The parking space the cold blood pressure cuff
Stocking the pantry browsing your local listings
Maintaining the expansive lawn
We need more data
We always need more data
To offer up to the voracious calculation
Whose trickling intercessions might avail
When the slack symptoms act up
Both of them gallop through the passageway
A sadistic horror
A psychotic nightmare
Smug sarcastic and invidious
Arcade of stones and wilted daffodils
Half hidden like stars in the smog
Like stars in the glare of the suburb
Skedaddling like bugs when you turn on the light
With a rhythm complex or merely confused
Like the snow on a nonexistent channel during the 60s
Upon which the perceptual apparatus
Imposes a spurious pattern
To the edges distant indistinct and mostly theoretical
What men or women or gods
Or indeterminate or inanimate objects are these
What nonontological entities lacking all qualities
Laid out as on a horizontal plane
Torturing with tittering hints
That something lies beyond

Reasons are real and come from facts
But what of this faculty reason
Province on the phrenological map

You will have noticed dear Reader the truancy
Of punctuation marks from these pages
And what reason could have motivated
So dire a renunciation I hear you cry
I hear you lament in your vexation
That you know not where sentence begins or ends
Nor where article nor copulative verb
And whether that indeterminate sentence
Should be construed as declarative imperative interrogative or exclamatory
Does it display a quotation
Or might here queried the pedant an instance appear
Of indirect discourse
Expressed perhaps periodically or in suspension
With inversion elegant or rebarbative
And pompous neologism impenetrable in its effrent
And dismal solecism hangly
And these lines that do not extend
To the right side of the page except when they do and loop and double back like the progress of the hoop snake or of that baleful serpent depicted on the Gadsden banner evincing the nasty defensive posture that prevails all too commonly in this age of contention and polarization O tempora O mores such that only victory seems of value whereas in fact the grim antagonists all merely suffer from a pitiable deficit in attention leading inexorably to an incapacity for appreciation even for the common decencies much less the finer things of life
And what of the content of these supposed sentences
Why can you not you protest
Make simple straightforward sense
But instead seem always to bite your own ass or elbow or fetlock
Like the hoop snake &c
Albeit without ever daring to split flagitiously an infinitive
And what of this absurd vocabulary
The inarticulable sesquipedalians
A farrago of baleful indeterminate fetlocks
A grenadiers’ tattoo replete with gratuitous displays of erudition
A bumper crop of lugubrious self-indulgence
A glut of cloying adjectival insistence
Morose delectation
Full of sand and frumy
Insignifying
Safety last
Miniscule
Tweedly
Name your poison your passion your persona non grata
The hences and whences and thences and wherefores and heretofores appertaining
Where’s the abstemiousness of which you boast
And why this revolting oscillation between
Self-aggrandizement and self-contempt
To the degree that they might be discernible amid the fug
And the kleptomaniacal compulsion
To steal from
Adorno the contortionist of the dialectic
Ammons the lover of nature lover of artifice
Anonymous the most prolific of poets
Auden the old master
Baldwin the tale of how we suffer how we are delighted and how we may triumph
Baudelaire the rich the corrupt
Blake the godblinded and drunk with vision
Blair the connoisseur of moldy damps and ropy slimes
Boggs the poor boy
Bowie the man and the masks
Brooks the affairs of state must take precedent
Bunny, Bugs and other picture postcards
Burns&Allen good night Gracie
Carson the transmuter who might translate pmisti effrent as fine art or divine imagination or innovation the blow of fate
Catullus ave atque vale
Chaucer of which virtue engendered is the flower
ChicoGrouchoGummoHarpo&Zeppo Hungadunga Hungadunga and Hungadunga
Cicero O tempora O mores
Coleridge the philosopher of dejection
Costello sticky Valentines
Davies tired of waiting
Dickinson the fugitive from and saboteur of the culture industry
Dryden the blow of fate
Durant nobiliar inanition
Dylan the savior of poetry in popular song
Eastman do you like my hat
Eliot the hollow man
Eliot the unconquered liberal
Frost above the rim
Gilbert&Sullivan tit willow tit willow tit willow
Ginsberg howl howl howl howl O you are men of stone
Goethe verweile doch du bist so schön
Gray full many a flower
Habermas the unforced force of the better argument
Housman a garland briefer than a girl’s
Harrison hare Krishna
Hendrix the blower of minds
HollandDozierHolland you just keep me hanging on
Homer&Jethro the coast is clear now
Jagger&Richards what to do
Jonson all father now
Johnson the kicker of stones
Johnson the stones in his passway
Joyce ineluctable modality
Keats the marvelous boy wise deviser of magic casements
Lehrer I hear you cry
Lennon&McCartney it’s just a feeling
Lydon anger is an energy
Mann the hackneyed expression I love you
Martial the prostitute with a heart of gold
Melnick teh vader cvmwoflux pmisti effrent bain gerstin
Milton the anointed of hideous ruin and combustion
Nash you told me once but I forgot
Neuman, Alfred E what me worry
Nietzsche the dionysian tempter
Parfit the realist despite himself
Poe his lynx eye
Pope from silver Spouts the grateful Liquors glide past metalepsis zeugma and chiasmus
Reed the punk disciple of Shapiro
Rimbaud a season in hell
Robinson the savior of poetry in popular song
Rowan&Martin goodnight Dick
Seneca anger the desire to punish horror witless horror
Shakespeare tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Shapiro the teacher and the poet
Shelley the blithe spirit in dejection
Shelley accuser of the creator
Smyth who counseled the eschewing of gratuitous display of erudition
Stevens it is a world of words to the end of it but there is no end Wally
Swift Celia Celia Celia s—s
Tennyson better to have loved and lost
Thibodeau the world sufficient for the appreciation of beauty truth and good in the reason-giving sense
Tommy&Dickie Mother always liked you best
Trethewey tell the story every year
Tucker now I’m happy
Whitman the avuncular American spokesman
Wilde the hero of modernity
Wordsworth the seer into the life of things
Yeats the aesthete and the magus of spiritus mundi
And Ashbery the formidable
Sweet and gay and incomparably competent and unbearably formidable
And hence I proclaim dear Reader
Rhythm before all else
The main frequency
The resonance that announces
The unfolding of universal consciousness
The irrepressible profusion
A child in the hardware store of words
Purchasing nothing but naming the knockers the wipers and the climbers
Where all climbers start and finish and circle back hoopsnakelike
The one poem
An ecstasy of joy
The one life within us and abroad

