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

Names burst through the postulated deliverance
Like sound policies and noble vestiges that deflate
Hear the queries that surface from the milling crowd
Is this the time for panic for rage
Or for some other hoarse vehemence
More people died in their beds in their stirrups
In their hitherto peaceable or relatively placid quarters
Deaths timely and untimely as happen at all times
And those near death and those waking from perilous births
The polished dispatches report dispassionately
As from the absence or the suppression of passion
Proclamations of intensity in grim composure

Leaves fall through inveterate spirals
Woodpeckers speed their intelligent courses
Bats pursue the opposite tack of fandangos in space
In clean well-lit rooms systematizers contemplate
Reckonings for the colonization of Mars
So eager are their masters to flee the planet
To whose dissolution they have contributed mightily
As if colonization worked out so well the last time
The ancient order of Ulysses
To strive to seek to lead and not to yield
Never surrender
They cry at the very moment they run

A pan of warm water in perfect equilibrium
The salt in such profound saturation
That a single grain more
Would precipitate the whole
Crystals rain through liquid medium to solid floor
But no the unbounded fantasy
Does not stand up in the macrocosm
The marble-swirled batter of interruption
Beautiful in its way but lacking in continuity
Molecular symbols as boat car house knife book
Religions gain momentum in the cards
The size of the Vehicle Assembly Building
Bigger than an Airbus A380
Those who wait heads bowed
They can’t get no satisfaction
Though they’ve tried and they’ve tried and they’ve tried and they’ve tried
And so to compose an alternative list
Of abstractions of the utmost precision
Ionic bonds endless space radiating above the crosswalk
Vulnerable maternity
Bits of information in enormous quantity
Whose terms regard the pelletlike doubts
With disdain
She removed her sweater
And took off her shoes
Thereby obviating another silken closure

Victims were chosen
Or taken out more or less at random
Air strikes were called in
Buildings were leveled
Rubble was searched
The dead and the nearly dead were carried
Hospitals were overwhelmed those that were left standing
Reports of casualties were issued
And accepted by some
But doubted by others
Aid was delivered in a pathetic trickle
An invading force was deployed
These events were inspired by a heinous crime
The perpetrators of which are thus held accountable
And peace and justice are thus restored

Decadence in art expresses eldritch energy
Decadence in life dare not speak its name

The truth bursts as much forth in the frothy costumes
As in the iron-clad testimony of the MRIs
The spume of signification
Are you taking notes
How do we know but that
The ephemeral particle charged positive or negative
The vehicle of truth beauty charm
Might not installate the key
To unlock the whole shebang
Might not intimate loudly and ceaselessly
The fallaciousness at the outset of a shebang
When events occur that cannot do otherwise
More the plunger actuating the dynamite
Than the linkage to graceful gesture
That maybe the blemish does not merely
Distinguish but in fact establish the essential feature
And must the flavor the intonation the charge decline
Into essences and charges and flavors
No it doesn’t work out does it
That impossible length of fence with no gate
The penning of the Yahoos
The flaying of their skin
Punishment for their
Their what
Their essence their flavor
Their ineluctable mode of being
Homo dedecadensis
A posture and a complexion
Those featured features
It’s no different this go-round
That scandalous di- or polymorphism
Just waiting to induce disgust
The surveyors so quick to take and to ascribe responsibility
To arrogate to themselves the judgments of taste
But at what point did they choose how they themselves are

Are you dead
Not just dead sir but gone forever
I and all my kind
Songbirds Chinese dolphins humble frogs
Unseen for decades

People laugh over polychromatic cocktails
About the definition of species
We don’t know DNA they say
Celebrating their ignorance
And drive off in their Teslas
Powered by coal if the grid is

The man himself wants to colonize Mars
Artificial cities for the elect
While the rest swelter on sad earth
Colonialism worked well for him
Billionaire and his rapacious ilk

Dissipation once constituted a moral condemnation
But people can scatter across spacetime
Involuntarily and without indulging epicurean carelessness
When the world situates them in the categories
Of the unfocussed unstable incoherent irresponsible and unreliable

Not the world
The various political-economic systems
The United States for example
Will not accept that all people are equally valuable

There is no first no last
No origin no apocalypse
Only the protracted unfolding

Sorry
I know this is not a poem
And I castigate myself more severely
Than any critic might
I fail to dress in rhetoric or song
The endless heartache

