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

Vibrating youth refuses to countenance
The wayward pitch far down the line
No don’t harp upon infinity
In the future they lose teeth in bunches
Without so much as pain or violence
To neglect the fond intention
To bring up from the ashes the golden bird
To physically draw the body up of
Terracotta teraphim cultic terrapin
Among the mulcted multitude
And they committed therefore
Unto the rigidity of imaginary wish fulfillments
Confronting ambivalently the reality that illusion
Must either dissipate or gather into
The thorough overturning of explosion
For the dismissal of dichotomies
The more manifest the better
And hence a normalizing of supplements
Technological ideological and motivational
Melatonin energy drinks tobacco products
We entered a zone of invincibility
Of urbane and compulsory sprezzatura
We recorded our impressions in curt dispatches
Irrespective of merely suppositious consequences
Notionally authorized
Subjectively devout

Why are you looking at me in wonder
If I may make so bold as to presume
The import of your facial expression
You have demonstrated your rugged poise in word and deed
As I have made similar exhibition
Of my stumbles in the regions of sanctity
Like you I am outgoing and gregarious
But you hold success high and believe in it

A few leaves here and there are starting to change
Promising relief from torrid summer
Halcyon fowl of predator and prey solstice or equinox
Dread of warm days’ never ceasing of weak equivalencies
The annual anxiety and excitement of new school days
The feeble morbid hope that nature
Would exceed her remit of exterior metamorphosis
And plunge the shaping implement daggerlike into the inner being

You say you’ve done your best to rearrange the neural pathways
But you might have tried harder
And anyway the skills have declined near to desuetude
Liberated by and from the roll of dynastic mandate
Washed in the scalding blood of sacrifice
Furious anger and precipitous withdrawal
So the world never gave you the endorsement you wanted
But you could have played your part with greater aplomb

Technical processes threaten to expose
The datamancy of inadequacy
As occupational responsibilities
Or domestic duties
As laundering the textiles
Or preparing the repast
Or maintaining the appliances
Or maintaining the body’s physical plant
Or conducting a vehicle at high speed
Among a throng of other rank amateurs
Or worse than rank
Not that the pros are that much better
Just ask Buddy or Stevie Ray or Francis Gary Powers
Or compiling these heaps of cryptic charactry
Bardel zairehfik cvmwoflux effrent
Nor nowhere stands the artifice of eternity
Into which to gather me

Amazonian cartage’s parousia late afternoon
We hastened to hit record lest it fleet
Miracles of rare device increasingly commonplace
Kingdom of dawn having yielded to principality of violet
As to justice law custom preference prohibition antagonism and force
Forget about adorableness or the glancing shots of admiration
We caught the cat train as we had done as kids
When balloons used to sail up beyond the trees
And debarked at the usual indefinite stop
Where new zoning restrictions had intervened
To disrupt the trade in educational materials
So that new recruits find it difficult to focus
And what might be the import of this thrice-invoked it
Continuity and discontinuity having resolved
Into matters of taste to take or leave
Manikins dancing in the klieg
Monochromatic bacchanal
And yet everything seems to work out in the end
For better or worse sometimes much worse
The notorious pothole for examples
Some folks blame the unavoidable vagaries of weather
Some attribute the duress to the machinations of unfathomable cabals
Some surrender to the futility of complaint
Surroundering the asymptotes of reference
All adopt their catalytic approach to tiptoe crawl
While many wind it out and zoom upward
Expecting by sheer velocity to rise above the schism
Whine of four-stroke overmanhood
Singspeech of an imaginary invisibility
The sudden cargo sodden friable
Crashes peremptorily to the floor
And just keeps going

An offering of bread and wine I give you
And partake of it myself
And celery and cucumber
Moist and crunchy
And pass my hand over your shoulder
In remembrance of ancient joys

Once you accept that the sensory world is not enough
Everything changes
Everything was already changing
And much depends upon the distinctions
Of sensory sensuous and sensual
Not to the sensual ear
And not just the sensuous woman
Nor the long sensory train from say
Cochlea to cortex
Grandma had eyes on the back of her head
An assertion that everybody knew
To be anatomically incorrect
But all cast a wary eye toward one of such formidable sensory acuity
But no eagle sees hound smells bat hears all that much
And what we humans perceive is mostly a heap
Of more or less broken machinery
How could it be otherwise
After 200 millennia
Of technical processes
And the vaunted augmentations
Particle accelerator litmus test and telescope
Barely scratch the surface
Merely impress lightly upon the surface
While children have forgotten how to go to school
And voters are flummoxed by the triple choice
Of standard venality mundane incompetence and criminal insanity
And time suddenly and sporadically runs in reverse
Absorbed by cars telephones and television sets
That which was attracted now is repelled
That which was built up now is torn down
That which was discarded resurrects in hideous return
Dog eats dog
Venus flytrap consumes itself
Truth demands forgetting

