Many of these works however are extremely brief

Yup

Winston tastes good
Like a cigarette should

Life and food
Sight and sound
Loving touch

Sometimes who works outdoors
Races the rain
Rushes to finish
Before the drenching downpour

Today I raced the sun
For he who was placed to guide and light
To heal and protect
To nourish and serve
Has lately killed

These days it is not enough to say
You’re wrong
And show how you are wrong

Now we must say
You are a sickening criminal
A bitch a cuckold a sheep
A sucker of Satan’s cock
Whose mother dropped him on his head when he was a baby

Matthew Arnold wrote a poor line once
Of iambic pentameter
Who prop thou ask’st in these bad days my mind
It’s got the caesura the proper distribution of stress
But these virtues can’t compensate
For the awkward contraction
The superfluous archaism
The puritanical subjunctive
A line that can’t be spoken
Not by my semi-paralyzed American tongue

The days were truly bad
The Hungry Forties
And yet Arnold asserted his mind was supported
And he answered
He had allowed
One person a poet William Wordsworth
To keep Arnold himself from falling before the brunt

The exaltations of art
The miracles of nature
The holy communion of family and friends
Avail not
I can’t keep my place
In this indifferent universe

I
The ridiculous number 1
In this infinitesimal moment
This dimensionless point of space
All due to the accident of consciousness

Men maimed and slain by uniformed assailants
Approved and authorized by duly constituted power
Women raped and debased as dishonorable
Children driven like debtors in a workhouse
Populations infiltrated by deadly disease
The cause and cure of which common knowledge
Needing only organization and decision
A state sustained by an ecstasy of barbarism
Powerful only to kill and degrade

And I a feckless adolescent with a long white beard
I have my good points
I serve to some extent the interests of others
But weak to affect the times and the customs

It is a mistake to regard feelings as uniformly trivial
Or as harmful without exception
Though often feelings qualify as little more
Than unreasoning passion
But reasons transcend the poisonous opposition
Of a subjective and an objective world
Have I not reason to lament
The poet wrote in early spring
When objective conditions interrupted
The languor of his pleasant mood

Passing moods and reactions
Differ perhaps from emotional attitudes of great duration
But whether transitory or long abiding
The feelings sometimes stand to reason
But sometimes seem poised only
To break reason like a butterfly upon the wheel
Overkill of overkills

A passion for paper products
A passion for the metropolitan team
The orgasm of crushing an opponent to death
The item on the résumé
The applause line in a motivational speech

But to feel the grief of loss
To gape in wonder at a natural miracle
To suffer indignation at unnecessary suffering
To bless the beauty of godlike creation
The swelling song
The gathering cresting song

A nondescript little grey bird
You perch upon the rail on my front porch
I can see the muscles’ straining of your throat
As the song pours out

I’m safely behind the window
You in bright daylight safe upon the rail
And I feel unaccountably glad
Pleased to take care not to move

It was a good thing that I quit drinking
Three years ago just after the inauguration
I had a lot of good times but none better
Than watching and listening now

But getting drunk really wasn’t much fun
Mostly just beating my brain as Iggy put it
And my beloved is here beside me now
What power she whispers of the little songster

And my mother still in Jacksonville
Still alive though ravaged by dementia
And my granddaughter cute and irascible
Loved and pampered in faroff Wales

I’m stuck in my house working from home
But you and I are together little bird
Though separated by panes of glass
The same force animating your song and my poem

And off you fly
Though you stuck around longer than I ever expected
And thus it’s decided
I want to keep living

Load every rift with ore
Shelley was once advised by Keats
Who might just as well have counseled
Write better

I have vowed never again to sully these pages
With the sour notes of self-contempt
But surely I might bemoan the torment
That one calls down who tempts the snare of verse

I could never weave the April shroud
Nor frame the dome of many-colour’d glass
You can’t do what’s been done before anyway
And Keats chastise Shelley for the love of God

And perhaps you will riposte
That Keats found no fault
But only offered improvement
To a fellow Titan

