Feather’d cormorant assumes its customary
Posture scowling over the field of grace
What main or goads are these
What madmen locked

Fierce predecessor who fashioned the creed
Or refashioned it to suit current fashion
Whereupon silence descended
Upon the agriculture the children the bugs

The branching island the labyrinth of mirrors
The mockingbird’s digital glitch
The midnight forest of faulty dilemmas
And Hatshepsut a tyrant for all that

The well-intentioned muster
Only token resistance
To the ancient catalog
Regarded by them as a foregone conclusion

The most natural thing in the world
And yet divergent somehow
Repellent in its uniqueness
Paces into the furled afternoon

We assayed an expedition
Nakedness after nightfall
In a place of daylight bustle
Relieved mostly pale of enthusiasm

The following day the leaves
Remained in their prescribed places
The calm doorposts remained
But we glanced pert disheveled

Such energy to protect the persiflage
Shielding the penumbrae from radiation
From blemishes sores sicknesses
How long can this or any throng keep it up

Words are falling out or were they pushed
Rubber raincoat virtual private network
Intrigue takes place behind the arras
Erosion saturates the selfie littoral

Naphthalene and hydrochlorides
An oriole pursues such actions as it is used to
Nimbolane and hypochondria
The feathered garments on the ground and in the air

The line between brute facts and social construction
Because in the heart post-rehabilitation
The artifact is a fact notwithstanding of art
Beforehand in fact frag g g exigency

A jiggle a minor vibration urges a mammalian corpse
Loosed onto the world of costs and behaviors
Taste the frothy residue compact with pain
The breath of times awry and neglected

Surface and depth above and below
Figure and ground ideal and painfully real
The birds and the trees don’t have these problems
Except that they totally do having inherited them

A bit leathery around the edges
A bit problematic at the seams
Bulging with internal pressure
A bloat an intractable burden

I take a walk around the neighborhood
As you can see in these pages
Privileged suburbanite
Mortgage and a paid-up car
Kids all grown and a grandchild or two
Long long marriage of childhood sweethearts
Still a smile of fondness occasionally
You can see here the weather
When I have nothing to talk about
Except the spattering on magnolia leaves
Beyond the curtains in the Japanese fashion
Not that leaves are nothing or rain
And though one poem butts up against another
You can count the days between uploads
When I’m busy with tasks not unpleasant
Like coaxing a three year-old unwillingly to sleep
You can see the seasons
When butterflies embrace the wealth of flowers
When flowers open an invitation
To the generous pollinators
Or when on blustery days the naked branches
Score and stab the white sky

There’s this one guy I often encounter
I cock twice the right hand’s thumb fore- and long fingers
Pinky and ring slightly tucked
And murmur a hiya
And he rolls his eyes away hard northwest
Or deigns a rapid eye-contact
Frowns and nods quickly once
What message does he send me
That haply I invade his privacy
Out here on the public pavement
I have disrupted him
We both are walking here
Nor headed toward a definitive destination
I have no promises to keep
And yet I should respect his solitude he seems to say
His remote and unpublished agenda
Seemingly similar to my own
Though mine might be looser than most
Perhaps he harbors some pain
He dare not articulate
But I don’t know do I
And I feel treated unfairly
Targeted for disapproval
Author of no misdeed known to me
And thus I compound the injustice
By castigating self-centered myself
For self-centeredness
And I want to retort
You’re not alone like or not

And therefore people should offer the blessing
Of a good morning afternoon or evening
A gesture toward clearing
The toxic fog of misunderstanding
For fleeting are our days
Let them not be sullied
By glowering countenance
And gladly if rarely
Cometh the spirit of delight

Light skims across the tops of trees
Shadow slices across below
From the houses and other trees

Too much consciousness we calculate outcomes
Slaves to experience and sooner or later
Out of fear or greed experts in the doctrines

And yet the body febrile and importunate
Will in the end have its say
Will set down the content of the creeds

The neighbors smile and wave as they should
Some withhold smile or wave
As if you don’t belong in this or any universe

The sunset my sunset this remembered rainbow
This outcropping with rounded shoulders
This prismatic glint of tears

Girls intone elaborate chants of their own device
Boys induce dizziness or a head rush
Hoping to start gurgling poetry

Daybreak pricks the little songbird
And hurts it into song and I hear it
As do the elf the giraffe the trilobite

Forbear
Remove just one of them

Kudzu resurgent as when it arrived
But why did it recede in the first place

A blacked-out Mustang roars
So anxious of manhood the young man

The English intruder sounds the monotonous chirp
Whither is fled the song sparrow

Emily poisoned by markets and autotune
Can’t abide a voice singing in a room

The acolytes fly their colors and their shibboleths
The better to identify the foe

A child dies of diarrhea
In this land of poverty

Long-legged daisies made me smile
But only on one side

During the last percussive century
When savory was in vogue
And the former child star was assaying
To bring sexy back
And what doddard imagined that
The waspish power had gone anywhere

The streets were bathed in yellow
Preparing for the emergent anaphora
A song of whatever witlessism

Furthermore
Index finger crooked aloft
Like the gas line of a flivver
We shan’t
They spoke that way
We shan’t have any extensions
Of this willing fracas
Splendidly generously superfluous

The depth of deep rumination
The length of long winters

Whispered suggestiveness
Let’s forget the gravitation hon
And mosey thitherward
Or amble sashay or promenahd
Some sophisticated intonation

Mood indigo liberating UV

You seem to have forgotten one thing
My honored rival
Where are the snows
What is the signal
Who are the ones
Who remain open to suggestion
To tolerate ambiguity

To the neighbor holding the leash I said
That’s the third dog I’ve seen this morning
Take a great interest in that post

An existence not devoid of pleasure
Nor lacking even in voluptuous temptation
But you have conceded the necessary regulations
And even served your term on the council
To verify trust integrity virtue policy faith
And all assume the meretricious posture

The possibilities are endless
And hence you deny the finality of defeat
But possibility is not probability
And probability not cause
In the substantial series of bitter losses
Only a few of them physical

I maintain vague memories of midnight revels
Of rising to emergent occasions
Of merciless punishments issued and received
Of debts and windfalls
Of cowering beneath cruel expectations
Of delighting in Medusa’s piercing cantata

A choir of three leaf blowers
Microtones apart
A backpack of herbicide

A little butterfly colored like white oak
Rests upon a clothes pin
I touch an antenna to coax it to fly
But it rests unmoved torpid with morning
Or entering perhaps the languor of its senility
I pinch a ragged wing as gently as I can
The bug flutters grudgingly
While I set it upon the next clasp
Where it settles as before
So have I been through most of my life
Crooked and slow after the last night’s revels
But I have managed most times
To make the coffee
If you haven’t made it
And prepare the laundry for hanging
And you my beloved have tolerated my grumbling
Though you have made no secret that you disapprove
So superfluous to be out of sorts
And none of our neighbors maintain a clothesline
And thus they deprive themselves of slow pleasure
One said How much is your time worth
As if I were throwing money into the fresh air
A two-stroke engine disturbs the peace
And the highway issues its inveterate threats
And now a wood chipper snarls intermittently
But ah beloved let us never cease to love
Not avoiding the fractious friction
That stimulates and annoys
Reveling in our otherness
Partaking of the holy communion
Of family and friends
Each unique each different from ourselves
Our bodies our motions the songs of our being
The private jokes and practices of affection
The sorrows that we would never publish
For here we are in these pleasant foothills
The perfect air moving about us
Amid the birds and the butterflies
Moving and still

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