Your lawn is full of chickweed
Aren’t you ashamed
To have bought so much fescue

A devotee of Kierkegaard said
The categorical imperative made Kant a monster
Better to obey a god I suppose
Who would have us kill our sons

At Your Dekalb Farmers Market
Crazy place it’s not mine
A chance encounter
Such as you might have at the store
With the familiar librarian
Who expresses consternation
At being relegated to the cohort
Of the unrecognized

At school students encircle the teacher’s desk
And to a girl with oval face and full lips
How’s it going you good
Eyes askance no reply
Standoffish like that other guy
The teacher returns to me a sheet of yellow paper
Covered with my own inscriptions in red ball point
In the upper left an irregular box
Standfish
Dementia
There’s your song the teacher says

Tomorrow some stitches remain unstitched
Responsibilities and false enjambment
Indices of cost and unsettled weather
Counting steps to the turnstile
The looming canopy
The dark interior

As schoolchildren are set free for summer
When one of them inclines his head to the sky
And crows and howls and almost weeps
And earns reproval from the frazzled parent
And as the trout caught and released
Swims woozily away
But now the children must attend the summer program
Which supplements their training
To conform to community standards
Enriching them with useful craft and patriotic song
And the fish must devote precious energy
To healing the grievous lesion of the mouth
So it is for those confined and pent
Who seek the stars and find
The glare of city the blink of aircraft
Who listen for the sounds of birds and hear
The hostile roar of the freeway
The children and the trout
Survive the ordeal most of them
But at what cost and with what scars

