Upgraded to Serious
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its roots back to an ash tree,
and its branches up
to an ash cloud,
the club that let in and that disallowed
the thought of so many—
ingeniously giving members
bullhorns for our little voices,
leather for our liabilities of skin—
the products of its expertises hooking
dugs to suction-cups
and penises to clever
lover-tubes, docilities
to stanchions—keeping the consumer
from those messy overflows—oh yes,
the clickogenic club—it’s now on its way
out, going the slope of the oil- and
cowmen, under a wave of nouveau
spunk, as reproduction comes
in plastic, tungsten,
dazzleworks of circuitry—no
boring boards! The club with all its antique
codes and codicils will have to
club itself out, out of courtesy, on the path
to a virtually productive heaven—let the gentlemen
agree. Their sons, the slackers with the liquor, hand it on
to generation Z, that need not multiply or sleep. The stock
of alphabets runs out, the line of swollen lifetimes hits
the point of several seconds flat, and any smidgen
beats a bludgeon. Just a blip behind the eyes
works better than a bruiser with a bat.
Unto High Heaven
Most people trust in will
and dream of power.
The man of the moment would kill
to be Man of the Hour.
Most people live by asking
daylight’s worth.
My God, they’re multitasking
everywhere on Earth.
But to inherit it—
my Liege!—don’t stoop
to seek. Pass up the privilege
of being meek.
I Cannot Clear My Eyes
On his chain in the merciless sun
is a dog; on macadam a run-over cat —
and what’s that moving mud
near the murder of wheels? How can
these crow-crowds bear their kind? The victim
screeches in the flap but can’t outfly them:
luckless, maybe sick. . . A relative of ours.
It’s not that we lack luck or luster, family
or sleep. But here at god’s own
Earth Day barbecue we are
the blackest sheep.
Philosopher Orders Crispy Pork
I love him so, this animal I pray
was treated kindly. Let me pay as much as even
greater pig-lovers see fit
to guarantee him that. As for his fat,
I’d give up years yes years of my
own life for such
a gulpable semblable.
(My life! Such as it is, this
liberality of leaves! The world
won’t need those seventeen more
poems, after all, there being
so few subjects to be treated. Three
if by subject we mean anyone
submitted to another’s will. Two
if by subject we mean
topic. One if by death we wind up
meaning love. And none
if a subject must entail
the curlicue’s indulgence of itself.)
Thous by the Thousands
There’s too much gobbling
going on. Gobble up the baby
with his cheeks! Gobble up the girlhood,
with its eyes. Gobble up the novel with its world
and scoop the lovers up, to coop them in.
After the gulletful, the lip
is dabbed. No trouble.
Just a single gob can multiply
into a gobble’s worth—or one small rub
into a rubbled history—the hag a whole
damned marketplace. And one scribe’s
nib? Well, after all, you get
the point. Get out the bib
(and lengthen up the eye).
Take that—a double-handled cup! Take
this—a clamor for acclaim. Throw in
a fiddle for Fidelio, and for the little lady
baby Bob, a nodding ornament.
The gleam of insight dimmed into a glimmer.
Our awe before a one-and-only
bogged down into frequentatives. From the break
in space and time—a crack across the priceless pottery—
we crackled up production lines. The thunderbolt to shake
your being’s very frame—the heavens’ way
of sparking up a conversation—that
got channeled down into white noise.
We slept in letters, woke in stitches,
toggled off and on. At last, forever
happened: we appeared in Oz, on Death TV,
where the illusions of expanded view
could not diminish anybody’s hunger.
Given an allowance, we began
to spend eternity, all but agog
in our designer goggles.
Ill-Made Almighty
No man has more assurance than a bad poet.
MARTIAL
The Logos thrives, it is crawling
with bugs. The lecturers are teeming —
memorific, futurized, dead-certain they’ll go
unsurprised. They don’t know nows
as we do, true to no clear
destination. (We can’t even
act our age: it’s over-understudied.) Steady
as you go. The greatest waves are barely
bearable, alive’s ill-
read already,
and the Skipper is sick
of the terrible lit
graffiti in the head...
