Floaters and flashes always appear
The first a true objective phenomenon
Bits of tissue drifting and wriggling
Like nematodes in a soil infusion
Or spirochetes in the aqueous humor

Ah but the photopsia
Pure perception
Pure because uninflected
By any external stimulus
Or for that matter internal

Review the parlor trick entitled
The Transit of the Invasive Skull
First in pink inscribe upon white paper
A small solid circle resting atop short vertical lines
When the aura swims swing your glance to white ceiling

Behold there the green skull suspended
Restless insubstantial transitory
Artifact of overtaxed rods and cones
Physical memory engendered by creative violence
By generative destructive will

The great poet is herself already divided
Her command not for posterity
But for herself
One part of the self commanding another part
One self commanding another self’s self

Tell it slant
The commanding voice
From the past
From the present
The faction that retains controlling interest

You look up from the ledger and see
Numerals dance before your eyes
And as you recline upon retiring
You see numerical figures
Projected upon the backs of your intermittent eyelids
Like a slideshow in the 1950s

The drudgery of keeping current
Of accounting for the incoming facts
A sorcerer’s apprentice
Drowning in the incoming flow
Acknowledging the agency not of oneself
But of that which trends

Fear of abstraction
Fear of machines
Nostalgia for the lost hope
Defense of the fading memories
Grief for the purged enthusiasm
Grief for the past elasticity

Now you have succeeded
And all the deadbolts lock at once
And variegated seeming declines to mere being
Parse the latest directive
Never ambiguity
Only superfluity

Can a database sustain tragedy
Can market research accommodate
An erectile engorgement of wishful thinking
Hemmed in rational affirmation
Repudiate the idealized past
And the dread future lose in mere forgetting

Innovation is the blow of fate

Suddenly yes that’s it
The primal sin of modernity
The one the poet spoke of
The iron cage the scientist spoke of
It’s ennui
Not even fully domesticated in our language
So new and yet so firmly seated

A different poet spoke of
A stifled drowsy unimpassioned grief
This isn’t that
It is a kind of desire no doubt
A lack an emptiness a defect a removal a shortage
An earliest loss
The invention of a truly original sin

Life begins with already-lost
The infant clothed cleansed and fed
According to well-established principles
Comes to believe in the advent of mercy
And soon experience
Transposes this expectation
Into the key of satisfaction

The builders of the pyramids didn’t have it
Nor did the condemned in solitary confinement
No you have to have money to spend
Or patronage or a line of credit
The compulsion to buy
The consumer’s addiction
Anything to fill the hole

Knowing full well
That no muffin will indicate contrition
No image of nourishment
Even of the beggar’s fleas
Will suffice or satiate that craving
And so we seek ever more thorough
Delirium

The contrary is also true of course
And many acts deliver fulfillment
But the bars of the prison cell are permeable
Our fellow inmates
Close enough to touch
But touch them we dare not
So fresh the mouth upon that gaping wound

Euery torwd drospe ue cyord
Tedeum onse trebvit anwe doreor
En awhil dreggie a
Nroml wird
Ljou conontre enmol ec genareod
Vair gaisson t marak owft
Oe eo aignt
Muriee
Wyrd nomril fagkst bcabstrot

And admitting what he’s suppressed for a long time
That he’s been living in the grip of fear
It used to be war in a far corner of earth
Albeit brought into our living rooms as was said
But now it’s in our coastlines our forests our neighborhoods
From Santiago Teheran Hong Kong
To the bleached coral of The Great Barrier Reef
The armed police brandishing their arms
The assembled multitude at the bidding of The Leader
Chanting Bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit

He had ducked and covered during the Cold War
In the shelter of the tiny desk
His fear of airplanes exposing the falseness of his hope
He had sampled the powerful psychotropics
But there must have been some problem with the dosage
His festive vacation a trip into terror
He had watched as his truck burned
He had listened when he was told he’d lost his job
Because of some defect in his character
He had gone through the windshield in a single-vehicle crash

The past is prologue some wise guy opined
And repeated insults to body brain and spirit
Had prepared him to expect catastrophe
An expectation he nourished and refused to acknowledge
Some other philosopher asserted that courage
Was to be found not in the absence of fear
But in the mastery of it
Yet another had claimed cowardice the only sin
Now he knew who he was or what
A shock of recognition and a feast of self-reproach

Because it hurts and people don’t know this
It hurts to perform the contortions required
For self-examination self-speculation
And he carries out the performance
Doubting and believing that he is thus obliged
The more tortuous in that he also believes
It wrong to examine oneself
The campaigners against cowardice also
Prosecuting a war against narcissism
Examining fear though not the cause of fear

