-prescriptions
Or are nerve endings damaged
In an alarming uptick in bitings of the tongue
If nerves they’re motor nerves
For the sensory nerves are fully painfully functional
Or is it all in my addled head
No
I can point my tongue to the left but not to the right
I can tickle with my tongue
The upper left molars
But not those on the upper right
And forget about scooping peanut butter
Out of the inner lip
One doctor an ear nose and throat man said
Your tongue looks fine to me
Irresponsible unfeeling wretch
Months later said another doctor a pulmonologist
My God have you had a stroke
The imaging procedure discovered the tumor
The size and shape of an egg
Ensconced in the cranial drain hole
Which aperture it had in charming medical parlance
Drastically remodeled and enlarged
Like the open concept of a house-flipping show
And daily for six weeks my head was bolted to a table
While a robot arm out of Star Wars
Positioned and repositioned and bzerp bzap
Fractionated radiotherapy
And I a victim of mild radiation sickness
Unnaturally sickly tired
My body demanding food
Misreading the illness as low blood sugar
Gained 25 pounds in a few weeks
And I thought cancer treatment was supposed to make you skinny
Felt hot for months and years thereafter
Effect I suppose of new layers of insulating blubber
My productivity at work fell off
I was going to be superman and blow through it
Never took a day off
I was kind of depressed
The bastards fired me a cancer patient
Or more truthfully
Refused to renew my contract
Thereby leaving me effectively fired
I had told them that the large mass was non-malignant
Which to everybody except those who know
Means benign
Though the doctors themselves remained at variance
But
I got the last laugh
When ten years later
The tumor ungrowing but still present
Destroyed the auditory nerve
And I became suddenly and completely deaf in one ear
And it turns out losing even just one ear is bad
Especially since the remaining one
The one I would forever after depend upon
Had sustained rock and roll damage
And people smirked when I told them
That my one-sided total hearing loss owed to a tumor
And not to self-indulgence with the electric guitar
And cymbals were at least equally culpable
In damaging the one good ear I had left
It’s not that good
And cancer or no
I tried to tell you
The large mass fucked me up
And I almost forgot hypertension
Deadly condition that requires a daily physic
That somehow or another blocks beta