Interstate highway
Airport runway
Country lane
City street
Subway advertisement
Pornography
Bodies
The distinctive markings of various species
Badges
Certificates
Tickets
Diplomas
Signs & signs & signs & signs & signs & signs & signs
Informational signs
Directional signs
Warning signs
Commercial signs
Banners
Flags
Pennants
Blueprints
Architectural elevations
Carpet
Linoleum
Hardwood flooring
Stone flooring
Vinyl flooring
Wallpaper
Paint glossy flat or matte
The portrait of a forgotten ancestor
The landscape one corner of which thunder causes to look darker
Scripts
Characters
Fonts
The covers of books and magazines
The pages in books and magazines
Flyers
The fan behind which lurk seductive eyes
Placards
Menus
The image of the snake that bites its own tail
Bunting
Garlands
Bouquets
Swags
Nosegays
Clothes & clothes & clothes & clothes & clothes & clothes & clothes
Business clothes
Wedding clothes
Fantasy clothes
Uniforms
The costume of a tramp
The costume of a dandy
The costume of an officer of public or national defense
The costume of a tycoon
The costume of an athlete
The costume of a fine lady
The costume of one who believes that nudity conduces to health
The costume of a child
The costume of a show business entertainer
Shields
Armor
Lampshades
Vestments
Regalia
Corporation t-shirts
Coats of many colors
Coats drab and unremarkable
Logo-bearing tennis shoes
Lists of lists
Lists of lists
Brown skin
Pink skin
Olive skin
Mottled skin
Skin of corpse color
Cheesecake
Beefcake
Paint
Peel
Smooth
Ripple
Waxy
Fuzzy
Reflections

I prayed for madness
And when madness came I thought for a while there
I am become a god
For my prayer had been answered
And since I was a real that is a manmade god
And not the inexistent omnipotent creator of the universe
I set about suffering and dying
In the venerable agricultural cycle
Of regret anxiety revision reassurance and contrition
So having lapsed now into testimony
I hereby disclose that I was motivated
By a certain means-ends calculation
Namely that madness would crack open
A mold into which I had been poured
Partly through my own neglect
Partly through the operations of others
But mostly through the machinic routines
Of punctuality input output and degree
Hence a program contradictory from the get-go
And I hoped to accomplish the liberating
Of the shaping power of imagination
Now lying inert
Through romantic derangement
Not conveniently attainable in this decadent age
And so instead I underwent unremarkable psychopathology
Though in my clouded frame I regarded this episode
As apotheosis
And instead of effusions gave forth symptoms
Intelligible to any objective observer
The depressive’s musings and sonneteering
The manic’s talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk
The obsessive’s enumerations and futile exertions toward comprehensiveness
ADD follies fish bicycle Mona Lisa lath and plaster wattle and daub

Nevertheless just as in sanity
The pathogen waits of insanity
So too lucidity shines in the mad shadows
And happy is he who carries out that light
That’s right I said happy
For even now as I sit upright and take nourishment
I relish the force of eight lines plus six
The tranquil counting of twelve breaths and five
The catalogues of my own device in the locus amoenus
And the rush of shapes the horrid and the beautiful
From the deep well of and so forth

Well for one thing I’m much bigger now
Bigger even than the I so large in life
That I must use to speak to the living

Everything in everything I used to say
The pomposity of that formulation obvious now
Though it comes as close as the mind can grasp

But the mind can grasp so little
The tongue discourse so little
And what organ is it
That registers that sense sublime

Of something deeply interfused
The one life within us and abroad
The spirit of delight
The blind inarticulate will

Nevertheless I assert it now
That what one apprehends
While hanging off the edge of a skyscraper

Or in the most intense erotic oblivion
Or in the deepest musical tone
Or in the true experience of the suffering of another
Or indeed in the distortion of consciousness

Constitutes a hint
Toward the rending of the veil
The apprehension as we say of what cannot be known

If it were possible for consciousness to cohere
In the aftermath
Then I might write this very poem

In a clearing
Amid the expanse
Of palmetto sweetgum and pine
A mockingbird declaims
Chup chup
Dandy-lanes dandy-lanes dandy-lanes
Beneedle alderbest
Purrip purrip purrip purrip purrip

A barren hillock
Hard solid clay
Red with oxide
But see the prominent chin
The lips curled in a half-accepting smirk
The weary gaze
He slowly moves
Imperceptibly shifting
On the great arm
That supports the massive head

Beside him the maiden is seated
Small by comparison
Her dark hair
Falling carelessly
Upon the white linen about her shoulders
The rest of her form concealed
Beneath the billowing black garment
Hands folded upon her knees
She speaks
We are here

Could be as chrism on the brow

I like to chew things
I ask questions with my mouth
I like to taste things
I ask questions with my mouth

