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

Perpetually learning and unlearning
And taking delight in the most trivial and unrealistic of undertakings
For example that what it is mispronounces whatitis
Symptom or malady
Inflammation of the what
Inflammatory malapropism for those lined up
Against the flaming rampart of the world
Beyond which live the gods
The jabberwocks
The ferocious mama bears
The three billy goats gruff trip-trapping to the annoyance of the troll who lives under the bridge like many we see and why not when you consider the considerable space between refusal and consent
The ewoks the brownies the pixilated pixies
The leprechauns the banshees the kelpies
The incubi the succubae and the lamias
The ghosts goblins goons gashers and grabassies
The flying horses
The flying unicorns equine and caprine
The flying monkeys
The flying flies
The flying cats
The flying toasters
The flying frying pans
The caring nurturers
The inefficient experts
The hidebound reactionaries
The putters
The potters
The pitters
The patters
The petters
The mischief makers
The bookmakers
The musicmakers
The listmakers
The cheesemakers
The shoemakers and the elves that look like birds
The clockmakers
The watchmakers
The matchmakers
The rainmakers
The wonder workers
The sex workers
The social workers
The soda jerkers
The oil checkers
The banana tallyers
The whipper snappers
The mustache waxers
The tintype takers
The elevator operators
The beauty operators
The telephone operators
The inmates
The bosun’s mates
The teammates
The rivals
The coaches
The assistant coaches
The assistant professors
The assistant homicidal maniacs
The seamstresses and haberdashers
The embroiderers and embossers
The starters and finishers
The millers and milliners and millionaires
The geezers and wheezers and gazers at geysers
The wheelwrights playwrights and cartwrights
The navigators aviators motivators and jockeys
The gilders plasterers and thatchers
The blacksmiths silversmiths tinsmiths goldsmiths gunsmiths locksmiths and arrowsmiths
The spaniels beagles setters retrievers poodles terriers wolfhounds and wiener dogs
The marigolds and black-eyed Susans
The Rosie the riveters
The leading ladies
The damsels in distress
The prigs
The punks
The thugs
The fops
The cads
The quacks
The geeks
The freaks
The narcs
The heads
The bouncers
The bounders
The influencers
The leaders
The followers
The ridiculously precious ladies
The nymphs
The sylphs
The fauns
The satyrs
The naiads
The centaurs
The basilisks
The chimeras
The hydras
The minotaurs
The maenads
The helots
The myrmidons
The malcontents
The well-wishers
The well-to-dos
The ne’er-do-wells
The attorneys-at-law
The Johnny-come-latelies
The sergeants-at-arms
The short-order cooks
The butlers
The bakers
The bottle washers
The mountaineers
The engineers
The privateers
The chocolatiers
The musketeers
The longshoremen
The stevedores
The stowers
The packers
The matadors
The spies
The escorts
The gigolos
The pipers
The players
The middle infielders
The messengers
The technocrats
The schoolmarms
The con artists
The tattoo artists
The machinegun artists
The fiber artists
The massage therapists
The flagpole sitters
The acrobats
The antipodists
The wingwalkers
The padres
The luddites
The ringers
The rattlers
The entrepreneurs
The bourgeoises
The proletarians
The aristocrats
The rude mechanicals
The coy maidens
The gay blades
The sad clowns
The happy wanderers
The manure collectors
The spitters
The fletchers
The carders
The fullers
The dyers
The skinners
The weavers
The waivers
The tailors
The tanners
The pinners
The panners
The punners
The trimmers
The slackers
The rustlers
The wranglers
The cowboys
The passionate shepherds and their loves
The zookeepers
The bar keepers
The crypt keepers
The cataloguers
The administrators
The wholesalers
The upholsterers
The drivers
The winners
The go-getters
The procrastinators
The singers
The dancers
The chorines
The character actors
The directors
The gaffers
The grips
The riggers
The ruggers
The raggers
The prodigies
The proteges
The retailers
The brokers
The breakers
The levelers
The diggers
The muggletonians
The fixers
The menders
The finaglers
The buffoons
The churlish knaves
The fiendish thingies
The modish fashionistas
The faux-Neanderthals with prosthetic foreheads
The veterinarians
The parliamentarians
The vegetarians
The valetudinarians
The antidisestablishmentarians
The sectarians
The sexagenarians
The barbarians
The librarians
The libertarians
The libertines
The liberal democrats
The sloppy drunks
The reformed drunks
The weepy drunks
The town drunks
The drunks who eat giant turkey legs at Ye Renaissance Faire
The knob twiddlers
The meter readers
The dial tappers
The needle noodlers
The tweakers
The seekers
The beakers
The talkshow hosts
The gameshow moderators
The color commentators
The nailers
The bailers
The pailers
The wailers
The grailers
The jailers
The failers
The mailers
The hailers
The railers
The phthailers
The pundits
The planners
The poetasters
The village idiots
The squires of the manor
The dukes of earl
The constables on patrol
The superheroes
The arch-nemeses
The sharpers
The avengers
The searchers
The climbers
The divers
The curlers
The fencers
The tumblers
The fumblers
The grumblers
The bumblers
The rumblers
The crumblers
The recidivists
The irredentists
The imperialists
The activists
The specialists
The generalists
The duelists
The narcissists
The ecdysiasts
The ventriloquists
The bigamists
The pianists
The jingoists
The geomancers
The gyromancers
The necromancers
The chiromancers
The ornithomancers
The sweet romancers
The cruisers
The crushers
The shredders
The slashers
The blasters
The bashers
The smashers
The hangers-on
The letters-go
The yes-men
And the naysayers
But on this side in the workaday world
People imagine what’s on the other side
And make adjustments accordingly
Or not
Perpetually stitching and unstitching
Raveling and unraveling
Unpacking unshaping undoing unthinking unwriting
Learning and unlearning
Apart and together
And all points in between