Where after all everywhere is the wherewithal
You must have something to twist the knife into
And so the fractured world
As if in compensation for its brokenness
Offers a wealth of orts and castoffs
Reconditionable into new life new food new bric-a-brac
Everybody knows the goat with tire at midriff
An icon as gay as a fur-lined cup
Or a paper stein from Burger King
Recordings on media unknown for eons
Words and pictures and garlands and silvery doodads
In the gutter and in the garbage
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Shall not be infringed
By Phoebus he that wandering knight so fair
Enough for all future comedies tragedies and satires

O adjectives
Would that all were so real
So qualitied
And so it is
Let there be luxe
Flying cape shooting gun strummed guitar
For strumming is not fashionable
Nor justifiably never was
The major and the minor ambiguous
In the blocky mass of sumptuous sound
An action painting with an unapologetic grin
For so the benighted crowd erring
Answers plenitude with cold austerity
And greets benefaction with renunciation
As it were deliverance to shun stubborn fragrant pleasure

And in the end the end is endless
For while growth and foliation continue to occur
And all entirety continues to decline
Into itty bitty pieces
Harmful in the trachea or the gills
But glittering trills in the auditory cortex
Mapped upon the flaring cochlea
And true rebuilding also obtains
Even as particles careen and ricochet
And forces blend in moiré ripples
But if you blur your vision a bit
Wobble your eyeballs out of alignment
You will see on the up escalator
In the attitude of wild contrapposto
One great hip unearthly elevated
Risking all in the moving tableau
The glowing image of callipygian Venus

The more or less complicated surfaces present themselves
As for example the can of Pibb Zero
Bright color backed with gray
Where the aluminum shines through in its unshiny way
Everybody knows the content another surface
That will lay itself out on the surfaces of the mouth
Or of the table top or of the floor
The surfaces of little carbon dioxide beads
Will manifest themselves and give a tingle upon nerve surfaces
The neurons lining up gaps from surface to surface
Atomic surfaces aggregated in molecular surfaces
Surfaces of tires meet surfaces of roads
Surfaces of roller ball apply surfaces of ink to surfaces of paper
Moldy flat deceptive cool bumpy polymeric curvy slimy haphazard dry matte pigmented hard antibacterial grainy lustrous puzzling translucent dusty patterned hypoallergenic yielding hot invisible clean glittering sticky iridescent permeable slippery repellent moist sensitive
Surfaces of skin will touch other surfaces of clothing skin or dirt

Why must it be so cryptic
The content of these pages
Well I’ll tell you dear reader
There are in these parts certain spiders
That build enormous houses
Ten twelve maybe fifteen feet or more
From tip to anchoring tip
Masterpieces of instinctive engineering
Nothing like the sad gun-sight caricature
Of concentric circles with radiating spokes
But irregular in shape
Like snowflakes and everything else no two alike
And every once in a space
The roughly rectangular cells
Are interrupted by a triangle
A strand that intersects an unexpected vertex
Like the flaw deliberately introduced
They say in the weave of a Persian carpet
To acknowledge the subordination
Of human wishes to divine will
And on dewy mornings the intricate device
Shines like an otherworldly chandelier
So pleasing are these witty supplements
All centered upon a splash of zagging scumble
The spider off to one side
A complexity that enhances the overall effect
But the inevitable addition
Of pine needle and broken leaf
Annoys and causes the aesthetically-minded viewer
To wish for a primordially pristine condition
Free from these contaminants
Foolish bitter hurtful desire
No such condition ever was nor should be
For no sooner has Arachne woven her web
But she begins to decorate it
With the skeletons of those
From whom she has sapped the life
The pride of home and hearth
And we who love nature must accommodate
The unlovely cry of the blue jay
The gentle rain so quickly ungentle
The wrath of His Majesty the Sun
The ground ready to renounce its stability
The pat of feces the moldering corpse
The fattening maggots
And the ugly erections of witless humans
Who act according to the dictates of their cortices
Which nature has complicated to insanity
What do we see of stars aloof in their gorgeousness
What do we know of ocean with its pearls chasms and corals
What byzantine events may occur
Within a cubic grain of salt
A red thread runs through all things
Call it consciousness will life
Choose any metaphor you like
For deep within things
Though there is no within or without
We can conclude a reality
Neither dual nor fragmentary
Nor metaphorical
That our gelatinous brains need not consume
Nor our clumsy tongues need fasten a name
And we enter this real world but fleetingly
With the apprehension of the ancient rocks
The sublime regress of cellular physiology
Bacchus leaping from a chariot drawn by cheetahs
While a boy with goat legs drags the head of a deer
For our experience is real if anything is
And more ravenous than spider we would experience all
Though no such comprehension ever was nor should be
And so I print these characters in these pages
In a layer of no depth
A little broken plane
A dot a dash a curving C
The vanity of human wishes
The blue jay cries its wild command
The poet cries the shallowness of hurt

