Let us open the gate
Nor fear beloved father that the stranger there
Who knocks with such importunity means harm
Though experience has taught you
That strangers bring bad tidings or worse
What time you stood upon ship’s deck
And fired upon the kamikaze
Whose momentum carries it down
Though the pilot be dead
True you have never shown me fear
Nor boasted of your wounds
But your Purple Heart covers only
Insults to the body
And not the lacerations of the mind
And you learned that the manly thing
Was to bury pain
Let us admit the insistent stranger
Who knows but that his tidings might be glad

Trained from early times to observe
With microscopic acuity
To detect patterns in streams of data
A skill poorly developed in the end

Never saw distinctly the many relatives
The aunts who smoked
The uncles who drank beer
The one I liked best who drank something stronger

Who bid me ride in fishing vessel
Beyond sight of land
And the other one the fat one
Who carried me through the waves past my height

Another who wore boots with straps and buckles
Who raised hogs and drove a truck
Whose wild sons almost grown
Gigged frogs by moonlight

I neither feared nor particularly loved them
Diverting and pleasant
Like the swoop of power lines
While I reclined in the back seat

I wasn’t strong in relationships as a child
Like good or bad weather
By far mostly good
Glossy magnolia leaves upturned in the wind

I saw them and never mentioned them
I played with my brother
And didn’t especially notice
That I enjoyed myself

The same when I played alone
Or with whichever was the yard dog at the time
The simple construction set
Mad magazine and Fahrenheit 451

Listening was less highly prized than observation
Adult conversations the evening news
And oh Gilbert and Sullivan Ray Charles and Johnny Cash
Dylan and the Beatles and the Stones

A single star bright Venus maybe
Cheshire crescent promises cool and dry
And from a heap of garden waste
Springs a single daffodil

A parliament of toads
And those that eat the toads

Hey Jason
Wake up way out west
Where time doth grow less
Not that you sleep a lot or too much
It’s later than you think out here in Georgia
Not that you think not right or too little
On the contrary I’m the one unclear on time and space
We’ve talked and talked and talked and talked and talked
And you know chat is my third favorite thing
After music and well you know
And getting high used to be an enthusiasm
For me but in old age I’ve cut way back
And still we’ve talked and talked and talked
In our offices in building H
At the Marlay in Decatur
And since you moved to California via Zoom
What kindness you have shown to me
What concern for my health and wellbeing
What gratitude I feel
What time you came to me saying
You that is I seem to be interested in ethics
Overhearing me speak of fact sincerity and respect
And we’ve tried to understand what matters
Of what it means for something to matter
And of what we should do and how we ought to act
And you’ve done most of the teaching
Though you credit me with some contribution
And we’ve discussed our psyches pathological
And the deontic and the axiological
And tried to orient ourselves toward appreciation
For the world is emphatically real
In its forces and its particles yes
But we are more confident you and I
Of the beautiful the true and the good
Than of the speed of light or the inverse square
Or the efficiency of mousetraps
And see more value in a tree or turd
Than in the cleverest invention
Or measurement most precise
And the age is ever darkening
With catastrophes in dwindling Fibonaccis
That is in inward spiral ever growing tighter
Starting with the agricultural revolution
But in earlier dim millenia past a species of ape
Gained the power to speak of futurity
And to speak in frank modality
And to understand reasons
And respond
And I wish I could devise an argument
Elegantly like you
But I’m a picker and a grinner and a singer
And a talker talker talker talker talker
And I’m a teacher I don’t say how excellent
And a poet I don’t say how excellent
And for a long time the worst sin a poet could commit
Was the fall into didacticism
But why should teaching in poetry be a sin
It’s good to help to learn
And it’s good to write a poem
I don’t say how excellent
So here’s a song about real things
The reality of value
The one life within us and abroad
And songs mostly express feelings
And some feelings come from facts
And some facts give us reasons
To act or believe or feel
So here’s a song about reasons in real things

A teary splash settles just before you blink
And an infinite rainbow regress
Surrounds all objecthood
Not a particle at rest
Not a gesture of force but signifies interestingly
Thirsty fills the neural labyrinth with motion
The assertedly living the seemingly inanimate
Sternly prevent inertness
A flux a flow a fluid mingling and separating
Light and more light suffuse matter with energy
Light more than energy
Life more than light
Calling to the past demanding the future
Gathering all movement all into now
That yet continues to move
The trees undulating lofty above the houses
Nestled in the quiet cul-de-sac
A mailbox balancing upon its stolid pillar
Front doors colorful or dull
All reverberate beyond the visible field
A group of dark birds less than a flock
Momentarily staged in the middle height
Their progress arrested by an effort of will
To schematize to render into subjectivity
That reaches out to grasp to reproduce to replicate
To transform to maintain to sample to integrate
To insist in the transformation
Grateful for the sun the clouds the greenery of spring
The warmth of southerly clime southerly breeze
The gay profusion of ephemera
The dwelling places the varied apparatus of transport
The natural and the seeming artificial
And they head into a future
As frenetic as the frozen moment
Frozen only fictively by exertion of consciousness
But no less real for that
And in the middle depth the pavement
Recalled as having marshaled the scintillating points
Like diamonds in its petroleum blackness
Under the streetlight pulsing yellow and cold
But now shimmers with the iridescent lushness
Of wing of tropical bird or lightshow of playful cuttlefish
The freshness the brightness of a dream
Bright as even those anxious dreams of awkward needy presence
Perhaps merely the product of a gestating neuron
But which nevertheless all generations have esteemed as significant
As they have esteemed the constellations as significant
As his youthful majesty the sun has coursed halfway through the Ram
And the lawn its inch of variegated grass
Not grass alone but a metropolis of leaves
The broad the narrow the brown the green the pointed and the clipped
Illuminated like manuscript and transfigured like mystical body
And memory retrieves the circular dewdrops
Nearly circular this being the phenomenal world
And how like the fragment of a tear
And the insects winged and wingless solitary and swarm
The earthworms that emerge and die
Being driven hence by the lifegiving rain
That mingles and separates in drizzles and torrents
As flowering plants seek the stab of lifegiving light
That drops like rain like honey like fluid of many colors
The small mammals that wary forage
And the raptors that swoop to catch them
And the little snake that occasionally rides
Admirable in its self-confidence
And afar an owl new to this range this habitat
Not having chosen the circumstances of its hatching
Calls and answers in daylight and darkness
And vast web of exotic spiders a prism of prisms
Like all they too products of circumstance
As the sunlight pierces and recedes
Where the circular sun or near-circular
This being the phenomenal world
Or rather the phenomenal part of the world
Casts shadow
Crazy irregular teetering between solidity and abyss
And how to conceive of this merely relative absence
Token of disconsolate mood
That hovers like shadow in memory
And like cold unrecognized in science
That knows only degrees of heat
While the vibrant indistinct periphery
Placid in its multitudinous assent
To a consumption that never consumes utterly
A haze nor purple nor blue but heavy metallic green
Lacerated by ultra-violet and infra-red
A plenitude inexhaustible and refreshing
To glimpse to drink a world so impressively dynamic
Caught and cause in an orgy of sensation
Sensory sensuous sensual
A sexy floorshow at an extravagant banquet
A kaleidoscope a circus of spectra
Never a dull moment of sameness
Crowded into the fragment of a tear
Briefly lodged in the ocular oracular organ
And yet change must mean that something changes
And thus that something persists
With astonishing regularity amid the flux
Unless this too is a quirk of fancy
In our brief time and narrow space
But feel the surge of serpentine confidence
Leaves will be leaves
Of grass and trees
And bugs bugs
As far as any eye can see
And outside and beyond and through and through
Numbers will ever generate sum product dividend
The circle will be circle
And good good

A blink measurable in milliseconds
Bathes all in red blankness and hints
At the possibility darkly tempting
Of annihilation though nothing
Can ever nothing nothing
But practically impossible does not mean unreal
For the imagination can conceive
The square root of negative one
As it can of the inexorable digits of pi
And what emotional posture
Might these imponderables demand
For we might undergo an involuntary shudder
At the thought of mere nothingness or less
Or of great infinity that teases out of thought
Anxiety induced by an imaginary fact
Or a factual figment
Assist me Muse nurturing mother
Provider of sustenance bodily intellectual and creative
Say first what source our pleasures our pains
Our drives for nutriment for reproduction for expression
Our grim dejection our poetic frenzy
We know the source of the greatest joy
The holy communion of family and friends
But say most for thou knowest
Whence the advent of witless terror
For while the tiger
That the trainwreck disgorges
Gives an object to our fear
With timestamp heading and coordinates
And we mobilize the forces required to subdue it
For we have it in our crosshairs
While that other tiger
Which burns in the forest of the night
Resists such easy crucifixion
And we rage against the injustice of reversal
For we enjoyed briefly a moment of hope
What time we said ahead ahead I see a light
But with what sudden supernatural horror
Do we gaze into the face
Of the tiger alive with flame
Impossible upon earthly frame
And yet a factual presence in the mind
And sharable with other minds across centuries
Through the miracle of text
The sacrament of image
Disorientation congealing into nightmare
But our companion soothing speaks
See what you’re looking at
It is but an animal friend
Cool bluey green
Padding to left
Not facing you in threatening confrontation
Alter eye to alter all
But though it be the last thing we might want
How often do our steps resistless lead us
Into that dreadful forest where we stumble again in the darkness
Again fallen into the fearful mood of shadow
The Dis of deep dejection
Only to be betrayed again by that meretricious light
And threatened by that imaginary tiger
Conflict internal bursting into birth
So you can replicate this experience if you want to
Replicate not repeat
For repetition is no more than perfection is
A thing in the phenomenal part of the world
The second happen somewhat differs from the first or the third
The eternal return of the same a psychological quirk
But no less factual for that
And certainly not unthinkable in a multiplicity of universes

And in one universe of space and time
Limited by space and time
Though haply interpenetrated with transcendence
What a waste is conflict and how unnecessary
When we lash out like tigers
Or slow burn like leaching acid
Anger directed inward or out
Or fall upon the sword of self-slaughter
When we can work out our differences
With our neighbors and with ourselves
Can
The ugly battlements of unreasoning fear
The nauseous intoxication of attack
The mystic bloody rituals of vengeance
Loving spouses hissing hurtful words
A drunken dispute among friends erupting in gunfire
A teenager poisoned by images to take their own life
Talking to you Zuckerberg
Warfare against both other and self
That shows that as we respect others we should respect ourselves
And not be talked into self-harm self-contempt
Or the bloody disproportion of retaliation
In adoration of the algorithm
In adoration of the volk
In adoration of the habit
In adoration of the dollar
In adoration of power
In adoration of the leader
Nor raise our fist in anger nor in compliance to foul command
Blackjack and truncheon
Lance and pike
Dagger and gladius
Halberd and partizan
Cannon mortar and howitzer
Long and short guns the automatic and the semi-automatic
Battleship destroyer nuclear submarine ballistic missile and intelligent drone
Aeroplane and zeppelin
Fortification and catapult
Reconnaissance intelligence and disposition
The firing squad for espionage or desertion
The heartless post the hostile incursion
Surgery dressing and prosthesis cobbling together the broken body
Reconstruction and torturous rehabilitation
Veterans of war trembling limbless faceless
Displaced persons dazed and mechanical
Reliving the trauma long after the fact
The corpse of a child recovered from the rubble
See ye heedless governors and die of shame

