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

I am disordered
Maybe it was the cocaine
Or the acid
Or the tank cars of alcohol
Or unwise reaction to the thousand shocks
That ordinary flesh is ordinarily heir to
And of the dozen or so shocks
Of which I was a minority recipient
And not inconsiderably the religious terror of a small child
Combined with the ordinary family dynamics
Of the fifties and sixties
When Father knew best
The symptoms did not come on strong until
At age thirty I started a doctoral program
And the goddamned free-play of the goddamned signifier
And professors could not or would not
Tell me what was the subject matter
Of a science called English
I tried so hard on those rotten papers
I tried so hard on that damned dissertation
And it didn’t help that I loved poetry drama and fiction
I graduated with distinction
But
It took me decades to accept
That I’m not cut out to be a scholar
Bibliographies equal drudgery
Though my wife a librarian kills at them
But
I ostensibly trained as a scholar
But
The job has always been teaching
A profession for which I have received some institutional recognition
And considerable approbation from students
The first decade and a half I thought
That a teacher pretty much dispensed knowledge
Like a Rain Bird
I liked that okay
And while God knows I still display erudition gratuitously and aplenty
I have come to see
And more to love and enjoy
That teaching is helping others to learn
And dammit they were right
Who said that helping others
Is better more meaningful more fun
Than helping yourself
But
I am made to be anxious apparently
I was the child made sleepless
By the branch against the window pane
When two siblings with whom I shared a bedroom
Breathed quietly slowly and evenly
And I sleep badly even tonight
Having left my bed
Having departed my beloved
To indulge these inscriptions
But
No priest ever showed me mercy
Calmed my fears
Like the priest in Hail Caesar
Who comforted the penitent with the words
You’re not that bad
But
I derive joy not merely from the act of writing
But from the satisfaction of observing
This burgeoning sheaf
Which you Dear Reader
Might wish might burgeon a little less
So no doubt a manic symptom
Nevertheless I approve of my unhealthy avocation
But
I fight the battle day and night with the black dog
The croaking raven
The white whale
The writhing maggot
The writing spectre
Of self-contempt
But
Let this be my epitaph
He wasn’t that bad

