The purple hum as the panic subsides
The rabbit hole that fictional construct opens out
Into a world populated by motifs from the upper world
There’s Zelda that’s Halo
That’s Myst that’s Wolfenstein
Kill the Boss and be carried home in triumph

But a real undertaking like Pacman Tetris or Galaxian
Cannot be won but only prolonged
The luckiest player a set of initials
On a high score list and a dark purple hum

I can’t say I can’t
For I have been forbidden to do so
An injunction I can’t obey
And so I can’t say I can’t say I can’t

The great achieve perfection
As I have read in books
As for example the communion of
Sound and sense in poetry

Elegant lineation
Precise punctuation
Forceful diction
Verbs without nominalization

I can’t say I’m a bad person
I can’t even say I’m a bad poet
I can’t make it easy for the critics
The critics don’t seek to look to chase to find me

See any metaphors
Hear any images
Cobble any synaesthesia
Who’s this I I can’t say

I can’t imitate the great masters
I can’t perceive the method of their achievements
I can perceive the achievements barely
I can’t say that I am impotent

I can’t say that I never enjoy pleasure
I can’t conceive of purity
As for example of pleasure
Unmixed with pain

I can’t take action
I can’t rest assured of success
I can’t win
I can’t show up

I can’t stop myself from thieving
I can’t control impulse
I can’t give in to impulse
I can’t give in to enjoyment

Others have expressed the failure of the gift of speech
Others have described the crash of lofty ambitions
Others have detailed the anguish of ineffectual lovers ineffectual warriors
I can’t do that

These trees that promise continuity
This rainy weather that softens the light
These birds who murmur their ecstasy
This music forever new and as old as ruins

I can’t enumerate the stars we see
I can’t call to mind my favorite color
I can’t call to mind my mother’s face
I can’t draw a straight line

I can’t lacerate myself efficiently
I can’t draw blood from a poor turnip
I can’t avoid cliches or adjectives without insistence
I can’t remember my sins

I can’t say I can’t say I can’t say I can’t say I can’t say I can’t
You know what that means
Tomorrow never comes for the lazy worker
I can’t decide what I’m talking about

I can’t irony
I can’t contradict myself
I am partial
I spill

Om shanti
That’s right
That’s right
Not a tender leaf trembles on the tulip tree
No logical requirement that it should ever end
Dwelling
Automatic
Quartz vibration
Appendices
Bam boom
Sibilant
Laying his finger aside of his nose
Large I contain
Gearhead
Impressionable
Misplaced optimism
Truly plastic
Westward expansion
Conundrum
Obverse
Organization
Airplane’s shadow
Sammy’s dead
Callous
Of the senses
Technical processes
Cerebration
Garish
Hot kitten
Blood-stained spoils
Indication
Within
Murmuring innumerable
The good foot
Embalmed
Metabolism
Zee zee zee
That’s right
Already
Alright
Uncle was a better dry cleaner
Vocal
Smell of burning
Good extension
Phloem
Seafoam
A pointing gesture swept from left to right
Effrent
Category
Boogie woogie
Replay
Rewind
At the buzzer
Cheers mate
Traffic as it were in a circle
Germ
Shadooby
With rainwater
Gust
Character
Somebody’s house is burning down down
That’s right
Soldier
Sailor
Masque
Career night
Airplanes ‘twas beauty killed the
Minute
Systematic
Throw it away
Sha la la la la la la la
Destiny
Without doing
Manifold
Evasion not suppression
See how the fates their gifts allot
Charm
Venus her zone
Vessel
What comes in
Medulla
Omnipotent reigneth
Sherry
Will he make it
Open form
Yeah
Om shanti shanti
That’s right

Your fragile mineral assemblage
Your watery solute
Here comes your dissolution

Your social practices
Your dependencies
Your fear of abandonment

Your many cravings
Never to be pleased
Your susceptibilities

Your senses gratified
Or offended
As the case may be

Your experiences
Your learned abilities
Your autonomic reflexes

Your hostilities
Ready at defense
Your struggle for existence

Poor humans
Not fastened to a dying animal
But the dying animal itself

Hear the voice that says
I may injure you
I’m a genius

Your life spanned the Twentieth Century
You lived at the center of that terrible epoch
Between the Spanish flu and chemotherapy
The crises political and economic
The vast carnival of death unthinkable in its scope
The charging forward of bewildering technology
You took the wounds shared in the triumph
Buried conflict within yourself within your family
Though conflict will not remain hidden forever
You tried to make yourself a poet in advanced old age
A painter applying color affirming goodness
At last you affirmed your love
You never neglected that
But you never told us how it felt
How it felt to be shot to pieces
To swim upon the ocean
The very waters aflame

People weep
They don’t just cry or bawl
Or raise vociferous lamentation

People shed tears
Grief in the body
Flowing out into the world

A great boxer famous
For the grimness of his visage
Remained undefeated
Until the match when he was felled
By a fatal blow

He smiled as he lay supine
And exclaimed in his dying words
At last I have learned how to lose

A sensitive
But mannered
Performance

When all is unsatisfactory
And things that are
Are worse than nothing

When windshear vitiates transportation
Aircraft fail to land safely
Cars are blown off the thoroughfare

When reports come in
Of the machinery of war
The chemistry the radioactivity of war

When weather moves
From amusingly changeable
To threateningly hostile

When memories invade
Of infestations and injustices
In sleepless nights alone

When doubts creep in
That the future might be even worse
Than the bitter past

When nothing is satisfactory
And nothing is worse
Than things that are

When emptiness worse than satedness
And vacancy worse than occupancy
Attend your projects

Then throw it out
Or carry it out

Say silently where we were when first we loved
And again speak only in words inaudible
Where we were when first we wept
And again where when our sorrow
Lay too deeply for expression