And the mood of shadow strikes
As the headsman’s blade falls upon the traitor to the king
Though the liege lord lacks authority
In tradition or in fact
To take the lives even of those deemed disloyal
But like the capricious whirlwind
That shatters one village and spares the next
Slashes regardless of intention act or explanation
No justice save the monarch’s will
For the hapless soldier disoriented in the fog
The guildsman in good faith to fulfill a contract
The wife who exercises the feminine lore of herb and textile
Neighbors who toil and till and heal
Consigned without warrant to dungeon and death
For satanic perfidy or foreign cabal
Spurious fantasies of a demented autocrat
Who punishes the poor for poverty
The migratory for migrating
And the thoughtful for thinking
And all suffer under his sway
So falls unbidden the mood of self-contempt
Dejection and residence in the city of Dis
And you can see the darkness visible coming
When the little dictator in the brain
Provincial governor
Pilate at his ablution
Like novel virus banishes all taste all pleasure all joy
And that compliant patient the accused
Remembers beauty
But cannot see it
Remembers sweet melody
But cannot hear it
Remembers the batter which nourishing mother bid them stir
But cannot taste it
And the little dictator possesses the mind merely
And the train of sincerely sympathetic friends and family
Baffled by this strange interloper
Ask what have you done with our friend
But where friends shall I put this fear of fucking up
Where shall I put this anger at the world at myself
Just don’t fuck up they helpfully reply
Just don’t get mad
And snap out of it the spell isn’t real
And they want to help more than they want to listen
Than they want to know what help might help
Meaning well as most are wont to do
Serve only to remind one of his wickedness
His incapacity
Morally torpid and an incompetent boob
Fully aware that every person he knows is human
That he himself is merely human
And subject to the limitations of every object every organism
Happy to accept the fallible humanity of all but himself
Who appreciates truth beauty and goodness everywhere
Except in himself
Arrogant in his exemption from the common run
Miraculously devoid of any extenuating virtue
Save perhaps that he is not the most vicious of criminals
But merely an inadequate mediocrity
And a pompous ass to boot
Vaunting his erudition in gratuitous display
Exposing thereby his ignorance infinite
Teasingly indulging in suicidal ideation
Who passively accedes to the sentence of death
Fit punishment he concedes
For the clumsy the wicked the ugly
Generous he supposes
To spare others the carnival grotesquery of his madness
The offense of his incapacity
Judge jury and executioner in one fell stroke
Denying himself alone the dignity of due process
And why do we torment ourselves with a cruelty
That we would impose upon no other being
Fie on punishment
Cursed be the curse of the ages
The debilitating wound of hierarchy
The tyranny of the vertical axis
Right comes from reasons not from command
And do you suppose your command
Will bring about right
Commands backed up by naked force and blind
By the threat of punishment
Thereby fostering the breed of sneak thieves
But people can understand reasons
Which come from facts
And people can act accordingly
Within the limits of their knowledge
And of their human self control
Can
For we experience those limits the livelong day
In our small and permeable selves
In our small and narrow provinces
In our small and finite universes
And we should esteem those who strive against the limits
Let us therefore forgive their wrongs
For they know not what they do
For they create not themselves in any case
And let us forebear to cast the first stone
We who have done and will do wrong again
Almost certainly in the suppositious future
Let us forbear to apply ugly epithets
As ass or boob with their puerile suggestiveness
Or yahoo even if amiably qualified
Let us experience the pathos of their vulnerabilities these humans
Their defects yea even unto their wrongdoing
Let us recall how endearing
Are the incapacities of those we love
As of pronunciation syntax or physical maneuver
Who shop at Walmark and dine at Chic a Fil
Who use fasteners of velcor in their condominimum
Let us appreciate the nobility of striving
In person beast alga tree
Let us tend to the weary and to the afflicted
Let us check the darkness
Let us love one another
And let us love ourselves as our neighbor

An Ode on Bacchanalia
He bounds from the chariot drawn by cheetahs
Who gaze knowingly at one another
The characteristic black streaks like tracks of tears
Each wearing a collar studded with bells
You can just glimpse the scrotum
Of the god who leaps with incomparable grace
Above the war car cunningly carved with foliate curlicue
Exposed as the great red cloak billows
The perfect anatomy the radiant skin
The long hair entwined with leaf of grape
The rich blue sky balanced with clouds
The streaky and the accumulating
That just hint of the sun’s retiring
Eight stars arrayed in circle
Or suggestion of circle caught in an oblique
Miraculous stars in dwindling daylight
The tops of the dark trees green
Giving way to ocher sometimes rimmed with gold
And a hooved haunch hoisted aloft
Before the obese reveler naked save headgear of leaves
Passed out astraddle an ass
With cheek pressed against that of a smiling companion
And another who sounds a trumpet to the sky
While a greybeard bows beneath the weight
Of a great bushel laden with who knows what
And the hoister of the haunch
With cap and girdle of grape
Legs with fell of goat
Lifts dancing human feet above the bluey flowers
Above the herbage green
And here image most strange
A bearded man struggles
To ungird or gird himself with writhing snakes
His brow creased with effort or with pain
Beneath the little horns
And above him a woman with eyes askance
Meets the eyes of him of the haunch
Her blue gown parted to reveal the pretty breasts
While she raises on high the tambourine
And cymbal too is raised on high
Played by fellow bacchante gazing at the god
Her garment too disclosing breast and thigh
And gazes too she of blue mantle and scarlet scarf
Having made escape from the labyrinth
For him who has abandoned her
And for herself gesturing toward the tiny ship
Departing
Past the rocky cliffs
Past the little town with quiet spire
The town unaware of the miracle in progress
While leading a dog a swineherd oblivious strides
Absorbed in another task than theophany
While she who turns sharply godward
The forsaken one
Stands above a golden vessel inscribed Ticianus F
She gazes at the immortal and he at her
Leaping to join her
To end her forsakenness
To have and to hold
To crown her queen
And cast her crown into the sky
To shine as significant constellation
And of all these figures
The frenzied the smitten and the oblivious
Only one gazes at us
A little boy his hair entwined with tiny white flowers
Toward whom a flopped-eared dog barks
In hunger hostility or invitation to play
Near the child’s hooves and goat-haired legs
Whose small cloak echoes that great of the god
And how child did you wind up among the divine retinue
And does your mother number among the maenads here
Who nourished your chubby arms chubby cheeks
And the child drags with rope
The severed head of a beast
Nor horn nor antler
Perhaps the victim
That rendered up the haunch
And he gazes at us
Of substance mixed
Goat and boy
Unsettling and unsettled
Lips parted
What is this overmuch of variegated world

How the infinite objects of the variegated world
Crowd in upon us each a congeries of other objects
What is this air of substance mixed
What is this ocean of substance mixed
What is this earth of substance mixed
And here a theme but little noted in a decadent age
Of monarchs and subjects and subjects and objects
Oh the times oh the mores
That not only is the object well fitted to the subject
But wholly dependent upon it
And yet the involution of the world
Involves the dynamic interpenetration
Of these two infinities
The phenomenal and the experiential
For we experience both what we perceive
And what determine a priori
But more directly we experience our own consciousness
And we directly infer the consciousness of much besides ourselves
And how closely allied inseparable
That which separates and mingles on the one hand
And that which remains on the other
Two hands of one consciousness
Of one subject perceiving and evaluating and knowing
But each subject exists only in relation to other subjects
And in relation to the world prior to subjectivity
And in relation to that part of the world divided into objects
Hail science compendious repository of objective fact
Incisive method for determining fact
Product of analysis template of rigor
Laid up in brick and stone
And in ephemeral gelatinous brains
And in generous bequest of hand and mind across centuries
Through the ministries of text image graph and schematic diagram
Donor of great pleasure in reading learning and growing in understanding
Discovered in the laboratories
Observed in the observatories in orbit and on earth
Induced in the huge particle accelerators
And collected near the sidewalk where a child brings home specimens
The ramifying taxonomies of biology geology and subatomic- and astrophysics
The proliferating units of measurement the grams the milliliters the light years
Ah but here let us pause
For we measure not merely in vague appraisal of duration or extent
Contingent upon our narrow familiar provinces
But in number unconfined in space or time
Innocent of phenomenal manifestation
Save that of certain merciful regularities to be inferred
As of that apparently insurmountable constant
The speed of light expressible as ratio
Such that we can intuit that spacelessness and timelessness
In the instance of mathematical facticity
Interpenetrate the spatiotemporal part of the world
That fluxuous world of forces and particles
That ceaselessly collect and dissipate
Mingle and separate
Every object a perplexing congeries of other objects
And what is this particle whose velocity we express as ratio
And what exactly do we measure
And how would we persuade this presubstantial substance
To sit up and have its picture taken
Wouldn’t it be simpler to confess
That we enjoy tantalizing glimpses
Of something deeply interfused
And that we know not how far
Manifestly present consciousness
Might extend in the world
That is in the world that is
The world that obtains
The world that happens happens happens
Both phenomenal and innocent of phenomenal manifestation
Something before force and prior to particle
Something far more deeply interfused than either
For time and space cannot confine number
Nor who knows what other entities with what other properties
Such perhaps as moral properties
Such as the immaterial properties of consciousness
And thoughts you cannot measure
But let us note that the gay science of phenomena
Of all this moving world that blooms
In color and in sound
In texture and in luxurious taste
Has been colonized by the dismal science of economy
And all value reduced to utility
But thus has it ever been
For to sustain our human households
Our human communities our human lives
Far more dependent upon technology than are other species
We must adapt we homo sapiens the objects of nature to use
And must prerequisitely therefore comprehend their properties
As of flint fiber antler iron and semiconductor
And but rarely do we seek knowledge for its own sake
And thus technology is the fall of man
The straitening of Pegasus in bridle and bit
To plummet earthward
Though conceivably a fortunate fall
When we direct technology toward wellbeing
While we fall and will again fall
But even our impressive future tense
Realm of dreams the tranquil and the anxious
Cannot anticipate unintended consequence
Circumstance being a dotard afflicted with presbyopia
As when playthings maim
As when labor-saving devices poison and destroy
As when the humans invent tillage
Thus condemning themselves to monoculture
Or nearly so
Loaves to feed multitudes
Badly
But you can’t plant and grow a fish
And the fruit of the field comes in all at once
And must be stored in granary ominous infrastructure
Under lock and key and guard armed and dangerous
The plowshare slow and patient
Begetting the sword terrible and swift
For the bounty must be doled out systematically
And not flung abroad for all comers
And must be regulated in fat years to feed the lean
And the commander controls the guard
And the sway of empire extends
And here we are as on a stubble plain
From which have been removed
Vast stores of knowledge and of grain
But where the hand to give it
And thus we humans have arrogated dominion
Over nature and one over another
And built our big beautiful walls
And built our superyachts too large to launch
And nobody should be that rich
While children in shadow
Dwindle to brittle sticks
Though worthy of our warmest love