And lacking moreover the intelligence
To grasp the decentered subject
And clinging instead to the Cartesian ghost
Even while subjecting the brain
To ever more extreme assaults
The drugs chemistry exhibitionism and excess
Not forgetting self-praise the kiss of death
World’s Most Successful Drunk Driver
Longest Duration for a Single Feedback Guitar Note
Most Egregious Act of Self-regard

And so to the cause
If one’s little life is the most important thing
Then paralyzing fear makes perfect sense
Forget that nonsense about fearing the unknown
We fear we humans what we know
We know our ill deeds our impure thoughts
We know the thick catalogue of fractional truths
We know the seductions of prejudice and superstition
We know the compulsions of greed and lust
And that Mad Captain Death fast or slow will never relent

Turn from the mirror
You don’t know how to make a lamp

Will some higher power send me
A lamp to blind this domineering mirror

What authority stands behind the command
To tell it slant
The great poet certainly
But
Are we enjoined to treat all others as children
And likewise ourselves
And does the deuteronomy end here
Or are there more narratives of shame
Exhortations to repent
And directives to be obeyed

And surely the implicit stipulation
Tell it slant to tell it right
And hence enough to say
Tell it right
And everybody knows or else should know
To renounce theft
To forswear abstraction
Avoid slackness
And above all
Seek exile from the kingdom of oneself

Poetry is not morally good
And aesthetic goodness
What is it
Certainly not adherence to rule
Renouncing forswearing avoiding and seeking
What everybody knows or thinks they know
Comparing sunsets
Ranking kittens
Anatomizing simple pleasures
Betraying the electromagnetic spectrum

My mother: I’m sick of it

Me: Sick of what

My mother: The whole thing

Mule deer and mouse deer
And savor of sage and wild fennel
Called stink weed
And cephalopods and crustaceans
And diatoms and great white oaks
And the decaying trunk of oak
Home of grubs and lichen and fungus
Red-winged blackbirds and red algae bloom
Plains of grass and broad freezing forests
Prey that graze
Prey that prey
Starfish shaped like imperial crowns of thorns
Flatfish shaped like shoes
Annelids and planaria shaped like the soles of shoes
Great birds with bill shaped like shoe
In the forest and in the museum
And skeletal coral
Bones bleached in the sun
Chimney swifts wheeling before the setting sun

Okay
I’ll give up calling them poems
I could learn how to write a sestina
But I can’t believe that
That’s what I should do
I could limit myself to noble sentiments
Suppress the autobiographical subject
And commit exclusively to moral and emotional uplift
Primary colors and major triads
I could go back to school
I could risk rejection and try to publish
In a literary magazine
Perhaps sponsored by a university
I could adopt conservatism
And tell history to halt

Ignorance is infinite
Especially among the self-described artists
Tennyson thought trains ran in grooves
You’ve got to prove your worth
You’ve got to earn respect
And once you accept these necessities
You’ve got to give up and quit
Because knowledge is always partial
And sorrow witless
I’m not respectable
I’m not worthy
I disapprove of my actions and of myself
Bad art is art nevertheless
And so I no longer care what you call them
Call them compulsory excrescences

Well of course things fall apart
That goes without saying
And the buildup too proceeds
In momentary equilibrium
Complex hues and subtle dissonances
Though seen of none save
Well nobody probably
The minute particulars lose themselves in generality
And will flame out in distinct preeminence
Ah but when and when
The Bacchantes on the Ed Sullivan Show
The Suffragettes the child crusaders
What’s needed is an epidemiology of culture
Where did I get that benign cyst
Of medium to large size

Is that what it’s for
Just to pass the time away
Is that why uncle went to war
And got shot down in a B-17
While father-in-law escaped with his life
They were worthier gentlemen
Though they did not choose their lot
For the next generation to enjoy
Their extruded snacks
And episodes of Friends
The latest devices
And unknown modes of being
Poetry butters no parsnips
So I guess I’m glad
They’re not poems any more

I seem to have ignored the great problem
I seem to have misread the tenor of the times
I seem to have overlooked the universal grievance
But more than one injustice makes the claim of universality
Different constituencies nurse differing ancient grudges
Each wound becomes a prized possession
And all insist that there is none worse than their own
But can you calibrate which evil is the worst
And nobody questions the accidental inherency
In cobbled language of the superlative
So like in function unto the future tense
That established panic fatality
So easy to say
What will be will be

And yet and yet
Is it not pointless to try to quantify suffering
And yet and yet
When infant mortality rates were higher than they are now
Did parents not grieve
How dare one pick at his minor wound
How trivial must a trauma be
To demand treatment with poems
Reader turn aside
Call them stomach pumpings
Call them violent purgations
Call them emetic constructions
Call them inexorable spewings
Of one who won’t allow another’s pain
To interrupt his own

Ours is a land
Rich in saxophones

I will not read Pound
Why would I
The man was a fascist

Whoever said The Triumph of the Will was good
Nazis mostly
This is not just name-calling

