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

Brother and sister had found
Some scraps of lumber
We’re going to make a table
The girl eight years old announced
And we’re going to paint it
And a grownup asked What color
But the child had not thought that far
A quick sidelong glance
But big brother had moved on
To another activity
A compression of the brow
A slight turning downward
Of the corners of the mouth
Blue she said
Her voice a question mark

On Briarcliff Road a youthful pine tree grows
Choked with coeval wisteria
Whose blossoms hang in heavy clusters like the grape
But dry and empty

And on a Georgia Power line that slices through the tree
Hard by the heavy flowers
A mockingbird dapper in his gray uniform
Flings into the air a heroic song

Neither joy nor sorrow but naked triumph
Fills the august improvisation
With assurance that comes from being the best
The bird fancies himself an aristocrat

Not unlike the bard of Yoknapatawpha
Who doubtless heard this song or similar variations
On the theme of our lost confederacy
And the crimes of our Jim Crow republic

You people think your sins make you human
Why do you so cherish every failure
He cries with the pride of his peerless virtuosity
Alight atop the surging voltage

And the sealed cars swerve down Briarcliff Road
Exceeding a little the posted limit
Past the ruined KFC
And the pine tree struggling under all that beauty

You can feel the fibrillation
But only once in a great while
Like the twitching in the lower leg
Or in the skin under the eye
But bigger blockier
Like a fist or like two fists
Pressed together to simulate brain
A pressure not resulting in fusion
Lacking crucially the corpus callosum
Connective divider

One could return to the carousel
Of Cs and Os
The pathway to earlier certainty
Remains open
Drop a fictive name
And pretend that a real stranger gets it
Earlier completions earlier euphemisms
Demonstrative adjectives and parodic armillaries

But only at the cost of those partial failures
Those invisible naked truths
As for example concerning the outrageous future
The hand of fate
The systematic confusion of fact and speculation
The encyclopedias of another dimension

Or
A doodle where the surf crushes the sand
A self-serving geomancy of control
Of cubic watermelons and hydraulic forearms
But is that so wrong
And is self-sacrifice irrespective of its beneficiary so right
Dalí refused to return the calls
Of those who narrated their dreams to him
The illustrator whose dreams decorated a century
Of the devil’s party with or without malice aforethought

Increase the dreams
Augment and enhance them
Duly sublimated
Pink pears
Silent colonnades
Well-worn hats
Wooly rhinos
Improvised Golgi bodies

Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear Lin
Happy birthday to you

Dr. King you should be alive today
We need you now more than ever before
America is an open cesspool
That breeds pestilence and horror
Digital transmission
Industry military and commercial
The vast resources of culture and education
Have betrayed their promise of human understanding
We have raped our mother
And condemned our brothers and sisters
To lives of endless suffering
And yet we regard ourselves as superior
In our house of razor wire and surveillance
You were a famous celebrity
Admired by many and hated by many
You knew you would be murdered sooner or later
And yet you strode out on the balcony
To preach the gospel of truth and justice
To the nation that knew its rights
To bear arms and pursue selfish happiness
In the deluded creed of rule by the majority
When the few great abused the many small
And all knew nothing of lovingkindness

Ebestinae toldruk lungtwirp
Dair tilden fi testinare
O ma ditheness thiw ibrassne
Da dir ma ning dess combirde
Vergint myo ent itilliaza
Temertin fap rnnes
Enicant dbi witin
Strety prug eskiszact
Labanlabir feloa mmemostiv
Plyhap celtia
Uo creveh myo

In youth I condemned myself
For lacking discipline

In middle age I condemned myself
For failing to achieve

In old age I condemn myself
For having condemned myself

To other people I grant indulgence
I don’t know what they’ve been through

But for myself I remember every thought
Every thoughtless act

Every lie like the one just uttered
An obsession with the cherished inner life

Self-consciousness self-absorption
Self-condemnation and narcissism

Which I hereby condemn
And what sentence shall I pronounce

A lifetime of falsehood mediocrity and unhappiness
Denial of the innumerable joys

That befall
Even the depraved

And in truth there are many lives not mine
Bereft of joy by war famine and pestilence

