Everything in nature gives of a fine decorum
Lobes of air coursing under the ice
As passing through a turnstile one by one
In humans not so much
These blackbirds that cross the sun in battalions
Some above the orb some below
All tending roughly northward
Strange direction in winter
But they know what they’re doing
People used to think that such phenomena
Said something important about people
As constellations reflected or even determined
The course of human events
Not a completely crazy idea
Nature being consistent within limits
And always making sense
But humans our technology I guess
We’re strangers in our own home
Watch the people making u-turns
As they try to guess the next move
From the playful voice of the maps
And in this town you must be particularly alert
To Peachtree Road and Peachtree Street
And West Peachtree and Peachtree Battle
And Peachtree Boulevard that until recently
Was Peachtree Industrial Boulevard
And NE and SW
And everywhere styrofoam cups from Chic-Fil-A
And among the weeds those tiny plastic bottles
From the counter at the liquor store
And wearily checking the phone
In the morning and when the sun sets
To give occasion for flights of birds

What nobody dares to do
The armatures of varying length connected end to end
At hundred-degree angles
A change of direction every fourth vertex
So that by the time you get to the end of it
And there is no end
You’re sick of the entire proceeding
A flight of birds passes before the sunset
And for a moment you imagine some detachment possible
Before falling back into habitual simpering
Worse the new product
Delivered to your very doorstep
Withholds the gratification
That you’ve always doubted anyway
But it does vouchsafe the salutary disappointment
That typically accompanies acquisition or attainment
The storm has deposited the customary residue
Vegetable matter and petroleum distillates
Paper plastic and glass
In the streets and in the gutters
The sewage drain at the corner issuing the usual complaints
The constellations emitting the usual tacit disregard
What do you want and why do you want it
And are you in fact acknowledging the disparity
Of reasons and motives
You did not create the world of mandates and purchases
Of the relentless pressure for affirmation
Any more than you created yourself
So why torment yourself with the debate
Over whether to grumble

Similarly
How are we to understand
This blank carcass of whim

But then how are we to understand
This sunset this flight of birds
This fire set under an overpass

I want to eschew autobiographical reference
But I’m in so deep now
I can’t retrace my steps

I want like the master
To let objects tell the tale
But they don’t connect and there is no tale

Or maybe the mind or the brain or whatever
Deduces a tale where there is none
Very like a whale

We repeat ourselves we homo sapiens
Like addicts like OCD patients
Recursion of impulsive carcasses

The rut becomes clear only later
This much is plain as always
The festering symbol of shy invention

A logic of averaging out
Of augmentation
Both ends against the middle

But since there are never simply two
Our tertium quid remains
Quite flat and ineffective

And a world persists outside ourselves
Where untold corollaries assemble uncertainly
Cold and wonderful

The locus of incapacity
Sharpened as one applies the tools
The fateful and forgotten implements

The healthy or harmful habits
The appliances we use to sustain them
Supplement this descent into decay

Zum card def Nemprobal
Canst dar vellum zin juasussus
Thoei inston castrman
Callig mmemremnem
Hwaetime shasyr blict dem Devra
Ortrbribou se corff
Tog ak crebbee hreuly drep stinniws
Hemfliw oc peshkal lana

A club for people
Who think hell is people

I had come quite a ways to visit him
Or visiting him was part of the festivities
Lots of other people around
Familiar and unfamiliar
It didn’t occur to either of us
That this might be the last
His dark hair and beard now gray
Not fully but sufficiently
To alter his appearance after a long absence
He looked like dusty death
Smaller than I remembered
My older brother after all
Sunglasses as usual
But sadness visible in his eyes
That always wore a taint of sadness
Or perhaps I saw what I expected to see
And resentment that those he loved
Or was bound to at least
Had disappointed had betrayed him
And I feared that I numbered among that throng
And he was right to feel let down
All are mortal and incomplete
All recover too slowly for life
I said hi and then we said goodbye

A tennis visor with pink gingham bow
Shocked that the author should invite us
To nourish remorse as we do vermin

A stain of white paste on the office chair
A residue impervious
To GooGone or Bon Ami or harsher solvents