And truly if we reject every work
That arises from a belief we disparage
We will reject so many

And denial
As so often
Tantamount to confession

Like other actions
Poems are motivated
And not just for art’s sake

How the leaves on the tulip tree
Fail again to tremble
Unmoved by the inspiriting wind

The wind surprised
By the jutting skyscraper
A momentary Bernoulian tumult

O the times
O the mores
O the lost simplicity of grief

Cause effect and a melancholy syntax
Effecting morose retreat
A window closed to the elements

Here might be no dispute at all
That lies are ugly
And houses not geometry merely

The sailor sails
And having made landfall
Walks for some time on sea legs

And perhaps displays permanently
The anchor tattoo bendy
Athwart the pierced heart gules

Is there a character here
A plausible embodiment
A laconic integer

Moves are not movements
Strategies not faith
You don’t believe in cartoon jalopies

It’s more fun when you compete
The legend on a gaming machine
Knucklebones and physics engines

No verbs in the carnival of abstraction
No resonant vowels
K-k-k-k-k-k-k

The frogsong of accomplished facts
Ascends with the ascending melody’s ascent
The fool’s fire of cynical history

Is more time past or yet to come
With so much anterior action
Hard to imagine a vivid future

Like seeing the lines
Of longitude and latitude
From space

The errors were necessary
An ineluctable stage
Toward clarity

Take the pledge
Carry out the commission
Project your ragged testimony

Project your old blue cloth
Emblazoned with the true icon
A circumscribed mimesis

The story of Rachel and Jacob
Or Sam Spade ill-shaven knight
And the quest for fittingness

At least in potentia
That’s how it is
With mad pursuits

A modest enthusiasm
A rapprochement
A negotiated settlement

Having committed long since
To certain predictable regularities
As of force particle genre manner and belief

Consequently most folks accede
To the unavoidable consequences
The rank and file ennuyeux

Defense of inherited error
Doubling down
Lest mere chaos be loos’d

Everything signifies
All is symptom to the medico
To the sybarite all is treasure

Once it was a simple pleasure
This tobacco
Once it was a doctor’s advice

Emblem of genocide and enslavement
Drugs and comfortable clothing
Comfort for the masses

Ah yes and stodgy food
Fats and starch
And plenty of salt

Cancel the subscription
Put the boxes in the car
Casually drop the forwarding address

The rotating chair
Sweeps across the urban landscape
Perched on one leg an axis

Defining a rectangular prism
Straight back flat seat
And legs nor stout nor spindly

Mounted atop an unseen vehicle
Rotating like a radar dish
Or the summit of a periscope

No expansion no contraction
Turning and turning
In dynamic stasis

There are only reasons for
Never reasons against
As for example reasons for definite omissions

Should one feel at home
Like Virginians in Virginia
Or adopt the outward vein

The poet called himself scumbag
Or his thinly dramatized speaker did
Was it from shame or from fear

The village has no voice
The times are declining
We fear what we love and loath what we dream

The melancholy long withdrawing whimper
The placebo requires commitment
Taking on the wonted anatomies

Pound Eliot Yeats alas
Modernists sickened by modernity
Invoking further atrocity

Calling in the air strike
Conjuring gorgon and minotaur
Denouncing the placidly rotating chair

They grasp the memorial katana
Replay the corrupted ceremony
Laugh over the popular solecism

The monsters enjoyed martinis
Everybody else was forced to slalom
Between the hash and the small robot fingers

The apotheosis of manhood
The leaders the innovators
Westcoast promo Disneyesque lemmings

The angry laughter of men with writing desks
A raven for a familiar
Pegasus a totem

Fake frivolity
Denial of the senses
A lie-revealing lie

The empty shell
The discarded horn
The exhausted magneto

The picture on the motel wall
A fantasy of pastoral embarkation
When in fact the shepherd’s life was really hard

I envy the eighteenth century
Despite slavery insolence and the pox

A world in which each knows his place
Wildly unjust for persons

But for poetry a good thing
The fitting of matter and manner

Grand language for the grand parts
And tender language for the tender parts

And awareness of grandeur and tenderness
Of advent and requiem

Alternative to blame blame blame blame
Blame blame blame blame blame

To know what is good is good
Though one’s belief might be mistaken

We who live now know only what is efficient
Mass production mass destruction mass delusion

We need not approve of the arrogance of emperors
The hypocrisy of republicans

But do not deny the magnificence
Of Bach Watteau and Goethe

I mean the perfection of their works
Not their human incapacities

Assertion
I rage against injustice

And can poetry persist
In an unjust age

And when has there flourished
An age of justice

And in the artifacts of culture
Let there be balance discipline order sensibility and taste