I am afraid
I fear death not dying
And though I do not relish pain
And while the painful passing I shrug off
The thought of being dead fills me with dread
A hangover I must believe
Of the fact that from the time I started school
Or a little afterward
Death would mean eternal suffering
Unavoidable fact of universal justice
In a world of flesh-consuming-never-consumed fire
Apparently created for me alone
Since others found solace here and there
In the ordinary conventional formulations
And try as I mightily did
I proved incapable again and again and again and again and again
But
Most of the time
Until the turn occurring well after the first blush
Of young adulthood
I was a happy-go-lucky charmer
I remember from my childhood
Occasional remarks from older people
As to the brightness of my eyes
And the persistence of my smile
And I remember pervasive contentment
Alone with record player, toys, and books
And together with my school chums
When I was five and six and seven
My birthday coinciding with the start of the school year
And in the first grade I was in The King and I
And Sister Nathaniel allowed me to come to school late
For rehearsals went far into the evening
And she let me stand in the front of class
To lead the children in singing
And on one such occasion I pulled my shirt up
And Sister Nathaniel sent me in disgrace to my desk
Said I was no gentleman and King and I
Pooh
When I was turning eight we moved to Winter Haven
And I prayed to return to Alabama
The mantra of a thousand pleases
Each repeated instance of please I desperately hoped
Would increase the chance that my prayer would be answered
Which it never was despite the fervor of my plea
And the vast accumulation of polite formula
And after Christmas in a weird interlude when for some months
For reasons of finance and employment
Beyond my childish ken
My father lived in Washington DC
While my mother and my siblings and I
Lived in the ancestral town
Amid innumerable aunts uncles and cousins
None of whom I got a chance know or care for
I had no chum
And the teachers in Florida
Had more than Sister Nathaniel’s sternness
And none of her indulgence
And I came to understand
That socially I was no gentleman
And morally I was no saint
And only saints go to heaven
I was a bad and disobedient boy
I had taken my First Holy Communion
And thus made my first confession
The preceding year
And confession and communion throughout the weeks
And said the words of the Act of Contrition daily
And I knew that my confessions were null and void
And absolution unattainable
Since I was incapable of examining my conscience
And I knew that my act of contrition was a lie
Oh my God I am heartily sorry
For having offended thee
And I detest all my sins
Because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell
But
Most of all because they offend thee my God
Who art all good and deserving of all my love
Well my dreading the pains of hell
That much was true
And I supposed even then
That losing heaven would suck
Heaven an immaterial abstraction
My voice soaring on the thee
And soaring with the crowning falsehood of most of all
For in truth I feared the palpable reality of hell
And the offense to God was merely and trivially theoretical
And I wanted to detest my sins
But in my busy fear I could never do so
Certainly while I was sinning
I was enjoying myself
The detestation and the regret for the offense
Could only come later upon reflection
Upon examination of the conscience
But
Of today’s sins I had only the vaguest recollection
And no recollection at all of the sins of yesterday
Or the day before that or the day before that
And so I fictionalized while waiting in line
And lied in the very confessional
And I have been an anxious person
For I fear punishment
From my sometimes-wrathful father
From my duly authorized employer
From the pot-sniffing police
From my wife and kids
From my nearest and dearest
From the objects of contempt and resentment
I fear death
For death is a punishment
Notwithstanding the merciful quazi-hellish torment
Of centuries albeit temporary in purgatory
And my reasoning brain can occasionally forget
The psychotic nightmare of eternal agony
Made worse by the unattainable promise
Of eternal bliss
Hence in part my frequent recourse
As soon as I was able
To the lawn mowers upon the cortex
And it offers cold comfort
To try to imagine the unimaginable
A universe of inexistence
But
My fear not of annihilation
But of nihility
Has never forestalled my harmful habit
Of suicidal ideation
Destruction less fearsome
Than having-been-destroyed
And I tell the truth in these pages
But not the whole truth thanky vous
So my vows purposes and promises even now are void
And I fail to evade the sickly confessional mode
And following that weird school year
In Winter Haven and Stuart
We spent the summer house-sitting
When my father’s friend and temporary boss
Had in the garage a classic car
That needed periodic starting
In the basement rec room a dehumidifier
That needed periodic emptying
And in that same rec room
The children’s record player
For in that summer cartoon characters
Had taken to releasing records
Pixie and Dixie diddle-dee dum
Are the best of friends
Did little-lee lum for me
Much more engaging
Professor Ludwig von Drake’s
Uptempo waltz
With its brisk Teutonic monologue
I’m a genius in psychology
Plane geometry and anthropology
I’m the living end of entomology
And at bridge I excel
I know all about atomic energy
[something something something] biochemistry
But when it comes to brain surgery
That I only do swell
And I particularly enjoyed that one
Since I was proud to know
That my father was in fact a biochemist
And my mother not yet certified as a medical technologist
Sent little brother and me
To the summer program
At the elementary school down the block
Where we constructed objets
Out of popsicle sticks
And came home
Or what we called home that summer
For a lunch of Campbell’s soup
But
One day we did not come straight home
For two older boys invited us
To see the secret fortress they had built
And so we walked past the baseball diamond
Some good little distance
I remember stepping in dog shit
To see the truly rather impressive achievement
Of trenches and barricades
And even a tunnel or two
Pioneered into a steep bank
Above the two-lane drag
And we were there for a long time
Occupied I don’t remember how
When I heard my father yelling GregorEE
Little brother hurried to greet him
While the pioneers hissed no
And I tried to hold him back
Lest we betray the secret of the fortress
But the expression on my father’s face
A turmoil that passed understanding
And only years later did it occur to me
That for a long time that afternoon
He had lost his two youngest
I don’t remember what happened next
But I think I was sent to my room
And I remember fantasizing
Or perhaps dreaming in semi-wakefulness
That I would be hanged the next morning
From the landscaping timbers
In the backyard
And I felt no fear
But
Only a profound sadness
That such a reprobate
Should have so short a life
And I forgot to remember hell
But
Now the first glimmering of the thought
That whither I go is hell
Myself am hell
A wrongdoer at age eight
Condemned predestined
No alternative but to do wrong
Without thought
Without intention
But
I will herewith disclose the occasional rare
Indulgence in homicidal ideation
Additional to the suicidal flavor
But
I will again protest
That I do not lack entirely some resources
Of self-control of disciplinary rigor
And that through my own efforts
The incidence of the unbidden imagery
Of killing self or other
Has notably diminished recent years
Though it has flared up in recent weeks
I aspire to personhood
And a person a being capable of reason
Respects appreciates celebrates and applauds
Personhood
And I will do no harm to any person
Least of all one whom I love as much as myself
And my death however it comes will cause sorrow
To my many friends and to my beloved