It may be true that a single yelp
A single groan is insignificant
Or for that matter a single orgasmic moan
The nursing infant’s milky smack
The stevedore’s grunt
The elder’s complaint upon rising
Though not insignificant to be sure
For the one who discharges it
And what is one they always ask
The flattering tempters
And these matters apply
Only in the medium-sized picture
While the grand-sized picture
Expands into insignificance
Amid far-flung gasses and plasmas
To the very edge of the big bang
And what is one even of a universe
The true picture of significance
Occupying the ample space
Apparently somewhere between
The intramolecular and the intergalactic schemes
The little claws of the animals
That creep beneath the skin
The heavenly bodies that grapple
In their immense gravitational fields
But what reason do I have
To care about the yelp or groan or moan
Of another
Surely it can’t be the case
That all that matters
Is what matters to me
It pleases me when my partner
Makes that delicious moan
It hurts me when that first bike lesson
Involved the novice fall
And the look back in accusation
Or the pictures from another land another state
That limn comity or antagonism
For ecstasy and agony constitute
The extremity of significance
With infinite degrees between
Regardless of whom they befall
And so must be one life one consciousness
That enlivens the molecules
That far exceeds our little Milky Way

The signal two perfectly modulated notes
The higher and the lower repeated in groups of three
First light before the sun rises
That used to cue bedtime
For one who worked at night
But now imports the contrary
That first light well before
The light shines up over the high horizon
Of houses and trees on hills
Periodically through the night the locomotives
Spoke with roar of engine clatter of track and blast of horn
A certain romance of earlier time
But now the cars on the street move out
The Hyundais the Dodges and the electrics
The quiet and those with voices tuned to annoy and to attract attention
They too made occasional appearance during the dark
But now hear the slow crescendo
How many had a good breakfast before leaving the house
How many will waste their lives and squander their health
Lining the drive-through
If you’re lucky you can spend some time outdoors
But for many that will mean working on the roof
Or rotating the octagonal stop-and-slow
Bartering like everybody else
Who isn’t splattered on the sidewalk or under the overpass
In the restaurants the offices the schools the hospitals
The retail establishments the light industrial and heavy industrial plants
The bases of operation for public safety and national defense
The gig economy hustling for the app
The ironically-labeled fulfillment center
The very home itself adapted to work online
Their precious time labor substance bodies and personalities
Their vanishingly brief lives
For money fungible universal solvent
And when the workday’s done
They get back in their cars
A few ride the bus or train
And attempt again surface street and expressway
Delayed perhaps by accident construction or stall
The glorious sunset one of the hazards
And return most of them to a roof over their head
If they’re not already there
To seek the solace of entertainment
Mediated by the culture industry
And hear perhaps before turning in
The songbird’s wistful twilight signal

