I’ve switched flavors from bubblegum to mint
For with the paralysis of my tongue
I can no longer create the pocket
Necessary for inflating a bubble

Long ago in my office as teaching assistant
I blew a gum bubble while reading Marx
An old professor walking by
Said Not big enough

Chlorophyll and a mucus trail
The uses of pleasure in various epochs
Serial cataloging in an unseen node
Frayed fabric insulation
No oceans but mere puddles of obsidian

When they come for me I will deny everything
The words they use are contaminated with coercion
I am complicit when I use those words
It’s like entering a freeway
Bumper to bumper at supersonic speed

Ask not whither is fled the visionary gleam
The pebbles in the long driveway
The peacock’s cry
Memories of frayed memories
Unrecognizably distorted

How the waves feel
Feeling the waves later
While trying to sleep
The lunar pull of ancient childhood
Jacob’s ladder lightning to children explained

Get off my back
You blatant stooge
They like to see you in a humble troll
Theremin’s cry peacock’s cry
Humid parcels a god might covet

No gas range after that sleeve incident
Call for the erector set
The mollusk’s complicated track
Fat foam protein foam
Ineluctable modality of the criminal

The powerful lure of effrent
The unspeakable language
The intricate surface
The ominously simple depths
Making the walls fall down

God-damned Pilchard
God damn
Never the
Never the same
I will conceal myself when

Soft music
Velvet in pastel
The snail’s horn
The conched ear
The yielding flexible carapace

They come for me
Will Lady Moon protect me
A leaf serrated like a cheap blade
The curling fingers of the wave
Hidden figure catalog denouement

Collect your desiccated berries
The heroic monument vanishing after a day
Never the same
The fragile walls
The fragile intemperate tower

1 Life in the Centrifuge

Flattened against the wall
Moving like gastropod
Encountering various objects
The apparatus for making measurements
The reagents
The sedimentation continues

2 Bunker C Number 6

At room temperature
A lustrous monument of obsidian
Fuel oil for the Southside Generating Plant

Fools will say he deserves his fate
Mistaking either deserve or fate or both

The rain came down in sheets
Gusts interrupting visibility

The way it was is the way it should be
The capacity for willing belief in falsehood

The voice of The Commander commanding
Heed not the commands of the Commander

His blunting resolve
His veiled compelled concession

Dread supplanting the fuel of anger
Fire drowned in gusting rain

But is your identification of the fool always accurate
Me for example you have suffered this good long while
But I am a merry fool
A holy fool

Whi Forhanor
Whi Gerllthyosu

The Polyhedron
The Redoubt

Here’s something funny
The incongruity of buckets and sidearms
Or the three-way folly of nature culture and diagrammatic specificity
Left behind were the mossy rebuses the angular seaferns
Everywhere you look some fractious vortex or other
Picture this a man with half his face stove in
But he survived the operation and fills the waiting room
With his jolly refulgence
Try that on for size you cynic-for-hire
How do you explain the turtles the aquarium the motivational placards
What d’you think I got here spots on the cornea
Where were you when I created the heaven and the earth
The orotund gestures
The stocks the buckram
The endless lists altar sword and pen
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it
You catch that allusion to small plastic containers
Charybdis in a hammock with a Margarita
One can infer the blender’s operation
Mock-heroic posturings with your head bolted down
Desserts flavored to an exact dollar amount
Wiseguys’ profits from the repurposing of obsolete detritus
Let them have their fun
Those skilled in the arts of phlebotomy
Calypso is all the rage
We know don’t we that the shoe’s on the other foot
Nameless castaways marooned without a name
On a dome-shaped islet with a solitary palm
Legacy of Langerhans and the other famous exploiters
Poor Tom
Lazy Mary
Dervishes whirling down the drain
A pair of asymptotes you and I
You said it
A couple of baboons
It ain’t fitting it just ain’t fitting
The time is out of joint
Things don’t fit
Take a break from your insomnia
Your hardboiled insouciance
Stop the presses
Stop the vortices
The centripetal and the centrifugal
The widening gyre
And the ever-contracting McPherson strut
The hilarity of putting two and not-two together

It does not take much apparently to bring him forth
A god say or an implacable force of nature
The enormous raindrops descended
And burst upon the ground each with a portly sploosh
The great mineral mass heaves slowly awake
And gives the lie to the unconsciousness of earthy substance
And surely the eruption inspires more fear than do the clammy thunderclaps

