The ghostly masses redolent on the page
Of spirit gum and erasure
Of meom and thoieisu
The wind shocked and dismayed
By buildings and transportation
The star fell into the dirt
How can you command appreciation
Much less love
You can at most give reasons
Comprehensive or less so as the case may be
Spectral moon in the high year
Failing beneath the misty clouds
A sentence that attempts regionalism
The aggrandizement of local conditions
Or some expression of attitude or memory
Of solvent lubricant abrasive or adhesive
The sanctuary full of chains and cages
The hungry pursuit
Much less belief
Flesh and the devil
Broken spectacles and a bloodied face
This is not entertainment
This is not uplift moral or affective
Pastime or theoretical armature
Heard the heroes ‘round the random
Unattainable in the phenomenal world
Of measures anologue digetal or gestoral
Of teenagers and commodities
Categorical disparities
Anathegma
Don’t refer to a lacerating inconstancy
For that would constitute a steady state
Embalmed darkness and lights’ tired eyes
Old age and vague indications
Events take place
Situations obtain
All in flux
All in dynamic twilight
But oh that deep romantic chasm

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

And what do we mean changed
We extract the substances of nature
And we adapt them in the service
Of human self interest
Thus copper’s ductility stands as a property
Inherent and unchanging
But copper does not array itself spontaneously
In strands of wire
Which swoop upward and downward
Between the poles themselves mounted between
US 1 and the Florida East Coast Railway
Which my grandfather helped to build
Through swamp and sand
Palmetto and coquina
And I in the back seat would trace the rising and falling with my hand
As if waving bye bye
We rarely traveled more than 60 MPH
A rate which my father would announce triumphantly
A mile a minute
In the Chevy station wagon seating six
Nor does pigment array itself spontaneously
In Bacchus and Ariadne
Nor language in Easter 1916
We extract the natural forces of image and figure
And adapt them to express
Our fears our conflicts our yearnings and our delight
So yes all is changed
But utterly must be exaggeration
Unless it means changed as much as change can be
And how much is that
While copper remains ductile and salt salty
And eternal beauty hath no birth
In sunrise or sea
Or song of bird
And yet is born
In poem and painting and copper wire

The archers of Isfahan
The portly woman of Willendorf
The Pompeiian copulators
La Gioconda also known as the Mona Lisa
Paris standing in judgment of Athena Aphrodite and Hera
Marianne leading the people
Lincoln Nixon and Obama
Garbo Harlowe and Marilyn Monroe
Elvis Jagger and Beyoncé
That guy who scrapes a growth of beard first one way and then another
Sports pictures
Baby pictures
Refugee pictures
Wedding pictures
Vacation pictures
The infant dead of Wisconsin
The recorded performance of children in joyless synchronized dancing
The ancestors from the age of oil painting their jewelry ruffs and upraised collars
Mug shots
Selfies
Pictures that celebrate accomplishments
Pictures that document atrocities
Pictures that schematize conditions before and after the use of some product or procedure
Surgical endoscopy
Histological microscopy
Satellite traffic imagery
Surveillance photos
Drone shots innocuous or nefarious
AP wire photos
Fingerprint files
News-readers pundits and gameshow hosts their neckties and age-obscuring cosmetics
Skype Zoom and FaceTime
Princess Zelda Mario Brothers and Ms Pac Man
The mysterious and roguish hero his features concealed behind a mask
The unmistakable and completely impossible profile of Popeye the Sailor Man
The anthropomorphic mouse who hurls a brick at the anthropomorphic cat who repays the injury with nothing but affection
The toys that rise and speak when no people are around
The automaton in the shape of a fool
And HAL 9000 yes or no