I am gregarious
The great joy of my life
Has ever been personal interaction
I despise debate and treasure chat
I don’t really like competition
Unless I’m sure to win
As for example in a game of Trivial Pursuit
So long as it was published before 1995
There is in me a prominent streak
Of the geeked-out frosh
The impresario of the late-night bull session
Which is as Hephaestus said
Well-lubricated to be sure
And I delight in the Socratic method
Especially when it is I who have passed the audition
To play the role of inquisitive Socrates

I am curious
I have ever reveled in the collection of knowledge
In both the natural sciences
And those sciences we feebly designate as the human
The beauty of distinctions
The way a donax burrows at the beach
Differing so strongly from the method of the sand flea
How Keats achieved fitness of epithet
So much more successfully than his hero Spenser
How Socrates sharpened the moral paradox
While Aristotle touched on all subjects but thinly
And I have preferred depth over breadth
My father was a scientist
And hence to some extent an Aristotelian
But
By his own modest testimony
He did not epitomize the scientific mind
A bit of a dabbler a projector a Schwärmer
An amateur and an enthusiast
Like me curious but nonsystematic
But
Before my birth and in my infancy
He was highly productive and a bit famous
For developments in the techniques and apparatus of tissue culture
And for advances in the synthesis of cancer-treating drugs
Himself a rare survivor of melanoma
But never a theoretician
He was a bit weak in math
And his downfall I believe
Was to insist to himself
That science must be applied to be valuable
He called himself a technocrat
Though he might have missed that term’s political import
I think he meant a technician
After his early successes in research
He devoted himself for a couple of decades
To the project of aquaculture
Involving a genus of large prawns called Macrobrachium
And I acted as his lab assistant
While I acted as the keyboard player of the New Calibre
And acted as Arthur in Camelot
And as Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way To the Forum
I totally peaked in high school
But the lab seemed less a lab than a hobbyist’s shop
I used a microscope to observe the growth of larvae
And a simple spectroscope to do some analytical chemistry
My dad had picked me out as a scientist from early days
For he saw my delight in bugs and rocks and rotting tree trucks
We rode the road in cars
We went down to the river in boats
And we chatted while I did most of the talking
The American paranoia about communism
The value of the hippie persona
The fearful notion of hell
And my father expressed his belief
That any decent person will go to heaven
He was an Irish-Catholic but not devout
Like many survivors of the Great Depression
And many veterans of the Second World War
He craved success security and peace and quiet
To pursue his avocations in the unruffled suburb
Burning chicken on the grill
Coaching Little League
Wherein I proved a disappointment
He’d had two aircraft carriers shot out from under him
And the second one at the end of the war
Left him in the hospital for many months
But I knew nothing of this
The struggles of a second son
When the Depression
Had knocked his wealthy family down a few notches
The two Purple Hearts
The reconstruction of his flayed face
But we chatted and I loved him
He scared me
He couldn’t control completely the effect of his wounds
We were always close and grew closer
When in his unaccountably long life
He turned to poetry and painting
And like the technocrat he asked me
How to get published
And I told him what I knew
Condescendingly I’m afraid
And I was reminded of the time
He asked me to teach him the guitar
When he was in his fifties
Don’t be so supercilious he said
But the truth is that a person must study
The beautiful the true and the good
These come not by nature but by art
And a person must appreciate
My poor father was never allowed
To appreciate pleasure for its own sake
To enjoy anything for its own sake
For everything must serve a purpose
He dreamed of profit though he never made any
He never saw that he was inspired
But
Through him and through my mother
Through my beloved and a few friends
A few inspiring teachers
I have been inspired to be inspired
I have found beauty and truth everywhere
A pocket full of bugs in my dungarees
The smell of incense and the peal of an organ
Choir’s harmony and horn’s refrain
Sketchy beauty of a decaying tree trunk
The resourcefulness of an old woman
Laid out on the sidewalk
Spiral in mollusk flower and galaxy
The doors of perception
And a window open to let the warm love in
But
The true the beautiful and the good
Are overlain with falsehood
The doors of perception need cleansing
And how hard can it be to know
That even the morally worst people
Have as much dignity and worth as anyone else