The stout hillock having thus revealed its secret
The maiden appears in her modest clothing
Summoned it seems by the superhuman being
A melange of radiation atomic forces and
To use the conventional shorthand
Gravity
Or was it she who was in fact responsible for the uncanny revelation
Undeterred by the elemental phenomena
Or perhaps the distinctness of earth sky mind apparel salt sea and gesture
Is the real illusion

Her words simple to the point of idiocy
Nevertheless reach a profundity of decorum
Unequaled among statements of fact and place and situation
We are here or perhaps only It’s here
And the work commences geological in its slowness
The imperceptible transformation
The maddening obliteration
Magical words
Or merely words that fit the situation and the facts
The black garment the white headgear

It’s pointless to ask why they want what they want
As if lactation or hurricanes require reasons
Irresistible force in se
To make the illusion real
Hills of imaginary ice cream
Stout hillocks sheltering the immortal
This slender supplicant
Curator of incompleteness

Perhaps it’s all too fine
Perhaps the village council is right to object
Wherein is it cleanly to grouch and grumble
Wherein useful to spin up parlor tricks

I am not cool
I am not free
Fiery gush wet hot
Tenderly tentative
Nearly brave
I bear up not well
The line at the checkout counter
The client’s patient bluster
I am not qualified
Forceless eruption
Serious reprisals will follow
You’re not far off
The bright side covers shadow
I can find no
Back to the beginning
Take off the splint
Never trust a weakling

It begins again
Just like the other one
Paper spectacles
Mornings without daybreaks
Aspects of hardness
Consequences levied
It doesn’t take a psychic
I am not confident
Sorry I brought it up
I can’t come back
I don’t know how it works
You’re right
Bad faith
I am a humbug
Repetition and repetition
A shadow moves across
I am not cool
I am not calm
I think I’m losing my voice
This is not good
I think I’m a narcissist

I spill things like a child
Somebody boycotted
Corroborating
Gutless compromise
No logical reason
Flesh is weak
Will is weak
Something is missing
Back at the workplace
Pockets of dark
Tragedy without savor
Neither useful nor sweet
This is not good
Shapeless formless
Thought is weak
Shadowy unpromising
Energy expressed formlessly
A wet gush of fire
Bad hands bad mouth
Pleasing nobody
Buddy you can say
It begins again
Compressed vomit

I give in
Eventually
Another charred morning
Not a spiritual state
Not a medical condition
Not a conscious act
I would rob a mailbox
I am not cool
A small disturbance
Clear the utensils
Certain types are prohibited
Recreational activity
The most important thing
Hundreds and thousands
There’s no market
Quiet departure
Mildly unpleasant
They used to go
The ceaseless hum
A small object
It is not beautiful

Make a choice
I am not confident
Examine the data
I don’t know
I’m well aware
Suppressed reflection of sounds
Faulty physiology
Had a little accident
Solid discontent
Remember the date
Overfull
The old-fashioned key
Deliver me
Deceptive prayer
Mercifully obscure
I am not calm
I am not cool

The cuttlefish parade of lights dances midway beneath the waves
RNA forges the rapper’s bling of polypeptide chain
The leafhopper mimics the rose’s thorn
The rose itself comes on with fragrance and red red velvet
The bee dances with joy to enlighten her comrades
Maggots achieve a quorum within the rotting possum
Van der Waals forces keep water liquid at a degree above STP
All for show
And so
The salamander slips in and out of fires at the encampment
The she-bear licks her cub into shape
The griffin defiant with extra appendages pulls its mighty bulk aloft

My mother named me Dusty Death
My waking cry her dying breath

The blackbirds have come back
Displaying their noble chevrons
Just a few to start with
Pecking at the wet grass
Like archaeologists
Or kids with heads bent over their phones
Walking ceaselessly onward
One hustles to peck over there
While a few more descend
Singly at first but then in ever-larger groups
Now there are a couple dozen
When a big subcommittee flies in followed by another
And eventually there must be close to a hundred
A handful fly up a few feet
But this is not the silent signal for a mass departure
They want only to relocate somewhat
Out of inscrutable motives
And their teammates persist in their patient toil
While a robin or two patrol the periphery

