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

Nothing in poetry nothing in the universe or outside it is the only thing
Not irony not paradox not figure of speech
Not image not tone
Not even syntax
Concrete object
Preeminence
Beauty
The
A

No it hasn’t been only concealment
The bee peeps sometimes from under its hood
But part of the appeal of the hive
Is the many rooms it offers wherein to hide

And solitude is hard to come by
In fact like silence solitude is never available
For even confined in a cell
The many voices crowd around

The many voices from the past and future
The many accusing voices of the present
Which howl the past and howl the future
Which demand confinement in foursquare lines

And yet even so the blue box suspended overhead
Occasionally shifts slightly ajar
And its content or merely the fragrance of its content
Diffuses slowly subtly calmly voluptuously

The oceans abound in ships laden with grain
Warehouses on the land burst with uncounted stores
A child in Syria dies of malnutrition
Her helpless parents in a hell of despair

The philosopher scoffed at his rival
Who professed a belief in shortages
When nothing is real but forces and particles
How childish to imagine a failure in distribution

Please hear this apology in the ancient sense
Albeit inflected by the modern sense
I do not contest that I have committed a wrongful act
Indeed I proclaim the commission of such an act
And I further confess that I am an irrational animal
Raging within a soft membrane of rationality

Perhaps there are those here among us
Who are rational through and through
If so they merit unconstrained admiration
And merit the authority to bind or loose
I however willingly assert
That I am worthy of no such regard

On the contrary I reprehend most forcefully
Not merely the act itself
But the person who committed it
And against no person other than myself
Would I levy such a condemnation
I know as I could know of no other
That I might have known before I committed it
That such an act was wrong
And I would have vigorously denied
That I was even capable of such a thing

And yet I now deny that I deliberately
That is with full knowledge and control
Committed that act
Whose execution I have already admitted

For I can indeed describe to you the horror
I felt at the moment when I became the first witness
The perplexity that it was I of all people
Who had done this thing
But in the event
I could not perform the moral calculus
My moral reasoning overtaken by the animal
Nor can I guarantee the permanent suppression
Of the enemy
Nor was its advent some casual eruption
But rather a response to provocation
Nevertheless I will not claim any extenuation

A saint a holy man once declared all persons to be good
For though a rational being might mistake the good
Nobody can with reason want the bad

And so this assembly must decide
An easy decision no doubt for those
Who are rational through and through
For it is as clear as the cleansing waters
That a vicious animal cannot be allowed
To subsist among us
And exile or death are in order
But those who live within the rational veneer
Will recognize among their kindred
One who failed
And the only question will be
Is one who failed irretrievably lost

I saw the world shedding sparks of liveliness
The mere walls an oscillation of joyous reds and yellows
Confined space expanding
Youth and energy
Attempt and discovery
All the while a person a human person
Used me as an instrument of gratification
And I was too foolish to comprehend the truth
That one I knew to be an intimate friend
Was handling me as a baby handles a rattle
And in my selfishness I wanted nobody
To be displeased with me
All the while I said to myself I don’t want this
I wanted my tormentor to disappear
Even as I had learned to believe
That I was always in the wrong
That a friend and equal could not cause me torment
And even now the voice of guilt
Surely you exaggerate
You know you gave encouragement
How wrong of you to deliver blame
My other self addressing me in the second person
Blame recoiling in cognitive toxins
Polluting my writing with a one-sided account
But that one side is broken apart
And the cascade of error advances
Advances through erosion upstream
The childish poses that assume the aspect of truth
First the badass with only dismissal
For something so unhip as lovingkindness
And second the melancholic
When in fact the addiction to exaltation
No less than addiction to dejection
The facile recourse to artificial excitement
Drowns the capacity for simple pleasure
I thought I was faking it when I said I was sad
And now I must don the last exhausting mask
Of equable urbanity
And although it makes no difference
Who did the damage
The spiteful ghost the past never dies
And I’ve given free my share of pain
And I lack the linguistic skill
To conceal his gender
Hence the disclaimers the provisions the backtracking the diagrams
I remember his telling me what he wanted
He only wanted closeness he said
And I never doubted his sincerity
He wanted me to draw close to him
His reversal of attractiveness
An error of judgment a simple mistake
Perhaps
But why did he never wonder
What I wanted
Why did he not imagine that I wanted something
That I wanted peace
But then I never knew myself
And now I know the truth
That he believed that he had the power
That he held it to be true that he had the power
That he was right to exercise the power
To make me want the same as he
And wouldn’t it be pretty
If all our sorrow could be shown to have issued
From a single source
A single thoughtless moment
But did he realize then
Or does he realize now the harm he committed
And what harm have I committed
All the while half-conscious or less than half
There are those in the world
Objects of injustice
Whom injustice itself inspires to strength
While some other similarly objectified persons
Become so twisted with pain
That they devote their lives to causing pain
I of course fall in the insipid middle
Still I never blow the whistle
Still I find ways to punish myself
For the one true sin of cowardice
Though I have certainly punished others
No wonder then that memory
Retreats into abstraction
Prosey lines
Arbitrary lines
A colorless world
Without fragrance
Without rest
Blind walls
Without form
Without sense
Without dimension

Did a cognitive revolution take place
Some tens of thousands of years ago
Or was the fat jelly of the cortex
Mostly unchanged for ten times as long

Can we even contemplate the cogito
Without resort to the Cartesian ghost
Or for that matter without resort
To culture’s innumerable compulsions