I am enraged
I’ve had a hard time learning what justice is
Though I have always raged against injustice
For the world had taught me
That justice meant punishing the disobedient
And I knew from my earliest experience
The impossibility of full obedience
And the arbitrariness of command
And I say with some pride
And no doubt with some arrogance
That I have raged not only against injustice
Perpetrated against myself
But against the injustices that I could see directly
Or displayed on television since the time
My family acquired a television when I was four
In the age of Joe McCarthy and George Wallace
And displayed to outrageous excess
In the age of the iron-headed
Mini-Mussolini mendacious murderous and moronic
And I have known almost instinctively
Probably because I grew up
In the age of Martin Luther King
That injustice anywhere
Is a threat to justice everywhere
And since injustice is indeed everywhere
I have despaired in the impotence of my rage
But
I have learned
Mostly through the patience of my friend the philosopher
Who introduced me to Galen Strawson and Derek Parfit
To Kant and to the Socrates of Plato
That nobody is fully responsible
That my father’s wrath
Who was not at all exclusively wrathful
But also loving and enthusiastic
Was beyond his control
That we enjoy to some extent the capacity for self-control
But that the application of that capacity
Is a hit-or-miss affair
Limited and unpredictable
Hemmed in by our animal passions
Our human frailties
And our unasked-for pathologies
And so in my advancing or advanced age
I am overcoming to some extent
The harmful habit of the reflex for rage
Although I by no means disclaim
The righteousness of my indignation
And overcoming along the way
The reflex to turn my rage against myself
For every person is worthy of respect
Even fault-ridden me
And even the iron-headed pissant in command
It’s a tough lesson
The hardest lesson I know
To feel compassion for the wrongdoer
So I retract pissant but glaringly do not delete it
The supreme leader in a democracy
Is a contradiction in terms
And whoever cherishes the delusion
Of supreme leadership
Is a poor deluded schmuck
No try again
Is a poor unfortunate clod
No try again
Is a pitiable wounded sufferer
And thus the current President
Shares this characteristic with me
Of having suffered
But
I have learned from suffering and have resolved
Though I often fall short
Never to impose suffering on any person
Myself or other
And how mild is our suffering
The President’s and mine
Who are white and privileged
And venerable in age
And nobody deserves punishment
For punishment is simply
The deliberate causation of suffering
A spurious leveling of the scales
A pretended payback of blood price
For which no price can be paid
And justice is simply this
That none should suffer
If their suffering can be prevented

I am oblivious
When I left home at eighteen
I thought everybody thought as I did
Which was a foolish notion
Since at my Catholic school I knew
Lots of people who thought that the Monkees were good
Thought that Richard Nixon was good
Thought that the Brady Bunch was good
Thought that the Viet Nam war was good
Thought that God was good
Who wanted me to suffer eternal torment
For the momentary
And let it be said universal
Among those of a certain age and gender
Pleasure of masturbating
And in a few short months
I became sexually active
And masturbated only resentfully
And under duress
And my too-early sexual activity
Turned out great in the long run
And since both my beloved and I thought that to be the case
I thought that everybody was similarly optimistic
Thus I couldn’t imagine that Mitch McConnell
Would prevent consideration
Of Obama’s Supreme Court nominee
That a cruel and buffoonish reality star
Would take the Republican presidential nomination
That the senate would refuse testimony
In the impeachment trial
That the official in charge of elections
Would seize the governorship of Georgia
That millions would think it an acceptable practice
Not to wear a mask during a pandemic
And thus while resisting indulgence in name-calling
The thought occurs
That I might be reprehensibly naive
Or perhaps that the current moment is more horrible
Than a decent person could entertain
Despite ample warning from the twentieth century
And the nineteenth
And the eighteenth
And the seventeenth
And the sixteenth
And the fifteenth
And the fourteenth
To the last syllable of recorded time