Spend the morning attempting to levitate
The afternoon in telekinesis
Behind the rabbit’s ears
Beneath the languid lotus
Dream of a fecal transplant
A subtle rearrangement
Having done say five of that
Hang upon the utterances of celebrities
Hear the admonishments of more proximate personages
But those pronouncements stagnate with familiarity
Better to apply the strict provisions from elsewhere
Pmisti effrent x through r
Explosion of blood and saliva
Smash the contract
The workplace accident report
Adopt outlandish garb
Albanian cape Ghanaian crown
Revel in dissatisfaction
Like buried the track calliopes in hidden

Cheerios were all full of carbohydrates
And Keds made kids jump higher and run faster
Mothers used to yearn for cereals and shoes
That would sap energy and slow kids down
But animals small mammals small children
Are not vegetables or minerals
We vertebrates love movement
The ballet of ungulates on the plain
The freaks and pranks of our arboreal forebears
The shimmering synchrony of mackerel-crowded seas
The flocks of innumerable redwings
Turning on a dime
The irresistible force of vehicular traffic
Occupied of course by human operators
And shuttling like the crescent products
On an automated assembly line
Viewed externally the site of frenetic activity
But the gelatinous organism within
Locked in the stasis of a contour couch
Belted and stabilized airbag at the ready
The shell of metal and plastic hurtling uncannily
Until it cruises to a gentle stop
Or meets a catastrophic end

The pedestrian on the street made for cars
With its nominal sidewalk slim refuge
From the speeding vehicles large and small
At various point in history decisions were made
By nobody in particular
Or by people whose functional roles
Remained obscure even at the time
Council members expert advisors agents of industry
Concerning transport housing and communication
But in such case the world of systemic instrumentality
Developed according to nature-like processes
Subject to only the most diffuse of intentions
And we seem to get along pretty well
Fulfilling our obligations
Working and paying
Waking and sleeping
Belted and stable
Finding time for mandatory recreation
Or slavishly enumerating objects in the room
And drawing diffident inferences
Both in our comfortable interior spaces
And out there on the roads
The crumbling hazardous necessary roads

You can’t just decide to adopt a festive tone
Or elegiac or libidinous
And then choose a form coincident with it
You can’t just match up matter and manner
Like the sides of a jelly sandwich
Hence the folly of binary thought
The folly of calculating means to ends
Here then is our sorrow
For the great work the finished work
Exhibits just such a decorum
And yet every creation fulfills a commission
More or less imposed
The most monumental works
The least personal in origin
So as usual we despond to apparition
As if a sunset or a bluebird or a poem
Had succeeded in success
And managed to defeat failure
And so it becomes a question of method
But one doesn’t choose the psychological pressure
And even in the economy of ripe expression
Beauty does not grow of will

The houses at the beach fail to materialize
Nor the mountains loom around the curve
In western Washington
They drive in the rain and exercise caution
Or perhaps merely warn others
Of the danger they represent

They’ve already transitioned into an afterlife
Hopeful of transmigration
Into a happier form if itself ephemeral
In which the thrill of excitement persists
Through time suspicious medium
And outside time
Freed from concern
To seek the return to nothingness
To renounce officious propriety

White belly and ocher breast
Bird on a wire
And taking flight the blue cape and wings
And next the mate arrives

This game is too complicated
The counterintuitive sequence of switches
The rules that vary from situation to situation
Apparently infinitely
They didn’t know that causing damage was wrong
Self-serving contention but sincere
Risking harm and a fate
That sometimes succumbs to temptation

Seven small snakes turned up with raking
Four shockingly energetic wriggled away
Two died outright or apparently did
The last tightly knotted stretched forth its black tongue

