Shameka says Something’s wrong with the dinner table
The surveillance cameras are picking up
People using their cutlery and napkins
But missing the actions she doesn’t know what they are
That show much amiss
And words misdirections cover-ups and manipulations

Shameka says she doesn’t know what’s wrong with people
They keep trying to make eye contact
When she walks from the parking lot into the building
I wish they wouldn’t take such an interest in me
So many envelopes with inscrutable addresses
So many messages with misaligned subjects

To ennui most modern of sins
A new sin has been added
Too new to have a name
The commuter supplants the insouciant flâneur
The solipsist ousts the secretly gay observer

There are no streets to amble
All embark for private worlds
The slender wires white or black
The heads bowed in submission
Realms of new sensations new celebrities

New tribes new enthusiasms
New luxuries new frissons
New crimes new indignations
New achievements in unheard-of endeavors
New spectacles of elaborate failure

New abstraction of image from thing
All are freed from the heavy weight
Of bodies animate or inanimate
In blank material space
Gone forever the libidinous touch

I have more memories than if I had a thousand years
From screens that receive the white-hot projection
Screens excited by electron rays
Screens composed of picture elements
Screens that illuminate and divide

Is there anything about you that isn’t perfect
Don’t mention that mole on your belly
High up near the left side
The single maculation the single note of contrast
Your compact body your pure body
Uncontaminated with judgment by thought supplied
Nothing to judge in the flawless contours
And when you speak is not the sound
Like chrism on the brow
The scent of freshness the scent of ancientness
Dark in all the right places
Florid in all the right places
And your touch
Transitory soothing emphatic
When we retreat to the secret to-us familiar region
The landscape of forgetfulness and remembrance

I don’t know what I’m doing or what’s to be done
A good three quarters through the journey
Living into an age of flails and epic fails
I thought of myself as an easygoing child
Or so I was told by those who would have known
And who doesn’t know casts the stone
And even as a child I vacillated
Between dull contentment and lacerating anxiety
And hence I never know what’s to be done
And hence I recur to the middle course of routine
Or rather wish that such a course should obtain

The progression is rather simple
From bright-eyed child
To wild-eyed youth
To heavy-eyed sour bitter old man
Who knows not what he does

Do I screw up more than others do
Should I compose while under the influence
Should I pursue the truth of theme
Or instead dedicate myself to practicing
The skills that mark true artistry
Should I restrict myself to what I know
Since I know that restriction frees the mind
Or should I speculate at large
Admitting without discrimination
The elegant the perfunctory the noble and the banal
Or should I sulk in silence
Awaiting the next peevish outburst
And curse my lack of inspiration
My lack of decorum
My defect

Concerning the cultural patterns in Acamura
The people there place great stress
On the disposition of the dead
And especially upon providing
Appropriate footwear for the deceased
For the dead’s own shoes are proscribed
As are those of close friends and relatives
And hence some member of the community
Perhaps even a stranger to the mourned one
Must step up to make provision
And enable the great departure

Well uh
Current events piss me off

Ah shit

The green enamel
Translucent over the white ceramic
The five pairs of legs
Just lobes really
Like the upreared head
With its coarse circular screen

It is not necessary to say words
But only speak
Whatever comes
Into the circular screen
And hear the modulation
The voice of the oracle

Abundant recompense
My ass

Among the infinite and therefore breach-honorable rules
We find the one prohibiting self-expression
Or rather to be fair sentimentality
From which self-expression is said to arise

A misreading it turns out
Of a critical rather than a poetic stricture
Asserting that knowledge of authorial intention
Is neither available nor desirable

Feminine lore of textiles
Stitching and unstitching
Easy for gentleman professors to dismiss
When every made thing has a maker you fools

Lift your tender eyelids maid
As opposed would you say to eyelids tough and horny
And if you’re trying to be objective then concede
No analysis without synthesis

No wonder then that she places the embroidered fabric
In the dresser lacking some number of glass knobs
Along with her unconventional punctuation
In countless thousands of fugitive stanzas

Sometimes the inscription
Seems almost intelligible
You can almost make out an O or a C
But then the C seems just an O again