I am sexual
We don’t speak of our own sexuality in public
We decent bourgeois
My grandchildren my adult children
Will be mortified by these pages
But
The lack of general currency
Enjoyed by these clumsy jottings
Reassures me that my family members
Member har
Will gracefully elide these remarks
And my beloved of lo this half-century
Knows that our intimate relations
Have been a continual source of joy to me
Thereby giving the lie to my complaints
Of unhappiness depression self-condemnation &c
And I have reason to believe
That she my beloved has enjoyed
Them our intimate relations
For which I credit in part our fidelity
Who prefer to borrow from the library than to purchase books
Who prefer to cook at home than to eat in restaurants
Who invented non-competitive badminton-without-a-net
Healthy activity for young and old
A good life needless of wealth or coercion
And our easy understanding
Natural consensus
From our earliest days
Which commenced far too early for safety and for the world
We enjoyed a general agreement on topics great and small
And even amid the insults of old age
To the brain and to the body
Even amid the vicissitudes of parenthood
The body of the beloved
The firmsoft flesh
The luxurious curves
The smooth skin
The sparkling eyes that bespeak the effervescent mind
The scent the taste
The full lips the downy nape
I believed that everyone thought as I did
Because my beloved thought as I did
I thought everybody believed intelligence equals beauty
That the intelligent are inevitably beautiful
No big deal
And hence I appreciated
Neither her intelligence nor her beauty
As I should have done
The rarity of them
The grace
A woman’s cunning at such an early age
Of course I want children
Did she give me the thought
Of course we want to grow old together
Was that my idea
And I flew to New York
Where she went to school
And on the plane I asked myself
Like the crass adolescent I was
In my early twenties
What’s in it for me
She loves you you idiot
Do you think she’s faking it
When we
When she
And we have indeed grown old together
And we have indeed raised kids
With all the dread and rage and joy
That such exhausting tasks entail
She greeted me in her kimono
On 23rd street
Her face ablaze with joy
You idiot she loves you
And I have reason to believe
That she enjoys my idiot love

I am clumsy
The first time I tried to kiss a girl
Even before my life’s enmeshing
During a middle school game
My address of my teammate was more a lunge
And I slammed my head against a brick wall
I’m the guy who cannot manage simultaneously
The dustpan and the far end of the broom handle
Which collides with an object
And manifests its own angular momentum
Independent of my intentions
I’ve fallen off the stage on several occasions
And only once was there sufficient audience
To heave me back up again
And O woe when I drop the knife
I drop things
My hands are bad
Trigger finger
And some inexplicable portliness of the tendons
And the effect most of all
Damnable expression most of all
Of distraction
Of failure of concentration
The man incapable of multitasking
As for example dispensing a single pill
While dreading mortality
Or carrying the cat’s bowl of water
While resenting the latest Presidential outrage
I look ahead and charge ahead
Oblivious to the intervening objects
So I guess I have clumsily muddled two categories

