1.
To gather audiences
is as easy as
to gather armies.
They are as destructive
of truth
as armies are
of justice.
Only the faintest echoes
of distant applause
fall tolerably
on angel ears.
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2.
Paradise is
one plant
one rock
or lacking that
one cloud
one star
Wanting more is the start of greed
and blindness
the end of wisdom.
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3.
City, country,
night, day,
now and again
mystery comes
aclumping in
("Ready or not!")
on elephant’s feet.
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4.
The effete verse
of enervated
moderns et al.
seeks neither
to shock nor
offend, nor
enlighten really,
but to deliver
wee frissons
of soapy sex,
scrumptious tidbits
of wan reality,
sissy slaps
at dead gods,
bad art, and
tongue-tied
metaphysicians,
while hurling
finely wrought
mudballs at
the Great Washed.
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5.
Wusser Britches
R.I.P. April 20 2008
Despair, if you
believe the nanogram
of the known outweighs
the world beyond
where pi ends.
Otherwise, humbled, dance whatever
dance your DNA
allows.
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6.
Always Leave Em Laughing
Lines in Honor of Donald E. Westlake
Just suppose there’s something
to this reincarnation business.
Further suppose a coupla centuries
back gods and odds and groundlings
conspired to give you a life and a
globe which you explored to its
furthest reaches but dwelt overlong
and overmuch in sere sore realms
of pain and loveless labor.
You return one day fullbore bound
for balance and another good
hard look, this time replacing
blooded might and fraught night
with guffaws galore and glee
at what clowns these villains be.
Lesser talents court the whore called luck.
With Dortmunder’s pluck
a balance is struck,
All’s well that tends well.
The gang’s all here.
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7.
Halfway out of this new ocean
halfway up this new beach
looking around we finally
notice the beat of a butterfly
wing in Brazil can cause
a tornado in Texas.
How far up the beach
must we crawl before we
notice the improbable distant
effect of a beggar’s death
in Bangladesh?
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8.
In what realm of light
shall I walk this night?
Ones where light's not quite
right for tripe-laden trope,
ill-pulled skeins pregnant with flase hope,
or faux Marist reels of self-weaving rope.
Men don't throw roses
at those who strike poses
anymore.
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9.
Other knowings and
other knowledges
are as remote from
this one
as Betelgeuse is
from Sol.
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10.
The revanchists
jungle dwellers
in all but name
neither win
what they hope to win
nor lose
what they fear to lose.
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11.
Human ecology
a rich conversation
with much waiting
ready needing
to be said
that we with
our violence
keep interrupting
what lost wonderings
lie buried
at Dachau Falujah
Guangzhou Rwanda
My Lai and
Wounded Knee
Having broke the
golden thread of
eonic converse
so often we
stutter and
dumbstruck
seek new
scapegoats
they of
silverest tongues
quickest wits
and naughtiest
thoughts. |
12.
Surrogate sacrifices
unseen unnoted
populate the worlds
animal plant human
here for purposes
beyond dreaming
patient beyond suns
strong beyond bombs
loving beyond even
dead gods
they give themselves
for essential reasons
we thank goodness
can't even guess at. |
13.
Beagles
bouncing through
the grass
tails awag
Looking for
the next new
smell. That's
us. One
difference:
they know
they're leashed. |
14.
Silver slides of silver light
rise and soar fall and curve
trumpet tintabulations
sound and echo in
space where there aren't
supposed to be spaces.
Where the messengers?
What the messages? |
15.
Accreting for
millennia
the boulder at
the cave mouth
is movable one
millimeter at
a time. Scale
is but an
intermediate
veil. |
16.
Re seeing:
re-see. |
17.
Insistent emissaries
are waiting in my room.
Their caunted beauty and bloom
of youth, seductive perfume
(weept, Araby!), perfect silence: a complex
message I can't decode
from alien realms
of remotest DNA.
Some call them roses. |
18.
Set symbols before yourself,
not grandly as the rich do,
like the self-rightoues.
By day one flower, a stone,
a landscape photo.
more may be less.
A lot more changes
consumption of essential
soul food to duress.
Before sleep
imprint the pciture
of one or several symbols
guideposts for
nocturnal explorations.
beware only, always, of
the poison artifacts of
ideology. |
19.
Some take well (others wildly) to
the business (of
being poet, novelist, priest, mortician.)
The only business I've pursued withany
success if that of
infinitely omnivorous
monad unsure of
its boundaries. |
20.
Fens at four A.M.
Louche wraiths,
some nostaligc,
some in labor,
clank about
gracelessly,
trying to fitmissing cogs
of rusty gears
in scarcely
cosmic PlotsUndreamt of
by WS
and his
latter-day
ilk.
O ilknesses
unto death,
spectres of
the rosy
unrisen
seeking to
pose mid-air,
sportily
attached to
coffins
all adangle
in the unexamined
mud of
fens at
five A.M.
C.E.
too
dle-oo. |
21.
Where the art
that does more
than dance on
the surface
gesturing
(primitively
or cleverly)
toward unseen heights and
depths
eh? |
22.
Down Town
Clues, balms, partial cures
abound, not in
the sterile sites you frequent
but in blade of grass
leaf of tree
cloud of sky
star of night. |
23.
Leave the children to their games
walk with us where shyer ghosts
wait to tug with skill on silk
strings synapses firing now
now now now at target dreams
empty black hole bull's eye me. |
24.
Plenipotentiaries
from distant suns
arrive daily.
Few allow them
to present their
credentials.
Fewer still
their cases. |
25.
Every morning
well before dawn
scan the horizon
past storms
future ones
and rainbows
catch your eye
yesterdays await again
as surely as all
invisible tomorrows. |
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