Beloved saprophytes
Acolytes of decay
Be wei have nary

A blinding into successive states
Attenuated recognition of bumps and slams
In the factories in the warehouses in the fields
Trailer railroad car and freight container
When the consciousness of bruises
Comes to the fore in ecclesiastical rectitude
Objects in the bardo of slow decay
Certes manmade or womanmade corpi
Or gaseous bladder of sargassum
Winsome tentativeness of a foal
Entered without invitation and began setting up
And when pray do innuendos
Assume the form of accomplished fact
As detuned leaf blowers intone
The drone that wavers in and out of phase
That slowly cycles confirmed moiré nodes
Ample cause to relinquish rosy gravures
The numbers one three four seven and twelve
Cincted hieratic garments in analogous pose
Of aristocratic detachment
The script that presumes discipleship
And substitute for them
The slick coated sheets of nattered proposal
Scraped smooth of every divergence
Every trace of denial
When turbulence calibrates the scope of the adversity
Similarly viscosity dwindles
This is not necessary a problem
Except for les précieux
In the limbo of disassembly
Such is their persistent will to endurance
For the rest of us the twee variation
Of physical condition preference and state of being
For the servant who milks the ass
The hired hand who burns the bones
Arises suitably negligible

Cheer up brothers in the glum fraternity
Sisters in the anxious conventicle
You really don’t know how bad it is

The obligation of empathy requires ruthless exteriority
For perception involves fragmentation and flux
Sometimes comely sometimes hideous
In an intricate interpenetration far past duality

We are children awakening from our nap
Still in our crib fingers in our mouth
We see the light of day
But we linger unready to step into the world

When the kids were little we would go
To the media library in eastern Dekalb
To fetch back VHS tapes
Alice in Wonderland Fraggle Rock old cartoons

And I would browse the collection of vinyl LPs
I knew Folkways Records
But even on its exterior this one was different
No sharecroppers or chain gang

Some weird hybrid of a fiddle and a barometer
And within a big pamphlet
With old engravings and faux newspaper accounts
Of the content of each of like 80 songs

Dropping the needle I knew that I had struck gold
The keening voice of someone called Dick Justice
A murder and shifting speakers in dialogue including a bird
The American south touching the fifteenth century

And song after song rolled out in wonder
Some reflective of conventional virtuosity
Some rough indeed but each a thing of beauty
No autotune in those days boy howdy

And soon a lilting slide guitar
In triple meter and two voices in thirds
Another murder but this one
Ominously annotated as ritual

The melody and harmony sweet and sad
But the lyrics unbelievably fucked up
The word rain three times to insist it was a rainy day
But all the boys in our school came out to talk and play

They tossed a ball again so high then again so low
No
You don’t say again twice like that
What is wrong with these Nelstone’s Hawaiians

Recording in Atlanta trying to cash in
On the craze for Hawaiian music
The murderess a disgusting slur in the lyrics
Words and music in intolerable conflict

At the end the murdered boy issues his convoluted will
A bible first at his head and then at his feet
A testament first at his feet and then at his head
Tell my mother that I’m asleep and my father that I’m dead

The ballad of Henry Lee which opened the album
Expressed plenty of horror
A little pen knife held in her hand
She plugged him through and through

Again the female assailant
And in the real world jealousy makes madness
But what inspires a fantasy of child-murder
Done by a woman designated as foreigner in our midst

What do we do with a work of fiction
That perpetuates an abominable lie
Some call The Triumph of the Will
A great or at least a good achievement in cinema

Its harsh geometry compelling
Expressive of compulsion
In all the dire meanings of the word
All the poets are poor dumb humans

We do not see what underlies
Nor know what’s ultimate
But the one poem
Resolves all duality

It takes experience to read
But innocence can look at pictures
The tyger blazes fearfully in the text
But see the little smile on its face

It did not cohere that well to begin with
Not that there was a definite beginning
A thousand-year Reich
Or a lousy ten-thousand or twenty
Wadya wanna live forever said the sergeant

Each gazes at the loveliness of the other
The first man first woman
Or bodies of whatever shape
The hundred-billionth embodiment
Of beauty that never dies

A small child croons over the people
Whom she moves about on the floor
They run errands pick up the mail crash their cars
Words never spoken before
For the million-billionth time

The rage of two flowers consumed a country
If they limped to the next relief station
Carnival barkers adopted the garb
Of bards of freedom who yet modify their claims
Under the aegis of census taxation and civil law
Mothers reduce their output
Singers utter their plaints under their breaths
Scholars inquire as to the relation
Of grievance and permission
Torturers and and executioners rejoice
At the renewed demand for their services
To trade a life for the Taj Mahal