I am artistic
When I was four or five
An enormous piano arrived in our household
A 1905 Kohler and Campbell
It remains in my basement to this day
Like a beached Skylab having partially survived reentry
Some institution with which
My father was affiliated
Was liquidating its practice instruments
And to my great good fortune
One of the most fortunate events in my admittedly privileged life
One or both of my older siblings were learning
The three-chord method
So that I could hear
And could soon carry off
The tonic the dominant and the subdominant
Before I could read letters
Who never learned to read music
And play any tune that employed as many tunes do
Those three basic chords
And I must have been as they say gifted
For in the primary grades I welcomed more good fortune
My kindergarten teacher must have been really into show tunes
She taught us Doe a Deer
Before The Sound of Music ever found its way to film
She had played some part
Perhaps even the female lead
In South Pacific at the Town and Gown Theater
And in first grade I auditioned and got the part
As one of the children in The King and I
And I’m embarrassed to disclose
That they dyed my hair and made up my eyes
I learned the songs and the movements
And was quite astonished after many evening’s rehearsals
To go on stage in a fancy costume
Lit by fancy theatrical lights
And sang Getting to Know You
With a full fancy orchestra
And I already a fan of orchestral music
Loving my family’s collection of classical excerpts
And for years thereafter was required
To sing on demand The Royal Bangkok Academy
And my heart truly thrilled at the march of the royal household
And my heart truly melted when the king’s wife
One of his many
Sang This Is a Man
And at the end
I returned ever more contentedly
To my books and toys and record player
And I told my father that I liked Mad magazine
Because it was so satirICKal
And I disapproved of Alabama’s poLITics
And I regretted being so MISchievous
I think I got that last one with its three syllables right
Though Sister Nathaniel said misCHEEVEEous
And my father chuckled and praised
What he called my linguistic flair
And explained that words
Do not always sound as they are spelled
And every night after supper
I would play duets with my sister
On the enormous Kohler and Campbell
I taught her an oom-pah bass
Using the three chords
And we would play I’m Getting Married in the Morning
And Polly Wolly Doodle
Those had only two chords
And I improvising though I did not know improvisation to be a thing
A zillion choruses of This Land Is Your Land
Which used all three
And which must have made my parents and Walter Cronkite crazy
And when I was eleven
My father bought a guitar for himself
And one for me
So that we could take a class at the YMCA
And I picked it right up
But the manual dexterity of advanced middle age
Did not lend itself to so fine a skill
As changing chords in time
And my attempts at private tutorial
Left my father frustrated such that
He leveled against me
The charge of superciliousness
And my mother who had arranged for me
To try out for the King and I
Took me regularly to the Jacksonville Symphony
And we heard the 1812 Overture with a real little cannon
And Beethoven’s Fifth
And the Lincoln Portrait with Copland himself conducting
And John Carradine’s resounding voice reading
My mother understood me
Though she no doubt concurred
With my father’s mistaken belief
That I was destined to be a scientist
She herself delighting in science as a child
Amid poverty and thirteen siblings
I was a bit weak in math
My mother knew me
She took me to hear Vincent Price lecture on paintings
And Willam F Buckley lecture on liberty
And she knew that even as a teenager
I disdained Buckley’s poLITics
But
I loved oratory and the stage
And the slightly underdone pancakes just for me
And a dab of dough before the cookies went in
And I picture my mother in the kitchen
Though she was a chemist
A medical technologist
When my lay teachers insisted
Themselves employed
That a woman’s place is in the home
And my mother beamed proudly
When I could accompany my singing
Of a real song on the guitar
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Thereby cementing my possession
Of that daunting instrument
Even as my father was forsaking it
I learned to bend a note
From I’m Mad in the Animals’ version
And when I listened with my big brother
To the guitars of Big Brother and the Holding Company
He said You could do that
A falsehood but a generous one
He spent his life in the library
At the university where our father taught
Soaking up history and the hipness
Of that hipster age
From The Village Voice
And The Saturday Review
And The New York Times
And Crawdaddy
And Rolling Stone
And he brought home esoteric records
Like the Grateful Dead
The Mothers of Invention
And earlier the moment it was released in ‘65
One of the great good fortunes of my life
Highway 61 Revisited
And we listened in the dark to Electric Ladyland
And in successive Christmases
He gave me Revolver and Led Zeppelin
Just before we saw the latter
In the Jacksonville Coliseum
And gave me LA Woman and Transformer
So that for a while I played at bi-curiosity
Though all I really wanted was sex with my girlfriend
Which she lovingly cunningly supplied
Our parents sent my brother and me
To the Miami Pop Festival in ‘68
They must have thought it was Newport or something
And in fact it was a pretty sedate affair
Even as we heard the blues of Fleetwood Mac followed by
Iron Butterfly’s thumping platitudes followed by
The Stooges not even kidding
But
I did not understand the last of these
And we conspired my brother and I
We can’t tell our parents that we saw The Fugs har
The Miami festival of the following year was wilder
The world having grown much trippier after Woodstock
And Johnny Winter and the Grateful Dead and Santana
Carlos prowling like a predatory cat
All this with my big brother
And I said to myself having just turned fifteen
That’s me
I’m going to do something worth a damn
And I have succeeded
I have remained obscure
But
Fame eludes even those who crave it
Even those who strive for it
And I have striven not for fame
But
Instead for something worth a damn
All striving is futile
But
I have achieved some serenity in my senility
For I have filled these obscure pages
With something worth more or less a damn