Destined alike to die in youth
Though Shelley made it to thirty
I can’t find an exception to the rule
You’ve got to make it when you’re young

But Keats never wrote in childhood
And his earliest attempts fell short of brilliance
They say he knew he was dying
I’d make that sacrifice

Shelley the wild aristocrat
Keats the quiet commoner
Both they say liked to raise a glass
Both could write a Spenserian

And nobody ever described their lot as happy
And I know I shouldn’t envy them
And what healthy mind ever pursued together
Love Poesy and Ambition

I fear the future will find my works repellent
If it finds them at all
The sickly confessional mode which I have renounced
Which I was renouncing while I practiced it
The desperate gesture of renunciation
And I have flaunted erudition like a rookie amateur
Unseemly in one of such great age and small erudition
And if an amateur is in some sense a lover
A song of love is no song of contentment
And yet I have enjoyed for there is no other word
I have found joy in these paltry improvisations
Even those that spring from dire discontent

I have been of my time and outside it
The culture of my time my culture
Has been the industrial product of media conglomerates
The assemblages of television networks
Record labels movie studios and the cavalcade of stars
But who can dislike James Brown
Who can disdain the soaring zither on late night TV
Behind The Third Man
Or a local broadcast of the Leipzig Gewandhaus

Dickinson and Whitman fractured poetry in English
But that was ancient history
What a relief during my lifetime
When their descendants the highbrowed modernists
Were themselves smashed to fragments
By saxophones a good beat and electric guitars

Who doesn’t love dangerous old New York
Son of Sam and the Chelsea Hotel
A new smell every half a block
The restaurant familiar or unfamiliar the fetid dumpster
And out in the provinces
Who doesn’t love the smell of orange groves
Steel mills and bakeries and pastures and refineries
And everywhere
A new sound every second
Delta blues Bird and Diz
Smokey and Aretha and Stevie

But when America is remembered
It will be for hatred and torture
Lynching and segregation and the peculiar institution
For devouring consumption
For obesity and the diseases that accompany obesity
For endless generation of garbage
For gases and particles that interrupt and trap the sunlight
And indestructible alien polymers
And novel pathogens
And fanaticism political and religious
Genocide and Manifest Destiny
And the deadly white light
And the hellish white heat
Of the nuclear nemesis
I could pray to God but there is no God
And maybe there will be a place in memory
For a shower of rain
For Gene Kelly twirling on a lamppost

Two big yellow butterflies
In an aerial dance of pursuit

The salamander does not lament her lot
Only we humans wrongly imagine the pain
Of darting in and out of flame

The salamander in her element
A perfectly rational adaptation
Involving mica and its high cation-exchange capacity

Similarly humans
By virtue perhaps of their generally omnivorous habit
Occupy an unusually complex and stressful niche

A heaven in hell’s despite
Another wrongful imagining
Of a pure hell’s purity and of a heaven’s

On the contrary an environment the earthly sphere
Rich and playful sad and forgiving cruel and beautiful
Greedy and giving and amazed

Trmento passig
Nemble massf droag sdir
Mnagimare nembrulogu u eaoeasto
Som vog abe stono gwierd

Trem briray voos im crenvurs prediou
Trem foragp neap strog dos marrda
Thad vite vire sem vok piste
La nor spient sist phisis beold drimarstrimy

Taerk im um noswurd Petrmanteos
Taek nostrum masfs cogn dficile
Astofator doomum versithnea
Passig zaerst fren epipiste

Gluck measumom avrer
Lex tra eoeasto bridde pliagr exeust praliamtar
Meagrim adlcer icera ferveao
Gred umn hipothalass

Garm testaded trumruic dhos iubill
Stid we endrosp broah laost racheolgrimty
O inervatord lesk tra cipcom
Unambiianote sraysom silg

Ramandor fren ztu presn
Vale crenvursti melnc krady
Mars potshen pligar ghe nadr
Wushun se wusht weso