There’s this ditch though they call it a bayou
Made by humans and a backhoe
Straight across the landscape
Unlike any natural feature
Alongside road or fencepost
Draining the soil oozy like gumbo
The water table nearly at the surface
In a topography essentially flat
As the spoonbills could testify
With their tapas of crawfish
No hills to obstruct the view
Of a traffic light miles ahead
And the lowest place this bayou or ditch
Gives its name on the one hand
To a fragile culture negotiating nature
A name endorsed by local opinion
On the other to filth akin to that of gutter or open sewer
Organic matter rich in decay
Sometime destination
Of a pickup truck discovered in morning
And in this ditch or bayou see
Flowers five-petalled of lavender hue
Languid atop frail vinelike stems
Observed only here in this ditch or bayou
And heart cannot help but rejoice
In beauty that persists the long summer long
And how should we feel
About the blossom in the scar
In our helpless admiration

The big tiger swallowtail a similar mystery
Which science could solve and probably has
How it gets airborne on two slices of playing card
With ragged edges and intricate design
No tipoff of an airfoil
A bit clumsy really
Unlike the dragonfly that darts and hovers
Or the clever mosquito feinting in light and dark
The swallowtail browses in lowest place
With ungainly dignity
Lighting only briefly
Making quick withdrawals
Or exercising the judgments of taste
The human eye incapable of registering
The insect’s rejection or acceptance
Of nectarous pleasure or fonts disgusting or spent
Near shrubs implanted by humans and a shovel
For the express purpose of attracting butterflies
But the butterfly prefers the ditch flowers
As Sgt. York yearned for bottom land
But he came from the hills
These are the judgments that clot our nomenclature
A taste for example for romance and local color
Button accordion and crawfish po’ boy
As seen on YouTube and Food Network
These the names that disturb our judgment
Through which we observe or see
Name and calculate
Ditch or bayou

Who knows what kind of party you were expecting
A robin beats a cricket to death
But with approaching footsteps
Quickly departs careful to retain the prize
But as footsteps approach the new position
The bird flies off again
This time leaving the prey
Surely incapacitated by now behind
Rage for occurrences that conceivably could happen
But manifestly have not nor likely will not
Thus it can’t be the case that everything is gone
Evaporated dissipated tapered to a point
Fallen past desuetude
Compensation finds its way
Through the tangled conduits
The smirking one for the blustering one
The old one for the posh one
The scholarly one for the ingratiating one
And still the retainers pass on their wonted perks
And the abandoners cherish their entitlements
If only in memory
That faulty foolscap
The lawn for example is littered with pinecones
Discarded after discharging
Their cache of seeds and yet still
They play the role of pinecones in size and shape
Varying of course from species to species
Though these exhibit variation only amid uniformity
Having fallen from a single tree
But manageable perhaps as objets
The poet for the sales associate
The fibonacci sequence
Known of seashells cochlea and other seedheads
Other picture postcards
The spiral tapering inward
To a point and what’s a point
For the spiral expanding outward
To infinity and what the hell is that
Though desiccated and altered in color
There you go again
The immature one for the erudite one
That continues to grow like a monitor lizard
I hear the asseveration
That you don’t have to put up with this shit
A point midway between the midway points
Halves of halves
Midway between the solstice and the equinox
Between the fulcrum and the force applied
The equalizer graphic or parametric
The triple beam
The Aristotelean mean
The telos and the categorical imperative

The claim is true as I have heard from hell
And other published reports
As of size shape and other relativities
Aimed at and missed
That all must be one or the other
Though neural pathways haply play a part
The part perhaps of the wild card
And other attempts at cartography
Imposing regularity
No doubt and by broad experience
And what cleverness would be required
To determine how what must be
Not always is

Nobody remembers exactly the routine actions
The motions of hygiene nourishment transportation
The specific instance then rolls in unquiet
Not like the freestone peaches of July
The smoke from the Jamaican restaurant
The drone of motor with its harmonic series
More like a scandal during a mountain hike
An indiscretion when strangers looked askance
Or offended on the crowded trail
We’re all related of course in some dim genetic past
And even in the world around we share
The minerals the plants the household implements
Dispensing with them as we dispense with stars
With the dark tempting ocean

The child says that’s my purple
Concurring I add
That’s my Third Stone from the Sun
That’s my Monsieur Hulot
That’s my Ode to a Nightingale