I am personalistic
Since I can’t or won’t call myself a humanist
That old term rotten and misbegotten
For as a species homo sapiens is no more respectable
Than felis domesticus or lumbricus terrestris
And if anything I feel almost contempt for the human
And more than compassion
But
Perfection is not granted unto humans
And who would do the granting
So much simpler to say
Perfection is not a thing
And why bother with a no-thing
We have reason to act and feel in certain ways
And we have reason yes
For certain omissions forbearances and demurrals
And why
For although it is true as Parfit says that
We are the animals that can both understand and respond to reasons
The animal part of us obstructs the reasoning part
The violence the cowardice the torpor the callousness the longing for death
Stunting our growth and impeding our mental voyages
But
The mere potential for such understanding and such response
Makes persons respectable
Even if the term personalist is not a word
Or if it is it is raw unwashed and partially digested
So we have not yet discovered the word
For the truth that all persons ought to respect
And indeed appreciate celebrate and applaud
The capacity for reason
But
So much more than just reason also for
Error and the correction of error
Error has cause and we can judge cause
Ignorance and the will to learn
Ignorance has cause
Disgust and the development of taste
Disgust has cause
Rage and the cultivation of patience
Rage has cause
Apathy and the exaltation of energy
Apathy has cause
We can take action and assume certain attitudes
Creativity empathy compassion kindness and love
Not just for a species
And not just for the privilege of having evolved into consciousness
But
For the universe in all its parts
But
The universe is not composed of parts
And for things
Feeble metaphor things
Beyond the universe of space and time
Like math facts and moral being
But
What a miracle or a perplexity
What a signal insight or a rookie error
That a particle much less than a nanoparticle
A negligible dimensionless point
A duration of unthinkable brevity
Should possess consciousness
Should possess the capacity to respond to reasons
For everything is connected
Everything that falls
Everything that rises again
The universal metabolism of falling and rising
Feeble metaphor connected
But
Here words fail me as they have failed all
Who have tried to put this truth into words
Though poets have come closest
The poets and the mystics
Mystics who have experienced their way past
And poets who can sing their way past
The mythological Person of God and past
The limitations of the merely human
The merely organic
Wordsworth’s we see into the life of things
But
Life is a feeble metaphor
And see a feeble metaphor
And Coleridge’s nobly feeble attempt
Which Wordsworth perhaps imitated
The one life within us and abroad
And Blake’s seeing albeit feeble seeing
A World in a grain of sand
And my metaphor cliched and contemptibly feeble
Of connection
Feeble resort to naming and personifying
Atman or pantheos
But
The mystery and delicacy of difference
Of distinction uniqueness individuality
And Oh The difference to me
The exquisitely particular truth of one Black life
The universal general truth of Baldwin’s
Tale of how we suffer
And how we are delighted
And how we may triumph
Never new but always to be heard
And how do you put into words
The weathered grain of an ancient door post
The dissonant chord in the Adagio for Strings
Amid so much sonority
The infant cry of fear
At the sight of the plume upon Hector’s helmet
The nakedness of Lear
The nudity of Josephine Baker
The outrageous costume of the reveler in Brazil
The bass line in Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag
Django‘s rendition of St. Louis Blues
Bessie Smith’s rendition of St. Louis Blues
A German Requiem
The second movement of the Seventh
Exile on Main Street and Sgt Pepper and The Dark Side of the Moon
And Live at the Apollo and Kind of Blue
And Highway 61 by Bob Dylan
And Modern Times by Bob Dylan
And Modern Times by Charles Chaplin
And how do you put into words
The artistry of words
Four bracing words of Martial
And Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards
But on the viewless wings of poesy
And the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie
And how do you put into words
The Sistine Chapel which I’ve never seen
Don Quixote which I’ve never read
The Russian mushroom which I have never tasted
The caves of Lascaux which I’ve never entered
The songs of olden times which I will never hear
Which nobody will ever hear
And how do you put into words
A solitary star
A flock of red-winged blackbirds
The miracle of a single breath
The taste of lime in a glass of iced tea
The fullness of my lover’s breast
Or anybody’s delight
Anybody’s sorrow
The universe is large
But
We’re not talking about size
And probably one of many
But
We’re not talking about number
But
The value of a person
Of a mockingbird
Of a stone
Of a ray of light from a distant galaxy
Of a priceless work of art
Of a plastic bag disintegrating in a landfill
For we must know of the breaking down as of the building up
And all is value
What we know and what we don’t know
The value of knowledge
Though knowledge does not create value
The value of caring
Though caring does not create value
Value no more created than math facts are created
The value of each dependent inexhaustible person
Of a patient
Of an infant
Of a student
Of a convicted criminal in the purgatory of incarceration
Of persons made to suffer
Of precious moments of delight
Of the holy communion of family and friends
Of things known and unknown
Of things visible and invisible
Of things in space and time and beyond space and time
And there is only one thing
And thing a feeble metaphor
And what is the extent of a thing
The value of a thing
I am a no-thing
A mote and a particle
An immeasurably valuable speck
A transient shell
An ephemeral mask
Unique and irreplaceable
Immense and infinitesimal
Lonely in a crowd
Crowded surrounded with love
Born to die
Mewling and puking here in a public post
Self-worshipping and self-destroying
Enraged at injustice
Privileged with comfort
Knowing everything and nothing
Awake to every sensation
Blind and deaf and numb and asleep
Thank you existence
Feeble metaphor existence
Thank you experience
Feeble metaphor experience
Thank you somebody something
Thank you