Decorum is truly art’s Holy Grail
But art disdains a goal

I envy those who believe their belief
Not to be mistaken

A world that knew what was right
But not what made right right

A singing riddle
A mystery and a malady

Let a century of art commence
A century of knowledge and judgment

Just
One century

From each rose with which you pelt me
The thorns have been delicately amputated

A thoughtful touch

Although

Iens prost sazty en Effrentiana
Ger tist da U kil trguh
Wunizs ger tiftaeg Melniciana
Cvmwoflux riz dn sguh

Fe sdargid ib dhe dur ghe mrednin
I pugk mli an kalor
Fe reagas trab mrerod els dradnin
Doz prisgarm els dedor

Not the tree but the vine

I like my poetry wet
My cookies slightly underdone

Blessed are the truly dead
Untroubled by an afterlife

Am I boring you I’m boring you aren’t I
But know this I’m trying to do it right
Not to make it new or even to make it good
To fit in the chance encounters
To fit in the parts that just don’t fit

It would be pleasant to see a seascape
The boats afloat on their foamy billows
It would be ennobling to witness the hero’s struggle
It would be charming to overhear the lovers’ murmurs
Pass the time make death arrive more quickly less painfully

A child was run over by a car
A woman died of cancer in her early forties
A city was reduced to tinder and the tinder set ablaze
A teenager committed suicide
Convinced that he was going to hell

Let’s watch television
Let’s go for a drive and listen to the radio
I hope my friends will be impressed by my new jacket and shoes
But I feel hollowed out
The emptiness no snack will fill

I can offer you no excitement no entertainment
There is no riddle
Science will never reach the limit of suffering
Technology will never fail of ever-greater torment
I will continue hacking at this unyielding block

The world is fresh and ever-blossoming
The clouds swell and drive in their accustomed track
The predators stalk and the prey evade
Successfully or unsuccessfully as the case may be
Call it an update an interim report

I know too much and control too little
Is this how old age is supposed to be
This mixed bag
This compulsion
I cannot like an optimist dig with a pen

The opposite of social responsibility
The ills I descry not avoidable errors
Who talks like that
Some parts do not and will not fit
There’s a certain liberation in futility

A celebrity had announced his own incipient dementia
He was famous for achievements neither insubstantial
Nor likely to alter the course of history
I made light of the emergent fact
Thereby earning the disapproval of all around me

If I had been a character in a play
If I had been a beautifully contrived concoction
Polished optimized revised and corrected
I might have extemporized some slashing riposte
To cast the philistines howling down to bottomless perdition

Being actual I voiced my objection silently
That the world suddenly notices greatness
After the great have fallen
But it was the fact of my having been denounced
And not content of the denunciation to which I objected

And so error proliferates
Why should I have derided so gratuitously
A harmless and overthrown clown
And why resent so furiously
The public registry of my error

And why let it be asked
Lacerate myself so mercilessly now
For acting according to how I am
Unless it be that I reserve for myself alone
The power to deride resent lacerate and denounce

For mine is the power the fury and the mercilessness
And let it be stated
Mine the deception
Both of the silent riposte and the secret punishment
Mine the shame

I was ashamed of my insensitivity
And of my sensitivity
And though I had not chosen to be sensitive or insensitive
Still I deplore
Those qualities of my framing

So many years to reform my character
So many victories and even more defeats
So many opportunities to change my ways
And yet they change if at all
For the worse

Each domino larger than the one before
Each iteration a subtle variant
No image
No palliative words
No eternal return of the same

Not a registered breed but a feline mongrel
A perfect Siamese but a bit heftier
With a white spot on one side
The left
Of his lip

He knew secret passageways
To escape to the wild outdoors
He could smell the good of it
We speculated
He paid the price

For months he crouched in silence
Underfoot as usual he ate his food
Until one morning he never moved
I moved him
Stiff and stark

And for years thereafter and even now
In the side pocket of my eye
He lurked as usual
His hefty bulk
Bunbury’s ghost

Little round bird
With upturned tail
Searching with hurried nervous pranks
Down to the planking up to the rail
Orange throat and toothpick legs
Find your true beloved
Find your daily bread

Yup that’s me
I’m not surprised your recognition
Was other than instantaneous

Changed no doubt from what I once was
The bright-eyed boy
The teacher’s pet

One wonders whether the transformation
Gradual to be sure
Owes to the thousand natural shocks

Or to artificial mods and projects
Self-imposed
Or hoisted by some brawny saddler

Or perhaps less to events
Than to responses to events
Tabulating consecutive reasons

Or failing to respond
Continuing to drive
After the bug has spattered

And bitter error
Occasion for remorse
And cold fear for what’s to come

This ragged beard
This hooded eye
Rough unruly repellent

Do you love me precious other
Or has love too eroded
Caught in the glacial progress

In dreams I stand at the fork
The garden of delight
Or the prison house of consciousness