Yes I live in the suburbs
A lifelong beneficiary of privilege
Yet despite this fact
And partly out of guilt for it
I sometimes lapse into
Shall we say low moods
And yet for all the oppressive languor
I feel compelled to speak or rather to write
To give utterance
To this dull flaccid stupor
Ah but to disguise it
So that the world will know me to be
First cheerful and charming
Wise and witty
Light and lissome and full of levity
And secondly
A brilliant craftsman
A technician of extraordinary skill
Gay deceiver
Selfish con
And so not surprisingly
No words come to carry out
This inconsistent agenda
When surprised by joy as it were
I spy the first few foraging blackbirds

I see that on some of them
The distinctive insignia is scarcely visible
And none of them exhibit the deep crimson
I remember from my childhood
Single specimens near the river
Not this impressive multitude
Gathering at the cul de sac
Are they maybe a different species
But pale marks on the purplish black
Comely nonetheless
And one forager a bit bigger perhaps
Sports the shoulder emblem
Of distinct preeminence
A golden angle pointing upward
Swept like the wings of a jet
Fitted to a brown-red slash
The silent signal comes
Of which only the flock is aware
Order in chaos it once was said
Together in an instant they depart

Als smi pluxad firtvoschiain pfduxhlinnde
Dounj ai owggli firmotrgord

I’m not that righteous

To get into that machine
It’d take a locksmith

Call Louis XVI
Get his wife to make some milkshakes

Simple and obvious what should one do
First confess paralyzing ignorance
Ah but faltering sequence
And interruptive sidetracks

Hit and run
And as the runners advanced to second and third
The shortstop according to one commentator
Didn’t know whether to shit or wind his watch

Sports metaphor bah
Ah but retrospection
And interruptive correction
And arbitrary prohibition

Don’t write about love
About politics about religion
Don’t write about
Write unspeakable truth directly

Hence the injunction
To tell truth but slant
One isn’t really paralyzed
This is writing isn’t it

Ah but theft
And getting caught red-handed
And organizing things
To get caught

The old world dies and a new one comes to be
And such has been the case up to now
Information storage has improved considerably
Not so the achievement of consensus

People want triumph not defeat
Even less non-committal inaction
Ah but behold how moves the paralytic
Who doesn’t give them what they want

After years in the garden of earthly delights
The apotheosis of the senses
You will have learned the dismal truth
That forces and particles are the source of the problem

Step gingerly around the griffin turds
The pearly turds of unicorn
Gigantic poisonous flowers
Rotting mangoes the size of atom bombs

The pleasures of grandparenthood
The comforts of dotage
The decline into senility
A carnival of autonomic reflexes

Schopenhauer worn a ring
Formed like the ouroboros
Circle of eternal truth
Undying flame of knowledge

Forswear alike materialisms
The Marxist armature
And the worship of market forces
Innumerable consumer particles

But oh the bright chevrons upon the plumdark wings
Blackbirds in migration
The cuttlefish’s round unfathomable eye
Its Broadway Melody of chase-lights

A time of day supposedly
Late afternoon
According to that unreliable exegete Humpty Dumpty
But in the arena of silly nonsense
You can’t beat a Victorian
Algernon so eager
To explain the rules of Bunburying

But what are the rules
Do there have to be rules
There have to be rules
Roman letters English words
In series
But why not THR33
Why not Pmist
Why not brillig
Why not colorless green ideas
Square circles
Boring digressions
Sitting on oneself
Why not &reg ^Oπ^ Kellemoo
Where have all the laps gone people standing
Must the spoon be runcible only attributively

Say there’s this guy named Phillip
Or so the report goes that avers
That he carried out a particular action
Or maybe it was a woman named Shaniqua
Or a trans-dimensional being named Xmczcul
Only that last name is pronounced
Like the sound of a slow leak from an interior tire
Of an eighteen-wheeler
Parked in a truck stop on Interstate 95
In northern Florida
Or in some other dialect let us suppose
The name is pronounced more
Like a low purple hum
Emanating from some impressive device
Contrived to transmit agony or bliss
To selected lifeforms
In various universes
Though truth be told or the story goes
That the contrivers being composed of pure thought
Communicate with pulsations of transcendent energy
And not with sound
Though these facts do not begin to explain their uncanny benevolence
Their sudden capricious cruelty
So anyway
This man or woman or wereparrot
Does something to or for or with somebody somewhere
Or alone
Or so goes the report
The narrative
The account
The whatchamacallit words or sentences or whatever
And the account or whatever
Is supposed to make sense or whatever
Or does somebody entirely else make sense of it
Or some combination of the two
In dialectical tension or synergistic expansion or metaphysical accord