And having discovered dignity
To traverse the endless indecorous valley

At the ocean floor a shrimp polishes its antennae
Attenuating the noisome accretion
Have the doors of perception been cleansed or merely opened
Drunkenness has never served the punch that’s certain
The end-stopped lines the faulty paradigm
How about an image that’s not a category
A tool a rationale a piece of fruit
How about an allusion that’s not a backslap
A source neither forbearing nor minatory
Eluding specification
Regardless of all the forks the way is just the circuitous way
The difference between mastery and misapprehension
Rarely a matter of definition or enumeration
And hence the dissonance of other people
One grows accustomed to the chronic defect
Assuming of course the primal perfect
And the futility even of acknowledgement
Ceasing to insist upon heroic resistance
And yet the fascinating exoskeleton

The hand is not infinitely strong
Nor the eye infinitely discerning
Neither is an avoidable defect

For John Kelly

James Brown who was a mad dictator
Is said to have enjoined his players
You’re not playing a guitar
You’re playing a guitar drum
You’re not playing a bass
You’re playing a bass drum
You’re not playing a horn
You’re playing a horn drum

James Brown could not have done otherwise
For he had been touched by the hand of God
He did not consent to his epiphanies
Any more than Lazarus to his revivification
And since James Brown must manifest his talent
Or what we weakly call talent
As surely as dogwood must bloom in the spring
He lorded it over the hapless mortals in his band

He could not help but prophesy
And on this occasion
As rarely for prophets
The content of James Brown’s strictures
Stands to reason
For in soul music as doubtless in all music
Rhythm comes before all else
And all players first play drums

Even singers first make the rhythmic grid
Take the birds with their Peter Peter Peter
And their Drink A Beeerrrrrrr
And Who Who Who Cooks Who Cooks For You
And primates are not far behind
In devising the patterns of duration
The lemur’s accelerando
The long-distance calls of howlers and gibbons

And those cousins the whales afar remote
In another grander dimension of space and time
Of vastness of extent and period
Count beats not per minute but per hour and per day
And now the hominids have exploded time and space
As they have their towering cities
Conquering death and bringing death to bear
With their technology their spells and their planning

For they have encoded in their cries
The logic of instrumentality
The logic of instruction
And they transmit skill in guise of command
To stitch a garment or tune a lute
And for all this song can never die
Decorum and due measure
The sweetness of sound the solace of sense

At the outset yes
It could have been a woman
These bad habits so devilishly resistant
The insensitive reflex for example
Wishing above all to be approved of
Even by those whom one disdains
And what amounts to the same thing
The craving to plug in an image
Amid all the vacuous abstraction
So what’s the point
Of all the rhetorical posturing

To begin with the charade
Of the third-person reference
The pretense that everybody
Doesn’t already know
When in fact the knowledge of that knowledge
Itself motivates the attempted deception
And to conclude
Venting spleen and the hypocrisy
Of dressing as an aesthetic object
The stupid naive homespun therapy
Of venting spleen

Since we are young
Let’s get in the car
Drive beyond the city limits
To the little plot of forest
Follow the elk’s bellow
Until we lose our way
Perform the indigenous squat

Now that we are old
Let’s go into the room
That used to be occupied
By one of our children
Before they all grew up
It’ll take a little muscle
Perform the indigenous squat

Osmotic exchange no quite the contrary
More than oxygen or indeed the release of carbon dioxide
Is the inebriant desireable
Similarly is glycerin desirable
Over real tears which are overrated
Lacking in the slickeriness of glycerin
We want long lines so there is something in long lines that make us want them
No act is unmotivated
Not even so sedentary an act as wanting
What makes you want it
Well the fact that you want it does not make you want it
There must be something about the object of your desire
Which may be much more than an object but a subject also
And you know with what reverence
I almost wrote reference
I use that term
That makes me want it

CHO:
You make me feel that way
You make me feel that way
You make me feel that way
Beloved

The intoxicant for example
I like
Although I can’t avoid the cliche
The feeling of intoxication
But that feeling does not explain
Why
Or simply what cause
Makes me feel that way
And how is a series of statements
Much less of fragmentary statements
A song poem dithyramb or mash-note
Desire crosses statement
I don’t need to say it
Nor in any case an imperative
Desire me
What nonsense

CHO:
You make me &c.

