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

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