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

Ciamte inlieb ilieb
Umspech e nochdoch
Ne iliebetet frutemant vatar

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
Ciamte inlieb ilieb
Umspech e nochdoch
Ne iliebetet frutemant vatar

If you don’t like my peaches
Don’t shake my tree

How is it that the British Isles
Are all covered in grass
They were forest for the longest time
Guess that’s what 3000 years of sheep will do

Here in Georgia we have the worst soil
Sun-baked clay when the trees came down
Suburbanites and golf courses spend a million bucks
To raise chickweed dandelions and wild strawberries

At least you can eat the dandies and the strawbs
But that’s hardly worth poisoning the river
All because English lords had rolled-flat lawns
Tennis croquet and the manor house unobscured

The bible says all flesh is as grass
Or so to say it passes
But in Britain the grass never goes away
From the canal bank or the amphitheatre

In Georgia the grass never gets started
Except as exploitation of desire
I hope everybody thinks I’m rich
I wouldn’t want to be the oddball of the subdivision

Re porbla apernd do mot mrud
Poset curpos wo nir lek lud
Mantifacal sylcomflec dur
Seremant e obvientur
Obveis celemant parnmasa
Facal calur mintes dasa
Apogavata derdeling
Upergibtos nede feling
Manapislagan quazephant
Dap ding fars da nir ni befant
Lek nui privetset des effrent
Pardalikos langleng ident
Cers apygrav cert autrephors
Pugel syngeal deutramenors
Crumvent jambent rihm aldenend }
Skirly tuscata fordevend                    }
Ak rhitam olzo cle dassend               }
Plaiceto ob sotay dupli
Sylflec damur dilek duci
Insuf en sturum gallefre
Couvar phlegis ferm legalay
Portemanti cent chapotould
Prehand avas podiacold
Im dempst jo posit frie curpos
Ak mrudifa selbstend vervos
Fectoverv mana xerox
Spontunus eek rara klenex
Hardanor montera dissec
Retinor descus profisec
Pravit celcret mars odevand
Anlindic lengtops mrudiband
Nunculpos ver nuncompisant
Nunmentas verbon dompicant
Nui selbstich aldeësem                                }
Dobbi etsi publosedem                                }
Aldest ot’ curt verev du reslumbor adem }

Who has no regrets has no conscience
Said my father
Do something even if it’s wrong
Said my mother

A skin-encapsulated ego

Hail Dejection fair seed-time of the soul
Whence I reap in the time of exaltation
Hail the time of crushing burden
And I beneath the weight
Of a hundred thousand school buses
Stacked to the stratosphere
All dressed in yellow
Their little stop-signs extended
And though I’m flattened on the pavement
Like a squirrel recently electrocuted
Fallen into the midst of passing traffic
I see them all above me
From the outside like a saint in ecstasy
I see the dry-rotted tires
The seats with their tubular steel rims
The tiny fans above the drivers’ seats
The old-fashioned cranks for swinging the doors

I hear the sound of my own croaking laryngitis
Like a blown speaker in the back seat
Of an old clunker I can’t afford to replace
And I know that every word
Means that when and if my voice returns
It will return with ever less force
And I know that the corruption in my throat
Originated in my own impulsive disregard
For consequences
And yet I was driven to imitate
The pure voice of the child in the sky
Quixotic attempt
The upshot of which is decay and fall

Who has no regrets has no conscience
Said my father just before he died
And if his death was a peaceful one
As so it appeared to be
Then the physical pains overmastered
The regretful pangs
And death gave the blessèd release
That everybody hopes for

O Goddess who bows men low
Riddling singer who stultifies reason
Dejection sweet whose dwelling is dusk-time and rainy November
Who steals all salt leaving only the sour and the bitter
Dominatrix who gives man the aspect of the vine
When the harvest is done and the grape is crushed
And the blood of the grape is put away in darkness
Until such time as drinking it
Man is filled with divine madness and raves
And embers wink and grow cold

Hard by the highway a lone gas station stands
Out of business for many years
With signs that still display the prices
When gas was cheap and travel easy
Some of the plants growing in the pavement’s cracks
Change color with the change of seasons
Behind a jetty some miles away
A youth with a broken-off antenna
Draws naked pictures in the sand
Mood swings are a matter for endocrinology
Soon enough one tires of questioning
What force drives the particle
What force though dormant still drives

I’m as high as a kite
As a rocket driven heavenward
On the fuel of cliche
I’m as large as Godzilla
With the wisdom and kindness to turn my rage
Away from Tokyo
And toward the inconceivable ocean
That is my birthplace