The graftings enlarged into durable appendages
Merged bifurcated or polyploid
Pursuant to the vision mission and goals of the assemblage
And the detached modulators indicated them
With exorbitant if characteristic disregard of distinctions
According to the sole criterion of their operant value
And confirmed their verifiable entity
In the hatcheries at the baggage carousel in the lofty depositories
Provided that in situ the rationale materializes for their proliferation
Along the surfaces in the unassuming facilities
Authorized by virtue of their mobilization of prudence and best practices
In other words their contributions
Whereas structure does not ask after the aspirations
Of a functional unit however vital or necessary
The procedures do not accommodate lateral events
That remain unfixed and outside their purview
Subterfugitive bliss
The ooze of oil crushed
The grass the thicket and the fruit tree wild

At the generalized venue in Norcross
The lady wrestler and the restaurant trumpeter
Celebrate their nuptials which like all ritual occasions
Arose out of trauma
The harried the hunted laboring for bread
The solemn words gave way
To festive food and drink and dance and lively song
He appears most days at the construction site
She takes a break from hospitality services
These too are public places amenable to those
Who do not yearn for quiet lives
Who must adopt quietude for wages
The only sounds the hammer blow and the toilet flush
Dampened perhaps by low radio drone
He sings softly along
She moves her supple hip
An IV line to boisterous revelry
The tumult of the arena
The vaquero’s lusty cry

Dear Neighbor
Thanks again for not murdering me
Though you came rather close
In my estimation
In this neighborhood without sidewalks
Where the sun shines brightly in the windy spring
Where I walk on the left side
As I was instructed in childhood
And I saw you heading right for me
And hoisted myself with my left foot
Onto the rather high concrete curb
And wobbled a bit
My balance not what it should be
So it would have served me right
A rather elderly man
And you youthful in your vim
Had I fallen into the trajectory
Of your big black truck
With the big big black tires
And the glass so dark
They won’t even know your name
All glossy all in arms
And the elevated speed
To strike fear into those
Not similarly equipped
It must be thus
Incognito in your black ops
Though I saw you in the distance
Pull forward from your driveway
So I probably know too much
And yet not enough
For I should have the good sense
To get well out of the way
Of your size
And your power
Which you display to the world
Out of obscure motives
Uncompromising you give no quarter
Hence I’m grateful that you did not fulfill your potential on this day
But you are self-sufficient
And need neither my gratitude
Nor my pity
Sincerely
Greg

Mars armed and glowering in the ascendant
The new Silverado with more aggressive styling
Accelerates northward to evade the police
Kills the driver and the passenger
And kills the occupants of an SUV
In the southbound lane

Everybody is somebody’s enemy
The enemy must be brought to justice
Or maybe just annihilated
For justice means retribution
Means punishment means payment in pain
Means victory

Decorate the legislature with severed heads
Line the thoroughfare with the crucified
Torture children with multiple choice tests
Equip the river with razor wire
Achieve the objective
Bomb them into the stone age

A cardinal couple peck at the ground
The female departs carrying a leaf
To the obscure side of a shallow tree
Grackles and starlings browse promiscuously

A plant blooms called wisteria
That tightly grips oak sweetgum and lanky pine
Clustered lavender flowers of meretricious beauty
All cup and no wine

An earthworm drags its slow length along the sidewalk
That courses before the swelling lawns
Some a darker green thanks to the application
Of carefully calibrated chemicals

Bending double I thought to extend the worm’s life
But the abrasive sidewalk resisted my attempts
And the little being never moved
Once I had placed it in the grass

And when I stood up straight my brain
Gave me a head rush symptom of anoxia
My new medication warns
That dizziness might pose a hazard