Time hides her machinery
Permitting only the sharpest turning points to show
Like babes peeping out from the bedclothes
And space so variously furnished
Like the shadow of an airplane passing over the landscape

Ah beloved
You punish me
With your martyrdom

The golden cup
Even so in which
We mix our memories

The pain we have caused
The pain we have suffered
The joys we happen upon

We lack language
To express
Our persistence

Why we remain
Or is it
Mere inertia

We are old
Dear beloved
Old and ignorant

A tulip tree
Vessel of peace
With three trunks

We could
Have chosen otherwise
The choice remains

And yet and yet
Daily we renew
Even on bad days

Daily we charge
Without a thought
The golden cup

God save me
From insistent adjectives

Trinity and Hiroshima
And those prehistoric heroes
Enabled by metallurgy and mechanical advantage
Plowshares beaten into swords
Unashamed of their rapes murders offhanded cruelties
We have plenty of wine left from when we sacked the city of the Cicons
And for millennia princelings and charlatans
Styled themselves each a noble Hector or a furious Ajax
Epitomes of honor and of the honorable few
Or else flamboyant strategists like the Ithacan liar
Illiterate and boorish
They entrusted their stories to servile biographers
Adept at giving atrocity the shape of significance and the charm of style
But who in the process bequeath shape and charm
And yes beauty and truth

As when the report of a catastrophe hisses across the radio
And all say silently or aloud It is as I feared
For the technology indispensable for human life
Has turned yet again against human life
Wielded yet again by the masters of strategy and honor
And the reporter’s words speak not of them
And their vicious hubris
Or of the dangerous fuel or the threatening hooked cross
But only of the dead the burned and lacerated
With the cry Oh the humanity
While a weakling in Oklahoma
Every man his own Hitler
Exterminates scores of innocent with a truckload of fertilizer
So we read the one great poem
We see the picture of the firefighter the toddler in his arms
And hear the beautiful song of sorrow and suffering
Love for the child
Dread for the beautiful child

The Supposition
The Wedge

The Chela
The Metonym

Large I contain

Commend each day the agile tongue
The trilling thrills from the tip of it
The liquid resonance that runs wildly around the edge

Raise applause for the lively ear
That wakens to answer to vibrate sympathy
In the corridors of its spritely architecture

Appreciate forever the glory of the hand
Shaper of useful objects
Shaper of objects sublime in their uselessness

Rainbows blossoming
From the white-hot core

These bad hands start dropping things
The pills have scattered on the floor perhaps for the last time
People are yoked to disobedient appendages
That lack the capacity to concentrate

The violinist struggles against weak intonation
The watchmaker strains to apply the tiny jewels
All note but none think to mention
The difficulty of actions previously so convenient

I can no longer grasp the simplest fact
The tendons of my intellect degenerating
Porous curiosity declines to probe
And I signal defeat in gestures of tremulous ambiguity

The sages in the stone
The sense in nonsense syllables
The state of true peace
The fusion of sound and sense
The origin of the inexistent species
The real flying cape
The song of the griffins
The opening of a cedar box
The names of those who have ever suffered
The unity of all being
The ineffable grace of consonants and vowels
The correction of errors made in ages past
The A minor arpeggio beyond the limits of the audible
The brazen cars
The wingèd boy
The derangement of the senses
The indisputable argument of a child’s caress
The articulation of the unutterable
The virtuosity of a yellow and black spider
The flight of angels
The fall of angels
The reincarnation of Socrates
The sublime thoughts of scrubby plants
The victory of the underdog
The superfluity of victory
The laurels having been cut
The dominion of good
The roasted manningtree ox with the pudding in its belly
The distortion of space and time
The forgotten chord
The stars loos’d from their sphere
The dales of Arcady
The poems written by executives of large insurance companies
The tales of mystery and imagination
The ride of putti astride dolphins
The world evermore about to be
The world of perpetual intimacy
The allegorical masque
The exhaustive list of things
The beauty of inflections
The tiny woodpecker perched on my sleeve
The ten-foot sphinx
The ranks of immaterial armies
The maiden’s tenderest hope
The flowers of evil
The taste of remembered delicacies
The utterance of the inarticulate
The garden of earthly delights
The first conscious fantasy
The sleekness of an otter without the otter
The digits of pi
The derangement of the senses
The poems written by unemployed medical technicians
The slapstick procession
The fictive landscape in total darkness
The fly’s buzz when I died
The great unveiling
The hilarity of the letter C
The solemnity of the letter O
The Pmist effrent melniciana
The prince of love in the sunny beams
The saprophytes of Thermopylae
The wild guitar
The purification of the mind
The improvised modulation of unheard melodies
The lost sin of Gomorrah
The propinquity of the beloved

The Age of Containment

The Age of Remorse

The Age of Darkness

Upir & iupir
Chrans & methochrans

It is certainly true that without conflict is no drama
If Vanya and The Professor work things out like responsible adults
No shot will ring out and no tickets will be sold

But is it not equally true that without drama is no conflict
For do we not agree to play when hostilities erupt
The intransigent ruler tormented idealist or put-upon ingenue

We live our lives in a veritable commedia
Behind the mask of zany or ballerina
Or dashing swordsman or melancholy bourgeois

No script but only the true disguise
The dance raises a sigh the blade cuts the flesh
The keeping of accounts makes Pierrot sad

Elsewhere everyone tastes the fruit of harmful gestures
Tersely the movement across the plaza costs much
A filament broke upon the occasion of the hanged man
Porters forebear to deny the attribute pulled apart
Inevitable ripples seize the implications of erratic rhythms
Viewing the flight a sinister audition will linger
A command to leap at bins bearing forward
Peristalsis and urban traffic patterns viewed from on high
Once more into the rut my dear conspirators