I’ve prayed only one other time in my adulthood
I make these personal disclosures with fear and trembling
In March of 2003 I begged the universal consciousness
That America might be turned aside
That somehow the venal leaders might acknowledge their folly
But leaders are disinclined to truthfulness
Their machiavellian calculations wrought covertly in service
Of their fatherland their class their overseers or themselves
And I was well accustomed as we all were
After Viet Nam and Watergate
To the polity of lies
But I was unprepared for the consolidation
Of two teams one ineffectual
The other brutally committed to victory at all costs
And victory for what or rather for whom
The racists the misogynists and the oligarchs

I remain the atheist I have claimed to be since adolescence
Though sometimes I’m tempted to identify as a pantheist
But I deny on moral grounds the existence of theos
Even if supposedly immanent within all things
A personal God omnipotent creator of the universe
For aside from its patent absurdity
Omnipotence should acknowledge that suffering is bad
And therefore create its world free from that evil
But if suffering and death
Are merely local aspects of the nature of things
They do not stand as evils
And indeed pain is one element of nature’s defense system
Though nobody in pain wants to be that way
On the other hand anybody responsive to fact and reasons
Should recognize the universality of consciousness
The interpenetration of all consciousness
The one life within us and abroad
And alas the prevalence of ignorance and gratuitous harm
And we live in an age in which those evils are in the ascendency
Amid the fluctuations and fragments of depthless phenomena

On Thanksgiving Day and at other times I express my gratitude
To nobody in particular to the world I guess
I am overwhelmed with gratitude
For the beauties of nature and art
For the capacity for moral judgment
For glimpses of truth however meager
For the holy communion of family and friends
For the consciousness the life the soul
Choose your metaphor
That rolls through all thinking things all objects of thought
And soon dread wraps me in its grim shroud
For I dread the suffering and death of those I love
And when I view this wondrous world
Suffused in beauty
I love all that is
The living things the broken things
The fast-food containers that litter the roadside
And I dread the wanton destruction
Of our dear community and our dear earth
I know that the earth’s orbit decays
And that the sun will expand and devour our planet
And all that stands will fall

And thus I pray that conscious beings
Will awaken from nightmare
And see that in fact they love one another
And that though our paths are strewn with darkness
And our days haunted with pain
We have the power to recognize
In our deepest hearts the beautiful and true

To read the holy quire
To peruse the mystic sheaf
Transcendental map that charts
The resplendent pathways through
A forest of symbols
Enlivening the grass the thicket and the friable sidewalk
Rankling the instrumental functionary
Who denies the deliberate mythology
Constituted to enable the embarkation
Upon the ship of reveries the excursion of ecstasies
Which arose amid smoldering catastrophe
But evolved and consolidated
In the length of tedious hours and drudgeful days

Hear ye O businessperson manager entrepreneur
Ardent fan of professional sports
Sophisticated follower of fashion
Foodie cos player cat fancier
Connoisseur of pornography
Authority upon the better brands
Enthusiast of science art or home improvement
Student hacking away in online coursework
Consumer of miracle cures and get-rich-quick schemes
Disciple of self-aggrandizement obscure cabals and popular frenzy
Political activist for an idealized past or future
Devout adorer of celebrity
Follow your fascination to the fullest
For you yourself are the hero you worship
For the exaltation of which you dream is reality
And since what you imagine is real
Have a care for what you imagine
For the dead matter through which you trudge
Dreaming of strange new worlds and new civilizations
Is itself alive in every drift and particle

The distant mountain
Drowned in indigo
The corn blazing gold

Those remembered melodies
Those ravishing harmonies
Bitter is their sweetness to me

Wealth availeth not
Accomplishment availeth not
Heroic devotion availeth not

My right hand has lost its cunning
My tongue has cloven to the roof of my mouth
I am the cause of mine own misfortune

The furtive thief
The perpetrator of force and fraud
The hell of his own devising

Who prayed that the innocent might suffer
Who took delight in pain
Who worshiped at the altar of deceit

No gleaming tower of iniquity
The house of crooked judgments
Sinning and sinned against

I have forgiven thee beloved
Instruct me if thou knowest
To forgive myself

Self-pity most unmanly was
In the catalog of wished-for reliefs
The census of anesthetics
When people continued to dine even in restaurants
A toddler clutching a tiny fork
They continued to sleep in scientifically organized beds
Though some sleeping arrangements were rougher
Adults many of them enjoyed sexual intercourse
Engaged in vehicular transport
Attended performances sporting events and worship services
Played their parts in the ephemeral entertainments
Of the vast electronically promulgated cultural system
Children went off to school and usually came home safely
People participated in the great economy
With their purchases and their occupations
Unprincipled lawmakers cast their votes
And rose to debate in their dismal house
The destruction of a city left standing one door
For a ghost or two or many more
To step through in sad waltz time