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

I can do this
Ask me who my parents are
Ask me why I a stranger helped out a stranger
Ask me anything

I’ll give you no dirty words
No arcane locutions
Or well I’ll put it in other words
If you like

Sure I’m a pleaser
Pleasing others pleases me
With the second and the third attempt
Silvery partial messenger

Unfixed
Unmoored
Unattached
Untroubled

Or well the troubles go
As quickly as they come
Porch delivery
On the circular drive

Dynamic stasis
Minutely vibrating stillness
A pilgrim’s staff and sandals
Waiting

A prophecy
Camouflaged amid the lists
Nestled among the nouns
Displayed like a purloined letter

Mood swings yes a few
Palsied with age
Or mewling and puking
Grand touring fiasco

Or a horny boy
Trying to maintain his cincture
Or straining
To burst the bonds

The negative telescope
The nearseer
Woodgrain
And woodflake

Every object
In the dream
Every vessel and implement
Seems a casement or threshold

A melody stretched and pressed
Fast-reverse faster-forward
Finely twisted
Frivolous filigree

A distortion
Or an accomplishment
A katydid trilling
On a long-stemmed rose

Elegant observance
The revelry of composure
The orgy of ceremony
The interwoven round

An insect song
To feather’d Mercury
A dancer windblown
In the velvet petals

The generative melody
The revelatory mask
Ask me anything
I am capable

One can never say before the fact
Surely a revelation is at hand

A stain on the ceiling of the old apartment
Resembled a face in profile
We covered it over with the most opaque paint
But I could see it there until the day we moved

Our cat a most underfoot creature when alive
Did not lunge from the shadows
But sauntered from hiddenness to interrupt the step
For years I half-tripped over Bunbury’s ghost

And for years I saw a different spectral image
The burners of books and bodies
But when the living candidate pledged to round up illegals
The mob chanted their fury and approval in the ancient manner

The festival of rage and adoration
The same assemblage more or less
That cheered on the auto-da-fé
That jeered on the road to Golgotha

You act like a celebrity
The center of attention
You think you’re entitled

You’re in the same hell as everybody else
The same drudgery
The same hell

A specimen of the Mannerist vogue
For complicated landscapes in the background
Smeared with much aerial perspective

To the right of the sitter’s golden curls
One can barely make out
A structure or growth jutting into the low cloud

To her left is a ruined tree half gutted
So it isn’t that picturesque reflex
A catapult maybe

What is this thing what is this picture
Does it offer a secret inkling
Of warfare or some other slaughter of the innocents

And in the most distant background
Most smeary most illegible
What is that pall of smoke extending to the frame

I am not completely naked
I’m wearing socks
Having overindulged as usual
I took a dip in the motel pool or
Perhaps somebody gave me a prankish nudge

I undressed upon my emergence
From the immersion
Somebody captured my grinning visage et cetera
And took the trouble to scan the image
So many years later

And yet
Followed by some uplifting statement
You’ve still got your health
Look on the bright side
Better luck next time
It’s how you play the game that counts

Hearts and flowers ruffles and flourishes
Kudos pour in for the lifeguard
An ordinary person with extraordinary skill
For an extraordinary responsibility
In the service of the ordinary general need
For safety and security

What are the facts is a basic but not profound question
The injury will heal to some extent
So there’s a bright side no doubt
But a dim side too demands
What is the significance of any fact

Marian’s ancestor dug ditches
And died when the fifty-foot-high wall
Of a burned-out factory
Collapsed upon him and his coworkers
And his boss

Everybody alive when that disaster happened
Is now dead
An insignificant fact
When one who didn’t have to die
Died in a deadly job

I meant to satirize Pollyannaism
To laugh a Positive Mental Attitude
Into impotence
But I just can’t find it funny

And multitudes will continue so to die
Many after suffering more prolonged than that
Of Great-Grandfather
Although digging ditches is no day at the beach
The only bright side being that
The suffering of any is the suffering of all

And yet
When we look on the bright side
And reassure ourselves that we’re doing alright
When somebody else drowns
We mute the facts and dwell in falsehood

It’s not okay
You saw the picture
The man drowned with his daughter
To dwell in falsehood
Is a criminal act

The first step is to know what there is
This is the easy part
Certain devices tabulate such information
Much harder is the composition of here
As any mystic will tell you