A friend of mine went rafting down the Salmon River
That flows through many moods the placid and the raging
With some middle-aged stout fellows
A friend and some friends of a friend
Confident of their integrity physical and ethical
Joshing and trading a modicum of bullshit
Vacation relief and healthful excursion
Who waxed philosophical
Asserting that a life was meaningful or valuable
To the extent that one made a contribution
Self-mythology of self-made men
But what thing ever made itself
An obvious fallacy considering
That we humans like all phenomenal things
Are products of presbyopic circumstance
And that the lives would be meaningless
Of those denied by circumstance
Those made by circumstances not their own which is all of us
The opportunity to carry out such an action
That the fellows might deem a contribution
A meaningful life an unearned privilege of the few
When manifestly most regard life as worth living
For even those who suffer which is all of us
Though some suffer with shocking exorbitancy
Regard life as worth living
Though we not oft consider
What factors might endow life with this worthiness
And what would earning a privilege mean
While the many suffer who merit our warmest love
As indeed all suffer included the privileged
Who nevertheless possess the wherewithal
To assuage to some degree their own suffering
As indeed that of others if they would
And which pray are those contributions
That might cross the threshold into the valuable
And who contributes what to whom
And what do you think value is anyway
While my friend tuned them out
Or responded with disingenuous nods
Or perhaps demurred courteously
While absorbed instead with the insects
Almost absorbed by them
Gnats caddis-flies or midges swarming above the stream
Sometime annoyance to the eyes nostrils and skin
But a thought forestalled his annoyance
At the fellows and the flies
The thought that flies feed fish and fish feed bears
Staring at miracle and getting flies in his eyes
And the shaggy majestic beasts
Owe their majesty to flies
In the flux of collection and dissipation
And bears shit in the woods or on the river bank
And certain flies love the shit
Of beasts majestic or pathetic they don’t care
Site of nourishment and nursery
While here in the soft hills of my home
Where rivers do not rage
But speak soothingly of cleansing pebbles
Smooth to the touch but not lacking in texture
Of cheering effervescence catfish and warm springs
And lakes and ponds perform their placid ministry
For worms for minnows for the larvae of innumerable species
Sought by birds that majestic strut the shallows with backward knee
I slap iteratively aiming to terminate with extreme prejudice
The canny mosquito
Wise to direct her dark body in sunshine and shadow
With graceful but erratic motion
To escape detection and prevent reprisal
Such as I intend
That she might feed upon the sanguineous humor
Absorb into her body something of my mixed substance
Proteiny compound of rich red milk
And nourish her gravidity
Neither predator nor parasite
But browser on the meadow of my skin
And when on the fifth attempt I score a victory
The meadow blooms with scarlet
And even before the crushing blow
See the swollen abdomen emblem of pregnancy
Glowing translucently with my blood
Mingled perhaps with that of other mammals
Of family or friends
Womb that should swell pampered
But now lies thrown asunder
Thwarted bequest from wingèd mother
To nourish her soon-swimming progeny
Sign of amphibious life lived interestingly
Vulnerably like all life
For the larvae hatch in the still water
Of pond or discarded tire
And wriggle tumblingly up to the air to breathe
And one day rise Venuslike to fly in middle height
If not devoured by birds or bats
Or crushed by iterative slap
Or poisoned by chemical agents
Supplied with chemical agents of their own to preempt
The clotting action that they may strive and sup and succeed
And like their mother nourish new offspring
So that I scratch and draw more blood
And continue to attack with merciless hatred
Any stragglers in the serial horde
For I know from experience of the annoying itching welts
And from science of the pathogens
Virus and plasmodium true parasite
Who would join the other animalcules
Bacteria of the gut and mites that dwell in eyebrows
That crowd in upon the space of my permeable body
Its stout integrity a self-serving figment
And yet I pray one day to make peace
To understand and patiently to forgive
For no being has made itself
Not mosquito nor confident stout fellow
Who thus cannot be held responsible
For the product of their not-making
For surely the attentive self-maker
Or the omnipotent creator for that matter
Or poor old circumstance of the aged eyes
Might have made the self better than it is
Might have made a world otherwise
Than that in which the suffering of one
Feeds the thriving of another
And in any case the creator
Is responsible for the creation
In a way that the not-creator cannot be
As men and mosquitos cannot be
Who thence play regularly their parts in the ceaseless flux
And thus I disclaim full responsibility
For these seemingly endless garrulous pages
Though the many errors are surely my own
Whatever my own means
But any being that can understand and respond to reasons
A category that includes human persons
And we must regard all humans as persons
Is accountable for their actions
Must be prepared to give an account
Of the reasons if any that have given rise to their motives
The modality of responsibility differing
Perhaps subtly from that of account
The ability to fulfill obligation a contingent potential
As circumstances not of our making
Permit our understanding and response
But since actions worthy of the name are motivated
And since many actions affect others
Albeit sometimes in unintended ways
We should take responsibility
Should
But we must be prepared to give an account
Must
We are necessarily accountable
Responsibility a should
Accountability a must
And it often happens that when we give unwilling account
Or when we imagine that we might withhold account
We give in fact the account of no account
That is we have no reasons to report
And henceforth must live with the fact
That we have acted without reasons
And life in its variegated involution involves pleasure
And also the endurance of pain
And worse the infliction of it
But we always have reasons to enjoy pleasure
And reasons to regret pain to prevent pain
Or assuage pain when it happens
And all make their contribution though mostly unawares
The sprezzatura merely of being there
In a situation that obtains
And an event that happens
In the phenomenal part of the world
And thus beasts and flies and fish and fowl
And amiable yahoos joshing upon a raft
Possess majesty in various forms
And they were right the jolly fellows
Though they did not go far enough
Down the river of their discourse
That all make their varying and valuable contributions
Without even trying though a little effort might go a long way
All participate in majesty
The selfsame majesty of moon and sun
And the collections vast or diminutive
Of river and mountain and ocean
And tree and mosquito and spherey turd

We have invested so much in objects
Available perceptible things and places
And categories and things
Readily or if necessary with augmentation of apparatus
Satellites and trees and capillaries and grommets
A train and a room and a car and a room and a room and a room
With our delightful little primate brains
Those thirsty fluxuous labyrinths
Involuted organs echoing the involutions of phenomena
When obviously verbs are more the thing
When objects exist and situations obtain
And events take place
They happen happen happen
And how far above do objects extend
That reach below to a congeries of other objects
Where does that tree begin and end
Root hairs and stomata
Whose name might be Sally
Who battens on decay
Friend of bacteria mold cockroach and beetle grub
Who competes for lifegiving light with the other trees
Straitened and driven and alive
Who strives like steeplejack ever upward
Who bends her bole inimical to darkness
Who dances in rain and opposes drought and pest
Who casts refreshing shade for denizens beneath
Salubrious cousin of the mood of shadow
Upon whose demise nourishes fungus to provide other nourishment
The waste of one the nutrient of another
Who tolerates the death of limb and branch
The loss of leaf that falls wavering to the ground
While continuing to flourish
And who unlike our primate cousins
Practices no sexual dimorphism
At least none dependent upon visual registry
And I should respect though I will never fully know
The experience of tree

When I awoke from surgery
For cochlear implantation
I found myself subject
To the tyranny of the vertical axis
Suspended within a whirling cone
Composed of disjunct fragments
Of sensory impression
Rotating clockwise at varying rate
Around one ever-receding apex
Simultaneously above and below me
Imposing gyroscopic inertia
Upon the crowded recovery room
Where other patients awoke and suffered
Mildly or intensely as the case may be
And the beautiful companion spoke to me
Greg could you please vomit more quietly

Does a potassium ion qualify as part of a tree
Only after it pierces some imaginary portal plane
A wide receiver winning at the goalline
Whereupon it enters the vascular system
Whose participation in tree we take for granted
And even exploit for our gums resins and syrups
And when we speak of that object designated a human body
Do we include the many organisms
That populate the gut the blood the eyebrows
For our primate brains labyrinthine though they may be
Perceive a world of discrete objects
Defined within our homely folk traditions
Our primate folk back to our arboreal forebears
Or perhaps earlier to scurrying insectivores
Or ovipositing monotremata mammals hardly mammals
And we cope as best we can
With the knowledge that every object
Is composed of a congeries of objects
Is more or less radically unstable
Changing from moment to moment
And that all objects exist
That is they must of necessity exist
In intimate relation with other objects
Our perceptions tuned over thousands of millennia
To the earth’s diurnal course mostly imperceptible
And the level horizon of our spherey home
In short the objective world that composite concept
Clumsily oversimplifies the real world
Oversimplifies even that portion albeit overmuch which we perceive
Until we quit the regiment of personality
To cleanse and throw open the doors of perception
A world that nevertheless extends beyond and outside perception
However vast and variegated
To comprise transcendent entities undeniable
Such as math facts and let it be said moral facts
To comprise among its many qualities that of consciousness
And who among us would indulge the jejune narcissism
Of arrogating consciousness to homo sapiens alone
Just wise enough to grant our infinite ignorance
When we behold the sapience of other primates
Sage orangutans and convivial bonobos
When we observe the dog who barks up the wrong tree
When we watch the file of ants plying their pheromone telegraphy
When we peer with our clever microscope at the unicellular alga
That propels itself with tiny whiptails
Toward the lifegiving light
Sans eyes sans taste sans nervous system
Even as strive mighty tree and scrawny sapling
While ciliated paramecium hastens to escape excess of heat
Itself a symbiotic composite with algae
And swinging single bacteria meet mate and exchange genetic material
And a single immunodeficiency virus
Little more than a strand of DNA
A single polymeric molecule vested in its fatty sheath
Knows to highjack the genetic composition of its host
We say know
But a tree no doubt knows not as I know
As I know not as tree
But I should respect though I will never fully know
The experience of tree
We say know
For we see and we say
We human primates
Our optics colored by sanguineous rosiness
Our vocals tuned by primate antiphony
The FOXP2 shared by monkey and mockingbird
Language not a prison house but a dwelling
Furnished with all possible thought
From whence to venture out
Out and into the one great poem
Let sing be finale of see
And what force gives the potassium ion
To join with the nitrate radical
Or disjoin from it
Who fathered and who mothered the boygoat
How does oxygen woo hydrogen
To birth the snowflake
Founded upon dust
Its objecthood composite
Unique as every object is unique
All is conscious and manifests will
And how much of my own experience do I myself experience
That I might dare to dismiss the experience
Of cousin primate goatboy dog alga animalcule bacteria virus ion or tree
And nature nurturing mother sometimes takes a mood to destroy
And hurricanes make landfall
And plagues sweep unruly to decimate populations
And innumerable snowflakes each a wonder of beauty
Collect and decorate the mighty mountain
Until one slips and loses its place
And avalanche obliterates the town beneath
All phenomena a flux of collection and dissipation
And we invest too in identity
Objectifying ourselves
Subjecting ourselves to that same fallacious definition
That we apply to other objects
That we extend so far and no farther
And within our inviolable perimeter our stout integrity
We are one thing sole solitary complete we say
And we enlist in the regiment of personality
And worse objectify others regardless of consent
But within and upon this conceptual body
In fact an overmuch composite unmasterable
Dwell innumerable organisms malign or amicable as the case may be
And our fatty sheath is constantly pierced by objects
Living seemingly unliving and cosmic
And in fact our multifarious consciousness extends beyond ourselves
And interpenetrates the larger consciousness
Neither oversoul nor undersoul
But simply the shared great soul
The one life within us and abroad
We know not to what extent
As we know not the final digit of pi
For outside and beyond space
Lies the space without extent
That nevertheless interpenetrates
The phenomenal flux
And from moment to moment
We play the part such as the social moment requires
As child parent sensei ephebe healer patient soldier criminal clown
Often several simultaneously
And make our contribution
Less a question of who we are
Nostalgic for some answer in multiple choice
As of playing our part well or badly
In the numerous repertoire

A note about we
Humans members of a biological taxon
A species like other species
As panthera tigris or chlamydomonas reinhardtii
Even unto culex quinquefasciatus may she find a world of peace
Driven by that will to life that is the motor of evolution
And endowed with unusual neurological anatomy and physiology
That enable discursive language
And thus the maintenance of both factual knowledge
And technical skill upon which our survival
And our great success as a species depend
Such that we can understand and respond to reasons
Can
And can reach understanding through conference with other humans
Thus acting as persons
That is as moral agents

