Faerin ko terr tin durst ma durst
Denspiit npla dhsucs foleran
Ninfnats cyr teldedlers lochtra
Mi srowes biurte Alveshlist
Mi jui Anugermardiclu
Blisit jmundel
Sit elles hich sit ey veaurx siites

I will write a cheerful poem
A poem free of self-reproach
Free of reference to universal sorrow

My father strolled in the garden
Sang a song about Violet
And whistled when he forgot the words

We’ve felt this way before
The celebrants
Exhausted
Continue their revels
Persist in the riotous acclamation
Of their champion

The antagonists again
Raise their fists
Their weapons
Their voices
Uninterrupted
Now is no time for reason

We’ve felt this way before
The quiet few withdraw
Defeated they slink away
Relinquishing defense
Perhaps a protest
Perhaps merely a gushing wound

Who cares she said
Just before the conclusion
Of a narrative the burden of which
Was that I care

In table-talk banter I was lamenting
The loss of thou
Stolen I averred by the Puritans
To crush intimate address

To give all discourse even that of lovers
The formality of the signing of a deed
The regulation of a business appointment

And the very voice of the beloved
Punctured the smug clowning
Of him who talks too much too enthusiastically

Never give vent to feelings Dear Reader
Except behind these hidden pages
Concealed like a purloined letter

But is it not true sir
That you called yourself a sack of shit
Only after the saucer had received its chip

I can’t put away the dishes
And call myself a sack of shit
Simultaneously

I can pray hard
I learned how to do it
At the age of 7
I moved with my family
From the city to a small town
And I prayed hard
Please please please please please please please please please
Let me move back home
But all I really said in my mind
Was please
I couldn’t have called
The city home
I pleaded for restoration

And I can’t say
My prayer was hopeful
I already suspected
That God would not reward
My prayer
Which was merely mine
That God was angry with me
For my sins
Which were wholly mine
Which I could never remember
To renounce
For in the event
They were too pleasurable

A child until 52
Then an old man

Uns lenip Saarl turst swevunt teor sndep
Pus larnadop cin ceen sin daw
La hust flaln ntons yy dop nu larna dop
Fris meb tra nve dops koenlu var nufun
Duemsibimdiv jerrip asd mes amkrout nredat
Ua nejnurdarme muros muros muros
Pleznemden gwarood uy daardin
U y daardinca seb uns crey
Chu giiv oun quucheld tsagk vreoriridh bleh
Muros bleh dop bleh sin daw sin tra sin jerripon

A man in a monster costume crushes the power lines
A cat upright on its hind legs heaves a brick striking the canine police officer
From inside the team mascot a woman extends sparklers
A little man with a hooked nose whacks his wife with a flat stick
A well-dressed woman hurls herself under the wheels of a passenger train
For turning an angel away from his door a farmer is incinerated
A Great Dane speaks English albeit with a limited vocabulary
And a systematic replacement of initial consonants
A spectral librarian shushes the intruder in the stacks
The gods themselves countenance their imminent dissolution

The Biped
The Churl

Delightful to imagine that this might suffice
Dog monkey orchid goat leopard snail nightshade

A disguise is an alchemical infusion
For a golden disguise can materialize only
In the realm of cultural signifiers
Where merely to assert a transformation
Is to effect a transformation

Take for example the driver
Of the undeniably beautiful tan Mercedes
A joy forever but an irresponsible expenditure
If that’s not jumping to a moralizing conclusion

So one must proceed patiently
And perhaps even methodically
The driver is a person with a personality
And doubtless with an identity
A place on the sexual spectrum
And other psychographic determiners

But all personalities are multiple
And hence a certain personality disorder
Is endemic in this mobile age
Or put more mildly identity shifts
With shifting social situations
Which technologically enabled have grown complex

There was a time there still are times
When social situations were small and interactive
Crowds were rare and governed by stern prescriptions
And the faithful in the cathedral showed a certain stasis
Uninflected by display except from on high
For the masses lacked the resources for scenic presentation
And now in this modular age
All the world’s a portable proscenium

All is performance and ever was
All that has changed is the scale
But do we in the role of spectator possess
The interpretive skill to make sense of it all
And what is interpretation anyway

We can’t know motives
But to place an expensive object in a public place
To move it from place to public place
Has to be some sort of sumptuary display

It has to be an aggressive act
Or at least an unappreciative act
Unappreciative both of beauty and of persons
And their will to respond perhaps variously to beauty

But here all interpretation is forbidden
And you shall know only I am a rich man

How profoundly different from the acts of that sickly youth
Poor small unacquainted with the world who cries
Oh for an age so sheltered from annoy