Fuck the Bukowskyites
The poets who say who say that’s right I said fuck
Deal with it
Battle simulators displaying their scars
Reliving the traumas of their childhood
Their neverending infancy
And demanding in inarticulate grunts
That everybody sniff their greasy turds
Ay very like a bear like a wolf
Very like a hairy ape
Enacting the dainty performance
Of their wildness
Pretending possession by Dionysus
Like they know who that is
Who gives permission to spew
When in fact the creation of significance
Requires much more than the guts
They wouldn’t know a sincere barbaric yawp
A phrase from Walt Whitman
Look him up
If it grabbed them by the balls
They wouldn’t know will to power
A phrase from Friedrich Nietzsche
Don’t believe what you’ve heard
If it bit them on their fat or scrawny ass
Masquerading as homo erectus
Like they know who that is
Posturing as the martinet
Braided and epauletted
Look it up ignoramuses
In an authoritative source
Or maybe just a t-shirt
Emblazoned with the visage of this season’s Führer
But if they would see beyond themselves
Beyond their pathetic little circle
Jerk their head around and see the world
The beautiful world of art and nature
The sad world of starving children and wounded civilians
Of ruined cities where stone stands no more atop stone
Of the forest swept away by napalm and the commerce in palm oil
So cherishing their own little wounds
So riven by nostalgia for the myth of the hunter
The quests of arrow string and bended bow
When in fact
When in historical fact
The plow begat the sword
The harvest begat the storehouse
The storehouse begat the guardhouse
And the guard begat the king
The wielder of rod and steel
Of the merely symbolic orb and scepter
But the storehouse also begat the city
Whence civilization its discontents and its glories
Chiefly the glory of the hand that wields the pen
For the written word comes about
By neither crown nor nature
But by patience
By repetition and slow rehearsal
Unto the achievement of style
Repetition and slow rehearsal alien
To jittery subscribers to suddenness
To acolytes of instant gratification
To devotees of snap judgments borrowed not made
To Monday morning leisure revisionists
To jealous holders of the birthright
Acquired by force or fraud
Silly boys proud of their entitlements
Of their abusive fathers whose crimes they reenact
Of their precancerous lesions
Of their enlarged prostates
Of their opinions hardly theirs
But originating in sewers and septic tanks
And especially of their guns long and short
Of their banners bumper stickers badges and emblems
Of their handshakes and shibboleths
Of their oaths and contracts
Of their pervy rituals and magical formulations
Of their fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
They don’t appreciate
They believe in nothing
Not in truth not in beauty not in goodness
Not even in the fragrant cunt the stubborn penis
Phrases from John Ashbery
Look him up
They don’t appreciate
They revel in passion without a thought in their heads
Delegating by extortion the tasks they shirk
The dirty diaper that must be changed
The exit wound that must be dressed
The tender ministrations of everyday life
The loveliness of life
They and not the humble scholar
Live on high in ivory tower
Mass produced of polystyrene
With access to be sure
To the conduits of dark effluent
Where they spin from their entrails
Their dollar store narratives
Fictions of foul cabals defeated by heroes
Equipped with sidearms and colorful hats
They call themselves artists who create to violate
They wouldn’t know transgression
If it yanked them by their withered pancreas
All is permitted if you call it gonzo
Talking to you Ted Nugent
You foolish human
You ignorant homo sapiens
Whose rascally feedback I enjoyed as a child
But then I grew up
And shouldered the responsibilities of adulthood
Learned the craft by slow patience of adulthood
Learned the lore of caring for self and other
Learned the lore mostly feminine
Of coping nourishment and functionality
Learned to beware my own ignorance
All are ignorant but you do it with pride Ted Nugent
I admit that you have authored poetry
Anchored in prejudice and pandery
Lovingly cultivating ignorance
A zealous missionary for ignorance
For ignorance acquired developed and defended
Heil große Lüge
Spreading the ignorant good news
Sharing the ignorant wealth
A sordid boon from selfish men
Phrases from William Wordsworth
Look him up
Who praised the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling
But counseled too the tempering
Of emotion recollected in tranquility
Therefore you Ted Nugent you loudmouth boor
With your land and your houses and your animal trophies
Your servants and your sycophants
Your fortress compound
Whence you emerge to murder beasts and fowls
Sport of Tudors and their retainers
You could learn something about courtesy
From those bullies and their toadies
Like them you choose willy-nilly whom to respect
But you don’t appreciate
Your Grand Poohbahness ak acka dak
Now hear my command
Which issues from the legitimate authority of letters
And meditation upon the realms of silence
And dreamy refuge in fair trains of imagery
And not from the spurious claims
Of blood or soil or fame or feculent riches
Try for a minute to be quiet
To see before you the image of the sorrowing mother
To hear the guitar gently weeping
To hear the child squealing delightedly on Christmas morning
To hear the children laughing and singing all over the world
As they caper over the rubble
And I say to your foolish face Ted Nugent
To your eyes glowing dully
Within your conceited smug impassioned leer
To your dull foolish insipid face
That you are a foolish person
The Party of Fools is in the ascendancy now
And you will no doubt continue to prosper for a time
And while you wish to silence me and those who think like me
You have failed and you will always fail
You would love to see me cower
And maybe I will who knows
But that would not make you a success
That would only make me human
You pathetic foolish failure
It’s not too late to practice being a person
But in the meantime
To your face I say you are a fool
So what are you going to do about it?
Shoot me?