Sometimes the words seem to speak for themselves
How else explain the spontaneous assemblies
And the citizenry swear to a man
They each heard an audible call

But when challenged to remember
What it was made the Giant significant
They murmur and glance from their eyes’ corners
Seeking confirmation from one another

And one or two might have the presence of mind
To recite what was it
Translation or commentary
And what’s the difference anyway

Maybe it’s enough that it originated
In the misty lore of ancient days
To stand here congealed
And pedestalled in hewn granite

Maybe people need this
This abstract intuition and yet
Arbitrarily right cannot aptly compensate
For necessarily wrong

Ig coud autdarv jui sloenlic
En effrent libreo pmist

Ansgt bitbagia sinlent
Thoiesi di mondaquoetdi

Setht rew scendar moniana
Sistre obrepices cvmwoflux

Vilcon jui
Jui vilcon quis sistre thniclicot
Sie vitar tremloss dlor plema
Besiogne ne pmisti effrent ceal

Posseblit necoud cvmpenflux
Crescliss met vrei plusia
Fluxas brefigor ansgt dlor
Ie couden na geirp

In those days people heated their houses
With oil delivered by big trucks
I watched when such a truck
Brought about the death of my dog Sam

And it is wrong of me to make a claim of causation
For Sam was the cleverest of dogs
Who could climb a fence to practice
A nasty and infamous habit

For Sam was a chaser of automobiles
Who died when he attempted bigger prey
I was watching when he leaped
And caught a bumper or stairstep square in the back

He yelped
And for several seconds through the gutter
He dragged with his forepaws
The inert hindquarters

He collapsed and my mother commanded firmly
That none should approach the body
For fear that Sam would awaken in death fury
To attack his loving master

The driver saw what had happened
He came to the door to offer payment
And my mother reassured the man
That no payment was necessary

The death was bad
But far worse were the long seconds of the dragging
Running from death
Clinging to a life of suffering

He may know not what he knows
But knows not grief

Randomness fractures dings
Pocks and false starts
Abbreviations shortcuts and broken links
Wrong numbers and missed connections
Aberrations fouls and accidents
Fissures and lacunae
Contaminants leaks and shortages
These are not defects
These are the materials

The salivary dregs in the vodka bottle
The content of the landfill
Nay of the sewer
Seafoam and pissfoam
Amino acids no different
From those of the comet
That first impregnated earth
And brought forth Aphrodite
And stirred the wrath of Achilles

The famous critic had already
Been accused of Nazi collaboration
By the time I encountered his observation
That she dies in the blank space
Between the two stanzas
And I castigated myself
For impercipience
Of that which was so obvious

It pisses me off when somebody says
You never know
I want to scream
Isn’t it pretty to think so
And sure
You can’t compare finite knowledge
To the infinitude of ignorance

But some things you know
That you can only wish you had never known
As for example
The horrors inscribed
Behind the closed eyes of memory
And here are my poems for anybody to see
And unsurprisingly
Nobody sees them

I know that I don’t know what makes a poem a poem
Much less how to make one happen
And the thought occurs
That others might possess that knowledge
Thus making these pages an object of derision
When I know full well they’re not worth the trouble
And so I write not out of conviction or even of desire
But merely under compulsion

Twelve and five
Twelve and five
Twelve and five
Twelve and five
Twelve and five
Twelve and five
Twelve and five
Twelve and five
Twelve and five
Twelve and five
Twelve and five
Twelve and five

Twelve and five
Twelve and five
Twelve and five
Twelve and five
Twelve and five

The triumph of the willy-nilly

When I read a poem
Or when I merely read about a poem
And on many other occasions also
The urge to write comes upon me again
The painful stirrings
Not unmixed with anxiety
And why fear the inevitable
But feelings too of happy anticipation

And then the disagreeable business of composition
Not foul or sordid or nasty or disreputable or louche
But kind of dirty
As in the phrase
Not afraid to get one’s hands dirty
And the anxiety of during
Somehow worse than
The anxiety of before