Let us be true to one another
Let’s ignore or pretend to ignore
The creeping suspicion
The chilly apprehension
That truth and telling the truth
Remain incommensurable
Noble attempt
Or flaccid compromise

If only all art could achieve the condition of music
And every argument were a melody
But these colors
These volumes
These plastic values
They each remind one of specific instances
A good experiment ends in failure
No wait
Yields a negative result
Or is it
Knowledge is overrated
Or it’s incalculably valuable
Being in such short supply
And please don’t bother with what qualifies
As art
In addition to forces and particles there is music in the world
One can imagine a world without the forces and particles

Or perhaps all art should achieve the condition of perfume
And arguments an ecstasy of deja vu
Well before facetime eyetime
Provoking and satisfying precognition
Kingdom animalia
Phylum chordata
Vulnerable defensive caretaking mammalia
Sexy sensible aggressive melancholy sensitive naked apes
Persons who break through their ennui to appreciate

There is a freshness in decadence
All the old things having corrupted
To make new ones

First off she smells really good
I mean she herself
Without supplement or additive
I’ve notified her of this fact
And she insists on denying it
Moreover her smooth parts are really smooth
And her hairy parts are really hairy
She keeps herself in good shape
But she has some meat on her bones
If you know what I mean
Her I guess you could say embonpoint
She gets bored pretty easily
She’ll listen to only one side of an LP
Which I really can’t understand
I’ll sit and dream
While she looks around for something to do
Once I was staring off into space
My arm stuck in a crooked angle
And she asked Are you orating
And I admitted that I was
And we’re like that
Each accepting the other’s foibles
Each accepting the things we cannot change
But she reminds me
How can you be sure you cannot
So I kiss her good mouth
With my bad mouth
I caress her good hands
With my bad hands
We’re stuck on each other
We’re stuck with each other
I didn’t mean to write a love poem
And perhaps I haven’t
I know she knows how I feel
We disagree slightly
About the relative importance
Of knowledge and feeling

U chreibme u sve beh i brivue
Fhwa grin’t u srege chreib im un i chreim
Un fhwuach sve Illions bregporst sve bim Borm Heriauc Rubregast
Ptind ap ind wilk iwiy

Ebir thra wik slonlig fravertst di sve frepostsluc chereib
Un fhwugh amb siirera ud the ansergarde den
Glinsaith iborda fhudh owggi ple
Ab dchefeit aupennig dlor piun ti bebvry

Aupenng jo allthirent ac svee pereoptri aupnes
U ilwsiys swi ham weir meon Iliosd cas pa
Arb yeiras liter fhlthunglisc u swha igiun dieseesda chreib owpenneigs
Dop glinsais iroovt fhuthrorp veroiu tarntug hus bullawvwd weid

The Strait
The Narrow

The Tort
The Declination

AHA
I think I’ve found the solution
Why would somebody commit
So foul an act
As to use typography for emphasis

The naysayers were right along
You can’t do that you simply can’t
I’ve been thinking
I should purge and live cleanly as a nobleman
Er I should say like a nobleman

It’s just like when Nixon played Fonzie and said
I opposed China I was wr—
And here I was positing some evil god
When a much likelier candidate is at hand
And isn’t the simplest solution always best

Well no perhaps not always
How is it simpler
For me to paste a deceptive label
With an address that never in a million years
Would I apply to anybody but myself

I can’t complain about having to wear this damned truss

I dreamed I was in a movie
Why can’t I just dream I’m in a dream
In which the lions before the New York Public Library
Stand up and walk away

But that was only prologue to the prophetic dream
In which my father in the underground den
Glanced about with eyes full
Of defeat exhaustion sadness pain and memory

Eyes so different from the commanding eyes
I always saw him wear like lion in life
Yet years later fleetingly I saw again those dream eyes
He looked around without ever turning his pillowed head