What do people care about
And do they care about the right things
Do they care that a person not oneself
Should experience unnecessary pain

A woman enters a vast stadium
On the last leg of a 26-mile run
But she doesn’t run
She staggers

All the other competitors
Have entered long before her
The many cameras transmit these images
To a billion viewers worldwide

With each stride she leans shockingly to one side
She drags one side of her body as if stricken
The commentators praise this triumph
Of the human spirit

She completes the final circuit
She is allowed the agonizing completion
She has done credit to herself her nation her species
In the conquest of the body

Under all that ketchup
I see only baloney
Said Larkin of Hughes
Though he might have said catsup
And he must have written it
And not just said it
So it ought to be easy to look up
But if he said it
Would an orthographic alternative
Have resulted in an alternative pronunciation
Although he certainly didn’t say it
Or write it
In Malay
Thereby trivializing perhaps attempts to standardize
Speech or spelling
But he certainly raised a question
Or in truth asserted an answer
About Warheit and Dichtung
In a concrete-to-concrete metaphor
The vehicle of which is a condiment
While the tenor is a vital bodily fluid
But aligned with a concrete-to-abstract metaphor
The vehicle of which is a luncheon meat
Orthographically and phonologically distorted
In its importation from Italian
Though perhaps one should note
The intervening Bowdlerization
Albeit conventional
Of bullshit to bull-oney
As damnation to tarnation
Or God damn to Goodness gracious sakes alive
While the tenor is falsehood
Thereby positioning himself as the less deceived
So Larkin put forth not unvarnished truth
But truth metaphorically varnished
Or might one say condiment-enhanced
The better to match  aggressive matter
To an insouciant manner
In order to attack an aggressive manner
That expresses tender-hearted matter
So that we are left to contemplate
Ted Hughes’s sensitive Augustan decorum
And Philip Larkin’s running amok

The organism dormant
Insensible of a pain
Insupportable
By any conscious being

There is no entelechy
Nor no sublunary purpose
Only the glacial pace
The supra-glacial pace
Of chance operation
Of elemental forces

Why should such a state obtain
Motive implies consciousness
Or at least response
And consequence sequence
Amenable to observation

Rather ask why
The pangolin’s scale
The Fibonacci spiral of an artichoke’s scales
The diatom’s elegant silica
The horn of a giraffe
The snail’s sensitive horn
The implacable drive of a bamboo shoot
The predator
The migration of the prey

All concede universal neutrality
But all have witnessed
Though few perhaps remark the fact
How neutrality is reprehensible

The Organization has weaponized discourse
This occurred about three thousand years ago
Speech for victory not for truth

But maybe they’re right
The ones who claim that dispute
Is the name of the game

Contention and conflict
Lies and verbal armament
Since syntax first fell into place

Like that diet styled paleolithic
Flesh and internal organs
Devoured of the slaughtered

The originary myth carouses
Force hails its own triumph
While reason fragile outpost languishes

I demand that you accede to
The invitation to the dance
The goose-stepping incursion

The Tumbleweed
The Frass

Natrul
Ethins
Carntolt

Sentzperod
Planorbts
Seaonsclimt

Sloenlig
Homnos
Exornttes

Sloenligs
Nventscver
Silbscursh

Prescoss
Peutre
Kallimfrom

Limtloss
Sen
Allimt

Scurf
Almta
Dnoray

The Dowsing Rod
The Dibble

The plastic simulation of gilding
Aloft the commercial monument
The logo the icon of selfish tenders
The thoroughfare a lesion
Visible from space
Supply chain orthodoxy
The theology of logistics
A mercenary pop song
Commandeered as an advertising jingle
Consumer cecotropes

And for all this
Imagination is never spent
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall
I think I may well be a Jew
His straining rump among the flowerbeds
Now fish dart among their bones
The acrid lilt of dissonant harmonies
Recollection will not be denied
Nor will the lover’s plaint the casualty’s plaint
Remain silent

All is aftermath
Events have occured
Responses to events have occured
Wherewhen recollection reconstructs
On a foundation already riddled
With memories of dread guilt and ignorance
Morose addendum

Another springtime and its golden hosts
These hills that rise above organic decay
For a moment the city’s heart is quiet
A city of the past
With its immemorial rhythms
Compressed between frenzy and coma
A moment a slim cleavage
But not even then
For this for everything
Shades of the prison house
Earth’s diurnal course
Perennial

So no
We are not tranquil
Nor will recollection be denied
With the disturbance it brings
Perhaps you had power
We have lost
Or perhaps your reassurances
Came colored
With well-meaning self-deception
Or perhaps the world is even darker now
Trying to shelter
Beneath the viaduct

Reassurance requires simple faith
Some can bring themselves to believe
That all we behold is full of blessing
But it cannot be
These vacancies
These spots of desolation
What are we to speak of
To speak through
Not with emotion
Thus discomposed

I wish that I could say
Regret that I cannot say
Mind and man
Fair trains of imagery

I feel not see
How beautiful things are
Those things wherein beauty might dwell
A tangle of appearances
Imposing a feeble will
Nor is one free to choose
Toward which features of the landscape
To turn a blind eye
These many moments
Their cramped interstices

Tranquility having failed
We are not poets
Or we are

Spring showers gnaw the soil away
Exposing roots like unholy guts
Some other place gains the boon of alluvium
While here the cleansing mercy is all too great