Too unfocused to work up a paranoid delusion

Statelier
More kingdom
Courtlier in the smash

The skink flees smart fellow
Lithe sinuous
Color of earthenware
Unaccountably quick
Blithe sinewy

Opportune surpluses
Instinct with instinct
Realms of mixed materials
Queen of grass

Compact compass
Quick return
Quick flight

Red queen
Redclay palaces
Turrets flecked with flint
Granite substrate far below
Earthen parapets
Granite piercing the surface
Polished leather offspring

Unaccountably quick

Statelier
More kingdom

O verst lirnda daes vrem diltak rirund Karsto Uiltu
Im denz di hwael bivebond stto aeareasthike
Idlass eter bnaltig dzen Liu eter Launi

Indz calim erti moghte shcew nino tiand zder oosfolic
Sanz faradivol eter slebdustian seroi elvic ampose
Amzo amposdur eoirioca eter comos foblio

Sem halstwe rereondeo ast pontifsx Viveroriane
Iber aniles wrordy chiios effrentioenea
Iber eter aipotheoisise lur pozens mearkt

Weeawdra ih metope eoirieo imid uwn biom
Despigtches michte shcien
Ud laqceuy dus chiios iber rereodera entiilicibulitag

Bless braces
Bless relaxes

You need them both
But in what proportion
That’s the braces talking

Not circumference
But bones

Express yourself
Transmit the energy
Along the viewless carrier wave

Maybe it’s true we’re trapped
In the psychological web
Of our childhood our upbringing
Our life’s experience

So that some are made
To crave fact and reason
While others can seek only impulse
And to hell with the insipid good

Blake rightly saw that
Reason is the bound
Or outward circumference of Energy
Who loved the shaping line

And although he saw that reason might usurp
The throne of rich imagination
And leave the world barren and cold
A universe of death

He never counterposed a world
Of roiling forces and particles
Indistinct
A rebirth of monstrous chaos

He knew that life energy delight
Which make existence tolerable
Lose their tang without the hale enclosure
Of sober rectitude