I have at my fingertips
More power more energy
Than all the steam turbines
And nuclear reactors
Ever constructed
My sexuality extends to the edges of the galaxy
I possess the beneficent force
To abolish all boundaries

I exercise the vast discernment
To acknowledge my less-than-omnipotence
I am overwhelmingly but not absolutely
Powerful
In my footprints
The crushed stems of plants
Grow verdant and flower
My strength is matched only by my equanimity

I embody all configurations of the sublime
The mountaintops
The storms at sea
The inexpressible erotic ecstasies
The inexhaustible Faustian play of knowledge and skill
I know even that there are worlds beyond my own
And I know that soon enough I will plunge
And sing as I descend into the hell of dejection

How dare you say that some thing is boring
When it is you who are bored to tears

To delight in contrary motion
Joining the bitter and the sour

Too much attention is paid to the genitals
Understandably really
Since the exploding galaxy of the cerebral cortex
Remains out of sight
And people love visual stimulation
We say I see when we mean I know
But at some point seeing gives way to touching
And we say touched when we mean emotionally aroused

Emotionally but not necessarily sexually
And that which is touching is extra-sexual tenderness
Metaphors of course for cortical functions
But functionality cannot account
Neuroscience cannot account
For states that must be accounted for
Philosophically and poetically if at all
Though science has grown close to explaining sexual difference
And no doubt desire is a function
Of molecular biophysics
No doubt caring pleasure fear wrath and aching desire
Each represents an evolutionary adaptation
Fight flight pursuit and copulation
But how to account for the ache of the ache
How account for the fire the ice the rushing wind
How do our molecules differ really
From the myth of homicidal Ishtar
Or blind gropings in the forests of repression

Here’s a test case for you
Ennui
How does pissed-off boredom give advantage
How does this modern affective invention
Conduce to survival and reproduction
Sex is great for relieving sexual tension
Sex is really great for sharing tenderness
But sex is a lousy response to ennui
It fails in its aim frustrates and produces deeper ennui

Too much attention is paid to the body
The mind-body duality has done much mischief
What problem does this analytical division aim to solve
Analytical division of continuum is the problem
Division of the mind into faculties
Division of the body into the internal and the external
And thence into systems organs appendages joints digits
And yes genitals
And the equally mischievous treatment of the body
As coterminous with the ego
And the ego as coterminous with the person
And the subsequent analytical division of one person from another
When one really wants nothing more
Than to join with the beloved

If only your new mower could both bag and mulch
Then the female vocalist with the single sleeve
And her dance ensemble identically dressed
Could fulfill their promise

Of intelligent kitchen deluxe
Responsive to the device implanted in the skulls
Of citizens of the Republic
Of infinite choice within specified parameters

Most have the blue device
The blue device is trending hard
But early adopters are going black
And singing the praises of Device for Men

Most of the women were already edgy and blue
And wow black came on just in time
Just in time for Saturday night
The weekend is a good time hey to die

But you already knew that
Getting there is half the fun
Hip and young and free and multitasking
And leave the driving to us

Sometimes grouchy old men tell the truth
Sometimes even hypocrites tell the truth

Truth is all that which is
And poetry is whatever the hell you want it to be
But the written poem must be comprehensible
And all we know of truth is what we know
Which isn’t much
And I don’t want knowledge anyway
I want truth

Knowledge is seeing
And writing is technology
The disparity of hands and eyes
Frustrates
In the fatal or frustratingly near-fatal
Failure of hand-eye coordination
Knowledge frustrates not because we don’t know all
But because we know next to nothing
And precisely not nothing at all
And writing frustrates not because we can’t tell the truth
But because we must tell it slant
So since I can’t write perpendicularly
I want poetry

Wouldn’t it be great if it were easy
But there’s no obvious conduit
Between the poetic and the true
And so the task is one of seeking and not of finding
The improvised communion
Of two partial less-than-objects
And thus the poem as fragmentary
Incomplete defeated if you must
But just as total truth is boastful bluff
So too the finished poem
Is never more than first attempt
And since the writer never knows
What the reader does not know
The must in must be comprehensible
The ideal wild compulsion
Like the Great White Way
Or the Bridge of Sighs
The path of broken hearts
Hearts already filled to the brim
And even above the brim
And hands that reach and eyes that seek

