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

          With apologies to Emanuel

Reflection or refraction seedlings in an opera cache
Red cat decrypt an aerodynamic morsel
Blisters from mustard gas a dispute about authorial intention
Perestroika soothing intimations of static verbs
Father said the child The gate is damped
Drive to enumerate wrought unto the outer darkness
Plague and the king who jams the plague
Do I expose myself very well
Right now right now persuade right now right now
Particle or viscosity residue of the strategic capsule
Stair-stepping transparency its erotic harmonies
Finial emplacement gouge atop these mumbling bards
Mangle-iron rapid-digited fiber trial
Because they will have forded in forth
Touch and capture self-described minimum
Their emblem athwart the galley proofs which flex precipitously
Gain regain never revenge his grease his determinants
The chair recognizes the takeout rifle casket
Search and search again in the defective territory
Porters mock the hatted agronomists
The lath exposed by some fallen-away coronation
There must be some trick claimed the uniformed diver
Passenger or stowaway renunciates for discord flower
There is no compulsion nevermore to rove
Infant parasol greens the putrid fancier
Pale in comparison wan iupir delight
In sorrow or in vain steep the tresses in the container
Purse the wastrel mince in cystic encumbrance
Dosed with incarnadine e replete with enjambment
A touching derangement is here much amiss
Omnibus derangement kind of an entrepreneurial cult
The last turbulence embarks even timely the decline of disco
Running of containment apart effrent days foolish and less wise
Academic ruler south beyond inborn truth
Two mere exempla thus cramp a broad voodoo
Past the cantering leaves too much emulation for novices
Blame upon blame keep upon keep
Lift up your kindling starbeams you troubled tardy
Facts and the lodgers who predict the facts
The architectural females testing the tastes
The command came down among the oenophiles Start making sense
The beleaguered option to decline the asphodels
Emboldened charactery facile dimension the one true facet
Pantomime or audit dirges through a various tag
Do I conceal myself very well
Repetition the one nuance unavailable to manifest
Shadow tumble for grey dusty institutes
Aurochs Lennon precipitates the ungainly monument
Indisposable shaft indisposable tipping
The portcullis has failed

In a pub well after midnight
Two students finally got to the bottom
Of The Seventh Seal

A small speckled woodpecker hopped about outside the window
And because it could not hear me through the glass
It did not fly away when I spoke to it

The watermelon
Had chilled in the stream
And it was good

A young woman in a kimono
Greeted the taxicab
As it arrived at 27th Street

A small boy opened the kitchen door
And announced aloud or in silence
Now it is spring

Nothing remains
All is change and falling away
Thus was it ever and ever shall be

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