There’s never the earliest ever
The cuneiform proto-writing from Kish
But then the Peiligang tortoise shells
Found in Jaihu

There’s never the before-when-nothing
What was time like before time was
A question not to be asked
What color are they selling
That’s whiter than white

O Muse forgo forgo the pastoral song

Ah but what might the antecedents have been
Now we’re getting somewhere
The cops killed a guy
In part because Arabs invented the astrolabe

The Black Death a triple conjunction
Of hostile zodiacal figures

A song finds a path
Thou singest of summer
Thou singest of summer
Singest of summer in full-throated ease

I wonder what Philip is doing right now

Early thirties
A little overweight
Loves his beer and giant burritos
Has a girlfriend he cares about a lot
Has a job he wishes he didn’t

No general condition qualifies as an event

I met a fan of Kierkegaard
Who called Herr Kant a monster
Which churlish claim I do admit
Filled me up quite with conster-
nation

In darkness I find many things
Mostly trivial I guess
Tricks of the neurological apparatus
Samples of inward prosthesis
How a lack of neural stimulation stimulates
Like tinnitus or a phantom limb
Therefore lacking in significance
Except perhaps as some psychological lever
To pry open the
Well it’s embarrassing to say

How shall I characterize them
These non-ontological entities
They aren’t representations of things
They aren’t things in themselves
They are an experience
Doubtless shared by everybody
Doubtless dismissed by any serious person
Kind of like a poem

And like a poem these formless forms
Associate themselves with feelings
Which are trivial aren’t they
When they aren’t positively destructive
Emotional attitudes distract at best
From the serious matter
Of the phenomenal world
Of protecting oneself from its assaults
Exploiting its resources

I cannot justify the habit
Of seeking refuge in the dark
Of communing with familiar patterns
Instead of with my human friends
Another source of self-contempt
Another need another addiction
Not so much I lack the will
I lack the mere desire
To renounce that which
In darkness I find

Dear Friend

The cat is yowling
Who has plenty of food and drink
Who spent time outside until he asked to come in
What do you want I fatuously ask
Knowing that he will not answer
Unless it’s with a yowl
And I know the answer anyway
He wants conditions to be otherwise than they are

You rode a raft on rapids in Idaho
The teeming gnats tormented you
You smiled before the gnats
Like the happy motorcyclist
You felt the unfamiliar stir of joy
For every gnat caught in your teeth

For you knew that nature had molded each gnat
And the fish eat the gnats
And the bears eat the fish
And a hundred thousand times more relations
Than bear and fish or fish and gnat
For a cubic inch of river say
Holds infinite permutations

And behold the power of the fish
Driving up the falls
Scaling the ladder of the water and the rocks
Upright vertical
Driven from the ocean
Compelled to make the attempt
The power of the water over the falls
The power of the rock
The power of the sun that converts the elements
And a billion billion suns
Or a billion billion billion

The rock washed to the sea
The continents scudding across the sea

You beheld miracle
And in real time you knew you so beheld
And as you gave the account to me
I felt the familiar stir of fear
For I feared my dear friend
That you were teetering into the embrace of Tyrant Yahweh

And I regret having judged you meanly
If only for an instant
For fear is no basis for judgment
And we fear what we think we know
And I know that the ignorant sometimes
Believe that a phenomenon they do not understand
Must be not only a divine revelation
But the self-same revelation bequeathed
By emperor prince and inquisition

And everyone is infinitely ignorant

Wonder is a good thing
Good is it to behold in joy
That which passes understanding

And I sin in envy that you enjoy
Humility without humiliation
For you understand that understanding
Is in its infancy
For the only being we know
Capable of responding to reasons
Is young and merely capable

All are made for suffering
All sentience senses pain
Life lives by battening upon death
Death thrives among the living
But we who can reason
Can know as you have taught me
The bad from the good
And if we can control ourselves
We can forbear to add to the suffering
That comes with nature’s bounty

Burn the heretic
Burn the witch
Behead the adulterous queen
Never mind defining or proving heresy witchcraft or adultery

Moloch or Mammon
What’s the difference

Lately white supremacists have discovered
The efficacy of automobiles
As murder weapons

And guns guns guns guns guns guns guns guns
Guns guns guns guns guns
Guns guns guns guns guns guns guns
Guns guns guns guns guns guns
Guns guns guns guns guns guns guns guns guns
Guns guns guns
Guns guns guns guns guns guns
Guns guns guns guns guns guns guns
Guns guns
Guns guns guns guns guns guns guns guns

A knee on the neck works just fine
A twist of rope
A length of bailing wire
And don’t forget the mutilation
The bloodbright ceremony