Just because it’s a dream
Doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen
A baby just big enough to walk is left outdoors
Until a stranger happens by to make rescue
And the kid was fine
And then you wake up and don’t need to worry
About the responsible parties
And will they be denied custody
And the perilous busy intersection
Of medicine and law
And in an infinite universe
Or an infinite series of what we have hitherto designated the universe
Everything happens that is physically possible
But how far do the laws of physics extend
And aren’t they more like guidelines
In a quantum world in which observation
Might stand as cause
And all phenomena have cause
And what is a phenomenon
Our fondest certainties
Math facts for example
Or the principle of noncontradiction
Are not phenomena
And are not dreams phenomena

That extraordinarily complex song
With its variations and coda tag
Comes from the tufted titmouse
Pretty little bird I’ve never seen
That sings it
Or should I say who sings it every spring
Presumably in perpetuity
But that’s a pipe dream
Considering the flux of species
Certain deciduous trees are yellow in the fall
And again after sleeping months
Yellow in the spring
They will green before summer
But never to the extent of the big spruce
A year-round green so deep
That it verges on indigo
The carpenter bee hovers
Empowered they say
By an army of mitochondria
But do they say she resembles
A fat biker in black leather
Colors emblazoned across the shoulder blades
Do they say I feel hostility
Toward the innocent bug
For boring into my porch
While the gentle rain from heaven
Did more damage than the carpenter bee

That’s what my father
Who was not above a modicum of bullshit
Called them
And Karl Shapiro the same in Auto Wreck
And when I came of an age to question my elders
I was like they’re cicadas why you lying
But they had seen more than I
More than anyone should see
What do you call death by flamethrower
What do you call the kamikaze
After the pilot is shot dead
With twenty miles of angular momentum
Heading for the flight deck on which you stand
Like it makes a difference
Locust or cicada
And yet I still lust after names of things
As if possession of the name
Were possession of the thing
As if things were all that mattered
Over actions say or math facts or moral facts
As if the forbidden name of God
Exercised deadly power in its utterance
And names are husks of locusts
The cicada having flown

If only humans hadn’t discovered agriculture
But then they might not have discovered ideas
If only humans hadn’t discovered ideas

And when did they discover the future tense
The conditional and the subjunctive
Well these are built into their chromosomes

Once again rain upon the magnolia
Upon the crappy lawn struggling against the clay
Greg can’t go outside and play

In rain the magnolia drops more leaves
Than usual and cones upon the lawn
It should live in a forest where it belongs

Nobody can claim water to be bad
Not even in the midst of drowning
A billion fish can’t all be wrong

And many more than a billion live
And that’s just fish
How does it feel to be just one fish

Just one fish is there such a thing
Perhaps in the world of ideas
Maybe not in the Atlantic

They farm fish in Texas and Viet Nam
And hire feeders skimmers and fish doctors
So they sort of farm labor too it seems

A Gregor is a shepherd sweet otium
But shepherds work harder than you think
Farming or at least herding sheep

Who doesn’t work must stand and beg
I wish they hadn’t named me Greg
I wish the great magnolia were other than it is

I want to hug Donald Trump
I want to press his cheek
Slathered in pancake makeup
Forced into histrionic distortions
Against my cheek which I have shaved
Since the last week of December 2020
When somehow I felt I must
Disaffiliate myself from bearded men
The same feeling I experienced
In the weeks before 9/11

I want to hug Donald Trump expertly shaven
His wispy coif a monument to tonsorial art
His boxy suits disguising his globular person
The better to extract the mob’s adulation
I want him to be unashamed
Of his baldness his obesity
Perhaps he imagines himself to be
Incapable of shame
And certainly the world has accused him thusly
But there’s more here than a media image

I want to hug Donald Trump contemptuous of persons
Contemptuous of peace and justice
Contemptuous of truth beauty and goodness
Contemptuous of all that is
Cleaving to the ideal of his own apotheosis
And while he looks up to certain personages
And down upon all others
There are more dimensions than the vertical
I want to hug Donald Trump and comfort him and calm him
Narrow furious cowardly and sad