Mark E Smith was totally wired
And hence or nevertheless
He was always worried
A crooked man walked a crooked mile
Across an unkempt acre
Exhausted by its own productivity
You could try to inventory the weedy residue
In the same manner that we recall
Superfluous details after a deadly disaster
The sign for Checkers a tuft of wild fennel
The blower shuts off responsive to some control
Only in its absence do you notice its presence
A trillion organisms in the wasteland
Relevance a matter of taste

Ordinary phenomena obtain
For example an appointment at 4:95
Falling body suspended
The contingency of a leitmotif
As silver gilded over taint of gold
Kirsch and ginger plums and antonyms
Droning speech unbelievably comprehensive
A categorical prevarative
No that’s too strong an infinite variation
But not necessarily infinite
An old-fashioned second hand that leaps
Gradation by small gradation
And thus elides the texture of the gradual
Paint chips in the rack on the shop wall
A length of garland hose virtuosic anthology
Do not suffice to provide freshness of perception
The quantitative analyses these do not
Exercise futility merely but nor are they
Entirely efficacious in their outcomes
Nor certainly entirely truthful
Nor is an outcome orientation entirely commendable
For at some microcosmic level
All that is qualitied is evented
Though as to universals of course
We should maintain a stance of circumspection
Tripping up the stairs and falling around the corner
Allowing that at a macrocosmic level
We perceive these graduated leaps
As for example pertaining to levels
The same chilled tea recipe every day
The same quantity of tea leaf of honey of water of lime
But these measurements grossly imprecise
And hence each cup a little different
Trivial variation no doubt
But dubious for the insensible impatient and old
All beautiful all damned in the flux
And mood fluctuates more than most
The more sublime the more blessed the more fleeting
And yet at the baseline a steady state
The settling silt of the irretrievable
Oblivious of the carnival beneath
Home of vicious sirens and gay profusion of color
Upon which it rests

See in these pages the peak
At midweek of clouds and butterflies
And by Sunday the trough
Of vile disturbance

I pass a tall spruce dead this green summer long
I gaze through the bare limbs to the trunk
And the boughs rotate around the bole
As the moon followed me in crazy daylight
When I rode upon the back seat

Immature pecans lie scattered on the pavement
Green in their exocarps
We had a windy shower a few days back
But plenty of nuts remain on high
And what if all had fallen

A young couple push a stroller
And when the wheel hits a bump on the sidewalk
Dad apologizes to the slumbering babe
And I father of generations think
A few bumps are good for sleep at that age

Black bees crowd around a flowering shrub
Some as big as I’ve ever seen
And some a third their size
Are they the same species I wonder
And why do I care about species

Tragedy lurks in the most trivial of acts
Not just events that turn out badly
Such as the spill that results in an injurious fall
But truly unimportant matters
That are completely unsubstantial
Except for their indeterminate effects
Of catastrophe and anagnorisis
Like ending this line by typing a capital C
Which doesn’t mean a damned thing
At the same time that it means too damned much
Like The Comedian as Letter
Or the resoundingly superfluous consonant in PCOET
Or the shitty no not that bad grade
That induces horror in some and relief in others
And whether through indolence or incapacity
Or through motives of self-defense
We don’t think things through
We don’t think things through
A thread of experience runs through all
And are we pearls on a strand
Or captives on a chain

Nietzsche forgot the volcano