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

Poetry is a political act
Poetry is an irresponsible act
Poetry is an indispensable act
Poetry is a superfluous act
Poetry is a lonely act
Poetry is a convivial act
Poetry is an amorous act
Poetry is an indifferent act
Poetry is a daunting act
Poetry is an easy act
Poetry is a sincere act
Poetry is a deceptive act
Poetry is a sacred act
Poetry is a profane act
Poetry is a simple act
Poetry is a complex act
Poetry is a significant act
Poetry is a trivial act
Poetry is a corrupt act
Poetry is an innocent act
Poetry is an original act
Poetry is a traditional act
Poetry is a sophisticated act
Poetry is a naïve act
Poetry is a purposeless act
Poetry is a purposive act
Poetry is a troubled act
Poetry is an insouciant act
Poetry is an artificial act
Poetry is a natural act
Poetry is a non-judgmental act
Poetry is a critical act
Poetry is a cryptic act
Poetry is a straightforward act
Poetry is a fresh act
Poetry is a decadent act
Poetry is an organic act
Poetry is a calculated act
Poetry is a creative act
Poetry is a custodial act
Poetry is a safe act
Poetry is a dangerous act
Poetry is an all-purpose act
Poetry is a limited act
Poetry is a moral act
Poetry is an aesthetic act
Poetry is an impressive act
Poetry is an unprepossessing act
Poetry is an invisible act
Poetry is a flamboyant act
Poetry is a jejune act
Poetry is a senescent act
Poetry is an expressive act
Poetry is a documentary act
Poetry is a formal act
Poetry is a spontaneous act
Poetry is an repellent act
Poetry is an accommodating act
Poetry is a profuse act
Poetry is an abstemious act
Poetry is a somber act
Poetry is a ridiculous act
Poetry is a frenzied act
Poetry is a sober act
Poetry is a figurative act
Poetry is a literal act
Poetry is an external act
Poetry is an inward act
Poetry is a studied act
Poetry is a hasty act
Poetry is a modest act
Poetry is an extravagant act
Poetry is a decorative act
Poetry is an austere act
Poetry is an efflorescent act
Poetry is an unnatural act
Poetry is an awkward act
Poetry is a graceful act
Poetry is a sketchy act
Poetry is a finished act
Poetry is a demonic act
Poetry is an angelic act
Poetry is a smooth act
Poetry is a bristling act
Poetry is a stabilizing act
Poetry is a disruptive act
Poetry is a frivolous act
Poetry is a serious act
Poetry is a general act
Poetry is a particular act
Poetry is a Dionysian act
Poetry is an Apollonian act
Poetry is a volcanic act
Poetry is a sexual act
Poetry is a demure act
Poetry is a confusing act
Poetry is a clarifying act
Poetry is an expansive act
Poetry is a diminutive act
Poetry is a nascent act
Poetry is a final act
Poetry is good but sometimes not so good
Poetry is over under around through gnarly parsimonious revolting affectionate irritating emollient stressful partial roundabout kind startling untethered inside unique generous frustrating rigorous yielding friendly beautiful

Those pale yellow butterflies
That fly higher than the others
Paired in pursuit or in love dance
But what’s the difference

That ghostly inverted moon
A mushroom cap open but not overly so
To sprinkle rain or spores
Upon the place beneath

The will will not suffice in this case
Not in an age when the primo condition
Is wanting badly enough
Debate rages over the requirement of passion
Whether fanatical longing in a single category qualifies
Or alternatively every object of thought
Demands the utmost in unrelenting zeal
Exploding like a meth lab in Tennessee
That’s because when you look at history
When you look at the winners in history
The fiercest lions the tallest trees the loudest cicadas
All the others imagining they had a particle
Of that high-corona magnificence
And throw their credit cards into fictive wells
Wishing upon stars when they should pray
To galaxies black holes multiverses
Something really impressive like that
Show a little self-respect for God’s sake
And let wrath flourish upon the land
We’re talking mission critical here
Diametrical gestures to intimidate the herd
Sure but how many could you have done answer me that
Competition and what’s the point
Or rather what is a point am I right
All the data sets reset at worst
While as the Uber rounds the corner
In a portly celestial arc
Compliant to the omnipuissant app
Which brooks no complaint
No sound is heard of murmuring motherhood
Wayward girlhood damning priesthood or lively neighborhood
Not even gibbering apes slobbering over their papayas
Instead only the low sibilance of suggestiveness
Of unsubtle and salacious hints
An obnoxious diffidence of affect
Like little trembling larval forms
Or monstrous little imps
That skate away upon seething lakes of bitumen
Or writhing wounded who gouge at their festering faces
And hissing curse their fates for they know not whom to curse
Diminished and foreshortened by their amputations
Where there ought to be a mouth
Only this large grasshopper its spiracles heaving
Like the companionable serial ports of cyborg and chimera
Or kids trading nightmares via the organs of remote interaction
Along the yellow gutters and out into the restless thoroughfare
Other cars other motor scooters
Ornamented with flames and crucifixes and birds of prey
Trucks of UPS Amazon FedEx USPS and logoless locals
Borne back ceaselessly into
Their reflexive originating nodes
The folly of their native instincts
For show me a start and I’ll show you the start before the start
Or rather what appears as origin is in fact intersection
A hiatus of the first order or of the second or the third
Remove the braces that shored up the ruins
Or don’t bother they’ve almighty disappeared
You can slake your thirst
But you can’t quench I don’t know
Where religions draw their battle lines
Where bankers arm themselves with skillets
Laundresses drape their theatrical membranes
Athletes cast their laurels into the dust
And poets relinquish the exercise of will