A young man purposes to kill all phonies
Starting with his heroes the magi of sincerity
Who just don’t cut the mustard
Incapable of their own stern doctrine
And proceeding through all others
Who have compromised and sold their souls
Their souls which they never truly possessed
So all signs point to me he thinks
Who has outthought his teachers
And he reaches the sad but logical conclusion
That all must die even the children
Especially the children to spare them further indignity
And he celebrates the ecstasy of gunfire and blood
The release of centuries of pent-up fury
And yet he holds out hope that somewhere
Sometime in this repugnant but necessary venture
He will discover one who shares his vision
Someone capable of his austere discipline
And he sets out
And he succeeds victoriously
With a middling magus
An artist of some renown
Admired among the masses for his philosophies
His soft inconsistent philosophies
And it should have been I
Who was renowned and admired
And now it will be
But the young man is apprehended without harm
Except to the hapless artist
After this his first attempt
And is tried by a jury of his inferiors
Who vote like the democrats they are
For his punishment
To be locked in a cage for all time
To be frisked by sentries and probed by psychologists
But they committed a stupid error
As he knew they would
And granted him writing implements
So that he might detail for some future species
Or some strange visitor from another planet
The simple truth of his struggle

When the brain fails to snap into place
The blame since falsehood began competing with popularity in the strict media circus
A specific foul repeated to paresis
The anthology of adjectives predicative and attributive
The garb of the fakir the gangster the nun the protester the geek
The declination of the words cunt ass and rag
And swallowtail those instances of bliss
Leaking spigot needs a washer and faulty gasket oil pan
Those phases of blue in the instruments in play
The only emperor is the emperor of heads-up display

Take that you puling mass of intemperance and could you please clarify your pronouns

The longer you live preemptively
Nina Symone’s impatient growl the last gasp of sincere feeling
A field of increasing tension
Or to neglect partaking of
The achieve of the mastery of
Let there be necking in the parlor
For how can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation
Singular sensations a frank impossibility
Embraces the procession of animals implements arguments ratchets bodily systems and goals
Electrical banana ho
Ho ho
Strange brew killing what’s inside of you
A fire in the belly corroding up into the chest cavity
You’re so beautiful just come stay a while
Access to the flum
Of family and friends and joys obtrude
Despite the by-now obligatory hairshirt
Fashion that despotic harridan

The skillet the frying pan
The bucket the pail
The abstrusity the recondition

And who knows not the sharp nail of frustration
The bureaucrat’s delusion
Or the chill dread’s linger
Time’s winged chariot
Got drunk the autopilot
Give us a rouse something to hang on to
As hanging stoning the electric chair the gas chamber lethal injection firing squad and crucifixion
Stop in at one of our convenient kiosks or use the app
The ghost of a chance an anatomy of criticism
Undeniably the beauty the annoyances persist
Alongside that of the holy communion
Salutary itch indicative of healing
But no less irritating for that
Relics of a higher power now available in twelve easy payments no interest until 1954 five ninety-five to be shipped and handled
Between the germane and the material
Beyond all mere antinomies of system and lifeworld
Mire and b-b-b-b-blood
Track down the elusive impenetrable quarry
Nosferatu for the thou
For a magisterial compilation on grumpy old manhood
Vasectomy and monkey nuts
And all is bleared smeared like toilet paper
The scatalogical imperative
Kate Smith’s moon over God-blast America
The goat atop the outhouse
Redolent in the alchemist’s simplosium
A partial explanation for the recent renaissance of easel painting
Enjoying like a toddler the demolition of the carefully constructed frieze
Real housewives a metaphysical conceit
And how sad not to remember new vexations
To rust unburned not to shine with bruises
While the word penis remains completely unobjectionable
Along with its proper synonyms Dick Willy Johnson and Leopold
And here’s the sweet desire the prospect’s worry
And to delectate one’s own discomfort doesn’t hurt if it doesn’t help
And the whole congregation began singing
I’ve got the clap and the blue balls too