Bad guys got guns
Good guys got guns
In between guys got guns

It doesn’t take nuclear weapons to destroy a city
Dresden
They just broke it into tinder and set it on fire
A few jets a few missiles
Will flush out the traitors to our revolution
Or rather flush them down
Collateral damage is central
Collateral damage is the whole point
Snuff gone viral

Or mutineers against our empire
What’s the difference

Poison and fire
Blunt trauma
Biological agents
Nothing hidden nothing deceptive
No dark conspiracy
A profession of faith
Just a pure loving devotion to death

Of course the nuclear option is always available

Cattle cars and crematoria
Machetes and re-education
Labor camp and reservation
Delicate homicidal categories
Discreet fatal technologies

This is my body given for you
Do this in remembrance of me

A few elect
Billions of damned
Behold the mercy of the metropolis of tarps
Order extras on Amazon

Grandma was going to die anyway
We must protect our free enterprise system
Everybody’s going to die
Save time and slaughter the whole mess

Furr’d round with mouldy damps and ropy slime

If Darwin fell into Lamarck’s arms
I’m not saying it happened
But if it had

Suppurine structural failure
As for example for repeated abuse
Of the hearing the digestion the pulmonary clogs

The wishful waves wend washingly
The crazed carvings crackle corkingly
The fine finials furl finalingly

The Brobdingnagian pinky extends
Vastly superseding its more modest brethren
As if from too much tea’s drinking

The greedy gastronomes
The cloistered clergy
The sententious senate

I can tell you where to go
To find every vice
Where to stay away from

The fruits of experience
Must take precedent over
The fruits of experience

You’ve got to steer toward
To make a good light show
The lady in light

The lights the hair the camera
The instructive compression of perspective
Highnote solicitude

A gay nude once in a while
A breezy festival once in a while
Food drink fashion and frivolity

Hammer and nail
Salt and pepper
Heaven and hell

Put in a good word
Get in the good foot
Cranch that tawdry cliche

An anthem extempore
Anacreon in parody
Ha ha heh heh heheh

But if it had
What then
Whither then the finch’s beak

O dream of flight
O dance of carelessness
O blessed rage for relaxation

The game
The old familiar game
We don’t need a winner

A Frenchman perhaps
A person of any gender
The rol the roll

Switch off the artificial gravity
Passengers are free to float about the cabin
Please wear your headgear of biodegradable foam

Ugh baobab
Gambab domorso
Gu denk zes eieoseiul

You greeted me wearing the soft kimono
The blue silk
The curve of your hips

Because because you care for me
A lot a lot
A lot

I want to fetch the sternal retractors
Give you a part
Of each internal organ

The peaches past prime
The slupping juice trickles
Upon the gray hairs

Sometimes failure is a good thing
The wicked intent
The foul attempt

Whamp upside the manikin mastoid
It’s all good when a plastic puppet
Gouges its own eyeballs

All’s fair in fiction
The excavator’s art
The deconstructor’s dart

Zest parliament factionalism
The plotters’ roman à clef
The tyrants’ ineptitude

What ho the jolly fuller’s foot
Steep’d in the waters o’ th’ night
Tramping merrily the noble fleece

A small child imitated perfectly
The propagandistic media file
Laughing out of mind the passion for perfidy

I once stated that I would ever refuse
To read The Cantos of Ezra Pound

I now profess that I will read that work
Immediately upon exhausting the literature
Composed by authors who are not fascists

I ingest food drink and medication
I sleep and wake
I excrete and secrete
I read and write
I go places
I drive walk sit and recline
I sing
I play music
Marian does things
I observe Marian
We feed Citrus
We clean things
We clean ourselves
We dress and undress
We play games
We make judgments
We cook
We comment
We watch television
We get takeout
We take deliveries
We maintain facilities and accommodations
We employ expedients
We buy things
We pay bills and taxes
We talk
We silence ourselves
We have and do jobs
I succeed and fail
I approve and disapprove
I complain and endorse
I hope and despair
I err

Strange reports from the provinces
Brandy carried off his severed head
Mismatched armies achieved mutual annihilation
A woman was impregnated by a swan

I don’t call you a pig
I don’t call you a slug
I don’t call you a worm
I don’t call you a nutria
I don’t call you a burro a donkey or an ass
I don’t call you a larva a grub or a maggot
I don’t call you a baboon
I don’t call you an insect
I don’t call you a dog
I don’t call you a blowfly
I don’t call you a leech
I don’t call you a rat
I don’t call you a coatimundi
I don’t call you a louse
I don’t call you an ape
I don’t call you a parasitic microorganism
I certainly don’t call you a wolf