More in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in philosophy
Is a banality and goes without saying
For many a philosopher would reduce the world
To a catalog of forces and particles
When of course there is more than E or M
The latter multiplied by a suspiciously regular C squared
A decadent age that conflates truth and information
Consigning the world to a menu or tabulation
Mind in column B and matter in column A
A death and B delusion
And their science which thrives upon measurement
However beneficial in theory
Ignores the transcendence of geometry of arithmetic
Arrogantly deeming them components of technology
A contraption contrived by primate ingenuity
At least they say an open question subject to further research
Maybe humans did invent mathematics
And would they then make adjustments to pi
Repair perhaps the hypotenuse
Or will they finally concede that there are entities
Not bound by space and time
And that among these let us not delay
Are moral facts
For this vaunted technology
Truly indispensable for human life
Can as well cure a suffering infant
As devise a weapon of mass destruction
While it advances ever and anon
The economy of better mousetraps
And they scoff how do you equate morality and pi
When everybody knows there’s no universal standard
As if measurement were things
Matter only mass and energy but joules
Regardless of the architecture of the thing
And the goodness of a thing merely the human reaction to it
The reaction of one little species
In one little biome
On one little planet
In one little solar system
In one little galaxy
In one little universe
The cowardly churls
The narrow provincials
The pathetic lazy cowardice of claiming the universe devoid of goodness
First I say universe is too small a word
And thus do I employ the word and concept world
Of all that is and obtains and happens
For in no universe nor in any interstice can it be the case
That the sum of seven and five
Is anything other than twelve
For mathematical facts do not belong to any universe
Nor in whatever space obtains between spaces
Even so in the greater cosmos can there be no place
Such as is depicted on Star Trek
In which whole planets foster but a single culture
Where it could be okay to torture small children for fun
I am more certain of the wrongness of inflicting gratuitous pain
Than in any proposition of science
Because value
Value inheres in the child
Value inheres in every person
Value inheres in everything good
In pleasure for example
That we hold the child to be precious as we certainly do
The contrary being the definition of monstrosity
Does not confer value upon the child
How we hold something does not give it value
That’s the word with which sci-tech cannot cope
With which our invisible hands cannot cope
Our arrogant little hands to seize control
Paradise paved
And oh what have we done to our green and pleasant earth
Where land emerges from the vasty seas
Where sprightly bats propel themselves in infinite obliques
Cutting and turning in the middle height
With rapidity to amaze
With intelligence and sensory apparatus
Utterly alien to the primate brain
I should respect though I will never fully know
The experience of bat
And behold the aerial dance incomparable
Beside the street lamps and above the trees
Before the plague of the white nose
And now they are many fewer
But is their diminishment an effect
Of the explosion of human habitations
Fungi have been around since early time
Who convert waste to nutrient
So maybe lovely bats but go the way of the world
But what of rocky toads
Representative of those vulnerables the amphibians
Brilliant deployers of toxic defense
Prey only for the hognose snake
At dusk you would see them
Near the creeks on the sidewalks amid the lawns
In the streets where they were sometimes flattened by cars
Of humid Jacksonville fragrant of salt marsh and factory
Mill for paper and mill for coffee
Estuary for the mothers and the larvae
But now they are many fewer
Receivers of greater toxicity
For those lawns thrive but poorly
Grass planted where trees should grow
And to green those patchy carpets demands
Generous application of weed ‘n feed
That leaches into the pools and eddies
Where tadpoles tumble upward to breathe
Possessed awhile of lungs and filtering gills both
And as they undergo interestingly their wonted metamorphosis
Monstrous deformity of limb and abdomen occurs
And early death
And science knows the loss of species after species
Through the arrogant dominion of one of them
Which has wreaked harm upon the darling planet
We don’t appreciate
We don’t register the value of things before our selfish selves
And imagine arrogant monsters that we are
That we make things valuable or not
As whim or greed elect
Pah
We are monstrously deformed
By poisons in the cultural environment
Now hear the truth
To appreciate is to experience to respect to bow in distinct humility
Before that which is truly precious
As a child
As a nurturing mother
As a green and pleasant earth
As a noble work of art
As a toad tree or bat
As the backbreaking work of gaining knowledge as a person as a species
As a smile of gratitude a nod of understanding
And there used to be two cultures in our universities
That obtained in uneasy coexistence
One concerned quite legitimately with the phenomena of nature
As knowledge for its own sake is a beautiful thing
And technology conducive to wellbeing is a needful thing
And the other with the something something of man
Self-described as a piece of work
And the one took an interest in phenomena
Primarily as a source of materials for tech
As a nitrate radical can feed a crop
Or blow up a federal building
Or a piece of flint can bring down the quarry
Or slash Achilles’ heel
And the other took an interest in something human
Primarily as a source of moral uplift
Beginning of course with one’s own culture
Regarded narrowly provincially as familiar and hence superior
But see universities had begun with the other
That is with man self-described as center and purpose
A little less than the angels
Until the whole world was subsumed within the one
And science became the only game in town
For the humanities had never
In the absence of alternative discovered themselves
Nor freed themselves from the hierarchies of priest and king
Of self-designated leader rousing disciples to murder and hate
With their films their broadsides their radio broadcasts
And I tell you now
That while scientists try to understand phenomena
Somebody must try to understand value

A decadent age with invisible hands
That manipulate understanding
Because powerless to control the world
Even merely the phenomenal part of it
That unstoppable unmanageable flux
That part of it which we can see
Who grasp for profit that trickles like water
Who try to capture the bubble reputation
Who seek dominion over earth and sky
And market politics like mousetraps tasty snacks or erectile dysfunction
And know the price of everything and the value of nothing
Battens upon the demagoguery
Of Western values family values party values
Values distributed across identity groups
And by the accident of birth the chance operation of privilege
And defend our values as we defend our tribe
You know like loyalty
Like faith to which we remain dedicated
Despite all evidence to the contrary
Despite manifest truth
As distinct from the revealed variety
Committing to belief without committing to truth
For the baffling variety of objects seems mysterious
And wouldn’t it be great if some omnipotent creator
Some invisible emperor
Lined it up and made it march all one way
Conveniently the way that grants dominion to the humans
Or to a sub-sub-subset of humans
How is it manifestly the case that the fluxuous welter
Should resolve itself topically and temporarily
Into the ephemeral stability of a mailbox post
That vanishes into the vertiginous vortex
Eventually to rot and fall
Or the suspicious regularity of the speed of light
But the seeming mystery is lightened when we realize
That all we see is but a glorious passing show
Albeit comprising certain merciful regularities
The view ahead pitiably limited
And little we see on the periphery however vibrant
And little we see in time of what’s behind
And nothing of what’s ahead
And we can momentarily arrest the ceaseless motion of objects
By exercise of will
To analyze and to integrate into subjectivity
And we can confer and thereby augment our seemingly sole selves
And we can lift the painted veil though law and custom forbid it
And imagine the square root of negative one
And discover a few of the digits of pi
Their transcendent facticity
And discover the one life the one poem
The facticity of love eternal love transcendent
And if we are to understand value
We must simply admit its simplicity
Its irreducible simplicity
That value is the goodness of a thing
Irrespective of anybody’s estimation of it
Irrespective of the subject’s horror of the mosquito’s bite
For the mosquito makes its contribution
When it makes its withdrawal
And thus the word and concept of value
Remain indispensable for understanding moral properties
For there are facts in the world that give us reasons
And we should do what we have strongest reasons to do
Should
Value we can confidently comprehend
And reasons too we can confidently derive from facts
Recognizing that a reason goes only so far
And can be superceded by stronger reasons
As the pain of the larger malady
Supercedes that of the surgical procedure
Thus in theory we respond conveniently to reasons
Decisive action determined by decisive reasons
All things considered
But therein lies the practical difficulty
Daunting and intimidating
For ignorance is infinite for any one of us
And even the knowledge backbreakingly collected
Throughout human history
Handed down from elder to youth
Laid up in brick and stone and databases deep
All too brief all too peremptory
Is as a leaf of grass in a galaxy
Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras
But we must take action
And we must know like or not
Every infant child a Faust
We must strive and in striving thrive
Must
And hence we stumble in darkness
But not alone do we scrabble along the stony path
For human social beings are companions
Helpers meet for one another
Who listen and speak decide and act
We can confer
Can
And if we begin with such facts as we verify together
As for example of the preciousness of a child
If we sincerely express our drives our aspirations
Such as we can discover them
If above all we respect the dignity of each person
The inherent value of our responsiveness to reasons and to ourselves
And much else besides
We find what will suffice
For the world gives us plenty
Plenty and overmuch
Unlike the gods
Those purblind doomsters
Those skinflint managers
Those greedy entrepreneurs
Who dwell beyond the flaming ramparts of the world
Across their royal rainbow bridge that only they may traverse
That invisible bridge of many unseeable colors
Equipped with their plagues and lightning bolts
Theatrical costumes made of pathogen and weather
Whose divine command gives no reason to comply
Ultimata perhaps but never reasons
Suspiciously delivered by the holy fathers
The ordained and tonsured
The definition of hierarchy
Guardians of the holy scriptures
Stewards of the prophecies
Issued by the ancient and the more ancient fathers
Which they alone transmit with glozing gloss
The ugly jargon the flicking tongues
And insincere apologetic
But without check or monitor
Seeking dominion not truth
Custodians of the sacred tablets
In the sanctum sanctorum under lock and key
With their canons and their canons and their canons
The anointed ones with their esoteric formulations
The priestly caste clad in vestment rich
Encrusted with jewels
Surrounded by ecclesiastical plate of purest gold
Who intone through the nose with hieratic gesture and arcane cant
Noses aimed heavenward to look down upon earth and its people
From the high pulpit
And say
Woe ye who embrace chimeric phantasmata
Heresiarchs who prostrate yourselves before foreign idols
Upon the planey earth sealed beneath the unyielding firmament
As learning a language or wearing a haircut or donning unauthorized garb
Watching a movie hearing a play reading a book
Granting an iota’s worth of worth to this worthless world
Concomitant with the flesh and the devil
Descending into carnal pleasure and morose delectation
Thou shalt not neglect to reck the rod and dread the hammer
And if you comply
An eternity of bliss
Of knee worship at the foot of the empyreal throne
Head bowed and hands pressed together
Thus prevented from grasping or holding or lifting or seeing
Behind the big beautiful golden wall
With its pearly gates
Among the gown’d and wingèd servants with their lyres and trumpets
A saint administering the guest list exclusionary with plumy inscription
Atop the happy fluffy clouds
Which to grubby mankind appear transient
While angels insubstantial chamberlains scurry hither and thither
But they’ll dislocate your hip if they get the chance
For men refuse to confess the secret plan divine
And if you err but once
And come the think of it you erred even before your birth
Even before your temporal conception
You are lost forever
You are lost irrevocably
Powerlessly
Impotently
Therefore repent and mortify the flesh
Though good works availeth not
Lest vultures come out and peck at your liver
While imps poke you with forks
Flung about in whirlwind with your salacious lover
And the angry gods dangle you as a spider over flame
And you roast unconsumed forever
In a special place hollowed out for miserable thee
And while on earth that vale of tears that shady holding cell
You await the execution of sentence
The gods may or may not hear your groans
And attend somewhat to your supplications
Probably not
Meanwhile back in the real world
The facts of suffering or bliss
And the infinite states that lie between
And nothing is ever merely a state
But always a process that happens happens happens
In this phenomenal part of the greater world of real things
Give reasons to act or believe or hold an attitude
And in the fluxuous world certain regularities resolve into facts
As of evapotranspiration that builds the clouds
Fluffy streaky gray or absent hugging the spherey planet
But always changing always moving
As of being and situation and event
And some of these facts give reasons
And humans can know facts and thence understand reasons
And humans can control themselves to some extent perhaps pitiably limited
Can
And thus qualify as persons as moral agents
And that persons can know and understand and respond is good
Merely can
Sufficient to validate good
And thus value inheres in every person
Every person is good
Regardless of the degree of their depravity
The value of personhood absolutely free of contingency
As number and circle are free of contingency
Of space time condition act or evaluation of others
Notably free from the evaluations of other humans and indeed of oneself
And we name the inherent value of each person
For we humans see and say and in our saying name
Dignity
And we sing in joy when we encounter the goodness of the world
When we experience the value of beauty in art and nature
The truth of science and of the metaphysics of consciousness
The goodness of moral agency
The antics of the three year-old rascal
The beautiful body of the beloved
The sublime act of putting another before one
Let peace be upon us
For we can respect the dignity of personhood
We can
For we can love one another
We can
For we can reach understanding together
We can
And thus peace is within our grasp
But it’s a smart idea to confer with somebody else
Before you designate yourself a doctrine