Mird mird
Dromotacum graman alz ladina
Sird ad farsicerm lex dibris
Marcoled tra saznddaar tra mird

Not to be driven by desire
Nor tormented by passion
To defer the feeling of pain
Pain of feeling

Like that era when the hippest among us
Were Dead Boys and X
While aggressive Sex Pistols
Were already passe

Dream of stasis
Fantasize that the laws of nature
Might be other than they are
Inert particles and spent forces

When the brute fact is change
Hurled in hideous ruin and combustion down
No nothing before nor after
And nothing is nothing

Apathy like decadence a theatrical pose
Such an immeasurable measure of energy
Being required to say truly
I don’t care

Ee’d plebnista norkohn forkohn perfectunun

The tiny woodpecker
On the rail of the porch

Set the playing card to one side
Ignore momentarily the suit and the value A through K
Join the battle of setting aside

It’s foolish to regard the imperative as always unjust
It’s foolish to regard conflict as always hurtful
Is always always always

Mention some flower
Some delicate petal of pink or gold
Mention some great movement of people or nature

Perhaps in our engagement with art
We willingly suspend consent
Along with our healthy habit of disbelief

In art anything is possible
But what’s possible is not always advisable
But what do you do with the pain

Here perhaps a clue
Here perhaps is part of what is meant
By the concept of acceptance

No deliberate not knowing
The K is still the K the 4 the 4
But must you always play the hand you’re dealt

True you can’t play any other hand
But there are places and times wherein
You can change what it means to play

No
This will be
The last

No holding said the sign in the Blue Boa
Head shop and psychedelic fashion boutique

Do you have any peace-signs asked the youthful guest

You mean like pendants

Yeah

No
We have an ankh pendant
You know an ankh
He pronounced the word like the first syllable of anchor
Symbol of life from Egypt
That’s kind of like peace

The hieroglyph seemed expensive

Okay
That’s okay

I didn’t have any money anyway
I shared the story with my mother
Who expressed disapproval
Of an establishment associated with drugs

Goya’s firing squad Bosch’s hell
Munch’s cry Géricault’s raft
A horse screams beneath the impotent light bulb
Salome kisses the dead lips of Jokanaan
Oedipus rakes the brooch over his eyes

The face of a dapper man is obscured by an apple
Two bourgeois lunch with a nude woman
A patriarch dies of a toothache
The bride is stripped bare by her bachelors
Ballantine ale gleams in bronze beside the toothy toothbrush

The nightingale sings of summer
A child one of seven plays about a grave
Hail daughter of Elysium
Brightening glance and body swayed to music
The radiant stars will shine upon us in all their scintillating beauty

Birth no doubt is quite traumatic
Hence death might tempt as quite romantic
None of which requires the interval
To consist of unremitting sulk

Mamas generally and papas too
Are solicitously disposed
Toward their frequently unattractive little burden
Who is oftener after all more quiet than not

Which is not to deny that
They fuck you up your mum and dad
But this process typically commences only after
The child advances in discourse sufficiently to complain

We place far too much stock in sequence
And the belief Before born babe bliss had
Does not put rapture out of reach thereafter
Witness these pages so-styled a blissful project

And in modern times every generation sees
The best minds destroyed by madness
The best minds virtually defined by
A perceptiveness to lunacy’s ubiquity

So howl your brains out ephebe
Wake the alley cats with your cri de coeur
Wave your placard and chant your chant
But eat right exercise and get a good night’s sleep

Insanity is all played out as a stylistic manner
In the Nineteenth Century certain artists
Discovered that they could exploit
Their own mental disorders
For compositional purposes
And that madness was a fit subject
For novels poems paintings and plays

By the Twentieth Century we saw
The Theatre of Cruelty
The pictorial representation of nightmare
The serial suicides of troubled grunge rockers
And reality dramatically figured
As a blessed rage for disorder
A competition of unreason

The vogue for insanity had well and truly ended
When international politics meant live televised slaughter
When crazy fictional characters
Succeeded to elective office
And invited their disciples to believe
That they by their words alone
Could abrogate the laws of nature