And if the object of desire is merely object
Then use it up as an object
Consume with all prudent provision for for example a rainy day
But the situation is utterly different
With an object that is also and at the same time a subject
For now you may combine your quest for goodness
Both in the approbatory aesthetic meaning of the good
And also and at the same time in the intersubjective or ethical meaning

And if the alteration of consciousness
As if consciousness were a static object
Subject to

BR:
I fell into a jealous rage
When we were seventeen
And he looked at you
And you at him

Once we have ascertained our mutual commitment to reason and understanding
Then we can work on love
Because just as there is an understanding that precedes understanding
So too there is the nakedness that follows nakedness
Though our clothes are tight
And our naked bodies famously stout
I mean look at us
The most sexiest couple in the world of our time

CHO:
You make me &c.
Rinse and repeat
Horns

The elegant ghoul poses as a supernatural species
The better sexually to tempt and betray
His credulous and half-willing victim

The firefighter cradles the toddler’s corpse
With infinite gentleness
Yearning to minister to the already-mortal wound

A plexiglass room projects near the skyscraper’s roof
Step out and something falls away
You are not you but everything in everything

You left me with the residue
A frank expression I can never forget
A wasp-colored stain everybody gets
You left me with the residue

Creando effrendere dur verblos excrypt
Enscrypt effrenta puisn’ cvmwoflux descrypt

I’m so sick of words of mediated truth
Especially of the nasty words
Which I have enervated through overuse

And even more the clever words
Drawn from a vast vocabulary
That isn’t all that vast

I’m tired of worrying
Over the preponderance of abstraction
The deficiency of action and image

I’m sick of points that skewer
Of stitching and unstitching
Of conjuring a reader

How dare I flaunt my gift like that
As if I were free to exercise my whim
People don’t choose who or how they are

I’m sick of mining my consciousness
For impressions and conclusions
And tired of judgments and estimations

And sick of the compulsion
To speak to sing to inscribe record and detail
Emotion recollected in distress

Must have been ‘77
At the hotel after the show
A nixie appeared in the swimming pool
Freshwater mermaid
Never had I seen anything so beautiful
Inviting me for a swim
Ready to pull me under

To steal outright from the classics
Is badass and cool

Casta pons wer churlesfrapol
Luhs trofeil scrutcin lactefru
Og menet shlik stipverdon fornonor
Abergastinairde fo dist gresstibre

Hir west don primyore roctible
Alscomme asl pmist effrent
Linst durmebn pres di moulti jearhs
Ana sturmpid grapito anyet

Rittan ritter sumnon tragador
Alscom medieir dunat
Duneir souvlet ponat
Trupet abestinan sginator

Ich alzu throtak nathles sinaverd
Des finom cumwoflux radix zum effrentiana
Subsprech chract O zumaken Moka abfui
Com pcara ab ansiimodr Killroy

Canpis papayon schterlng lupis
Todat mic alzo nambaketjion ratic posd merkling
Eche paginem presantor
Ni Romno ni Polachis tumit

Ni mper ni sclab
Xibit non cumdior izt
Linie sold mus’t kurtist sein
Disisit

Anr sperrand oni dasmebedid
Ens celemant un revelant
Gardor glyklic midioahm
Tadis sonn spel in benticron magint zervuvell

Greder onstep furdur
Riginariot croplas tegumanita
Sycotera gudliy logwerd
Stanithier dewisme nunithier

Even my mistakes are marvelous

Huck knew he would go to hell for helping Jim
The Nineteenth Century loved that natural nobility
For young Finn grew wild and uncaged
Neglected by and free from the father

And while the rescue was a decent act
It was no saintly sacrifice
For wild uncaged unpunished and untutored
Huck knew no fear of hellfire

We cast our lot with ironclads
Making investment in defense
And fear the bristling tiger
The retributive imps of the storybooks

Better to remain a child
And never to have sinned
But sinned we have
And take arms where devils die

Violent exhalations too strong for sighs
Unintentional communication

The joy of birth-giving
The pleasure of fingers torn
On the recalcitrant strings

The sun off the river’s ripples burns the eyes
As the speeding dinghy slaps each little swell

Delight not only harbors torment
But requires it as an axle a wheel

Conflict conflict Yeats cried out
Waving the decorative katana
Insensible of the genocide he would endorse

Nobody knows the cost
Nobody calculates profit and loss
Does the driver consider the drive-train warranty

Wedding feast and recognition
Blind frenzied encounter with the hideous truth

Living in the end times Jim DeMint
Revelating some crazy shit
Final answer a permanent majority
Escuadrón de la muerte
Give Armageddon a little nudge
Shortcut to the Last Judgment
Finally cleanse us goats
Of all those nasty sheep
Judas Charles Darwin and Franklin Rosenfeld
Frozen in the pit of hell
The silent many must field a sharp team
Automatic machete
Locked and loaded
To cut the knot
Unleash the furies
Until not a timber stands

The vest-pocket derringer
The exquisite embroidery
The palate discerning of bourbon and spiced hash
The irregular hours

The tonsure
The robe of coarse homespun
The hand and eye discerning of majuscule and circumflex
Vespers and morning prayers

The impersonal production
The cast of thousands
The army of technicians
The market research