Some folks get their kicks on Interstate 285
Fast and furious they display their power
Demanding attention from the motorists
And from the nearby residents
With automotive noise aggression and speed
Mere tokens and not the object of the game
Which is to force notice regardless of consent
That is to annoy
To defeat tranquility
And by victory in speed and sound
To gain recognition
To be seen and heard
To achieve the victory of attention
Say what cause Muse
This craving for the notice of others
What cause could there be
Save the primate need for social belonging
Belonging a necessity for members of a social species
To the band to the clan to the tribe
The ritual of our initiation
The badge of our affiliation
The strange oaths of our platoon
The shibboleths of our narrow province
The colors of our gang
The insignia of our regiment
The embroidered emblem
The old school tie
Striving to increase our status our prestige
In short to impress and by such impression to belong
Bitter self-defeat when we belong already
But belonging fails to satisfy
In a world that values winners conquerors success and size
And how sadly we err when we use value as a verb
And we demand that others praise us as most high
Blaspheming the value that inheres in all persons
And seek to bolster our manifest inadequacy
So we imagine erring
For we belong like or no
Once having survived the night of our birth
We are not foals who stand within minutes
Upon spindly but sufficient legs
We humans must fall and we must again fall
And others have been there to assist us
Else we would not have survived the night
And the tantalizing goal of success
Merely the end of the game
The instant of cessation
A contingent destination
And the vaunted superiority of size
Judge me by my size do you
Merely a circumstance of sexual dimorphism
In vast variation past the petrified composite binary
Scarcely worthy of mention
Godfather of hierarchies
And this erring imagining like all imagining
Takes its place in the one great poem
But forget about satisfaction in the overmuch flux
For we have learned that success
Is a game of skill not merely of chance
And humans depend for their lives upon technical skill
Proficiency with flint and fabric
Unfolding the horizon of modality and of the future tense
Responsiveness to reasons
The sensei and the ephebe
For in reality the social fabric serves not least to nourish
Knowledge in science technology and the arts
And self-awareness self-respect self-esteem
All are estimable not least since humans require each other
And should notice and attend to one another
Should
For we cannot conceive of our sole selves
Except in the company of others
Each a value supreme
None a superior species
And certainly achievements intellectual artistic and athletic
Prove themselves worthy of esteem
But only when we direct them toward general wellbeing
Even as we respect and esteem personhood
For humans belong to a mere species
One among innumerably many
Tigers and algae mosquitos and trees
Albeit a social one its sociality mediated by discursive language
This an evolutionary bequest like any other
No more or less impressive than the liver or a wisdom tooth
Those complex appurtenances
But language in turn bequeathed the gift of counterfactuality
As that which has not happened yet
As that which cannot happen and yet we say it does
Willingly suspending disbelief
Because we can
Illuminating fiction
As the mouse taller than its pet dog
Who resides in suburban dwelling and drives a car
Modestly like a suburbanite
But the mouse can talk while the dog cannot
And they negotiate the challenges
As of love friendship and mechanical failure
So that we recognize ourselves in the monstrous talking mouse
And the counterfactually not-yet future or never-could-be fiction
Unfolds the horizon of decision and consent
As it does let us concede of deception and threat
What we will do
How we will act
The past and the present
They are as they are
And but little we see even of them
But the future is not factual
Not yet
The future is entirely suppositious
On this spherey earth fluxuous part of the greater world
As indeed the past and present mostly are
When we puff up with self-assurance
Self-assurance a far cry from legitimate self-esteem
Which rightly derives from responsiveness to reasons
For given the universality of ignorance
We can give assurances
But we adopt at our peril the posture of certainty
The facts are there but how do we acquire them
Thus we nevertheless enjoy the power
To imagine what the future will be
Get ready to do and to act in readiness
As we can imagine the square root of negative one
And hence our complicated neural apparatus
Gives the gift of imagination
And thence the one great poem
In other words the experience of the sublime
In other words the cleansing of the doors of perception
In other words the improvement of sensual enjoyment
And tense awesome though it be
Gives way to exquisite modality
And especially the noble modal auxiliary should
Should
We have responsibilities to attend to
Not mere necessities
As what goes up must come down
Though that is more a regularity than a necessity
And somewhat of vertical tyranny
Or better seven plus five must equal twelve
Must
For transcendent facts must be true
As goes without saying of necessity
But necessity by no means exhausts
The modality of existence situation and event
In the phenomenal part of the world
Which by its very flux demands that
Should
Necessitates
Can
Should must can
And thankfully at the time of our birth
The time of our utter forgetful helplessness
Some benevolent mammal took the responsibility
Meaning well as many are wont to do
To do what it took
To do what they should do
To keep us alive through the night
And we can shirk ungrateful and drive like a maniac
And display our power
Thereby displaying our relative impotence
On the public thoroughfare
And rage against the neglect of our uniqueness
And pester like mosquito without nourishing offspring
And somebody’s always faster
And somebody’s always louder
And somebody’s fury is always more merciless
Or we can acknowledge the fact
As we should acknowledge the fact
That others are trying to reach a destination
On the public thoroughfare
Though all should know it’s about the journey not the goal
That they too negotiate the challenging path winding and changeable
We have responsibilities to them as to ourselves
And the fragile skill of driving a car
Surely an unjust requirement in a civilized society
O friends let me take a train
Requires the utmost attention
And thus we have little attention to spare
For those fast and furious antics
The more blameworthy if you’re trying to win money
Can we please retire that tiresome word
But we have reasons to care for you
To esteem you
For you too can respond to reasons
And that’s a good thing
There is value in this responsiveness
However fragile and sporadic
You can do the right thing the good thing
Can
Though people often don’t
But they can if given the opportunity
To know the facts
And to understand the reasons that derive from facts
Thus we could all use a sensei
One devoted to being useful
One devoted to nourishing intellectual offspring
An expert with whom to confer
To devise exercises
To devise salutary routines
To devise a didactic poem
And we have reasons to sympathize
Even unto your very incapacity
O driver of the Dodge
Thou artful dodger
Admirable in thine artistry
Though not in thy will to defeat
To deprive of consent
For our urges our drives
Especially our drive for recognition
To be well seen and well heard and well liked
Submit but unwillingly
To our meager capacity for self control
And indeed how can we justly divide our self
Into the controlling and the controlled
When we may with more justice
Acknowledge the value of each person
Starting with ourselves
Respect the dignity of each person
Starting with ourselves
Esteem the surprising capacities of each person
Starting with ourselves
Whence thy fury O fast and furious
For fury is anger and anger a fight response
Welling up from our mammalian past
Curse of the males of the species
Though certainly females oft vent fury of their own
Often manifest male and female alike the urge to punish
That is to cause suffering as retribution for alleged misdeed
And such cause is never justified
But what misdeed have your neighbors done you
Save perhaps to withhold attention
When as a child you sorely needed it
And you lash out like tiger
And seek to induce fear
Misdeed most heinous
For no crime is worse than to cause a person
To fear for the integrity of their fragile permeable body
Deprive of consent by the inducement of fear
Dignity violated by the inducement of fear
Noisome noise while we try to give the baby to rest
Rascally child resistant to rest in their striving
And oft we carry out swaggering threat
Or mistake most melancholy
Cause pain and death by misadventure
In an arrogant instant of miscalculation
Primate absorption with appearance and reception
Can induce forgetful inattention
Can indeed prevent our ever knowing
The facts of the case
Especially the fact of our necessarily social situation
Our lovely interdependence
Here on the ground where we stand and fall
Facts which give us to understand that which we should do
Should
Let us wish that our furious driver might grow and learn
That is let us send good-vibe vectors in their direction
That they might achieve adulthood and learn a little patience
To situate the slings and arrows
That is the wounds we all incur especially as children
In the story of one’s own becoming
The care of others and care for others
Resolving our brittleness into resilience
We can help each other understand the facts
We can shed a little light
And we should help each other
We should care for one another
Love is not too strong a word nor high a bar
And as we love let us adopt humility
Easy enough for a being of immense capability and value
And concede our own ignorance
Even as we strive against it
And let us move with deliberation
Before judging the minds of others
Our actions expose the content of our character
And our words express to some extent our attitudes
Though some admittedly cultivate skill in deception
But let us not race to conclude
How another is or where they come from
We who know not ourselves
Let us not ignore the obscurity of our drives
Let us not ignore the demands often unconscious of will
Let us not ignore the attractiveness even of death
The rich desire to feel death’s cool embrace
Not only in the dark hour of the shadow
But in the firelight of youth’s temerity
The glamor of seeing how close you can come
With dull opiate or with the Dodge
Or the ascent to vertiginous height
As guzzling vodka while teetering on the rail
On the twentieth balcony at Daytona Beach
The ecstasy of body thrown asunder
Its perimeter dissipated utterly
The allure of the ultimate prohibition
And in certain frames of mind our own death
Seems not so much
But how dare we allow such passing
Through irresponsible challenge or culpable inattention
Even of the ephemeral intersection
How dare we subject the world to such loss
When somebody cares
Our little family cares
Our little universe cares