While old conflicts the footballs of autumn the azaleas of spring
Curds on the wing the macaroni-crowded seas
Pimps under water flowers in the sky
Season of masks and mellow frootiness
The nixie basks in the motel swimming pool
Hiya Hiya Walla Walla Liya Hiya
Nora’s freezing on the trolley
A floating chaise and a triple brown liquor
Brian May’s guitar sound amid the influx of the new
So wear your echoes and borrowings on your album sleeve
Murk up the chartered streets
If you were a master thief perhaps you’d get away with it
But the proportion of delight remains about the same
For more dies
Sunset loses its hurtful energy
Can you see me through the scrim
My pants down around my ankles

We ride no horses any more
Nor stand in horse-drawn chariots
Or only rich folks do for diversion or movies
Back when there was such a thing as a Western
Maybe someday soon they’ll look back
And pity the benighted passengers
In our crappy five-seaters
Or our SUVs bloated for elephant hunting in the suburbs
Or our crossovers nor fish flesh nor fowl
Too big for safety too small for utility
Or our enormous pickups styled like sci-fi tanks
Stinkpot burners of aerosol distillates
Dropping charcoal like turds
Or powered from the local coal plant
Or bunker C number 6
Or the nuclear reactor vulnerable to weather and operator error
And where do you put its turdlike wastes
Imperishably active and fatal to life
Or a few lonely wind turbines
Reliant upon the instantaneous judgments
Of drivers with judgments no better than mine
Or worse if that’s even possible
And what must be the health effects
Of stressful left turns and lane changes
They used to have an animal glamor
Marlin and Mustang and Lynx and Bearcat
Competing with unintelligible letters and numbers
And the names of tourist destinations
Or heroic Challengers Chargers and Avengers
Everybody wanted to go fast daddy
Except the little old lady from Pasadena
Timidly attempting ingress to the freeway
Its already limited access furiously guarded
By young men who with sound and speed
Join the uniform parade of macho bullshit
So needy are they of attention
So ashamed are they of their incapacity
So lustful are they to strike fear in the citizenry
For warfare demands victory sieg heil
Howling at all hours
In bright noon
And roaring clamor to trouble the dead of night

That one little pony had to wait
The one with the jingle bells
That could drive a cat a pony or a person crazy
While the woods filled up with snow
And who ever thought woods fill with snow
Some accumulation might be predicted
Perhaps even considerable in its depth
But fill no
The same guy who wants to take
The long way around for his delectation
For his civility for his cherished liberty
Bourgeois maggot
But no
Maggots effectively cleanse necrotic tissue
But this guy poses as a free agent
Start the bidding at a million billion

The actual Batmobile with its actual devices
Purportedly defensive but with capabilities
For collateral damage unknown to mortal men
Everything on an earthly plane
From a skillet to a frying pan
Ask around and you can obtain
The soporific supplement
Or the critical stimulant
If you swing that way
So no
Bodies in motion
Bodies that exert mutual attraction
And still he pretends
That all is discontinuity
When in fact you take beauty
Where you find it

Or perhaps the priest was right
That beauty and truth carry no water
For Omnipotence which must be placated
And hence the absolute necessity
Of the sacerdotal trade
Of hieratic gesture
Intoxicating censer
Esoteric formula pronounced in archaic tongue
Sumptuous vestments plate and statuary
And blood sacrifice immersion or sprinkling or drinking
To bend the Almighty to mercy
And might needs not mercy
Nor power need not bend
In the reverberant basilica

Take in the sense of absorb
Of mutual absorption
For beauty is the visible aspect of the life of things
Not in the sense of take possession of

This town retains a few granite curbstones
Attractive in their roughhewn extractive industrial way
With semicylindrical spaces
Adorning their craggy faces
From one of these a robin flies
Upon its dark drab wings
And leaves behind a pale gray streak
Of which one could praise the luster in a hymn
Before the inevitable congealing
But only to its intellectual beauty
For composition rarely requires
A dollop of this or any feces