But I don’t think of them
Preoccupied by my own guilt and dread

I tried to believe that I dreaded emptiness
Because Wordsworth dreaded vacancy

In fact I dread being apprehended
While looking and acting like everybody else

And so I promulgate the myth
That I am much worse than everybody else

And fall into a confessional style
That scarcely merits the name of style

And I dread abstraction spread across these pages
Like projectile vomiting

Abstraction is bad because two scumbags*
Separately declared it so

But behold a majestic fact
In no possible universe

Can the sum of five and seven
Be anything other than twelve

 

*Ezra Pound and Vladimir Lenin

No really
I need that

How proud I was of my pet hognose snake
Though now I know keeping pets to be reprehensible
When children are suffering fatal privation
Wild pets particularly
The attempt to domesticate which
Constitutes a form of animal abuse

But my pet ate wild food inedible to humans
Indeed the hognose is the only creature
I know of that could tolerate
The toxic toads that abounded
In my north Florida homeland

After dark with a flashlight
I would patrol the sidewalk
Hunting for the chubby hoppers
Present in their dozens
The only challenge to select
The toad neither too large nor too small
For the loose-hinged jaw to accommodate

When you return to the place childhood
All has changed
All has grown smaller
I walked the sidewalk with my new grandchild
Too small for me too large for the baby
No toads could we find of any size

Sons and daughters and all enlist
Albeit only half-voluntarily or less than half
In the various categories
Of attitude and affiliation

Something compels in some of them
A need to count
Others amass collections of candy and playthings
Still others ceaselessly drum their fingers

Many indulge a wish to control
The origin of such desire obscure
Thereby requiring responses
From those now designated as opposition

And since all regard the population
As resembling themselves
Assuming that what is easy for one must be easy for all
Few perceive the splendid variation of difficulty

Few perceive the abject suffering
Even in themselves
Luxuriating veritably bathing
In the pornography of cruelty

And history presents yet another iteration
Of hollowness of horror of faceless sojourners
Of a void never to be filled
By muffin or cucumber sandwich

And yet another occasion for sorrow
The suffering of those who endorse suffering
Sons daughters and all
The pitious multitude in the great evacuation

All march one way
And though the tread is inequitably distributed
Among sons and daughters and all
The monarchs of wickedness are suffering too

The grate above my head lets in the sunlight
Lets in the drippings from the gutter
While at intervals some unseen agent
Hoses down my cell
Upon which occasion I rejoice
Until the realization again befalls me
That lacking drainage
The floor will retain the residue
In its fetid entirety
Slop orts and imports

I say my cell not as ownership
But only as relation to a space
That excludes all but the solitary

My clock my clock
Why hast thou emprisoned me
The morning hums
The afternoon blares
And in the evening
The riotous clamor
Of discontent resurges
And deep in the midnight
The heartbeat silence
Inaudibly whispers
Of dreadful morning
And shameful yesterday
The circuit runs the circuit
And the reverberant commentary
Pops and hisses
In its immemorial groove

We study war
We cultivate aggression
In order to deploy it
In the furious close
Of tactical butchery

We study commerce
We cultivate calculation
In order to redeem it
In the exclusive precincts
Of meretricious exchange

We study philosophy
We cultivate leisure
In order to ask
Would you give your life
To spare a stranger a nasty abrasion

Nobody is dying
To see the expired invoice
Nobody undertakes
The difficult journey
Toward the stoical the ascetic
Not even the stoic

Instead a few seek out
The rapid plucking
Upon the Spanish guitar
Or the mural that seems
A window opening
Upon an exclusive park

Nobody is to be faulted
For a preference
Toward simulated immediacy
The clocks disagree
With each other
In constricted vocabulary

Nobody is rushing
To read the autopsy report
Nobody is taking steps
To complete the encyclopedia
Of suffering
The catalogue of defects

Instead a few add to
The spectacle
Of varied and shifting colors
The red changes to gold
The gold to green
The dimming geometry

Instead a few make their
Acid findings
To supplement the one great poem
Infinitesimal increments
That all can see but
Nobody is dying to

Whether Philip had succeeded in his calculation
Calcium chalk calligraphy
This we ask nominal dominator
Crash or fall or first crash and then fall
The raptor airborne acrest the thermal
Hovering upon the incitement
That sags like a tiny island
Like a leukocyte
What comes of distinguishing wants and needs
Who bids the enforcement of equanimity and subjection
The obstruction of chaos
Obstinate obsidian oblivion
Who will be deflected
Impassive necessity obeys the reckoning
The birdsong the crops the horses
The language of ascendancy
The old manner the old idiom
The irresolution of of
The crackdown thereof
The mastery of the achieve of
A theft of molten crayons
A cognitive rift toward sequence
No visible inducement toward cessation
Whether Philip had succeeded or no
The sin of having been born too early
The other unavoidable sin
The flak the investiture the laceration
Concentric rhythms an oppressive order
Is dissonance really better
Is chalk