But what is death but a momentary texture
The instant of a garment flung aside
As by nixie in the motel pool
In the flux of glorious sensation
When wormlike we emerge and die
Cast off for good the regimental regalia of personality
Extend our participation in the flux
Of dissipation and collection
In another key another mode
The mixed substance of salt dissolved in ocean
That flux interpenetrated in any case with spacetimelessness
No more to trouble ourselves with the fretful antinomies illusory
As body and soul within and without time and timelessness being and unbeing we and they I and it
Driven hence by the ministry of water
Of which virtue the flower is engendered
That furthermore dissolves substance nearest to a universal solvent
And light that suffuses
The transit of striving energy
In the fluxuous part of the world
The experience of ion alga rodent and redtail hawk
And how much sensation does say a cubic meter
Of seemingly dead matter experience
Well infinite it would seem
And what difference does it make
If even infinite orders of infinity obtain
Considering the possibility of peace
Interpenetrating the overmuch flux
Forget about this non-event non-state of death
When life that is to say motion
Energy passing futurity memory
Movement horizontal vertical infinitely oblique
Ascent descent lateral curving
Crashing careening creeping trudging leaping gesturing
Sneaking cavorting consuming digesting excreting
Photosynthesizing depredating grazing fermenting
Dawdling dithering dallying dilating descending
Mitosis and pitching woo
The hands that grasp the feet that dance
The flagella that drive toward light
Awake and at rest
Striving for nourishment
The qualities of qualities of qualities
Happens happens happens
The composite body no more than a chalk outline
On the scintillating pavement
Soon to wash away with rain
A hard but soluble composite stone
Like a pillar of salt
A petrifaction of that which
Happens happens happens
Each object a passing node in the flux
An ephemeral intersection of ever-wavering vectors
A mineral composite a congeries of other objects
A faceted cubic salt crystal
And all objecthood stands in relation to all subjects
Is a mountain an object
Is an ocean
There’s only one ocean you know on this spherey earth
Topologically speaking
Though there are many coasts
Whereupon the many may behold the serene horizon
The infinite subjects even on our tiny darling passing node of a planet
The darling spherey planet that has nourished us mother that she is
Daughter of infinite grandmothers
Tracing back to the great mother before nature
Outside alongside interpenetrative
Each subject is the center of its universe
A solitary confinement delusional
That is an apex a vertex a point without dimension
That is experience converges on a point of ephemeral intersection
From which all matter recedes shifting red
Pitiably brief in duration
Itself shifting unpredictably
Its indurance a theoretical construct
That our variable experience of time explodes
As sequence duration memory fugitivity frequency and ennui
Rush rest spin dally dawdle dilate
Hurry up and wait
Tempo temporal contemporary extempore contretemps temporize
And scansion arbitrary regulation of rhythm
Subject to surveillance from royal academy and systemic analysis
But the art resides in variation
Thus time a suppositious matter of definition
In ever-fluxous contexts situations circumstances
A glorious release into counterfactuality
Or a fallacious adamantine chain
When we suppose time and space sine qua non
But perception interprets sensation as it flows
Gives it angle attitude aspiration
Hence the Doppler effect a truthful registry
Of an object’s receding
The frequency stable on the moving train
But perceptual pitch detecting motion
To the hearer beside the tracks
All life interacts with life
And let us disclaim together or proclaim
Life mind poem world consciousness organic unity of subject and object
Gift of metaphor meant to keep a lid
On an infinite field of ceaseless change
To render it sufficiently intelligible for us to confer
Too vast to be comprehended
Too dynamic to be defined
Our confined little universe probably but one entry
In an endless dance of musical chairs
As a spume of universes drifts and dissipates
Thus to open that experience before change
All is real
Even the unreal is real
As the goatboy is real
As Tigger is a real tiger
Albeit a toy and an act of fiction
And all products of the imagination are real
As are the assuredly real objects of perception
Product and object more aptly process and event
And surely perception may be hoodwinked
By illusion delusion and deception
Nevertheless real objects obtain
And don’t perform the pompous pyrrhonist charade
You wouldn’t have survived the night of your birth
If people didn’t know stuff
If people couldn’t know stuff
This is a hand
This is another hand
You can sustain the skeptic’s attitude only so far
Or miss out on lunch
Never mind where the hand begins or ends
But the smothering infinity of ignorance
Too is real
A truth but a theoretic truth
When we know enough
To keep the precious babe alive
Through the dark night of its birth
Real things give us what suffices
So long as we learn and teach
Sharing experience which is real
As many real things are wont to do
In pheromone or discourse or mineral nudge
And thus the hominid species enjoy the privilege
Of verbal interaction
Wellspring of understanding
And earnest of the one great poem
The bountiful invitation to confer
For all experience participates in the flux
Not a dome of many-colored glass
Dividing the world in two
But a bioluminescent ocean of infinite wavelengths
Perceptually variable as objects advance or recede
Collect and dissipate
Mingle and separate
That is to say joins in the dance of life
That is to say manifest the one great life
And merciful regularities obtain even in the flux
Such as gravitation dimple in spacetime
Such as the creative drive that aims for equilibrium
Such as that sublime and blessed mood
That grants apprehension of the deep interfusion
On those brief occasions when like little mosquito larvae
Freed momentarily from the regimentation of personality
We tumble upward and breathe the air above our submergence in ego
And thus all must attest I can’t be satisfied
For each subject big or small experiences the world
And drinks it in and hungers for the boon of pleasure
Long may it last
But it lasts but an eyeblink
For the being encased in its notional stout perimeter
But the transcendent world interpenetrates the phenomenal one
And in our fluctuating experience we glimpse transcendence
In facts mathematical and let it be said moral
And how much more might remain unseen
Invisible to gelatinous primate neurology
O living thing thou cell organelle ion
May joy be thy portion for thou art worthy to enjoy peace
To know the rich peace of your taxon one division among many
For the advent of peace shocks to wakefulness
And awareness dawns of the goodness of things
For things are good before we are aware
The oneness before division
Before genus or species
Peace beyond extent
Beyond universes unknown
The innumerable souls
Each a participant in the one life
The fictional the historical the living and the dead
Those we have known and those we only know about
The holy communion of family and friends
Surely we will mourn those who pass and that which passes
For what we have seen we now see no more
No more to feel the lover’s or the mother’s touch
Sorrow not soon soothed
Even the passing of the beloved child
Irreplaceable irrepressible too briefly in our care
Of all losses the hardest
And we are as children in our incapacity
But as children too in our surprising capacities
Only the living suffer sorrow and the disturbance of joy
And hence death is not to be taken lightly
Of a guildsman or a snowflake
Of the leaves that lovely fall
And drift wavering to the ground
Endearing part of the unknown whole
And we have good reasons to grieve their passing
And address the shadow of death with indignation
But the greater world recognizes neither beginning nor ending
And we thus surrender to pleasure while it lasts but briefly
The beloved child’s surprising capacities and endearing incapacities
And the enduring good like perfect circle
The sweetness of reconciliation when we have fallen into conflict
The beauty of truth
The truth of beauty
A universe in a grain of sand
And eternity in an instant

The world overflows with sensory delight
Cold indeed are they who shun
The joys of physical plenitude
That passes before us in glorious show
The chevrons on the wings of blackbirds
How they vary from ocher to deepest red
Sometimes rimmed with gold
The cardinal pair the scarlet and the pale
Colors derived like the pink of spoonbills
From their diet
The tormented feedback cadenza in Machine Gun
Cymbal and sistrum and pipe
The shop brimful of ladders buckets and pliers
Implements that make joyful noise when upset
Orchids their complicated anatomy
Cuttlefish their psychedelic lightshows
Hummingbirds their iridescent hover
Sound word sentence image figure
Rhythm melody harmony timbre pitch
Line color shape scope gestural application of lively paint
That give us to recognize the transcendent facticity of the one great poem
Oak hickory sweetgum tulip-tree pine
Palm banyan magnolia cherry beech
Dogwood in spring like lace sprinkled upon the forest
Maple in autumn the cold fluid flame
Pansies marigolds black-eyed Susans
Mid-May’s eldest child the coming musk rose
Full of dewy wine
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves
Clover the small the medium and the large
Coral the flat the round and the branching
Predator prey arboreal swinger nocturnal sophisticate
A nighttime flight with view of city lights
And the lights too of sparsely populated regions
Portly beavers and sleek otters
Phlegmatic sloths and resolute koalas
Spider monkeys and lanky gibbons
That brachiate with the ease of Sunday strollers ambling in the park
Cheetahs with jingle bells on their collars
Herds flocks pods packs schools
Huge flights of birds how they turn as one
Huge shoals of fish how they mingle and separate
Their silvery surfaces reflecting light
Clown-fish remora wrasse and goby
Fishy cleanup crews for submarine crime scenes and office parks
Reptiles the confident cylindrical and the forehanded domed
The ritual artistry of rolling a joint
The fragrant curl of smoke when the joint is lit
The goatleg boy dragging with rope the head of a beast
Terrestrial crustaceans
Aquatic mammals
Arboreal crabs
Heavenly hosts of choral voices
A draft of vintage and purple-stainèd mouth
Nature in her moods contemplative and intoxicating and awe-inspiring
The rites mysterious of connubial love
The stately improvisation of the mockingbird
Not mocking at all but respectful of its sources
Which it weaves in intricate synthesis
With inclusion of brilliant original material
How like that other Bird Charlie Parker virtuoso incomparable
To say nothing of his compatriots on drums bass piano and trumpet
How like the incomparable ballet of the bats
And chimney swifts batlike in their aerial agility
Those substances attractive to bug bird and beast alike
Those substances filth to humans
But to other creatures nourishment and nursery
Sometime approximation of the sphere
The green thorn that draws blood red as the rose
The pebbly desert mountain
The cresting wave crashing on the pumice
The young woman who slips her garment off
Under the water of the motel pool
Heia jaheia heia jaheia
Wallala la la la leia jahei
The butter yellow butterfly that browses among the flowers
Oblivious of its truncated right wing
The song of love
The song of joy
The song of sorrow
The massive crowd singing along with a superstar
The wild three-year-old her curly red hair
How she kissed the palm of the hand that stroked her curly red hair
The angry and ecstatic grace of Nina Simone
The clouds wispy or accumulating or ripply or streaky or gray
Their constant metamorphosis
The sunlight that stabs like dagger or drips like honey
The slender crescent moon flirtatious in misty clouds
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
Cows who come when you call them
Fishes in ponds who gather expecting a meal
The mosaic floor depicting the pilgrims of the Canterbury Tales
The mosaic floor depicting the Songs of Innocence and Experience
The mosaic floor depicting the dolphin-torn the gong-tormented sea
Toshiro Mifune taking arrows in Throne of Blood
Brad Pitt extracting arrows in Troy
The bliss of The Swing
The torture of The Raft of the Medusa
Chile relleno at Jalisco
The sunlight alongside the Fighting Temeraire
Impossible upon earthly frame but perfect in pictorial ocean
The city skyline that suddenly and unexpectedly rears
The flowers that grow in ditches in southeast Texas
The jetty at Fernandina the limpets urchins and anemones
The slubby skin of a torpedo that shocks when you stroke it
Marilyn Monroe’s sculptural nudity Venus aborning
The mosquito’s abdomen engorged with blood
The mad scientist’s assemblage of terrifying apparatus
The conspirators’ whispered colloquy by light of stumpy candle
The astronaut’s journey through realms of light
After having defeated the insane computer
The flaky crust of a Cuban sandwich
Hector’s farewell to Andromache how his infant son is frighted by his plume
Athletes their beautiful movements reminiscent of the hunt
The hunter’s making peace with the quarry
For the quarry lives and the forest lives and lives too the course of the arrow
Cole Porter as rendered by the Comedian Harmonists
The intoxicating incense at high mass
A bowl of chili and a PBR at Moe’s and Joe’s
The busy metropolis beneath a rotting log
Stevie Wonder opening with Superstition before the Rolling Stones
The swoop of power lines on A1A at Jupiter Beach
Crazy Cuban flute despite the effort to jam the signal
The infant’s face upon the first experience with a spoon
The woman in the kimono on W 27th street
Her joyful expression meeting the taxicab
Her radiant skin when she removes the kimono
Guinness after Guinness while discussing The Seventh Seal
The old man’s whistling while he inspects the grounds
The stone pulled from a river smooth but not lacking in texture
The sublime tactic of raising the glamorous image of Bacchus and his pards
Only to dismiss it
The second movement of the seventh symphony
All the songs
tuffm I zimbra
All the plays
All the pictures
All the dolmens petroglyphs and cave paintings
Truthful earnest of the one great poem
A cheap American lager after a year on the wagon
The enormous orange tabby lustrous and judicious
How he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation
Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock at Hiroshima
The entrance to the Paris Métro like a fragrant curl of smoke
The voice trained in luxurious vibrato
The untrained voice especially that of children
Embromeom col pmisti effrent
Birds of undistinguished plumage
Animals of mouse color and of hyena color
Slow moving like Sysiphus the scarab
Who drives the emblem of the unconquered sun
Ay the very turd itself
Approximation of the sphere
Expressive of the will to express
Etta James busting it out her arm in a sling
The curving road beside the Columbia river
And a bighorn sheep that trots alongside it
And the mountains that slide past each other
Like the flat panels of stage scenery
And the theatrical effects of light in the gathering storm
A domelike wave of many-colored fluid
And the salt marsh its mingled scent
Of tomb gas and primitive placenta
His majesty the sun his glorious rising and retiring
Her majesty the moon changeable serene enigmatic