Emotional postures proceed through fashions
At least in the post-Gutenberg age
When trends can circulate somewhat rapidly
Hence modern times commenced with the primal eldest sin
Of dividing the human family into colonies
Into the abstract strata of empire and subject
With their destructive and exploitative concrete effects
And thus the extractive conglomerations of modernity
Imitated the style of ancient instances
And hence in the eighteenth century everybody
Who was anybody wanted to be a stoical Roman
Stoicism the stately attitude of imperial hand-washers
For the upright pity the downtrodden
Whom they themselves have trodden upon
All the tragedies ended
With somebody falling on a sword
Hence the plighting of sacred honor
In the Declaration of Independence
Whose primary author was memorialized
By a little Pantheon in the District of Columbia
Patrician upon the little mount in Albemarle county
Holder of enslaved workers and lovers
But when the time came to commemorate Lincoln
Not a founding patriarch but a paschal lamb
A martyr dead for our sin
All the hipsters had gone over to Greece
Hence the Olympian temple on the mall
Things never begin in history
They always pick up from something else
Wherefore a few wispy souls
Like sighing scions of Petrarch
Unmoved by martial strutting
Savored the pang of sensibility
And lamented softly that a flower
Should be born to blush unseen
But a signal moment came
When Childe Harold left Iberia
To sojourn in Hellas
But there are always earlier beginnings
Napoleon idolized Alexander
More than he did Caesar
And he like Alexander conquered Egypt
But when immediately upon the fall of Buonaparte
The Elgin marbles including friezes
Rescued or plundered from the Parthenon
Arrived in England
Egyptomania which nevertheless persisted in France
Was overshadowed by Philhellenism among Britons
And thus Keats born into a livery stable
Plebeian of Hampstead Heath
Could discover that heifer lowing at the skies
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest
For she the bas-relief heifer
Mourns her imminent demise
Being led by the mysterious priest
To the perennially green altar of sacrifice
And the age of melancholy had arrive
Ushered of course by Lord Byron
Who would enter a fashionable gathering
With that peculiar gait
He spent his brief life long trying to conceal
Outward sign of his inward Sophoclean flaw or flaws
To take up a fretful posture in the corner
Awaiting the flock of female and male admirers
To congregate around him
And the heroes so tragic and Byronic
Quested after their white whales
Americans being typically behind the times
Or more punctually glowered on weathering heights
Or brooded in lowlands over their noble
If self-induced lacerations
But short-lived Keats the commoner remained
The true the blushful connoisseur of melancholy
Whom the sensitive aristocrats Shelley and especially Byron
Treated disrespectfully in private letters
But they tried to change their tune when he died
Shelley with a noble elegy
Byron with a flippant parody of Cock Robin
Both insisting with astonishing insensitivity
That critics not consumption had killed John Keats
A mosquito bite killed Byron in Greece
And Shelley’s death more ambiguous
Came with a sudden storm at sea
And the little bark Ariel foundered
And before long the romantic age of dejection
Gave way to Victorian pieties
Thus Tennyson devoted his career
To obsession with the death of Arthur
And Dickens to depicting his English eccentrics
Neither one expressive of
An aching heart or the pain of drowsy numbness
More now a matter of guilt and atonement
For the timeghost had drifted beyond
Moping dreamers and atheist rebels
To reside with evangelical fervor and imperialist grit
Feeling became religion and religion feeling
And the finest among them could not stop for death
But death stopped obligingly for them
And it needed France to discover
The ennui of yearning for the ineffable
Amid the sparkling jewelry and the shopping arcades
Inspired by the American prophet of the nevermore
America driven for profit
More compulsively than even its European conquerors
But the great genius of the fin de siècle
Was Irish and found gaiety
At the fraught intersection of art politics and sex
But power dedicated to earnest hypocrisy
Rejected the importance of irony
And punished the poet for his failure to comply
And a new century began with old miseries
Of empire industry and command
But this grim trio brought hitherto unimagined horrors
Of holocaust and mass destruction
Giving rise to an age of anxiety
And anxiety induces depression
That far exceeds the decorous melancholy
Of being too happy in a songbird’s happiness
But one slender mercy obtained
In that twentieth century of ungainly brutality
The blues manner of madness sadness libido hope and loss
Product of survivors of the colonialist fury
Torn from their mother to toil
In Mississippi Virginia and Georgia
And yet even by the rivers of Babylon
They raised their voices in song
And for a time a brief alternative obtained
Blessed by Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith
But was soon subsumed within the systems
Of politics and mass production
And convenience and mass consumption
From which it was never free anyway
Diversion for gangsters tycoons ordinary people
Functional nodes in a totalizing system
Mickey Mouse Garbo Gary Cooper
Beatles Stones Nashville and Motown
Culture an industrial product done on the cheap
And technologies chemical electrical and digital
Deadly polymers and merciless algorithms
Absorbed all lives and all life
In an economy of lies
A religion of weaponry
The dictatorship of market share
The idolatry of data
For now sadness is a clinical
That is to say systemic malady
And all are citizens of the Prozac nation
Ask your doctor about the panacea Pharmacorp
And many self-medicate with dismal enthusiasms
For cults for demagogues for entertainments
And for mostly for sports intramural and international
All is conflict
Somebody must lose
That’s common knowledge ask the man on the street
So hurray for the home team
Death to the opponent
Who in opposing deserves painful death
Torture the enemy
Scour the enemy from the face of the earth
Man woman and child
We have the technology
Nothing on earth means any damned thing
So success above all and victory and vengeful butchery
And drown your sorrows in lustful blood
And sleep the long sleep of the opiated