I call you a person
Endowed with dignity
And a very poor character

Hear the hackneyed phillips call
The reflex to comfort
Or less
To cheer you up

Once encompassing an entire acculture
The courtly espenser
To advance that famoso faery dictatress
Embodying like allegory law faith stealth and physical dominance

Unknown does of allaying
Through the domes’ transept of a squinting fane drest with roses
Parsing the pesty modes from holy Byzantium
Unto the pert and aromatic Genevas

The clever edmundegreen
Asserting effrentacious certitude
The marl that fructifies
The bitumen no we are not

O that insouciant flummery
The mulct-white hinder
The requisite
Risable churl

The baronesses mount the Masque of Monarchy
Assume the imposture of the heir-breeding rosies
Hair-braiding rosaries
Air-breathing rougeries

Whilst the soi-disant King that bloody usurper
In sought of them
Dranches the sillions in sanguine potash
A tender crop of cripplage

Hover the pit of ultimate error
The unsure footing of Beulah
A cotillion to agitate the livery lymph
Erosive exaltation to the serapphine vertex

Thence to adopt the drab routine
The compulsoriness to think badly of it
The stratified norms
Of moral correction lately become fashionable

Commences the fluid of despatches
Justification by fear
The presthood of all who bleed
A sacrament of degradation

Hear the polished paean
The enchromium of cupidity
By now buy now by know
By no

A cherished hierophancy of naked command
To extract repribution from the naked
Witness the monstrous birth
The teraph’s fetid ascent

A prayerful multitude rotates in hellucination
A retail anchorite in the role of St. Joan
Eyes narrowed
The floor in fovea

A child in Tennessee reaches for riches
A gift withheld jars with the fauna
As if espoused to diminutive vivration
Or motioned to migrate to chill Arcadia

A banker in Connecticut dreams his gallante vignettes
Chaired in concentric storm and drag
While army brats are orphaned
Sharecorppers slain

Do you want your child to die
Screeds the concerned citoyen
In a passion of passion
A paroxysm a purplex

The regalia’d functunaries hurl the living
In hideous trauma and battery down
To th’incarnadined sidewalk
To step mincingly about the warm gules

New nuances taxi et ego in aircraftery
If only a sentence
Only insistence
Upon melancholic bodelearian reassurance

Until at last the declination
No John not phlebotomy
Not phlegmatimy
Certainly not estivation in some cozy cavity

No airplane appeared over Atlanta
No tender leaf trembled on the tulip tree
Iago is not
What Iago is

Surely some bilious revelation
But no none worse
Cortical contour the steepy sores’ resort
Nor bollarded in a bunker

Nor sinused on the cresty calx
But mere zephyrim of the muse her musted self
I’m sorry I’m sorry
Must you restore that baroque hilarity

Must you emplac that jubby denial
I’m sorriest
The epithets the quaalifires
The wan superlatives

Ain’t it funny how time slips away
Not just that a moment or an epoch moves into the past
Or even that the past moves in to take a moment or an epoch
But time itself under certain circumstances departs

And in such circumstances one becomes aware
Of the self-deception occasioned by time as a substance
Time an illusion
Self and other an illusion

The little houses on the prairie
Where you grew up close to O’Hare
The wooden floor where we took
Our children roller skating

The room where my father died
Looked to me more like a hotel than a hospice
I tried to lie and told him it was a hotel
He was past caring about a particular location

No more to be seen here
No more to see
No water no wind no waves
No flower

We love each other
We know that love exists
But you don’t call a relation
An existence

The past the future
Relations to the present
Tangible in varying degrees
Until the moment comes

The destabilizing moment
But you can’t call it a moment
You can’t call now
What isn’t there

Or rather
Isn’t then
The slip
The gone

The hand that drops things
The brush the pills the keys the phone the suitcase
The stack of small bowls the cooking utensils
The pen

The childish scribble since childhood
Illegible unintelligible
Inarticulate
Fomenting misunderstanding

The hand that upsets the drinking glass
Noisily bumps the door jamb
Slips away from the steering wheel
Strikes in anger the innocent or the guilty

How do you express a feeling
How do you do it
Keats began with a cliche My heart aches
But then worked around to the sublime renunciation
Of Bacchus and his pards
Wherein it becomes rich to die

A woman’s place is in the home
Said the female teacher in the sixth grade classroom
Just as my mother was commencing her job
As a medical technologist at the big public hospital
I can’t even name much less express the feeling
Occasioned by that contradiction

The words for feelings couldn’t be less helpful
Did sixth grade make me sad
Resentful
Indignant
Afraid
And now the pissed-off boredom of adulthood

Wordsworth was a liar like everybody else
Emotion recollected in tranquility
Ha
Maybe tranquility was readily available
In the late-eighteenth early-nineteenth century
For traitors to love family country and philosophy

