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

For Kelly

Her life didn’t go all that well in the aftermath
After the outraged initial public response
Motivated by fear of imperial reprisal

The emperor went into seclusion
And silently instituted measures
Even more repressive than those in place hitherto

The family huddled around
With words of protection and damp approval
Don’t be afraid child you’ve done a good thing

But she was not afraid
Everyone else was
She was too young to be afraid

But she felt alone
And could not go to school or play outside
Without being pointed at

There’s the girl they’d say
She’s the one
Who saw and spoke

When she just wanted to see
The interesting parts of her world
And not the emperor’s genitals

This must be snowman coffee

A tiny bicyclist racing up the gutter of an open book

Before robot fingers installed tiny screws and springs
Men silently loaded the empty cassettes
Into the feeder magazines and then swept up scraps
Of videotape that fell out like excrement

Meanwhile women wearing white gloves
Chatted at a cloth-covered table
And inspected the products like polished lacquer
Before placing them on the boxing line

And one woman recounted to another a miracle
That occurred recently or long ago
She couldn’t remember which
That she knew had decided her destiny

For her husband had defeated The Adversary
By taking his wife downtown with him
To the Greyhound station
To purchase the Satanic Bible

And when they brought the book home
He placed it atop the television set
During a broadcast of the Miracle Gospel Hour
Which played day and night on channel 68

And the Reverend Bobby Stevens
Of Sugarland Texas was explaining
That the faithful could acquire a marvelous cloth
That had been prayed over by Pastor Stevens himself

And thus exposed to the sacred word
The fiendish book began to howl with the pain
Of six thousand years of infernal torment
And to bellow words of unsurpassable obscenity

And Bobby with the utmost calm
For the husband’s name was Bobby too
Placed a Testament upon the squalling beast
Thereby silencing it forever

And then she knew that her husband’s gift
Had earned him the right to his own congregation
And if she prayed hard enough
Someday his own worldwide television ministry

The joke used to be that blues was devil music
Because it was all about sex and sex is bad
Pretty funny huh

But what of those who lack the wherewithal
To cultivate the techniques of enjoyment
Is it not so that basic needs must come before
The pleasures of philosophy

Many a philosopher has glorified the ascetic path
A dead end unless it’s freely chosen
For it is the path of self-denial
And not of the chance effects of political economy

Does justice therefore require renunciation
Of all pleasure since it’s denied to some
No it cannot be
That one simply chooses coldness to beauty or to truth

But indulgence in sick pleasure abounds
Notably the taste for violence
Or just as bad for sybaritic luxury
While a single child goes hungry

The magus is one of such extraordinary competence
As to make a practice seem a congenital property
Disentangling a traffic jam for example
Lighting the flame in the inaccessible beacon

Myriad other actions less obviously technical
Filling an audience with pity terror and delight
Toasting the emperor with a subversive pun
Causing the pathway to blossom into a new Eden

Don Juan mastered the seductive art
While that other lothario Faust
Needed only the conjuring word
For all creation to come under his sway

But the most sublime act is to set another before you
And beauty manifests itself
Only to those capable of appreciating it
Cultivate therefore the techniques of enjoyment

The extraction of surplus value
During fun times funky times
The chief emblem of invidious emulation
Steel glass paint polish vinyl rubber polyester
And the employment of subsistence labor
For the maintenance of display

The loop of musical selections
A psychiatric patient with repetition disorder
The uniformed personnel
At their similarly repetitive tasks

The sodden towel having been applied
Inattentively to a door frame
The door at the hinged side closing on the thumb
Door handle out of reach of the free hand
Waiting for somebody
To appraise the situation
Upon which accomplishment
The relief of release
And the horror of mutilation

Presumably they don’t become spectators
Before finding positions to witness the spectacle
But what name is there for the file of pedestrians
En route all marching one way

When suddenly the vectors of attention shift
To the disturbance that defines a center
Two young men grappling
And punches thrown

Mystics inward or upward
Refugees outward
Not-yet bus-riders along the line
And the aimless milling before the panic

If it’s in a poem
It’s not really me
Especially if I use italics

Start with error avoidance
Begin with forbidden words
Fuck nigger and cunt
Law for one is law for all

Do not employ the imperative
Neither permit any autobiographical reference
Do not explain
Make reference only to concrete objects