There is no literal substrate
No truth-telling prior to figuration
I say I comprehend something
And I employ perforce the manual metaphor of grasping
Or more crudely a leg under me to stand on
Hominid tool use and the upright posture
And the mad cosmos of the neocortex
The new bark on the brain’s old tree
All of which allow the language-ape to see more deeply
And more colorfully than the quadrupeds
And confabulate about what’s out there
Kudus and sacred springs and moon-seas
Lutes and windows and burning lovers
Who can’t be satisfied

It doesn’t help to fabulate the clash
Of an army called mind
Against another called body
Wishful thought congealed into doctrine
Manichean utopia
Better a peaceable modesty before the truth
Here is a hand with which I grasp
That which I see before me
Here are lips tongue a larynx lungs
With which I fracture breath into articulate speech
And sad and lustful song

The claim is perfectly comprehensible that
I see and sing
For seeing is knowing and singing is speaking
Albeit here in that technological simulacrum writing
But then the poem goes on
By my own eyes inspired
Not what I see but that I see
Inspires me
And metaphor goes all the way to myth
For of course only a god or goddess
Could breathe into me
The light of truth or the life of light
Wherein I awaken
And open my eyes
But in this decadent age myth is falsehood
And the only permissible seeing
Is that of concrete objects
Potentially exploitable for profit
And thus for the materialists sleep is death
And the phantasmagoria of dreams nullity

The truth is that everybody dreams
And I can’t say within earshot a blue horse
Without your envisioning that imaginary thing
How crass therefore to synonymize unreality and insignificance
Or imagination and untruth

To seeing and speaking we must add breathing
And though speaking involves breathing
The breath seems to come from without
The invisible work of a goddess or god
Here there is no light
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Wherein the poet constructs an artificial darkness
The better to perceive the light
That moves upon the air
Of imaginative inspiration
Technique manipulates language
Working with the cortical hand
To transmute breath into speech
And speech into song

But an age that insists on the objective
Lionizes uninspired technique so that
True wit is nature to advantage drest
What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed
As if the second instance of the thought
Were the same as the first
And Mr Pope in his Essay lays down the law
As to what might qualify as good expression
In the objective age
Certainly felicity of expression charms
And poetry falls flat without the charm of style
But the truth of nature or the thought thereof
Is but a small portion of the whole truth
And truly the career of atoms
And indeed the whole sweeping vista of phenomena
Provide little sustenance
For a being driven and torn by passion
And a better disposition for the passions
Hurtful though they are
Must materialize than suppression
For suppressed passion returns vengefully
And the only song worth hearing
Is that which burns with life
And exalts the hearer with the sublime

And while some truth is better than none
Some truths are more truthful than others
And don’t suppose that I claim
One truth for Alexander and another for John
And others for Trixie Ned and Nancy
For on the contrary those swerving atoms
Are the same for everybody
And for everybody too the inner being
Is a muddy mess of desires
Though the composition of the mess
Varies from person to person
Hence subjective intelligibility differs from the objective
And thus there are more dimensions than the phenomenal
And more fitting for poetry
Especially in differing or clashing subjectivities
Namely the drama of human cruelty
And the idylls of struggling love
And so for most of the time
The psalm of life is the poem of suffering

Since the whole truth lies out of reach
Then poetry becomes the quest for significance
Or less romantically
The act of finding what will suffice
Or rather settling for seeking and not finding
And for a long time poets thought
Or wishfully thought it a matter
Of a man speaking to men
The neutral transmission of thought
As if through some substance called mind
One could see and sing
Grasp and manipulate
Without the intervention of the breath
And so I reject the poem of the mind
That spectral residue of worldly renunciation
And reject also the poem of the body
The inarticulate cry of pain and appetite
But I extol the hand and the eye that reach into the world
The terrible world
In a blessed rage for coordination
The beauty of the beloved and the work of noble note
And I embrace the poem of the breath
Both the warm moist exhalation
And the deep enlivening inward flow

The great evasion
It all depends

Do I want my verse to be savage
There’s a place yes for savagery I suppose
And I wouldn’t want ingratiating urbanity
To still the storm and stress and conflict of emotion

And I wish to free it from the Cartesian ghost
And I would never want the poem of the mind
And while I imagine it might affect a reader
I can’t abide the straining for effect

Least of all the catalog of sentimental violence
And images owing all to the latest CG
Or the blasts of gladiatorial virtuosity
The sword as pen the gun as counterpoint

Every man his own Ares
Open carry from the airport to the nursery school
Each justifies the right of naked coercion
And threat parades in suburbs all unclothed

Civilization has contracted a bad odor
From thought-control and the rage of empire
But a book of verse is underneath the bough
A loaf of bread a jug of wine and thou