The delight of fumbling with zippers and hooks
The parkour of tumescing desire
Instructs us not to overvalue the main event
To recognize great but not overgreat importance
To appreciate trivial but not negligible pleasures
Necessary groundwork for eruptions of bliss
Yet worthy in themselves they take time
And thus the opening acts need not occasion tedium or onus
For in them patiently inhere various stimulating commendables
Not least the very awkwardness of their accomplishment
For though they may propagate the atmosphere of haste
And hence the conduction of anxiety
They nevertheless evince the charm of a puzzle
Not wholly innocent of a fillip of fear
The grace of a journey not unaccompanied to solution
And getting there is half the fun
Or some indeterminate proportion
And indeed a game need not be winnable to be pleasurable
And its importance lies not solely or even mostly in a goal
For nothing is but it occurs
And every object is a process
And every process an event
Intricating an infinite constellation
Of objects intricate in themselves

Peggy wore black socks
As she ran her laps before soccer practice
And during the school day
Her uniform skirt had a hem
Lower than that of the other tenth-grade girls
And unknown to them she filled notebooks
With twilit stories about the terrifying forest
And the Wild Girl who dwelt there
For it came to pass
That on the appointed day
As the most valuable of possessions
By virtue of her tender years and noble birth
She was brought into the forest
Even unto the farthest point
To be given back to the Powers
To purchase their placidity
That the people might earn their livings unmolested
At the edge of the forest
And even unto the farthest point
And sure enough after the people had departed
The Powers came
Hulking Glumgrim
And leafy Entriffid
And Gelida of the freezing touch
And the others willowy or round scurrying or slow
And collected her and harmed her not
But raised her as their own
For they pitied her small size and tender years
And vouchsafed unto her such lore
As to the people was unknown
And she grew and throve in the terrifying forest
And it came to pass that on a certain day
The people penetrated deep into the forest
Even unto the farthest point
For they had exhausted their stores
But their efforts to collect the forest treasures
Had availed not and they sat sore dismayed
For they knew that male and female alike
The ancients of days and those of tender years
Would perish here in the forest deep
And unknown to them the Wild Girl
The forsaken one
Filled their baskets and filled their bags
To keep them living for many days
Back in the world of people
And they were sore amazed
That this day when they had so lost heart
And grieved as never before
Should be the appointed day of bounty
And as I girded myself for practice in the other field
She caught my eye
Wiry not voluptuous
Slight not curvaceous
And she held my eye
That night before I could give in to sleep

To sustain the operation and deploy it
With ever-growing intensity
As if to forestall the inevitability of its desuetude
And continually to augment the seamless texture of regulation
Always adding offices and mandates
As the subalterns might proliferate under the podestà
Never subtracting the superfluous the ceremonial or the moribund
With which the citizenry lack the capacity
To monitor much less comply withal
And their impotence
Before this burgeoning and unmasterable register of imperatives
Does not excuse them from payment
In kind health blood treasure and lifespan
Anesthetized it is true by bread circuses and figmentary reality
The privilege of purchase and the consummation of convenience
And they are comforted moreover by the compensatory thought
During intervals relieved of superstitious avarice
That their pain does not originate
From the malefaction of any person
Nor from the wickedness of any
More or less ignorant and therefore fallible neighbor
But only from the state of things
Within the vast but fragmentary abstract machine
The mere apparition of a universe of death

Oh for the confidence of a criminal
Clever to outwit the security system
Patient to efface the foot- and fingerprints
Expert to dispose of the body

The rain had all but subsided
It adopted the posture of decision
Grow my beard down to my chest
Inform the multitude of their infirmity
As if I knew better than they
Or raise another grievance before the council
A ring of wayward pennants
Semaphore back to the finale of seem
Across the blended landscape
And a new chapter wraps aside
A predication effecting a suave unraveling
Of the native construal which nevertheless soft repulse relinquishes
Give me another labyrinthine turn they cry
Another prospect of the Trylon
We shuffle briskly under a break of day
A caesura of indistinct dimension
Narratives of insistent cause
Poems of intense desire
To bring the broadcast to its bending point
A decorum of plenitude
An embarrassment of rises

The disjunction of disjunctiveness and primal unity

The extinction of homo sapiens
Is coming in under budget
Behold the feline fungal or human blueprint
And people impose their own design matrix
Onto the deeply textured material of matter
With their gifts of person number tense voice and mood
Their genius for speculation and apt analogy
Especially upon the organic compounds
As octane acetone Mylar and polystyrene
Ambien to make you sleep alcohol to mess you up
And microparticles with the duration of a planet
Proliferate like a flourishing clan
And oh the phosphates and the nitrates
Algae bloom and sudden boom
Outside a sheared building in Oklahoma City
A firefighter grips in one hand the great work glove
And in the other cradles the dying child