The comfort the blindness of familiarity
Dishes toys auto parts
The grinding conflict of dysfunctional relationships
Work work work work work work work
The momentary solace of getting a little tipsy

The dancer is very strong with there
Having placed here under control
In the service of there
So too the reaper
Looking ahead to the next swath

But alas poor poet
This sea that bares her bosom to the moon
The same out yonder as nearby
Though storms may lash the ships
Theoretical storms matching their taxa

While here who can comprehend
Religion politics economy the arts
Oh dread the didactic finish unaimed for
Glory be
To the past the present and to the future

I was driving when the flash floods came
On perilous crowded I-75

I took the exit
After a particularly horrifying slide

That made the passengers free
In their expressions of unease

The back road lost somewhat its rural charm
In the relentless torrent

Thus the double bind
Courage the mastery of fear

But fear nature’s suggestion
Freeze flop or get out of Dodge

That’s dangerous she murmured
Just a shower answered I

Later the news came through
A town flattened in Alabama

I had to wear a hospital gown
I managed not to say out loud
See what you have become
They say clothes make the man
I’ve worn neckties handcuffs bellbottoms and gardeners’ gloves

Some folks claim to know who they are
Some even demand that others acquiesce
I’ve been sitting on this fence so long
I have a fence-shaped crease
In the seat of my pants

If I died now who would go to hell or heaven
The professional the criminal the hippie or the gardener
Some folks claim to know
But maybe death is not a change of place
Just a change of clothes

The afternoon cartoons were hosted by Benny Carl
An Italian Catholic as I later learned
He drove through the schoolyard of Our Lady of Sorrows
One recess-time when I was a second-grader
Children surrounding his car as if it carried Beatles
Who were as yet still schoolboys themselves
The kids had never seen a celebrity up close
But I held back
Judging it rude or worse unsafe
To approach a moving vehicle

It comes back to me now
School day afternoons
On one channel
There were only two or three
Benny Carl presented
Warner Brothers cartoons some of them quite old
Enchanting me with their trombones
And their wriggling clarinets

In the following half-hour
On the other channel
Benny Carl’s rival Cousin Cliff
Showed Popeye cartoons and Three Stooges shorts
My brothers and sister and I considered ourselves winners
When we saw Curly instead of Shemp
In one dramatic moment Cousin Cliff
Issued a warning
In a southern drawl to his tender audience
Not to imitate the Stooges’ actions
They are clowns

Around this time in my life
Ruff and Ready and King Leonardo materialized
On Saturday mornings
Made especially for television
And I knew that they were something different
Because Popeye and Bugs Bunny
Still sometimes appeared
In the movie theater

And soon Huckleberry Hound and his spinoffs
Invaded the afternoon
And I must have been just the right age
Because it never occurred to me
Loving them as I did
Or at least addicted
That their limited animation
And their stereotyped repetitive music
Sparing the company’s budget
Were really kind of ripping me off

And later
Too much of a mediocre thing
Cartoons and comedies
Car crashes and criminals
Howling conveniently at all hours
From a thousand static or streaming channels

Politicians plutocrats and propaganda
A mandated minimum of bared bosoms
Like the plastic mass heaving in the Pacific
The unreal reality of self-published posts
And pages like this one
Poetry without form
That grotesque contradiction
And with our eager connivance
Too much of everything cheap
Borrowed mortgaged or charged to the card
Has laid waste our powers

Never mind
Forget it
Direct your thoughts elsewhere
Claim is error
Understanding faulty

Reaction to external stimuli
Truth unattainable
Expression banal
Pompous display
Gratuitous display

Suspiciously obsolete
Control claim
Will is good
No thoughts

You wish that seem might reach a finale
You might command as much
Is is
You miss it every time
Misapprehension of external stimuli

Misapprehension exquisitely accurate
Claim is faulty
Is faulty claim
Display gratuitous
Value is
Is out of reach

Uncontrollable will
Will is not good
Ineffective rebuttal
Stimuli misapprehended
Command stupidity

Stupid adjectives
Pompous words
Stupid reaction
Wrongful attack

Wrongful rebuttal
Mercifully ineffective
Almost attractive
Damn the suicide

Every time
Every claim
Control yourself
Remove external stimuli
Fail deliberately

