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

There is no tranquility
In which to recollect emotion
Exposure to the elements is hard work
Ennui is hard work

We wrongly assert a passive state
When we can identify no special agent
I am anxious we say
I am depressed

I am replete
I am overcome
I am irritated
And never I am contented

Existence for an organism
Requires much more than a state of being
And consciousness rejects the calculations
Of cause and effect

O for a plausible embodiment
To express the tumult
Some mortal immortal god
Some frozen fiery river

CHO:
Hey hey we’re They Might Be Giants
Hear us sing and hear us play
Travel the world in our magic submarine
Write one song per day
It’s easy when it doesn’t rhyme

John 1 trims the sail
John 2 mans the helm
20,000 leagues around the block
In the good ship Metaphor without Any Tenor

Hey hey we’re &c.

Sticking it to the man
Mad Triangle Man
Assemble in the clubhouse baby
You don’t even need a Marshall Stack

Hey hey we’re &c.

BR:
All the beauty in this wicked world
Somebody’s sure to be unhappy

Hey hey &c.

To play the part as well as I can

Remain calm the mayor intones
As he blesses the congregants with a shaving brush
Besprinkling them with Gilbey’s gin
And they depart with a newfound sense
Of tribal acceptance and grudges relinquished
Soon the univalves arrive to collect the residue
Chanting in their impossible bass-baritone
Hoo loo hoo leh loo lah
Sleep little wormlings
Fear not your early liquefaction
For the alcohol has performed its antiseptic purpose
And the rasping teeth achieve too
Their saprophytic effect
And the snails are presently joined
By a few brave brittle stars
Who have quitted their accustomed habitations
Of submarine castle
And petrific garden
And rococo monastery
And their piping treble joins molluscan chant
In festive obligato
Echinodermata true leviathans
Who drench all space in uncanny duration
So slow and stately is their step

But the humans have hustled away
Tormented by past and future alike
The agony of their own fictions
The lurid tiger in the forest
The tiger in very hallway
Not that the counterfacts
Betray an avoidable error
But simply that the vertebrates
Upright in soul and body
Depend upon contrivance
As a sunflower upon sunlight
A dependency inscribed in their bones
They do not devour the soil
Like exotic earthworms
But lay brick upon clay brick
Or burrow beneath the avenue
To lay fiber-optic cable
And having invented sequence
They struggle to fit duration
Into the branching labyrinth
And weep inconsolably
And remorsefully
Having forgotten how to regenerate
Their severed limbs

Politics
Polytoxic

Legend has it that at their first meeting
My father offered my mother a tug on a flask
Which offer she declined

Huxley asserted I seem to recall
A universal human proclivity for getting high
A claim that maternal myth apparently gainsays

And throughout my life
My mother’s behavior
Has backed up the legend

On rare occasions my quite-moderate father
Would suggest that they share a toddy
A term he employed generically

Even more rarely my mother would accept the offer
After protestations of unwillingness
And her more-than-half-full glass would waste

It may be that my mother’s tastes resulted
From the worldly renunciation
Characteristic of the Protestant ethic

If so then they stand as proof of the rule
That human nature resists universalization
In a world of cultural contingency

A tree surgeon once said to me
Upon observing ants swarm around a gash
The bar is open

But surely the ants were there
For sugar and not for alcohol
Though the two are molecular cousins

Captive animals can be made to desire spirits
And I’ve seen a dog lap a bowl of beer
Small children not so much

Although Hanno Buddenbrook
Drinks wine
Until his head swims

At 19 I drank tequila until the room whirled
Threw up my spaghetti supper
And can’t touch tequila to this day

By 20 all the other bevs were mother’s milk
And I spent the decade treating a hangover
With large doses of hair of the dog

At 30 I had to rehab myself
And practiced a year’s abstinence
A can of Bud dormant in the back of the fridge

By 40 I’d mastered the weekend binge
Several days without a drink
Then a debauch with a rock and roll band

At 15 I played my first gig for money
The bar in a fishing camp
On the southern edge of the Okefenokee

And shared my first joint
With the New Calibre
Out of Jacksonville

And weed is wonderful for certain styles
The unleashing of creativity
The slight confusion and anxiety

The mild euphoria
So in keeping with the tone
Of jazz trumpet or rock guitar

A cultural practice no doubt
And therefore not a universal
But pretty widespread certainly

The nakedness past nakedness

Somebody is sure to be unhappy

 

One melody rises
While another descends

People want what they want
And won’t let truth or reason stand in their way
And employ verbal and mechanical devices
To separate flesh from bone

Joy it was to be alive in those days
WAPE The Big Ape in Jacksonville
Aaaaaaa-EEE-AAAAAH
And five notes announcing Satisfaction

Temporary symptomatic relief
That does not get at the cause of the pain
What did you really expect
The brimming cup of happiness

Nevertheless the anti-inflammatory function
Does more than nothing
Though the effect is subtle
And a matter of the longer term

But immediate relief is what we’re after
When the mother in labor
Otherwise demure and contained cries
I’m uncomfortable you son of a bitch

Can there truly be no help for pain
Ah love let us be true to one another
Well hell shouldn’t everybody be truthful
Shouldn’t everybody at least try to tell the truth

An institutional superior
Once disparaged shooting the breeze
But who has not sustained trauma
And sought relief in timely utterance

Camera tricks give you a more realistic background
Than the one you already have
Buffalo herds for Plains Indians to infiltrate
Star-fields for interstellar travel
The perplexing byways of the forest primeval
Air support for the troops pinned down on the beach
The impossibly sophisticated cabaret
City streets where cops and robbers swerve and crash

For Kelly

A shaman told me the following story
At least I think this is the story she told
I was a little messed up

The fox accompanied by the crow
Or the crow accompanied by the fox
Either way
Met up with the panther and the armadillo

And they all had a real good time