It comes in from the west
She can feel the pressure drop she says
Sees things smells things I just don’t know
Like how to behave
I know it
But why don’t I act like it
I don’t know
Raising my voice to express incapacity
An uptick in wind velocity
She sensitive to atmospheric pressure
Its ascensions and descents
I only feel it rise and from inside
In the somatic sense
Until it bursts through the fissures
Shearing the wornout rivets
That might have been placed there
By my mother at Curtiss Wright
Or by my father on the flight deck
Of the Saratoga
But Pete why don’t you leap about
As you used to do
Something about the monitor placement
Something about the incongruity
Of The Who in Duluth
Where they never rode horses
The remnants of disheveled intentions
Moldering on the faulty floor
Willful commission of error
Like a single spike-like limb
Planted in a tuft of turf
The abbreviated head
Falling forward hurled headlong
The simple fact that mental derangement
However objectively harmful
Entails a kind of suffering
The issue is not that they’re all the same
Quite the contrary
But unless they announce their differences
Those obscure facts remain
But obscure means not imperceptible
Then the question of instrumentation arises
Am I a sieve
A repository for browning documents
An archive of miscalculations
In the theater the costumed personae
Deliver fluently their tailored orations
But the organic apparatus
Or the technical flowering
Groping toward a rhetoric of plenitude
An ikebana framed of tropes
At the cost of integrity
Of sepal ovule anther and stigma
Whither is fled

A dark pond in Pissarro
Delicate highlights and what rough beasts
Patrol the interior beneath the opacity
Furtive carp and disenteric amoebas
And God knows what
So we say vaunting aloud
While silently we intone the lament
That we fear not the unknown
But the known the likelihoods the probabilities
Of infections of violence of howling winds
That can displace a dwelling
The innumerable assuredly real displacements
The ceiling lightens somewhat
But only momentarily
And with the effect only of heightening
Rather than relieving the discomfort
Is it even possible to renounce exaggeration
Theoretically yes
But I mean as a practical matter
Among the facts as we know them
We speak of dark clouds threatening
I mean
To experience one’s own bowels
Like the earth’s tumultuous exhalations
Or the dopplerian whine in the flickering hallway
Unfolding in the warped recesses
Tapering to a finitude
Darkening again
Must we then conclude that everything
Has become just a little worse
Despite the ardor of verticular administration
Which proceeds according to its own procedures
For the rank and file seem oblivious
From where I stand in their very midst
While the storm remains in abeyance
The suspense killing me softly
And even I old and insensible
Worn and indecisive
Can detect the barometer’s shift
It’s a bit of both isn’t it
A subjective apprehension
And a secular mutation
That may well amount
To a rend in the fabric of the world
And to a discontinuous self

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