Truth is
Value is
Is out of reach
Is self-indulgence

See and sing
Wrong and wrong
Heroically flaccid
Banal expression
Big and heroically wrong

Can you see anything
Can you show
Display
No thoughts
No things
Exquisitely accurate nothings

Have it your way
You deserve a denial
Exert stupid will
Error avoidance

Turns your thoughts
Toward something nothing
Deliberate misapprehension
Willful derangement
Ineffective rebuttal

Keep it simple
Keep it stupid
Stupid
Exquisite value
Out of reach
Stupid reaction

Wrongful will
Will to control
Will to claim
Turn your thoughts
Misapprehension
Banal expression

Forget thoughts
Forget nothing
Exert claim
External display
Can you sing anything

Hurtful words
Stupid expression
Forget it
Never mind

The gusts bent the treetops
The air a gray bog
The street the gutters rushing torrents

But there’s something I fear more
Behind the weather

I should feel relieved or happy or something
When I see that photograph
Of the young descendant

And everybody suffers
We are bound together in suffering

I fear betraying secret my secret
That I suffer more than anyone else

Shameful claim
I’m in good health
Surrounded by lovers and friends

Each of whom injures me
In perfect blind innocence

False claim
Shameful utterance

The storm abates
The air a suffocating pelt
Here in the deep south

A poet from the north saw this place
As a relief or a remedy

Perhaps I feel the same
About the snowy peaks
Where after all one can die

Can one speak of himself without dwindling
Into sickly the sickly confessional

Let’s just talk about the weather

U kil trhuf
U kil trhuf
U kil trhuf

Here it is
People die
Toddlers chuckle
I am imprisoned in passion

I wish a were a piece of plastic
I will be dirt quite soon enough
Or perhaps burnt wholly
Entropic diffusion

Make a world in foursquare lines
Lash all conflict under compact phrases
All joy all anxiety all enthusiasm
All physics all mathematics all fact and reason

Ignore both the general and the peculiar
Both the abstract and the concrete
Both the invisible and the visible
Only all everything the universal and the exhaustive

But dirt will never be I
Hell
I’m barely I as it it is
Not enough or too much

And yet I once soared aloft in a cardboard space capsule
Once lost a loved one in dusty death
Once beheld beauty in a blue kimono
And ah the apple breasts