I’m not that kind of courageous
To defer to you dear reader and efface myself
I would rather share my imagining
Which you may take as you wish or leave behind

Here come all the gumballs again
Tumbling rolling spilling to the floor

There was this lucky lucky boy
Who got to drink from the fire hose
It was the 80s when he went flying
Across that glaringly lit studio
That’s easy for me to say

Cyrano’s five-dimensional bicycle shop
With pistachio ripple

The turnip tops cooked in vinegar
With turnip root mixed in
That one really happened

The small children playing pretend
With me as the protagonist
Instead of those witless beasts of the Paw Patrol

Space centaurs male and female
With rocket streams coming out of their butts

The gummy babe at the nipple
Eyes rolling back like the eyes of a knocked-out boxer
Smiling and twitching like the defeated
Who descends slowly to the canvas
That one really happened too

Or that one occasion when I almost got to play
With the Grateful Dead
Back before Jerry tuned in turned on
And dropped way way all the way out

And the dream woman with the belladonna eyes

And if you allow me my crotchets
I will regale you with anecdotes
Of my time in TV heaven
With Peewee Herman and Captain Carl

Have my peaches free gratis without fee
You need not even shake my tree

For the association of poets
It’s a world of words to the end of it
But the poet plays many roles besides that of poet
Sailor homemaker negotiator mammal fool
Compounded of attitudes experiences expectations
Some commendable some less so
Ephemeral and somewhat nugatory
But the poet is not the poem
Which is of the world
Outside and inside itself
And not a person place or thing
Well it is sort of a thing
But neither fully abstract nor fully concrete
Rather like that first world that we call the world
And to enter a poem a painting a story or a play
Or cathedral arena theater bank or humble home
Is to enter a world of artifice
That might as well be made
Of color stone or words
Which are of nature
And so we cannot know which world comes first
And so the artistry is only in the arrangement
The piling of stone upon stone
And even that is no more than the skill
Of handling flint steam or semiconductor
Which compose nature’s measurable surface
But space image line sound and concept
Denote significance beyond themselves
They express something
And words especially exercise this power
Of driving truth into the world from their world
The fantastical rhythms of understanding
Everybody already knows the dawn
But remind me please of her luscious rosy fingers
Remember to me the glory of His Majesty the Sun
Show me again the tenderness of the nursing mother
The gentle rain that droppeth upon the place beneath
The night time that is the right time to be with the one you love
The alarming spectacle of butterfly upon flower
The cunning of the predator
The power of storm that torments the sea and the land
The intelligence of scavengers and fungi
Their stately obsequies for the dead

How arrogant to compare oneself with
And to claim to have exceeded the accomplishments of
The worst people who ever lived
The genocidal maniacs and their disciples
The shooters aiming to break the record
The users of nuclear weapons upon cities
When I merely offend when I try to make nice
And accept cowardly the judgments of others
Such as I imagine them to be
And fail to comply despite laborious anxiety
With systemic mandates
And yield up moral questions in despair
And regard autonomy as a hopeless ideal
So I am not horrible nor most horrible
Only completely inadequate
Well not completely
Please strike that sweeping claim

I saw the wide St. Johns all in flame
The region engulfed in the smoke
Of a second asteroid
The catastrophe visible
Only to those in the heart of it

The grate at the height of the Mathews Bridge
Red hot to melt a tire
The cars packed in the lot beside the port
Only enough gas to go a few hundred yards
Exploding one by one

The stubborn skyscrapers bowed
Before the immensity
The lush oaks on the south bank
Communicated the fast fire down the state
And the fragrant salt marsh boiled away

You could not see retribution
Except in the banal sense
That foolishness has consequences
That humans having evolved for greed and mendacity
Will seize every opportunity for enterprise

The beech leaves are golden now
Still tinged with green
Retaining green at varying rates
In December they will go graybrown
And persist the winter long
But the branches are already hung with icicles
In the form of pine needles
Toppled like bowling pins
By the November rains
The daunting learning curve
The laborious break-in period
So slowly coalesced the vocabulary
So gradually grew the language of mastery
So intricate and deliberate a narrative
That it must be rendered as myth
The emergence of obliquity taxonomy the lore of toxicity
To serve the technologies of sharpening brazing ballistics
The stick for all purposes
The artistry of arrow string and bow
Wood flint bronze steel and sinew
And bring out weight and measure
Self-fulfilling prophecy of dearth
Until at last the human operators
Serve their turn as mechanisms
The women who paint radium on dials
The children who sweep beneath the shuttling loom
Rotary energy converted into lateral
With the force to slay a giant
Or behead a queen