Elephant seals locomote on land like vile ungainly maggots
At sea the sleek swift Pegasus

Whether a technical process
To be performed well or badly
Or giving permission to experience
To drink and taste and open all the gateways

The hawk must learn to hunt
To scan the ground from far aloft
And see with unearthly eye
The furtive prey

And hang with impossible chill
Suspended between open wings
Tipping them momentarily
And turning in great spirograph ellipses

Ennui stands as the greatest of sins
Or languorously reclines
In crumbling palace old
To truth and beauty cold
Impassive to the horrors ‘round
Bodies bleeding on the ground
When life loses its savor
And chewing gum its flavor
And passion and prosody irregular alike
Ferrent tuo gmban da locohol
No idea how far to fall
Even if you don’t start out that high
Coffin worm and child’s first tooth
Inflicting pain for dramatic effect
Nonsense posing as depth
And dear enthusiasms cloy
No pleasures to enjoy
Exposed to rank annoy
Far short of true distress
Faint hints of bitterness
Commit to nothing wholly
For angel voices foley
For thought and feeling null
For masterpieces dull
Turn from muse and organ Calliope
And heed this potent recipe
Resort to arcane signs
Aesthetics of the bad
Slurp slurp
Smell the freshest decadence
Distract from hateful impotence
Weak bones and ruined face
The death in life embrace

He passes through the portal and bam
Four faces
Four mouths four noses four pairs of eyes
Another portal and bam bam
Sixteen faces
With mouths noses and pairs
Although the noses smell little
And the mouths do not speak
What a cacophony if they did
And who wants to talk to a monster
With sixteen faces
Scientists might be interested
But Janus is not interested in them
Not after what he’s seen both before and behind
And that binary loses its force
With the multiplication of viewpoints
With yaw pitch roll sideways and inside out
He keeps passing through portals
Bam bam shebang bam wham
And when he gets to five hundred twelve faces
He stops counting though he keeps portal-passing
And all those thousands of eyes in pairs
Start seeing things
Beyond wonder
Beyond terror
Beyond object’s coherence
Spacetime dying and aborning

A computer simulation a clock
Or maybe something with indistinct edges
Like a poem
Mariana trench and Everest
Of this exquisite miniature earth
Roses bloomed before Burns
Infants cried in fear before and after Blake
Patients in the recovery room struggled
To make sense of their surroundings
And sometimes surroundings made no sense
A city flattened a home destroyed
And resort to the comforting thought
That sense resides outside and over there
In the hands perhaps of the polymer god
Or on the wings of that transcendent being
Imageless but somehow like a dove
Or the sorrowful pierced heart of our dear goddess
Conceived without sin
Assumed bodily into heaven deathless
Delightful depictions graven on cardboard
But on the flip side the image
Of an eight-month-old’s corpse
It’s eyelids parted to view
Something the living will not see

Give me a song about the old home town
Some of us never had one
Some of us wish we never did
Hole in the wall where the upright
Still uphold that racism is right
Company burg for the mine the Navy
The distribution center
Get your pole
Get in that hole
Where women share instructions
For silencing a satanic bible
That howls atop the TV
During a devotional broadcast
Where the big box store
Sells two-stroke leaf blowers and the ingredients
Needed for a healthy lawn in the clay
And the dollar store blue boxes
For whipping up the mac and cheese
Now fortified with gypsum
And apple sauce enriched with lead
And you can get a chicken sandwich
And a beverage in styrofoam
No do-rags allowed and all music except rap
Saving up for a Challenger
Or easy terms on an eight-year note
Trying to make it into cheerleader camp
Xanax spelled Xanak
Aspire to agribusiness
Raise the monoculture point woods
Sustain the monoculture point people
Where everybody believes
Where everybody is made to believe
Nothing matters except what I want
And you gotta wanna win
Nothing matters