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

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