We I you
Or one from the small set
Of options in the third person
How amid the infinity
Of objects actions and concepts
Persons affects and projects
Available in the universe
Can a set of options seem small

And yet the facets
Of the most perfect jewel
Must be shaped by somebody
Somebody must evoke the rush
Of shapes streaming by
Outside the subway car
Somebody somewhere
The little prison of time and space

But the universe is as capacious
As it ever was
The change therefore
Has been wrought
In a different perennial fixture
The bugbear of experience
The weaker pole
Of a false dichotomy

A particular hallucination
Sometimes afflicts
The neurologically troubled
In which a body part
Limb head or torso
Or the entire body
Expands to colossal size
Unlimited by the environs

Is it a hallucination then
That the environment
Has contracted
To the static cell
Insufficient time
To compose the lyric invocation
Insufficient space
To wield the lapidary instrument

I don’t want to pull out my pocket knife
I want the knot to detach itself
That is the recalcitrant tangle
With no contribution from me
Self-conscious as always stingy as always
I keep turning to the left
As if imprisoned on a racing course
Drawing inferences concerning
Crustaceans and the different trees
Exotic characters and amorphous glass
Does a single node define the figure
Does the ordeal of fame define significance
Drain holes appear on the pathways before me
That rhyme with the drain holes in my brain
Alleged remedy for concealment
I don’t want to pull out my crocheting hook
My bookmark or the public fountain
I want to attach the status quo ante bellum
To finish the synecdoche
As if firing it in a kiln
Though letting go is easier than reputed
Plaques and tangles abound
Nobody public is listening that’s a good thing
Not even myself
I don’t want to pull out the trading cards
That some company tried to puff to exaggerated value
Not because of the righteousness of my cause
To be thoughtful of others
Whose own thoughts remain unknown
But only because of the credible shortage
There are shoes at the front door
Of the neighbors’ house
They must have organized their exaggerated readiness
The unknown does not imply a concealment
Nor silence an attitude of parsimony
If the dialectical materialists have relinquished
Their insistence upon the metamorphosis
Of the status quo
At least dependency on typography
Has declined
The small enameled box
Object of impressive solemnity
Whoever should undergo the famous ordeal
Will assume the title of Emperor by acclamation
I however keep turning to the left
Emblem of the pains of sleep
I’m not even myself
Cliffs and shocks abound
The landscape an abundance of confused categories

For The Hoop Snakes

In this salon no antagonist troubles the goings-on
The givers all swear by the go-signal
The theater of control is strictly a no-go
No shot-caller designates another as go-fer

Nor is it the design of some mad visionary
Nor a rehabilitative or recuperative revision
But simple voice civil attention and clear vision
Easy for the modest mortal to envision

Social intercourse is not a route to infection
Nor common discourse a kinky defect
Nor the ordering of forms a perishable confection
But doing without trying the way of earthly perfection

Matter and manner are not matters for choice
No augury imprints the mark of The Chosen
But a noble work should be valued for its choiceness
And every mover a marker free to choose

Knowledge does not matter very much
The existence of truth matters
The possession of it rather little

Possession of the truth is a fool’s errand
Since there’s too much truth to go around
People capture little more than a little shard

And even this quantitative fantasy errs
The unit of measure irrelevant
When the understanding reduces truth to mere belief

We know that beliefs make actions rational
Provided that we perceive the truth
And then act according to the truth of reasons

The albatross sticks the landing
On this most rare of occasions
Knowing little of the laws of motion

We do not designate as actions
The impulses of instinct
Or obedience to arbitrary decree

Instead we demand choice
Among alternatives explicitly posed
All furnished all in arms

But nobody sees all the pitfalls
The catalogue of serpents venomous or persuasive
The index of glittering weapons and gaping traps

We raise the edifice of laws and wish by decree
All is as it should be so what’s to think about
Ignore the future emergency the legal improvements

Adjectives nullify
Abstractions conceal
The illusion of no illusions