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

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