Perhaps the Empire instituted the new procedure
To condition the public’s expectations
To inure them against the onslaught of harm
To involve them in the suffering
Exhibited in the performances
Everybody demanded realism
And in fact reality
No more pretend ships in pretend battles
No more violent choreography
That makes mockery of the shock of war
And thus it has come to pass
That beyond the reassurance
That comes from merely witnessing
The death struggles of beast against beast
Of beast against man
Of man against man
The struggles that must end in slow or quick death
Observed from shielded vantage
The people are now permitted
To take part in the show
And even now the great surge of water
Cascades over the seating area
Collects upon the great round floor
The billowing wind bends all before it
And all the children the women and the men
Having paid their admission fee
Are drowned

The gibbon hurls its accelerating call
Oua oua oua chit chit chit chit chit chat
Like Aphex Twin’s bouncing ball
I make sounds make sense before sense
The saxophone’s foo fur na na na
The orchestral dit dit dit dah
The singer’s blue moon you left me standing alone
Gorgeous like intoxicating perfume
Like an embrace in full nakedness
No wonder Frankenstein son of Victor
Or Henry as he was also called
Tries to catch in his hand
The notes of the plangent violin
If they’d been butterflies
He would have crushed them
But they drifted onward and drift to this day
Perhaps we would have been better off
Without inventing the violin
That squawks and screams in early days
Until petted into submission
And oh the awkwardness
When the left hand doesn’t know
What the right hand is giving
And the pain of pressing upon the strings
Perhaps we should just raise our voices
And clap our hands
The instruments our bodies give us
Remain with the gibbons
But then we might not love Itzhak Perlman
Let Nina Simone soothe us with her rage
Let sweet Hendrix blow our minds

I am not mechanism
I will not slave

He spent all day the old cobbler
Translating concept into object
I merely imitate he intimated privately
The one transcendent shoe
Ah but are not the various parts
Expressions themselves of originary ideas
The great stiff sheet of cowhide
Product of husbandry and chemical transformation
The sharp tacks the stout thread
Artifacts of ingenious manufacture
And what of the arcane tools of the trade
The intimidating blades the specialized hammers
The extraordinary implement for fastening the eyelets
They too enlist in the roll of esoterica
And the sad symbol of application or of bondage
Called the last for at the last it embodies
The form of shoe itself not shoe
And all in each of innumerable categories
Pertain to their respective models
But in experience surely the variations
As size shape color gender and the vagaries of fashion
Matter
All things aggregate other things
Hence all event all existence all situation all individuality all universe
Pertain to the one great aggregate
And the line at the bottom of the bill cannot encompass
The marshaling of things visible and invisible