Where the sky is so blue says the song
But is it really bluer in Alabama
Not around the steel mills it isn’t
The pungent yellow haze and the smell
That distract furiously from sun and air
The toil within that shortens miserable lives
The part of town the kids’ football team
Never visits willingly
Partly for the environment there
But mostly because the players
Could whip our asses
There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow
Sings the man atop the horse
But surely it’s the meadow that is golden
And not the haze
No doubt our mood inflects
Our vision of the world
And a songwriter in Connecticut or New York
Fancied the feeling of straddling horse
And waking the cornfield with pretty ditty
Fantasizing but not feeling a mood
And even on those occasions when
A true emotion seizes us
Must we claim fallaciously
That nature responds to our pathetic feelings
This mockingbird that has not perched
Upon the wire for many months
Spreads its little beak and pours forth
Such a mighty torrent of sound
Invitation or warning I know
But I can’t help but note the tones
Mournful brash amorous hurt or mean
And what is joy to a songbird
What sorrow
Its wishes nothing to which I can respond
This corpse of squirrel once so frenetic
Busy excavating or turning wary
And waving its semaphore tail
Gnawed the power line weeks ago
And now a few thin bones and a bit of hair
You can just make out the little skull
Sacred relic and significant sign
Or site for scavenger and saprophyte
And what is it makes the world intelligible
Where does fiction fall and bullshit take up

Respectfully John I demur
You cannot isolate a note of it true
And say it is good or bad
But it would be quite wrong to claim
As perhaps you do with inoculating tickle quotes
That the end crowns all and therefore
You must wait till it’s over
That’s not how it works at least not music
The goodness or badness does not
Simply materialize with the stroke of doom
No more than in the moment of conception
But in the relation not even of one note with others
But of all the notes with all the others
But even this characterization falls short
For there is no totality
For one thing the it is never over
As the risingfalling drawnout cadence that allegedly ends
A Day in the Life must must be followed by
The compulsive silliness left off the American version
Never kiss me any other w
The essence of melody at least
Being its repeatability
And that’s just the horizontal dimension
Though that’s the dimension you emphasize
When you call the end the crowning moment
And what is a moment
You’re telling me that there’s an impermeable
Barrier between being and non-being
And what of the vertical dimension
The celestial harmony that dwells outside time
Consequently the worst is not that bad
But I’ll tell you one damn’d thing
My bigger orphic brother
Thou Yoda and Pai Mei of song
They can take our heads off
But still and all we will sing

Acrid verbal curlicues that accessorize
The most foundational of formulating forms
Taking arms against a sea of troubles
Now I know and what rough beast
Here there is no light save on the breezes blown
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain
And that damned votive lassitude

I’m not talking about a well-
Regulated militia or justification by faith
It’s the there not-there
In or on manifestly real monuments of intellect
Vestigial virus in DNA
It seems the ornament is the point
Discovered or created begotten not made

You are the stick you throw under the footbridge
To watch it emerge on the other side
Shall we call those navigators victims
As if it were possible otherwise than to float and flow

The skin toughens in the region of contact
The cellist’s fingertips
The elder’s feet after decades of shoes
The child’s knees after the falls of play

You are the knee the finger the battered brain
The organic matter that floats downstream
Whose significant features come out involuntarily
Shaped by the currents of the world

You are the arrow that courses toward its target
To pierce the quarry with cruel geometry
Shall we call that flier a perpetrator
As if it were possible otherwise than to fly and strike

The prey needs the predator as the predator the prey
The raptor’s eye coasts upon the impulsive wind
And skewers the fecund mammal terrified
Who scurries in futile or fortunate flight

You are the agile hawk and you the feckless prey
All play their part in the intricate play
Nobody chooses what or how they are
Shaped by the currents of the world

Seek phenomena find experience
Those fine images from Hubble and Webb
Looking glasses in space
Of which one wears spectacles
Give substance over to artists
Who translate information
Into intelligible color
That scandalous element
In the eye of the beholder
Battering chaos godlike into cosmos
Or seeming so
Galileo’s mirror translated mere size
But let new planets to swim into our ken
While scientists now cull the dark matter of data
Cuneiform of zeroes and ones
Objective truth being both invisible and blind

No wonder then we take refuge
In the fictions of display
Solemn church museum or prison house
Or in waggish worlds verbal or pictorial
We migrate over the borders of space and time
Imagining them real in diurnal round
To the displeasure of puritans and pundits
Hence some say translate to traduce
The nurse on Penny Lane
Feels as if she’s in a play
But she is anyway twice over
And some suppose that our lives
Are tales told by an idiot
But what does Macbeth know of life
Except to take it away
At least his Lady knows to nurse a child

No it’s fine but how regrettable
That these tacky polymers are all that is
No more the simple stick
Notorious hazard
Brandished or thrust into the fire
Primordial tool and universal plaything
And instead the edutainmental programming
Streaming from the glowing screen
Problem solving teamwork and multiple choice
The old days were bad
An eight-year-old dead of sepsis from a fishhook
The new days less bad perhaps
Children bubble in their answers
And comply with the dress code
And yet they still as ever delight in light
Radiant reflected emergent or prismatic