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

But is it literally true that
In fantasy anything is possible
Klein bottle and cat’s hovering smile yes

And let’s not get snared in a taxonomy of faculties
Fancy against imagination that tipped Coleridge
Whereas the capacity of fictive cognition is claimed unlimited

But surely the unimaginable obtains
And of that we cannot speak
Putting into words an undiscovered nothing

For if we attempt such an act
Words will create the special effect
Of a nothingsomething residing in the ethermatter

Those famous green ideas
Which are colorless
And greenly burn in colorless fury

Or the facile resort to
Uahthantig sens jrahklom
Which Doipoln alleluci tucoign gurdriff dni

And yet there are unimaginable somethings
Can you imagine twelve or five
Or compassion or equality

And definite but unimaginable nothings
Like the necessity of a well-regulated militia
Or the substitutive retribution

What now is proven was once only imagined
An idealistic formulation
But not a fact of history

And some things are too big to imagine too    there isn’t a word
Holocaust mistreatment of even one person the death of a child
And we must imagine what we dare not imagine

So what
Who cares

Raise the flowering branch
Bending it upward
The dogwood strong despite its delicate seeming

But with sufficient downward pressure
The branch will split off at the forking
The way the physical world operates

But in the perceptual world
No precise measurement
For calibrating destructive force

And perception reacts
It does not calibrate
It reverberates in endocrine speech
Far outside the cognitive matrix

Silent commands
To delight to dread
To suffer to triumph to arise in pursuit
To collapse in downcast disappointment

An infinitesimal red bug traverses the table
In two-dimensional Brownian motion
And at our most splenetic nadir
The world submits opportunities for wonder

Vernal equinox and the parliament of fowls
Emit their collective Hear
Regardless of the audience
Genetically disposed to respond as to music

Thereby suggesting an ecological advantage
But who cares
Since nature is good and song is good
And the poetry of earth is ceasing never

I only get my rocks off when I’m dreaming
–The Rolling Stones

Sleonlic ien effrent senstito
Sinswex senstit jui
Sybilleffrent crotazx brekek
Uahthantig sens jrahklom
Frecure lonlign effrendondo Melnici
Doipoln alleluci tucoign gurdriff dni
Gurdriff Ardonor gurdriff
Bim Beri
Leet hu kolb hu pragtig

In fantasy anything is possible
And so I make believe
That there is an omnipotent god
So that I might act as adversary

To start with I look pretty cool
Anti-imperially slim
The black and silver of a Kiss costume
A cap with an impossibly long pheasant feather

All my actions are just for show
The intricate gestures
The opulent dark decor
The small but spectacular destructions

I am heedless of the innocent
Whom I construe as collaborators
With The Tyrant
To them I cause wanton but not permanent injury

And yet I am tormented and torn
I do not waver in my enmity
To The Great Forbidder
But I doubt myself even in a dream

This is no dream but an act of will
It’s okay to impose will on an unbidden illusion
But this is cheating
Another opportunity for regret

William says he doesn’t like what I do
Well not me in particular
But anybody who does what I do

The grand parts are painted in grand strokes
The tender parts in tender strokes
Or so I thought when I attempted it

But it lacks definition
It lacks clarity
It lacks form

That’s me talking not William
All I ever wanted was to make something of value
That’s not really true

I’ve wanted other things too
Recognition
To equal what I admire

And so I recognize myself
In all the failures that have come before
Well not all I don’t know them all

But William helps me see
I’m just like them
I guess I should be grateful

I protest that I mean well that I’m sincere
Most damning praise of all
I’ve fallen short of what I meant

But what harm have I done
Soiling the history of art
With well-meaning clumsy blots and daubs

A man of achievement especially in literature
Is capable of remaining in uncertainty
But here the evidence is overwhelming

I believed that feeling would find a way
And so it has
The old bad feelings assert themselves

But that doesn’t make it intelligible
That doesn’t make it a joy forever
A symptom is not a symphony

And a new feeling is added to the old
The party to which I thought myself invited
Is a hoax

It should be like hammering
It should not be like the distasteful image
That haunts the brain in an afternoon nap
How can you know which voice is mine not mine

Line up the cards and probe fate
But nobody can believe such nonsense
Birds in flight the entrails of a raven
And belief isn’t voluntary anyway

The noblest art from the basest superstition
Gods who raped earth girls
Who yet remained virgins
And song a loathsome incantation

But is poetry possible without creeping unreason
The drunkard’s pursuit of intentional derangement
The metallurgist was once a sorcerer
The poet the object of divine possession

Ambition is a toxin
A noxious psychotropic substance
Which discipline makes it possible to tolerate
Itself a dire addictive

Truth is a cliche and fact a commonplace
Did anyone ever know what holiness meant
The deadly apparition with a dozen dozen wings
The god with the head of a hippopotamus

One should engage in steering the world
Out of these catastrophic times
And not this fantasy-flogging
With long-stemmed roses

The doors of perception are filthy
As they always were
Only an optimist of the Enlightenment
Could have imagined them cleansed

Did anyone ever know what beauty meant
Or innocence
Which demon will you serve
Poetry or ennui

The Earwig
The Mandrake Root

The little chemistry lab
The breakdown-buildup factory
Oscillation of ebb and crest
Flourish and decay

And when the numbness comes
The tale told by neuropathy
The screed of satiety
The alarm of deafness

Tobacconist and camera shop
Filters of varying densities
I can kick
Or I can lie down and take my rest