Naturally annoyances obtain
The bugbite’s itch
Vertigo in the recovery room
The fuzzy drone of two- or four-stroke engine
Wound out to the uttermost
Discomfort pain yea even unto suffering dire
O my beloved humans
Endorse pleasure
Surrender unto pleasure
Build skill in sensual enjoyment
Elicit laughter from a child
By pulling a goofy face and making a silly sound
For a person’s mind strives to express itself
Expression feels good feeling good and feeling good to sing
As the tree strives upward toward the light
As the nearly sphere is driven by the scarab
A happening a work in progress
Poetic frenzy a kind of nourishment
That expresses like milk a community a species
Its understandings inclinations follies and fears
In sprightly song and lively paint
Calling to the past demanding the future
We bear witness to the world and its wonders
The wonders of the fluxuous phenomena
And those wonders too never bottled up in phenomena
Those transcendent facts moral and mathematical
And who knows what else
Though the phenomenal part of the world
Offers wonders inexhaustibly aplenty
Products of infinite striving
Much and overmuch crowding in upon us
How the green lizard sometimes brown extends a red pennant
From his white throat and bobs acutely the head
Expressing the drive of sexual dimorphism
The will to life of the mantis fierce predator
Mariticide to nourish the offspring
Virgin mother if no husband comes available
The butterfly’s colorful panoply
The katydid’s droning ka zikka zik
The near-instantaneous chemical reactions in the cochlea
That permit the discrimination of intoxicating pitch
The low the midrange and the high
The harried parenthood of the avian nation
Nest-builders incubators retrievers of nutriment
The blustering displays of beasts and fowls and flowers
Who might envy the serenity
Of sponge or jellyfish or horizon or moon
When I inform you that from early childhood
I have been enamored of prismatic corneal effects
Of the ravishing juxtaposition of a major triad with the minor
Of the fragrance of combustion
Of the textures of bark river-rock and exoskeleton
Of the flavors of foods the sweet the salty and the hot
Don’t tell me I forgot umami
You pedantic hall monitor
For you are reading for your pleasure
In this my dithyramb
Not an exhaustive survey
Though it may seem exhausting in the event
And you might want to open a tab to Wikipedia
But a single hadron in the galaxy of the one great poem
And you too emplace them there
A single poem cannot be great
Since no object is truly single
No work of human hands is of itself great
Although Machine Gun and the Ode to a Nightingale and Bacchus and Ariadne and the second movement
Are in fact pretty great
Together they overwhelm
As the world
Merely the phenomenal part of the world
Overwhelms with its overmuchness
But all participate in greatness
Indeed their very modesty can stand as virtue
In this overmuch of variegated world
Witness the refreshing triviality
Of Music Man and Mikado
Though their trivial intent does not excuse insensitivity
Sensitivity to feeling the highest virtue of art
Nor can a work be chastised as overexposed
Afterlife not of its own choosing
The Brahms e-flat major intermezzo is a warhorse
But who can resist even on the thousandth hearing
Such a melancholy lullaby
As lullabies are melancholy
The weary mother urging the babe
Who restless resists blissful rest
The overwhelming sorrow
Of its ominous modulation to the minor
Some of the selfsame cadences of the magisterial Requiem
Now the Coventry Carol
Also a warhorse also a lullabye
Begins in the minor but ends in a Picardy cadence
Sonic emblem of hope
Bathetic uplift
For hope is not the cardinal virtue it’s made out to be
Surely we hope for the newborn that it’s life will turn out well
But we must know albeit with rue that everything that stands
Or rests blissfully in manger or crib
Or bawling resists blissful rest
Takes a few halting first steps
Utters a few lisping first syllables
And tests with transgression the normative limits
Falls
And again falls
And must fall again
And bear witness especially to our joys and our pains
To our pains most especially
That assert themselves with distinct preeminence
And bruit their grievance
And we palliate with hopeful platitude
Decorative denial
They are not gone those we love we say
For they dwell forever in our heart
While in fact they also dwell beyond forever
Before time
Beyond the regiment of personality
The straitened condition of identity
That stony composite of objecthood
And we who live attempt deliberate forgetfulness
The anodyne metaphor
Aggrandizing the busy motor
Of the sanguineous humor
But in unexpected eventuality by luck or skill
The cry of pain beautifies and beatifies
The pain that gave it cause
The cry of pain transmuted into song
I cannot bear it and yet I live we cry
Oh to flee the weariness the fever and the fret
Away away we cry
For I will take flight
Upon iridescent wings
Such as nature never knew
Whither we know not
Beyond the perilous demesne of grumbling elves
Beyond the grim heroism of ignorant arms intoxicated with honor
Beyond the sighing horniness of healthy youth and plump
Beyond the overmany dissatisfactions that gnaw the flesh
And having soared to the pinnacle
Descend but half a step
And the sorrow of a thousand thousand years
Precipitates in a torrent of tears
A fragment of which might linger in the eye
To transfigure the broken world
In a regress of refraction
And those who yearn for a life of sensation
Should open their eyes
Or at least enjoy the show of the half closed
All is sensation
Clamorous emesis in the crowded recovery room
Gazing in awe at the bighorn sheep
Drinking in the vision of the beautiful companion
As she doffs the kimono
But all is not all
And nothing is all or nothing
Memory so slight so diagrammatic
And yet the kids pursue their projects
Chivalric architectural scientific in the yard
The pavement marshals scintillating points
And I in joy in lust in drunkenness in concentration in nakedness in compulsion I
In expressive delirium
Poetic frenzy
Do I expose myself
Well then I expose myself
I am large no vestment contains me

How delightful are the old warhorses
Satisfaction Magic Flute Sgt Pepper
Tales from the Vienna Woods
Its delicate zither so evocative of a complex culture
The accelerando before and the slight lag after
The second beat of each measure
If properly performed
But that piece was composed
Not for all subjects of the Austrian Empire
Of its complex culture or rather cultures
Which know no stout perimeter
But are permeable and fluxuous
But only for the members of the upper classes
Who live behind big beautiful walls
Who alone enjoy access to sybaritic pleasure
All the artworks we know come from humans alas
Heia jaheia from an antisemite
Lapis Lazuli a tour de force
And an otherwise brisk beautiful poem
With an ugly slur or two
Or robust waltzes from a servant of the rich
Himself arrived to plenteous wealth
Scion of wealthy composers’ family
And nobody should be that rich
And how rich were the employers
Nobody should indulge in foie gras champagne silver services
Crystal chandeliers glittering jewels gorgeous brocades powdered bosoms
While anywhere in the empire a child misses a meal
All roads may lead to Rome
But the road goes both ways
The technical means exist to feed the hungry
Even if we provisionally accept
That the fat years must be regulated to feed the lean
But who does the regulating
Who holds the key
Who bears the sword terrible and swift
And the rod of empire extends the technology of administration
And the emperor is but the chief atop a chain of command
A systemic mechanism abstract and impersonal
And accountable to nobody
Pilate at his ablution
Not to the chamberlains at court
Not to the generals in the field
Not to the officers at every crossroads
All of whom transmit the power of the godking
Not a person but a systemic function
Surrendering personhood to system
And colonizing the personhood of persons
By means of the power to command and control human bodies
To till a field
To build a wall
To gestate a fetus
To staff the workforce
Power transmitted and not merely concentrated
So that persons with the capacity to understand which is all of us
And therefore the capacity to consent which is all of us
Are converted into machinery
With the emperor holding the ignition key
But there’s no stopping an assemblage that rolls like a second nature
And so many empires for so long around the spherey globe
Until billionaires grew more powerful than a nation state
Empire still stands still extends its sway
With plutocrats now as the emperor
Who inherited the godlike scepter
Talking to you Musk you Bezos you Zuckerberg
May you die of shame
And alas to you Jagger and Jay Z and Swift
Noteworthy artists otherwise
Servants arrived to plenteous wealth
But the arts too were absorbed in empire
And culture became an industry
And the great divide obtains
The uneasy interpenetration of system and lifeworld
Between system driven by technology
A world of clockwork the soul of an automaton
And the realm of understanding driven by the will to social comity
The capacity to communicate
A will exercised by primates
But also by colonial algae
By ants with their pheromone telegraphy
Great flocks in bustling skies
Great shoals in mackerel-crowded seas
And the artist once not a separate occupation
See the beauty of ancient tools ancient textiles
Dolmens petroglyphs and cave paintings
Serves time as in mine or galley
And I predict with pride that these pages will never make a dime
For I am sick to puking of the word money
And my little philanthropies
And my little crimes
Are as a single salty teardrop in the mighty ocean
That encircles the spherey globe
But enormous ships brimful of containerized freight
Traverse that ocean
And other vessels those airways those Roman roads
Thus the technical means exist to feed the hungry
And Musk and Bezos could arrange free shipping
For the destitute the displaced the dispossessed
What matter if they’re in Sudan or at the southern border
And Zuckerberg could spare a therapeutic dime
For the children whose minds he has poisoned to death
Defiling the sacrament of image
Astronautical tourism pah
Hear ye gluttons ye sybarites
The parents of a starving child
Will do everything in their meager power
To break your lock and shatter your sword
Let us hope they are comfortable those billionaires
Cringing behind their walls with their bodyguards their sycophantic entourages
Their toadies in the halls of government
Or drifting aboard their superyachts their space capsules
Colonize Mars pah
Try on earth to squeak by on nine hundred ninety-nine million nine-hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents
You heartless criminals
Let us all hope that in a moment of leisure during your busy busy day
You will find the time to look inside yourself
Find there the shame that you have anesthetized
Find there the moral agent you have put to sleep
And may shame rise up and choke you awake