Feel free to add your peculiar savor
To unearth and qualify the latent significance of the thing
According to your own lights
Don the mask of the sad lion
And prosecute the thin materials
Indicate the madness of taking sword to salt sea wave
The rarities that have garnered unearned commendation
The mystery of lives celebrated or notorious
The astonishing fecundity of nature and culture
Everybody possesses the wherewithal to hazard an appraisal
And while it may be true that pitching beats hitting
Hurlers don’t hang ready to drop from trees
And you don’t get many sluggers to the pound
Mostly you just say wait’ll next year
Victory always happens and always too defeat
So be ready to reappraise
You don’t exactly succeed at getting it right
For doing well transcends the category of success
Nor error does not deny the beauty of phenomena
The success of a sunset
A question not to be asked
Nature flawless by definition
The successful embroidery bejeweled on QE I’s gown
A question to be asked
Product of a thousand woman-hours
Appreciate the gorgeousness and the oppression
But if you’re going to talk about say literature
Catch a clue of what a sentence is
If painting a color
If music a sound
Learn it from somebody and teach it
And lots of folks succeed at awfulness or inconsequence
The palm for silentest embezzlement
For neatliest beveled bezel
For cleanliest beheading
A million likes for the influential sniff test
And which is worse the greatly horrible or the needlessly trivial
And facts like these are worth observing
You can see when the mechanical garbage can lifter
Drops items in the street to remain unretrieved
A torment of egg shells and waxy grease-pucks and coffee grounds
The metered traffic light that measures rather poorly
The autotuned voice with the glib consistency of synthetic motor oil
You can hear the exhausted child drifting upon toys
Refusing to nap
Or the voter hollering hoarse at the cult event
You can watch while the hopeless drunk
Fills another glass with hope or guzzles from the bottle
And advertisements baited with the joy of life
Or with the fear of exile
Switch to drumming away at worthless crap
The agricultural revolution was pretty bad overall
Bronze age bad
Iron age bad
Industrial revolution bad
Digital revolution bad
Twenty-first century bad
And the twentieth no picnic
And the nineteenth and the eighteenth
And the seventeenth and the ninth and the first
And forget about the BCE
The rotten crowns and shabby potentates and miserable emperors
And worse their craven lackeys
Scribes of decrees not their own
Enforcers of the arbitrary
Encouragers of the worst
Ah save us from the loyal
Who believe their little banner worth dying and killing for
Or hollowly claim as much
Invested in the relative viscosity of blood and water
Sacramental sorcery of blood
The formulae of obscuration that efface the language of illumination
The language of freedom
But finding a healthful use for mold growing on oranges was good
And the Venuses of Willendorf and Urbino are good
People can clap their hands and wish the sun good morning
And kiss and caress and find a topic for laughter
And the child wakes fussy from the nap well oh well
Before long it’s row your boat and life is but a dream
Aldraysom pmisti effrent sine- or cvmwoflux
Soother than the creamy curd
Lots of times you see a driver stop
To help somebody fix a flat
And most days a truck drops off the mail
Despite snow rain heat gloom of night and the politics of destruction
The song is better than the sheet music
The image is better than the painting
Even the play is better than the performance
And Quinnies is gone shuttered and closed
That had the best shrimp and grits butter and salt
Replaced by a Subway
Maybe they weren’t the best but they were damn good
And everybody dies upon a heaving sea of beauties
Salty but prolific

Perhaps to certain unidentified people
Those happy few golden personages
The anomalies speak with the clarity
Of a Venus of Urbino
The speed of a Charley Parker solo
The intimate suggestiveness of a big bowl of popcorn
The elaborate sophistication of a camellia
Precincts of warmth in domains of darkness
Miles of concrete highway that stretch invitingly
The mysteries of technology
Suddenly rendered sweet and accessible
Like the rhythms of children’s songs
The bar is not that high we are told
And the same height for everybody
But they the fortunate make out the constellations
Without effort or anxiety
The drifting clouds adding balance
A fillip of contrast without distraction
During the lunch break they turn from the yellow day
And issue their perorations ex tempore in the highrise
With a view of the other buildings that reach above the hills
Unconcerned with who might initiate the call
Recreational activities not merely fun
But conducive to mental and physical health
No false moves only true ones
They drink but not to elevation
Graceful impulse uninterrupted by misapprehension
Stepping unimpeded up the curb
To identify the best products and acquire them
And to maintain them in accordance with pride of ownership
Not filthy with wealth but comfortable
Their suburban landscape undulating
With the contours of a body physically fit
Exempt from the dread predations of wear and tear
Just enough little gaps to highlight the luxuriance with gray
Of course difficulties sometimes arise
But nothing beyond the easy reach
Of coping skills product of nature or culture
Never a suppression always a foliation
Salubrious xonansen and fresh laundry
And when night falls perhaps they generously acknowledge
The real presence of the life partner
Long since having solved the riddle of competency
Or perhaps never having felt the need to confront the riddle
The confidence and consistency
Of a Greg Maddox a David Gilmour a Richard Cory
They neither chose their path nor denied it
A birthright of decorous security
Pitiless and serene
Unoppressed by the anomaly of suffering

The physiology of response
To an environment in conflict
To the perennial state
The disrupted baseline of continuity
Where great deep-rooted plants
Sway as always in the wind
But now the rain-sodden soil fails
And oaks unfixed roll toward the sun
That which should remain unseen
Even so we turn our shameful guts
Outward to public scrutiny
Our ignoble deaths are publicized
Like box scores and candy ads
Expert systems adjust the parameters
And abstract impersonal entities
Exploit the data for obscure usages
The structures of command exert control
Assigning ostensibly feasible tasks
Which we perform with reprehensible docility
At the cost of health love and life
We turn ourselves about
We avenge our indignity upon ourselves
And upon those we love