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

Seething fissure at ocean’s deepest floor
Where myriad lifeforms thrive
Needless of the sun
With heat from earth’s consolidation

The siliceous aggregate
The bacterial mats
Nay the very crustaceans
Do not wish it otherwise

Do not wish to frolic or bask
Where from where algae dare not stray
Though plenty motile
Defined in photosynthesis

All have their homes
Salmon-falls
Birds in the trees
Bands of acceptance

All suffer and die
But only humans dream of sailing
Of driving submersibles
Away into the darkness

The group of palms from It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World
The little circle into which the angels
Draw up their mouths
In the prologue to Joseph the Provider
That backless chair with its right leg reduced
And then the topheavy little ring about to tip to the right
And ah the slippery small serpent sneaking up from its shaft

The stout bracket half a pair of bookends
And now the best part the pince-nez
Nestled within a kind of ocularity
Intoning surprised gratification
Toward the Wizard of Ooze
Though here shook and put into a lower sonority
And a trestle a fragment shored against one’s ruins

A second right-facing majuscule bookend
And atop a chimney a miniscule oily glob
A tiny smokestack with
A puff from Popeye’s pipe
And angular and asymmetrical
A second trestle leaning against
A short stout fellow in a silent comedy Laurel and Hardy hat

These cars are not okay
They’re dirty
And they go too fast

Quoth the poet
All need some kind of ventilator
Bread and circuses in the age of the tyrants
Smoky rituals and vendettas in the dark age
Therapeutic interventions in the age of medicos
And perennial psychotropic anesthesia

Rest and relaxation enjoyed a vogue
And lots of couches remain fully occupied
But the puritan abhorrence of sloth reasserts itself
And has made its compromise with unproductive work
Justification by 10k runs and fitness machines and jumping jacks
Good old mortification of the flesh

The dreamy sensitives among us
Invoke the grass the trees the singing birds
Mountains oceans sunsets and songs
The monumental network of chemical relations
The truth of imagination the beauty of forms
The holy communion of family and friends

Presumably a ventilator works in two directions
Inhaling and exhaling both
Drawing in the good and exhausting the bad
But our broiling planet already replete with toxins
Can accommodate no further fumes
And the interior ecosystem’s all backed up

Crowned with clover
They dance the fairy round

Lingflu bhle zerstistor
Ginnid qut zet pirmabhle
Rabn nerg brek sobbata
Lessluss fui dorla
Cumfunduer cvmwoflux
Fteh gaurgor moltseh thjan
Id vela l’crim
Prem depmisti
Ardonor
Ardonor

You see that graying at the temples
You’re losing this
Either you haven’t made yourself clear
Or nobody wants to consider your proposal

But if they reject my proposal
Shouldn’t they tell me

They haven’t rejected it
They just don’t want to hear it
If that’s what happened

They could have let me know they don’t understand
They could have given me a chance to explain

Why should they give you a chance
Who are you to make proposals
Do you think people are going to read between your lines

I’m just trying to help

Are they so badly off they need help from you
Maybe you mean well but they don’t want your help
You’re the one who needs help
You’re losing this

Awh awh awh
Awh awh awh
Awh awh awh
Awh awh uawh
Awh awh awh
Awh awh awh
Awh awh awh
Awh awh awh
Awh awh awh
Awh
Awh awh awh
Awh awh awh
Awh awh awh
Awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh
Awh awh awh awh awh awh
Awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh
Awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh
Awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh
Awh awh awh awh awh awh
Awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh
Awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh
Awh awh awh awh awh awh
Awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh awh

She lifted the backpack by the straps from his shoulders
And he looked up in dismay
A landscape strange but welcoming enough
Of granddaddy oaks bunny owls and swirling blue lady streams
A necessary act repeated becomes a routine
But who judges the necessity of necessity
The style of clothing
The accessories braces or spectacles
And you soon forget the specifics of the day
The painful intricacy of script and improvisation
Utility poles pigeons and wet black top
Potholes and manhole covers
Viewed from the lightly padded interior
Straps buckled and talk radio

He had chums and then letters came crashing down
He liked looking at pictures and it didn’t bother him
That he did not speak the words that accompanied them
But pretty soon the words took over
The phonic words the words as themselves
Sight words
And the world became at once
More masterable and more mastering
Less bewildering perhaps than the colorful animations
But more demanding more sudden more questionable
And worse treading through two realms
The same oaks and streams and potholes
But now translucent shapes of the future
Defined by resolutions and the tables of the law

Rubber tires ladies’ underwear
And other picture postcards