But then the shameful acknowledgement of after
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
The eloquent voice of the Accuser
You should have worked harder
And if you have lost
You didn’t want it badly enough
Because winning is the only thing
And wanting must always be done badly

Complete
Closed

Open
Obscure

Contained
Callous
Claustrophobia
Contempt
Cordial
Calorie
Colon
Corvid
Crapulous
Contaminate
Chthonic
Corruscating
Corrugated
Clamor
Confound
Chromatic
Cost
College
Cancerous
Causation
Comedy
Choice
Cognition
Condign
Couplet
Crowbar
Condemn
Chorus
Combine
Capacitor
Collude
Conformity
Clog
Cordon
Cochlea
Compulsion
Coelenterate
Calamitous
Correspond
Convention
Command
Chronic

Outside
Overlap
Obituary
Oral
Obviate
Otter
Oenology
Orbit
Operation
Oyez
Opportunity
Obey
Odalisque
Organ
Ostinato
Oxen
Oleaginous
Oboe
Obsession
Origin
Obloquy
Onto
Ostensible
Ovum
Orotund
Orgy
Obstinate
Ombre
Oleander
Oblige
Odd
Ossify
Obsequious
Osprey
Orpheus
Ogee
Obesity
Olive
Ontology
Ohm
Onomatopoiea
Oppose
Ooourooobooourooos

Fi sagst haal
Sagn haal knest
Agnerm ya mestric
Slaint cnungny

Ni memos ni meom-m hmunus
Malg azamt
Cirt lignes sid konaist lagnap
Obvich effrent castagis splan

Slemnapild clomber tur efil
Veldan i cinddag
Cagt sembla retrab
Sickerly tismann senagot west

Necra haal vincera
Ni ven deranc
Sid azamte
Za dern mgut thoiesu thecor

Let us praise Citrus while also acknowledging his defects
For he is big and beautiful
For he speaks when spoken to
For he speaks at other times too
For he is occasionally playful in his advanced adulthood thereby calling to mind his frequently playful infancy
For he is intelligent and demonstrative
For he indicates the food he likes
For he bites Marian’s ankle to express his wants
For he received his charming name from Lydia
For he does not object when called a dumbass
For he is a fiend murderous of moles chipmunks lizards rats and alas birds
For he is the beneficiary of irrational indulgence
For he is often in his affectionate nature underfoot notably upon the perilous stairs
For he damages the furnishings
For he flees sneezes
For he was the chosen of two brothers Abel to Cain Jacob to Esau Isaac to Ishmael
For he has survived thus far in a threatening world of coyotes
For he sets up with gravity which is patience upon approbation in imitation of his great feline predecessors
For his personality is distinct from that of Bunbury Thammuz or Yellow Melissande
For he is obese and unashamed
For his motives are mysterious as of the lashing of his tail
For he has seduced his master into death-defying feats
For he exerts a therapeutic influence upon children and others

Gratuitous display of erudition
A phrase I learned from Mr Smyth
As something to be eschewed
For one should always express modesty
For both practical and Christian-doctrinal reasons
But what of Milton and his Sminthean archer
But the poet was vox clamantis
Or rather Jeremiah under house arrest
And which is the right side of history
Muddy Waters examplar of the American Renaissance
Proclaimed himself the greatest man alive
And no reasonable person would gainsay that contention
For it arose in a poem and poetry is fiction
A made thing
Neither true nor false
But only decorous or indecorous
And Milton made the purely fictive move
Of enrolling the gods in a roster of demons
No fundamentalist he
Just as surely as he followed the Mantuan
And myself am in no wise averse to theft
Neither from the great masters
Nor from my secular obligations

Do I pity myself
Well then I pity myself
And perhaps my suffering is too paltry for pity
But how supercede the mechanical operation of the spirit
And more anxiously
Evade the peril of blunder
For though I open-carry the curricular certificates
And even preen as preceptor
I am not a learned man
And few are in any age
For learning is lovingly cultivated
And I have lacked devotion
To the beautiful and the good
And our age is more degraded than many
For it adulates with orgiastic frenzy
The gratuitous display of idiocy

Thou

An apple
A receipt
A yellow plastic fastener