I’m not asking nor can I ask
The right question
There’s more to it than a technical process
Not that I have applied myself even to the technical process
Poetry and truth are distinct and diverse
And what is that something more

As I contemplate these bad days I go back
To 1972 the overwhelming fact of the Viet Nam War
The Middle East Africa Latin America The Cultural Revolution
The age of assassination and cities on fire
The apocalyptic ideological conflict of the Cold War

Yet I popinjay that I was
Aspirant to hipsterdom
Loved a toke or four or five of marijuana
Four sides of Exile on Main Street
And getting close to the girl I love

Look back
See the person in the mirror
Now look ahead
Those are other people

I am not Aeneas
I am not Paul
I am not a hero of obedience
Nor a hero of defiance
Nor a hero of any kind

My father on the deck of the Saratoga
When the kamikazes came in
Effected no daring rescue no divine commission
Just got his face blown off
And a medal depicting George Washington

Which medal he lost or threw away
The same awarded to his brother who died
Which one was the hero
The lacerated seaman or the crewman of the doomed B-17
The suicide pilot or the slave at Nordhausen

A plague of earwigs

There is no substitute for poetry
In America we’ve tried sports
Which is like thinking about baseball to prevent premature ejaculation

We have songs
Show tunes pop tunes
Baby tunes torch songs raps hymns jingles and handwashing mnemonics

But for painting and sculpting
Architecturally building
And yes singing with words alone there is no substitute

We have streaming video
And special-effects blockbusters
But for mordant or tender verbal arrangement there is no substitute

We have sex and drugs
And undead rock and roll
But for inflections and innuendos there is no substitute

No ideas but in things
Sure but what’s an idea
We certainly have plenty of things and probably for that matter ideas

There is no substitute for poetry
On the list of essentials
For the practical and the impractical there is no substitute alas for poetry

William Carlos Williams they say
Hated the iamb
Opting instead for the plodding spondee
Or lines so short
As to defy the measure of a foot

Prosey rhythms tend in fact
Toward blank verse
Provided that lines break
So as to begin low and end high
As had done Stevens and Frost

And images and sounds never really
Coincide do they
One or the other will always prevail
As Chieftain Azcan of Iffucan attests
Along away aloft astride his red wheelbarrow

Hate is far too strong a word
And did he make a statement
Or is history judging from the squeaks
Of analytical philology
The sunset murmurs of russet March

Are we to discern biographical data
His foibles
His infidelities
His physician’s panoply
Anapestic protective device

It must be a science
Or a quixotic journey with Stevens
Across a world of words to the end
But lo the refrigerated plums
They too are good

And the death-deadly flowers
Daffodils in rugged March
Litmus hydrangea
Blooming crimson sunset
Below the horizon

The boatmen of the dead
All the ancients
Bearing their dead weight
Everything new is old again
An age of hurtful blossoming

Dream yet awhile beloved
While I toil as I must in the scriptorium
Or rather indulge that other fantasy
My obscure emulations
For you whom I love beyond all measure

A dialectic
A mutually constitutive arrangement
The force of branching thoughts
The shaping constraint
The golden cage of form
The fountain trained to buttress and to dance
Architecture blossoming and protecting
Serrano’s seminal trajectory
The cool diagnostic clipboard
The barbaric yawp
Boatman across the river
Let the dead past bury its dead
Let imagination welcome the bondage of reason
The momentary pang of pleasure
The eternal majesty of mathematics
The ongoing campaign to know the facts
Let’s go down to the ivy bank
Let’s celebrate the acts of love
With which we are familiar
Which await their latest invention

The mutilation or dissolution of one’s body
The commission of violence against oneself
The commission of violence against another
The emission from one’s body of noxious horrifying or impossible substances
The expansion of a limb or other member to shocking dimensions
The expansion of an ordinary space into looming or terrifying dimensions
The assault upon one’s person by myriads of small or large creatures
The conversion of part of one’s body into vegetable or mineral matter
The invasion of one’s body by large parasites
The expectation that another will respond irrationally to one’s own innocuous action
The expectation that another will take advantage of one’s self-deprecating remark
The explosion of one’s body when its internal pressure exceeds external pressure
The imputation of hostile intent to an innocent other
The deflation of one’s face
The recurrence in memory of some trauma
The enlistment of a unique person in some malevolent or disgraceful group
The conviction that one is in the unconquerable grip of a conscious but morally agnostic power
The conviction that one is threatened by an indistinct figure of graceful menace
The conviction that one’s body is collapsing under the harsh gravitation of Jupiter
The conviction that one’s avocations are harmful or deadly
The conviction that one’s existence is harmful

He hung his keyring
On the piano string