Some wit once avowed that
There are absolutely no absolutes
A statement closer than Jabberwocky to nonsense
Rhetorical inelegance aside

The philosopher has a harder time than the poet
For the philosopher takes pains to make
True statements and only true
The whole truth having been abandoned long ago

While the poet merrily putters
With language as with clay
Promiscuously welcoming those enemies of statement
Irony ambiguity repetition and metaphor

And those senseless but charming devices of sound
And the whole outrageous cult of device
Lines of text far short of the right-hand margin
The willful absence of punctuation

The poet aims not to state but to express
Although statements are welcome too
In you know that merry promiscuity thing
But expression is much harder than one ever bargained for

For expression does not lend itself
To means-ends calculation
And tackling expression as technical process
Sets up the itinerary to embarrassment or worse

But the how-to ain’t the half of it
It’s the of-what that gives one hell
Not because not enough or I can’t find it
But only the preeminence of one damned note

What feeling shall I express today
I hate being addressed in the imperative mood
I hate being scolded
I hate myself

Really
That’s the feeling I want to express
That’s the essence of beauty and truth
I hate

I intended those statements ironically
I intended those statements metaphorically
No
A part of me is speaking in earnest but only a part

And I have allowed the tyrants from my past
To hijack my blissful project
And little kids are dumb at least I was
They don’t understand the commands of tyrants

They believe the lie that it’s for your own good
And that the only good is obedience to command
And that they’re really only trying to scare you
Universal disclaimer for attempted murder

But most of all kids don’t understand
That the tyrants are sadly ignorant
Repeating what they themselves have learned
That the threat of pain sets the path to goodness

Tyrants in their world of pain believe themselves good
And they believe other humans to be naturally bad
The greed of infants
The faithlessness of infidels

Innate depravity an article of genius
To implant the tyrant in individual consciousness
Transcending space and time
Hell is the eternal threat of hell

Hence my recourse to the sickly confessional mode
The confessional the only hope
A hopeless hope when the only sin
Is to be born human

So to hell with hope
I want the truth
It is not a sin to be born human
Any more than to be born squirrel or jellyfish or chimpanzee

There’s nothing special good or bad
About any biological species
But about persons is something special
For persons can respond to reasons

And perhaps the primal response is to pain
Which gives us reason to steer clear
But why regard pain as primary
Just because no binary opposite conveniently appears

Or maybe binary opposites are a waste of time
The opposite of pain isn’t pleasure exactly
Perhaps the distinctness of pain just shows
A disturbance of the healthy primary state

Every person is good
And yes humans are prone to error
But no organism gives birth to itself
Thus the limit of human responsibility

And hence the mystery of self control
Which is not as mysterious as I’ve made it out to be
For everybody wants what’s good
Though our notion of good is grotesquely ungenerous

Me and mine
I want what’s good for me and mine
We say
As if we knew

Nevertheless
Though we might be unclear on the concept
Nobody doesn’t want
What’s good

And Oscar Wilde was surely right
To observe that only by giving in
Do we have even a prayer
Of ridding ourselves of temptation

And clearly we have believed
If only momentarily
In the goodness
Of that which tempted us

Which only goes to show
How poor we are
As judges
Of our own self-interest

And speaking only for myself
The character that aims to do the controlling
Is not myself liberally defined
Because I really am large and really do contain multitudes

No
Who issues controlling commands
Except the homuncular dictator
The implanted tyrant

And starting today
He for he is like me masculine
No longer gets to monopolize
These pages

He might have his say now and again
But a historical axiom states aright
That tyrants seize first
The organs of communication

It doesn’t require control
To go for what is good
Hard though it is to know what good might be
And ignorance is always infinite

Every person should study philosophy
This is not a command
But a moral obligation
For every person should understand the truth

Understand that particle of truth
Within the meager perceptual scope
And hear the voice of reason echo
From the infancy of understanding