The only way to make a good future
Is for the present to batten upon the past

I get high
I get high
I get high

Grand Sombre Pots
Ambiguous Overtures
For What It’s Worth
Stodge and Fug
Publishing in Secret
A Hitherto Unrecognized Allusion to Richard Glover
The Prince of Love
Sucking Up: An Anatomy of Sycophancy
Blithe Confessional
Samizdat
Serial Miscommunication
Trireme with Ghosts
Reason and Reductiveness
A Sequence of Folly
Phonological Dissent
Bull Connor Considers Conversion
A Can of Beer
All the World’s a Drum
The Bombing
Wally in Elysium
Livestock Down the Flume
Getting Somewhere
Br’er Fox’s Rejoinder
Gently Down `
Five Foreign Languages
Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy: Psychoanalytic Observations
The Art of Slippage
Do You Remember?
Terrible Agnes
The Aha! Experiment
Offerings in Burnt Sugar
The Floridian Tragedy
Elementary Geomancy
Robin Goodfellow Takes a Shot
Get Your Kicks
Policy
Who Lives Along the Line
The Monotremes
Kemp’s Naval Puzzles
Last Chance for Wind Chimes
The Enigmatic Baby
Hurly-burly or, The Ruckus
North by West Coast
Singularities
Waggles the Reluctant Sea Lion
The Feral Actuary
Alas Poor Gonzo
Our Developing Capillaries
Rats Cockroaches and Humans
Partial Inexistence
That Sinking Feeling
No Commercial Potential
The Steerforth Manifesto
God’s Blood
The Buttonhook
What’s a Heaven For?
The Dylan Mondegreen
Food!
Error Avoidance
A Passion for Order, A Tyranny
Cowardice the Only Crime
Cortisol Precincts
It Is
A Few Too Many Syllables
Legal Impasse
The Perfectionist and the Completist
Superficial Trivialities
As Good As I Can Get ‘Em
Tympani for the Masses
A Ha’porth of Tar
Divergent Orthography
The Testimony of Elves
Issues
You Can Look It Up
The Profit Motive 1451 to 1929
The Optimist’s Retreat
Sang Freud
Snug as a Gun
Shadwell’s Fancy
The Ineluctable Cliche
meom-x
Paris in the the Spring
Of Times and Movements
Exceeding One’s Grasp
Gravetown
Hide the Seams!
Indefatigable Biodegradability
King Gimmedat
The Five-sided Square and Other Heirlooms
In the Belgian Manner
Lucid Imaginings
Now You Know
The Lad in the Sailor Suit
Blind Spot
Scarcity and Skepticism
Socrates is Missing
One Level Bump
Songs and Glees for Young and Old
But They Do
Rough Equivalence
Perne in a What Now?
Chance Operation
Jump-rope for Despondency
Slant
A Humanitarian Act
Speculations Etymological and Taxonomic
The Gay Subversive
Ribbons and Braids
Just Another Con, John
And That Goes for the Rest of You Too
Purloining and Propinquity
With an H
Peeking Under the Dust Ruffle
The Boston Macassar
Hoops of Razor Wire
Proceedings of the Dust Committee 1970-1980
Parlous Exploits
Aw Gee, Mr. Stubbs
The Reformed Hipster
Forgotten Transits
Voting with Their Butts
Effrent: A Primer
Of a Zygote
Tea and Tiramisu
The Beckoning Swain
Gratuitous Displays of Erudition
Plow Down Sillion
The Damned Dirty Eight: Adventures in Partytown
Deciduous Teeth
The Holy Criminal
Who Like Jed Clampett Hunt for Food
Imperfect Contrition
Norms and Particles
The Academy of Frauds and Conspiracies
My Gauntleted Hand
The Day of the Heroines
Cast Your Bread
Glib Facility
Stamped, Self-addressed
A Bold Departure
Needless Interruptions
A Dime for a Cup of Coffee
Waxing Wroth
Ellipsis
The Mastery of Fear
Chevrons on the Wing
The Purse-snatchers’ Cotillion
Empires and Empiricism
Tesla, Coiled
The Well-to-do Ne’er-do-well
Kevin the Gambler
Oh, Tough Guy, Eh?
Tease
Finicky and Twee
Nepotism among the Cat Fanciers
Hugh and Cry
An Abode of Bliss
Acquired Incompetence
Sidekick Made Good
Black Fly
The Woman in the Moon
Perkins Rising
The Kindly Dirigible
Drenched in Monochrome
Closeness Rudely Forc’d
A Term of Art
Happy Birthday Dear Kettle Drum
Sawdust
The List of Lists of Lists . . .
Psychic Prophylaxis
Damn the Insecticide
Column Pi and Column B
GuitarPARts
Piping Treble and Doughty Scots
A Falling Out
Cyborg Modding on a Budget
Tantamount to Slavery
The Disillusioned Enthusiast
Parse the Atom Bomb
Benevolent Necessity
Wasps and Other Elocutionary Challenges
General All Over Ireland
Seeming and Being
The Antepenultimate
Mark as Read
I Think We’re Done

I fear for those with whom I am acquainted
Ignoble passion
When one bears the weight of the whole world
In which all organisms
Born hatched or sprouted
Cultivated with diligent care
Or conceived upon impulse
Or in oceans generated by a cloud of gametes
Suffer
Suffer and die
Near and far
Die too soon and at a length of suffering

Predators prey and the lifeforms
That break down and reprocess
Necrotic substance
All is fitting
All is appropriate

Ah the abstraction world the abstraction suffer
The worry
The gathering symptoms
Which demand interpretation
Which demand formulation in language
And who possesses such skill
Not I clearly

Bad poetry unworthy of the name
The dunces triumphed ages ago
I am their inheritor
Sickly corpulent compulsive
I did not create myself
Nor have I succeeded in turning the tide
The bathetic legacy technically augmented
Contemptible fragments of the one bitter truth

The skillful advance their programs
With purpose and concentration
And when they succeed
The results show balance
Which in turn reflects discipline

I am a disordered person
In tune with a disordered age
With dire propriety
But the march toward order continues apace
Not an order perhaps of which one would approve
As a corpse appropriately emits a stench

The Gourd
The Ramifications