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

The Fungusses
The Lobes

In the foreground
A dark person with short hair
A light person with long hair
A small person in colorful clothes
A big person in drab clothes
A slender person with big shoes

In the background
The building
The planted trees
The pavement
The light tower
The unassuming camera
The decorative artwork

Have I not reason to sing in joy
When Freya wears a goatee of baby food
The tabletop an action painting

How tempting to forswear joy forever
Contemplating the lamentable wickedness
The cruelty of neighbor upon neighbor

To punish oneself for sins universal
As if it were possible to preempt a feeling
And anyway nobody deserves to suffer

Even the parents laughed when the
Helmet of Hector afrighted Astyanax
Dulce et decorum for babe to cry at the bellicose plume

But Hector himself must face the fateful demigod
Mother must die child must die
Towering Troy must burn

Grieve for the past mutilated and slain
Grieve for the present for the frightful future
But rejoice for the child the dispenser of blessings

I’m so tired of it
Tired of what
Tired of the whole thing

She introduced me
As her brother
He’s been all over the world

Paddling in her wheelchair
Around and around
The dining area

Rage all you want to
Nightfall
Is coming anyway

Nothing but to endure
The long slow tedious
Twilight

The Bludgeon
The Casting

And there’s only one feeling I want to express
Not one that people generally want to hear about
And I immediately wince in self-reproach
Speaking of people generally
What feeling pray would people want to hear about
Perhaps this fact as distinct from this idle declaration
Accounts for my impoverished ability to make an image
A defect that doesn’t make me not a poet
Just a poor one
And I hear a multitude shouting their endorsement of this claim
And why would I invent large-scale fictive derogation
Because it would be joy eternal
For a multitude to have perused these pages
Sufficiently to say that they suck

You can’t do just what you know and love
You have to do things that are onerous and unrewarding
Suppose I tried to express some other feeling
Like maybe the wonder one feels
Upon seeing a flower unfurl
Well I’ve never seen a flower unfurl except in a time-lapse film
That was pretty wondrous but what do I have to show for it
Some prosey unpunctuated sentences
Separated into arbitrary lines
Which I will publish to the internet
With all the others literally all
Since I pretend a point of pride
Not to pronounce an exclusionary judgment
Except that every instance pronounces judgment
Always the same that I am always wrong

If I had a narrative gift which I don’t but if I did
Perhaps I could treat of personal relationships
I and thou or at least I and them
Instead of this unrelieved I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

Never never praise yourself
As I silently just did for contriving an odd number
Of instances of the first-person pronoun
A number meaningful to me precisely in its meaninglessness
And simply meaningless to everybody else
Or rather anybody else who should encounter it
Which is virtually by definition nobody
Never never claim any knowledge
Never make any claim whatsoever
You would be wrong to call this a suicide note
But you wouldn’t be far wrong

The issue is
What is appropriate for these pages
Some wiseguy once said there is no outside-text
Maybe
But different texts are different
Even as they interpenetrate
I mean to say such might be the case
Since I dare not make an outright claim
In other texts I’m an enthusiastic person
Morally aware something of a humanitarian
And yet here I punish myself
As no being deserves to be punished
Though seen of none save him who
Well nobody really
And why here
Because here I must tell the truth
And who can discover the truth of the subjective world

To discover the truth of the objective world
One must enter into dialogue
And here there is nobody to talk to
Except the President of the Assembly
Secure within his portable bunker
That parasite
Who punishes disobedience
And thou Dear Reader
Silent Reader
Fantasy creature out of a song by the Dixie Cups

I am afraid to sin because I fear the consequences of sin
Admittedly no longer those of the loss of heaven and the pains of hell
And not consequence really but mere subsequence
Namely the punishment levied by the Tyrant
And there is really only one sin
Cowardice

Tell the truth
I know the truth
I don’t know the truth

The Incarnation
The Niblick

The crack runs in a perfect concentric curve
Around the emphatic core
The goblins have been on vacation since the 14th C

So you can’t blame them
An airplane’s window blew in and somebody died
So it’s not as bad as that

There was a time when it was as they say
Relatively entire
And in the dire future the damage will only increase

Blue surfaces are the most vulnerable
Or so it seems
Some people stand by blue

But orange passes away almost instantly
So you hardly ever see it
But that’s not relevant anyway

Like the fuse of the starry welkin
Or a Hapsburg celestial medallion
Hard to focus on decor when the faucet’s dripping

8 over 6 the gumpress routine
Doesn’t make any sense
But it’s not quite nonsense the art of fencing

The facile dynasties
March by in a masque of tableaux vivants
Scorning the persistence of vision

The transcript of the fashion show
Sealed without an expiration date
Hard to focus on declamation with so many periphrases

Don’t you cry no more
Trickling tears are vain
You can always borrow a replacement

An inferior replacement
To laminate the symptom
To flesh the blade from top to toe

A fissure a crevasse
A mouthèd wound
Though seen of none save the connoisseur

And the senses fall through
The fog the noise the concealing fragrance
The anaesthesia the inert tongue

The traditional itinerary fails to factor
Did it ever work for those doughty ancestors
Did it ever work for me

If memory serves
But no
Memory in its selectivity only rules

He always deliberately had second thoughts
Whether say to name the card game he had invented pier or blust

His strategy had always been that of error suppression
A fictive simulacrum of facility of aspiration not achievement
Hence the nullity of the final draft

He wanted to speak from the other side of the grave
The other side of the ashes really

He wanted the sublime capaciousness
Of artifice uncontaminated by physical substance
A radical distillation somehow of Os and Cs

To land neatly squarely between
The products of conception and the products of combustion

To erase the fruits of experience
To dispel all heaviness
As the seeing the reaching the grasping

He wanted to make one of those boxes those precious displays
The elegant t-shirt the ancient luxurious postcard the special spoon

Back then life was simpler
Ishtar’s lustful wrath
Open to receive tribute
From Father Sky
The rain of mercy
And the stroke of homicide

Nowadays only Adam’s sin
Demands human sacrifice
For only death repays the debt
Notation on a shopkeeper’s ledger
And a penny owed
Is a penny extorted

The lamb takes on the sins of the world
Along with all its agony
It cannot be
The torment torturous enough to be sure
The beating the nails the sop of vinegar
The dispatching with a lance

But a torturing unto death
Might be greatly more painful
And greatly more protracted than this
Even with the scorching sun
The public display
Of a Friday afternoon

Now the Agony in the Garden
There was a human creature
Trapped in fear
Trapped in ambivalence
The brain wrestling with the impulses
Of fight or flight or hopeless resignation

I saw a fragment
Of a pair of spectacles
Cartilage twisted on the sidewalk
The remains of an animal barely vertebrate
How it is a world of artifice
A world of illusion