The poet has a hard time too
I state as bravely as I can
To express the multitudinous self
And breach the rampart of cold command

Okay an off rhyme
When I didn’t require a rhyme at all
And I probably should have let it go
Sez who

I have believed that truthful expression
Would place me on a path toward creating beauty
And thus I vow to take up the challenge
From now to express my more complete self

Long ago I vowed to respect
The dignity of every person
The value of rational personhood
But too often I have tried to obey the tyrant

Too often I have bought into the tyrant’s lie
That because I had some little knowledge
Of my inner being and my motivations
I was somehow worth less than everybody else

And that
Lie of lies
The tyrant therefore possessed authority
To punish

Nobody deserves to suffer
And what is punishment
But the corrupt deliberate and aggravated
Imposition of suffering

And everybody suffers
Some much worse than I of course
But why oh why add to the suffering
That is of humans the natural lot

If by respect we mean to acknowledge
The dignity and worth of persons
Merely to recognize that inherent value
I demand much more than that now

For what is wanted is not a state of knowledge
Nor much less a statement of the state of knowledge
No periodic table of the values
What is wanted is an emotional posture

For we do not merely acknowledge
The value of value
We do not merely respect
The beautiful and the true

Rather we appreciate them
We feel not merely know their value
And even that is too feeble a word
When what I really mean is love

And agape I believe too high a bar for humans
And eros I reserve for the beloved
Maybe philos might designate a love for persons
That makes allowance for the all-too human

Thank you philosopher for helping me know a little
Though I trust not to relapse
Into that pollyanna nestled in this best of worlds
And I will strive to be philosophical

Some wit once called poetry
Language freed from what it has to say
Not nonsense but a view limited perhaps
To poetry of the decadence

Yet another wit once strongly implied
That it’s okay to be a decadent
So long as you admit that you’re a decadent
Which is a bit like being relatively absolute

Or the murderer with excellent manners
You gotta know right from wrong pretty much absolutely
And mere obedience will not get you there
You need understanding from true philosophy

Yes pretty much absolutely
One of those goofy formulations
For a philosophical matter of life and death
But you can live without poetry I guess

Poetry is an optional extra
After food from the earth
And a roof over the head
But no less important for that

Forgiveness is an emotional posture
Appreciation gratitude emotional postures
What lover of wisdom or of anything else
Would want to live without them

Two roads diverged in a wood and I
I took the wrong damned road
See why do I do that
Why do I indulge that nasty habit
Of self-condemnation

When I an old man
Think back on my life
My unimpressive life
All that ever come to mind
Are the poor choices I have made

But see that’s not true in so many ways
Take for example the choice
To which I secretly refer
Namely my choice to regard poetry
As the expression of feeling

Certainly it was other than
One momentous choice
And more a matter of having lived through
The swinging sixties the sordid seventies
And the deconstructive eighties

And who’s to say the choice was wrong
If choice it was
And the error if any was that of sweeping generalization
A serious error to be sure
And one to which I am particularly prone

Because with me it’s always
With me it’s always
And all that ever
And indulge that nasty habit
And sin and error and poor choices and self-condemnation

I condemn myself for condemning myself
And in what sense is any of this poetry
Well from Wordsworth I learned to recollect emotion
From Dickinson I learned to imagine myself
And from Whitman I learned that myself might be song

And from Milton that myself am hell
And from Baudelaire Rimbaud Yeats Dylan and Hendrix
That madness could be method
I prayed for madness
And you see that madness came

But from Keats
Ah poor blessed sane Keats
I learned the miracle of epithet
That indolence could be honey’d
And the wings of poesy viewless

And my poems
For so I have insisted upon calling them
Became infested with cliches
Of sin and condemnation
But at least my cliches could be tawdry

The sickly confessional mode
The enfeebled habit of self-absorption
And hence of self-contempt
And adjectival insistence
From which I banish clarity action and image

Uh but only for the most part dude
I always sweepingly generalize har
And in general a poem begins in feeling
None more fecund than lamentation
Available we hope for rational inspection