Do not enumerate catalog or compile
No ideas but in things
Rules rules rules rules rules rules rules rules rules rules rules rules
Rules rules rules rules rules

Expose no obsessions desires or aspirations
Employ no punctuation
Know therefore that syntax will manifest itself
Only in word order and lineation

Expunge suicidal ideation however fleeting
Do not repeat word choices
Erect solid defenses against reference
To violence antagonism or hostility of any kind

Observe the precepts of scansion
Maintain a positive mental attitude
Accept the fact that no situation more requires obedience
Than punishment

Somebody once wrote that when Dickinson says bee
She really means the clitoris
And another said that demon life for Keith Richards
Was nothing more than addiction to heroin

Dylan’s Mr Jones inadverently
Blunders into an uncomfortable
Homosexual encounter
And all art is traceable to mundane events

Alls I’m saying is
There’s gotta be some overflow
Beyond what’s on the poet’s mind
And how do you know what that is

Not that what I have in mind is any better
Bees put me in mind of bread-balls on fish hooks
Colorful pebbles rolling down a bank in New Mexico
And a girl with an epi-pen in her purse

I don’t know what to think of demon life
Other than demon life had got me in its sway
And to be under the sway of any force
Is to suffer the grossest of indignities

The poet tries to speak the truth
And the reader tries to understand
No problem if you have the self-control
Not to let mind get in the way

But matter is an almost equal problem
The head baboon and his emphatic tooth
The cryptographer’s enigma variations
The book the crown the jar the robes heraldic

For a summer in ‘38 my father played first base
For a B-class affiliate of the St. Louis Browns
He was long and could stretch for a throw across the infield
But right-handed and couldn’t hit a curve

In ‘39 he joined the Navy to learn mechanics
Working on biplanes in Pensacola
Which seemed a good career move
Until two aircraft carriers were shot out from under him

Later he coached a Peewee team
In the Catholic school league of our town
And while a St. Louis farm team of the 30s might win
Jacksonville choirboys in the 60s had no such luck

There’s a photograph of me in my cap and jersey
Proudly displaying the Christ the King initials
But I never went in before the fifth inning of seven
And then to right field and never at second base

Next to me my brother stands wearing a miniature version
Too young to join he could feel a part of the team
But boredom would seize him before the bottom of the first
And he would putter in the dirt under the bleachers

In high school I traded my baseball costume
For Berber jewelry jangling down the street
In imitation of Brian Jones the monarch
Though mine consisted of beads from a discount store

And my father said Be your own man
Why do you want to wear a uniform
Just as Zappa had ridiculed Feathers and bells
And a leather band to go around my head

But I wanted to join the cultural revolution
That came from real people who had made themselves artists
Otis and Jimi and Janis
And not from the wife of the Party Chairman

And I never really pulled it off
Not with my Catholic schoolboy’s haircut
And the braces on my teeth
And the regalia doesn’t buy membership anyway

Everybody wants to belong
Nobody wants to be expelled from the circle
But the tribe does expel and with endless enmity
Toward the loser the apostate the wretched outsider

Let me explain the truth to you
Shut the fuck up

Immeasurable merchandise
In seven stores

None would write save under compulsion
The good old Dr Johnson said
Financial compulsion he must have meant
Poor old straitened gentleman

And yet he was afflicted with singularities
He tried to suppress his long life long
Neurological residue of The King’s Evil
Curable only by the monarch’s touch

And so he was no stranger
To compulsion of another kind
Not unknown in our later time
Affliction of psychological etiology

And like his other sagacious claims
This one meant more than he might know
Though more self-aware than most
And given to generalize from the particular

None writes save whom some force compels
Outward state of need or want
Or less observed the inward drive
To repeat repeat and repeat again

The joke used to be that crazy people
Imagined they received radio broadcasts
In the fillings of their teeth

That the voices in their heads
Were really the insinuating calls
Of secret agents in Berlin

Warning them of obscure conspiracies
Effected by groups with terrifying names
Bent on domination and destruction

Requiring them to take action
Innocuous or catastrophic
As the case may be

And thus all heads are full of imperatives
From actors public servants world-class athletes
Buy more life-improving shit

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Umspech e nochdoch
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Impermeable density
Or
Impermanent identity

First state
How I love thee beloved
Only now do I see
That I never loved your earlier avatar

Second state (putative)
I claim beloved to love
Inspecting thus but now
Never having loved beforehand avatar

Third State
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