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

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