I am not Keats I am not Blake I am not Wordsworth
Not Yeats not Dickinson not Whitman not Wilde
Not Hendrix not Keef not Wolf not Muddy
Not George Eliot not Thomas Mann not Samuel Johnson
Not Bessie Smith or Bob Johnson or Bob Dylan
Or Habermas or Parfit or Kant or Socrates
Definitely not Socrates

I am the dirty monk who owns things
And has no pride of ownership
The overweight ascetic who does things
And doubts their rightness or efficacy

That hell is other people is a banal thought
True only insofar as each person is a demon
Myself am hell says the true prophet of the age

We demons love to shift our shapes
Dog monkey orchid goat leopard snail nightshade
You don’t have to buy a Mercedes

Hard and heavy
Adaptable but only in fragments
Or in conjunction of fragments
With much larger fragments
The organism much weaker in structure
Mostly liquid
Saline solution
Acidic solutions
To see the gush
And in between
Emblems logos
Random signifying forms
And outside
The buzz of organic
Buildup and breakdown
Marrow and excretion
And beyond that
The network of utility
Redox reactions
Finicky circuitry
Signifiers organisms and implements
All weaker than
The gravitational fall
And crush
The invitation
To activate
Already perhaps accepted
Unveiling
An intrinsic defect
All one way irreversible
Like the folding of a protein
Under great force
No great achievement
Merely an event
An obtrusive cliche
A coward’s cry
A concave mirror
That great simplicity
Mercifully shattered

She comes in sorrow
Or in vain

Even as a child I objected to Pegasus centaurs and griffins
Vertebrates with six appendages
But as an adult I was thrilled by the thoughts
That the skull of an elephant had inspired the tale of the Cyclops
That the griffin was really the skeleton of a ceratopsian
But ultimately and reductively the mermaid was just a manatee

I worried that I was incapable or had lost the capability
Of letting myself go and giving myself over to fantasy
For facts putatively explained myths away
But the myths themselves those superfluous appendages
Held no particular appeal
Ah but when the myth and the fact array themselves in correspondence

A weary march pickaxe on shoulder
Only a picture the famous greys and browns

The showbiz extravaganza same effect
Amid the golds and the magentas
That’s me up there

The same tension two turnbuckles
Trapped in the tyranny of twos

Take from the dresser of deal
Take from fecund past
After all these eons still a field of limited choices

The prison of privilege
Decadence a carceral institution

Savor like a connoisseur
The possibility of annihilation
Second best after never having been

If that’s me in the picture
Then what am I doing here

It’s not true that it’s all spleen
But in here
A sumptuous meal through a slot in the door

Oh for an age so sheltered from personality
Oh for an implement to pry myself from my self

The supremely vulgar act
To complain of one’s own suffering
To exult in the stoical liturgy

Iha dsuchs plen didp lans

The composer the critic the creator and the interpreter
Are cruel
The artist above all
Safe in the bastion of the present who says
In a rage of indignation to the past How dare you
How dare you commit such grandiloquent pomposity
Such exclusionary sop to the cognoscenti upir autocratic patrons
Or alternatively
How dare you commit such vulgar passages
Such unmodulated expression of unrestrained feeling
Enticing the mob the newly compacted consumers
Or yet otherwise
Such clumsy cobbling untutored at the greats
Or even
Such hackneyed rehash of yesteryear’s fashion
And at inevitable length
Sald grevnet effrent upir varl dostonovokov als C

This rage projected of course toward oneself
Or in fairness toward one’s methods one’s assumptions
The routines the legs one has to stand on
And what a hackeyed rehash demanding an of course
And the usage errors as for example the repeated one
Further abominate
So nothing’s any damned good
And thank our lucky stars to have entered an era
When nobody gives a damn about
The composer the critic the creator and the interpreter
There are not now nor never have been
Any Kantian lucky stars
Which seem so significant in their picturesque constellations
And you can’t see them for the streetlights anyway
And still looking for the moral law within

The Battery
The Runt

The Conundrum
The Obelisk

Still doing the old color field thing
Better than ever before

Gush
Reasons have lost their protective power and gush
Rivulets decline in oily sputters
The thirsty forest gags or sways
Fostering cicadas’ raspy churr
Whoosh
Tired sounds of superheroes
Hand-lettered and hand-inked on the pulpy page
Surrender their blandishments as they set

Your eyes
Somebody’s indistinct eyes
Albeit remote from the globèd casements of insects
Drive water up from the ground
Water teeming with substances
Living dead and merely mineral
Suspension and solution to extinguish

A fat brown caterpillar writhes
Under the exertions of a big red ant

Shall we agree to designate as language
The signals that organisms emit
Visual chemical and auditory
Lumping the fiddler crab’s wave
With tall Troy’s burning roof and tower
Cortisol with Ophelia’s florid ditties

The fire ant announces its terrible prerogative
All are enjoined to fear the caustic formic weapon