See through this air this ocean and this earth
All matter quick and bursting into birth
See nighttime sky when the clouds give their leave
The heavenly bodies at their stately dance
That like dreams all generations
Have esteemed as significant
See in the hay infusion the animalcules
Who scurry to the sidelines when heat is applied
Desperate to escape the scalding
Frenzied to maintain bodily integrity
Who lack a nervous system
Ill can they afford to pause and consider
That this integrity is but an effect of consciousness
The stout perimeter plastic and thoroughly permeable
Through which the nutrients the wastes
Ceaselessly come and go
The wastes of one the nutrients for another
And the apparently individual insistently dividual
The organism into cells the cell into organelles
Even unto the fundamental particles
Which must not be fundamental
At most a ratio of matter and energy
And what pray ultimately are they
A perplexing congeries of object-sub-object
And the apparently separate a mingling of vectors
That waver within the eddying solute and converge infinitesimally
Even as they diverge in rainbow refraction
Phenomenal flux thus comprising a regularity of collection and dissipation
The hay infusion but an index of that more deeply interfused
But protect they will this semi-fictive coherence
And in that service nature has bequeathed them pain
And pain is bad
Pain must be bad
Intrinsically bad but extrinsically good
To perform its adaptive service of notice and alarm
Its service to the will to life
And pity those for those there are
Who regard that will as shameful
A will exercised by the smallest of things and the largest
The striving to nourish and to thrive
To thrive not merely individually
But for the progeny the species the world
To maintain the flux in any case
And real things that exist
Real situations that obtain
And most especially real events that take place
That happen happen happen
Are merely that portion we can perceive of the greater world
With our labyrinthine neurology and clever microscopes and orbiting observatories
Perceptual apparatus that we can set aside by effort of will
To glimpse those transcendent entities
Among which number facts of mathematics and of morality
And what is a thing but an effect of the mind
That struggles to define and defend the stout perimeter
Though no less real for that
Which takes and extracts the arrows of time
Hence the experience of life
Is the also the experience of pain
The epitome of that which is to be avoided
The epitome of that which we always have reasons to avoid
The epitome of that which we always have reasons to refrain from imposing
Hence we should not respond reflexively to pain
With the infliction of more pain
As if our punishments and retaliations
Would somehow even the scales and pay a debt
What are you a moneychanger in the temple
Converting act to coin
And what authority have you to impose suffering
When suffering already abounds for people and animalcules
What arcane knowledge have you
As to how another is and where they come from
Did you create yourself
Do you know yourself
And in your self-creation do you know yourself to be perfect
For perfection is not a thing in the phenomenal world
Where only the approximation obtains of sphere
In the form of sun or planet or scarab-driven turd
Let us do what we can to assuage not augment pain
And let us observe that sometimes stronger reasons obtain
For the endurance of pain over the avoidance of it
As the surgical procedure induces temporary pain
To relieve the larger malady
And just as with pain nature sounds the alarm
Pleasure signals all clear with heavenly harmony
The epitome of that which is to be embraced
And observe also how near allied are pleasure and pain
As plumpy youth takes love’s agony
Revels proudly in love’s agony
The torment of delay
In anticipation of delight
The torment of uncertainty
In anticipation of knowledge
Anticipation stronger than consummation
Delight intensified by delay
Relishing in love’s agony the epitome of passion
No mysteries exist
Not in the sense of the permanently unknowable
Permanence like perfection unavailable in phenomena
Nor in the sense of knowledge forbidden
For how often does foul transgression open the eyes
Alter eye to alter all
And we do not know the final digit of pi
For there is no such thing pure and simple
We do not yet possess all knowledge of things
Not merely owing to the numerousness of things
Nor to the orders of infinity
But to the flux of phenomena
And to the fluxuous historical challenge
Of comprehending that which lies outside sensation
We know to some extent what we can see
And we know to some extent what cannot be seen
As figures geometrical and properties arithmetical
We know in short our experience
In which transience figures more prominently than does permanence
We know that beings other than ourselves experience the world
And we know that the division of the world
Into those fretful antinomies
As subject and object and masculine and feminine and pleasure and pain
Outside inside up down great small black white predator prey nutrient waste
Dead matter and spiritual life
Phenomenal fact and transcendent truth
And into objects things discrete entities and stout perimeters
As phototaxic alga and a sweetgum named Sally
Distinction sometimes useful sometimes nugatory
But always more or less illusory
A consciously composed and sharable fiction
Derived merely from the evolution
Of our gelatinous if labyrinthine primate brain
Which perceives things separate distinct individual
Sources of nutrition or poison
Sources of pleasure or pain
Sources of acceptance or rejection
Objects of interest or of apparently negligible significance
And indeed from our cultural traditions
Source alike of expressions in language
Indispensable for mutual understanding
And of baneful acquired ignorances
As prejudice provincialism and superstition
And ignorance being infinite because fact is infinite
We know not yet whence the infinite variety
Or rather the merciful regularities
Characteristic of the flux
Which we perceive
Whose progress we arrest momentarily with a gesture of will
As freezing the flight of birds of indistinct plumage
As imagining the digits of pi or the square root of negative one
In our representations which do not accommodate
Much of the overmuch real world
Which oft resolves itself into vertiginous torment
Say Muse nurturing mother
Mother of nature
Mother before nature
Peaceable womb of all things visible and invisible
What barrier prevents the full unfolding of totality
No doubt the primate labyrinth has yet to accrue sufficient extent
To perceive much less grasp the originary or final truth
Truth that surmounts proximate beginnings and ends
That requires the deeper-than fundamental higher-than overarching
And yet no mystery obtains
How entirely natural that truth prior to understanding should baffle discourse
Especially given the difficulty even of posing the question
The superfluous dream of genesis or denouement
Hence the vagueness of locutions like something interfused
Hence the necessity of poetry with its free recourse to metaphor
Hence the elusiveness of sufficiently rigorous expression
Though the possibility persists as suggested by
The unconquerable conviction
That if change obtains then something changes
And therefore something persists
That truth is therefore unconstrained by sequence
This being only the phenomenal part of the world
And that we can say that which we see
And by discoveries in mathematics
And by salutary disruption of neural pathways fallen into harmful habit
Alter eye to alter all
And we achieve in moods simultaneously sublime and restful
Teasing glimpses in the beautiful the true and the good
Which we perceive if often only indirectly
In art in nature in ourselves and in those we love
Which we perceive even amid the welter of experience that crowds in upon us
To lift the veil and see that space before space
Wherein dwells something prior to sensation substance sequence duration or name
Call it will or consciousness or soul
Or nurturing mother
Our compulsion to name an epitome of striving
To nourish with knowledge ourselves and our posterity
The mere possibility of metaphor an earnest of the unity of being
Of situation of event that happens happens happens
And hence the possibility obtains
If only theoretical
Of restoring peace
And peace is always the return to peace
Before the tumult intervened
Peacefully prior to space time change or distinction
That activates the measurement
That moves the needle
That configures the experience
Whereof we speak for we must speak
Primates being such great singers and speakers
As will or life or unity or consciousness or soul
Or that which is deeply interfused

There was a tree
I speak of many one
Of which variety I can’t remember
Some hardwood not an evergreen
When I was still young
And young too was my beautiful companion
With a yard full of boisterous kids
And this tree bore a wound never healing
At the base near the root
Where from time to time legions of ants
In their perfect pheromone file
Or seeming perfect this being the phenomenal world
Would line up to sup
And gather in their myriads
The bar is open I thought
Identifying with the myrmidons
But the tree to my knowledge
Had not transmuted its vascular fluid
Into alcohol and the ants one would infer
Were lining up for innocuous sugar I must suppose
And not beating their brains with liquor and drugs
Ah the thousand shocks that brain is heir to
Smacking the windshield
In the days before seatbelts
Or the seatbelts were there but we didn’t bother
Major surgeries with their general anesthesia
Earnest of the state outside personality
That excuses from pain but saps cognitive power
Novel virus that obliterates sense and fogs the intellect
The soothing rituals of fragrant smoke
The nicotinic and the cannabinoid
Booze and boogie til you puke and pass out
The self-mangling acts of insult
The self-mutilating acts of folly
That happen happen happen
Again again again
And oh the injury
To the beautiful companion
And to the yard full of kids
And you can display your shame
But you can’t really make amends
Not fully
For a thousand cuts
For wounds beyond healing
And many resort to mystical cult
That the mutilation of the redemptive body
Will somehow substitute for one’s own
And secure forgiveness
From an invisible tyrant
Who dwells beyond the flaming ramparts of the world
Imagined as somehow vertically superior
But earning forgiveness never from those
Whom one has truly injured
Here on the ground
Here where we stand and we fall and again fall
Each fall a unique iteration
And what does earn mean anyway
You can’t earn that which must be freely given
If at all
But in age we grow a little wiser
If we confess our fault
To the world and to ourselves
Even as our mental powers decay
For if I have done much harm
As surely I have done
I have done some service
My children grown to adulthood
And suffering their own painful shocks
From which I have not protected them
And who knows which traumas I might have prevented
Short of those that originated with me
But even those did not originate solely with me
Who am not creator of myself
Plentifully but not totally responsible
The precise contours of responsibility obscure
And the beautiful companion still lives with me
As difficult as that must be
Who am often angry depressed and loud
So she must have forgiven to some extent
Or tolerated the seemingly intolerable condition
Of the ineluctably social human situation
In which annoyances persist daily
Like the fuzzy drone of two- or four-stroke engine
I’m sorry for the wrong I’ve done
For the wrong I continue to do
Though I have nourished conscience and fortified will
But I’m not dead unlike so many of my friends
Who adopted like me the fashionable postures
Of living dangerously or worse
Or who lived unobjectionably but died anyway
Though I so long of the party of dissipation
Will dissipate merely and separate completely ere long
To rejoin the peace before flux
So I’ve been lucky and at least a little skillful
Or at least put my heart in the right place
Or nearly in the right place
This being the phenomenal world
For I have loved beauty
Especially the rapturous pleasures of music
And of the other sources of sensual enjoyment
The wonders of nature the ravishments of art
Gathered up in books and in galleries deep
The vistas of canyon and oceanic horizon
And especially of interaction
With those lovely earthly creatures the humans
Who seem most of them unaware how beautiful they are
With their hair their sweat their bodily functions
Which they attempt unaccountably to disguise
Their selfish cravings
Their noble aspirations
And I have felt the true feelings of others
Their suffering and delight
Their contentment and loss
Their fears and triumphs
Their aspirant striving to nourish and seek nourishment
Whom I am helpless to refrain from loving
Though a baneful voice within denies my worthiness
And yet in my age I have cultivated to some extent the healthy habit
Of responding to reasons
To the extent that I can know the facts
To the extent that the flame of youthful temerity has cooled
And to the extent that I can control myself
An obviously limited extent
But good is not a matter of quantity
Dignity not a matter of extent
And I have taken on the responsibilities of senseihood
Not having possessed all learning
A magus by no means
But merely to help the young to learn
Which they will do in any case
That I might serve to make the path a little smoother
Not too late I dare to hope
For there are moral facts
Indisputable as the facts of mathematics are indisputable
The facts of joy and pain
The facts of being and of situation and of event
And thus I have learned to lean into the good
Though conflict seemingly inevitable has sometimes arisen
And again and again I have fallen and again fallen
My father once said
If you have no regrets
You have no conscience
And thus stupid humans like me
The affiliation whose badge I proudly wear
Who stand upright and regrettably fall
Can learn what’s right
Human biology
Person morality
For they are as little children
We are as little children
Can
For all the persons we know
That is all the moral agents we know
Are human alas
But they are born into the overmuch world
And into the human part of the world
With the capacity for moral awareness
And if they learn the facts
While nobody knows all the facts
And they build the skills
Through long experience and many mistakes
For we must fall and again fall
And we do not learn everything all at once
Or ever
And life is short
They can respond to reasons
That derive from facts
If only once in their life
And thus they are good
And they feel bad when they hurt somebody
And they regret the harm they have done
With their seeming-inevitable mistakes
For they must fall and again fall
And they can try to make things right
Can
And thus they might grow into adulthood
And thus they are worthy of esteem even now
And thus they are lovable
As all real things are lovable
The more lovable for their incapacities
And imaginary things too are real
Alter eye to alter all
For all that we behold is full of blessings
For even when we suffer blessings obtain
As the beautiful companion
Endures the noisy retching of him who helplessly loves
As La Vie en Rose
Freely gives the voice of emotional understanding
As the lights visible on the ground
During a night flight
Even for one averse to flying
Stimulate and refresh
And one can take pleasure in high places
And exult in exaltation
But give me the serene horizon
The round ocean and the living air
The ground to stand and fall upon
And even that which is beyond beholding is full of blessings
The truths moral and mathematical
You don’t have be a mathematician
Just know that there is more
Than forces and particles in the greater world
And you can learn to know value
And learn what makes life worth living
And it isn’t wealth or status or power or getting high or even comfort
For everything that happens involves suffering
And we can feel the sufferings of our neighbor as of ourselves
And strive to nourish and attend
And share gentle companionship
With the lonely the sick the troubled
Let us forgive one another
Those who have loved us
And those who have shunned us
Let us aid the afflicted
Even unto our wounded selves
Let us think highly of ourselves
And let us love one another