And the Greatest of These
Stupidity’s no grounds for our despair.
It drives or drowses everywhere—
waxen, bristling, pitted, slick—
as variously textured as
notoriously tough. It ought
arouse more wonder than aversion:
cases most complex are hexed, and know it,
while the simplest merely grin into the void.
A sort of wisdom, either way, this
being short on wit.
Nor may despair accrue
to humankind’s unsightliness—the humped one no one loves,
the scrawny and the scrofulous, the pimpled and the pocked—
who hasn’t lost all sight of beauty,
once the beauty talked?
I can’t lose hope over the way
we tort as we retort, reveal as we redress—
I can’t regret the spank of life, its sparkling
more-or-less. Where heartlands lie the lowest
(stream and meadow, desert, swamp)
I trample on, I keep up hope
at every everloving turn.
Each turn, that is, except
the wickedest: when cruelty
comes cackling from its
crackhouses in nature—hell
must help me then because
I lose all heart at hurt intended. Not just
humans, after all, who massacre
their cousins and their dogs. You’ll see
the crows gang up as well, with bloody beaks and
malice and intent, bedeviling some half-defeathered
brother to his death; or, dashing out the kitchen door,
the pampered shepherds lunging from
the farm-wife’s kibbled kiss, and just for this:
to fang the haunches of a fawn—not once
but seven times (it seems inexpertise is all the more
excited by the sufferer)... The heart
must bear it all, apparently, or burn, or dim, as
claw on claw the creatures in the tank
go
scrambling to outclimb the creature crush.
On days like that, when cruelty is king,
and sun in swill appears to swim, I thank
no lucky stars for life: It wants to take a lover
limb from limb.
For Want of Better Words
You lose your
grip, you could say.
That handy bag.
The ones you poured your life into
were ripped away—their treasured senses,
knacks of narrative,
abruptly stopped
with mud.
So you get number—
adjective that never should have been
susceptible of the comparative.
You are not faithful, hopeful, kind—
are those the three? (The only three? so many?)
Must the one be greater, as the Scriptures say?
The buck cannot stop anywhere. Once gotten out of hand,
it goes on growing in the mind. In masterworks of map
the big fishfinders
sweep the seeing globe—
with people always
coming out on top. One man
professes to believe
no hope exists where there’s
no love: he opens up
a sex-toy shop.
Above it all, behind it all, beyond
its all-or-nothingness, the only
opening that counts—
a countlessness the stars have stood for
even as their senses moved—
an opening the measurers adore
because it marks the end of ends. And mind
is mesmerized by such unfathomable states, past all
high fives, deep sixes, and the wondrous
horizontal eight—a nowhere
faster than the newsflash,
faster than the speeding hearse.
You’re late in your
one-upmanship,
your craft, your
universe...
Space Bar
Lined up behind the space bartender
is the meaning of it all, the vessels
marked with letters, numbers,
signs. Beyond the flats
the monitor looms, for all the world
like the world: images and
motions, weeping women,
men in hats. I have killed
many happy hours here,
with my bare hands, as TV
passes for IV, among
the space cadets and dingbats.
Myrrha to the Source
O fluent one, O muscle full of hydrogen,
O stuff of grief, whom the Greeks
accuse of spoiling souls,
whose destiny is downward,
whose reflecting’s up—I think
I must have come from you.
Just one more cup.
With the Moon
March 26, 2007
Utterly impossible for a person of some
(how you say?) literary discretion
to attack the blossoming
goddamn cherry trees—
and by attack I mean attach
her ever overly-involving
meathooks of admiring to them (mire and ad being alike
inherently besmirching). He would never
love me, for example; that was only
a commercial break, while I was putting in
a lifetime. Nature loves its laws
above its instances. But Mrs. Christ
I wasn’t born to be. (The dogwood made
too many bloody claims on its Virginias.
In its stranglehold of jurisdictions there was no
West Hag or Northern Hussydale for me
to hurry home to.) Moving,
moved, without avail, by doubt,
and wary of a human’s fondest hopes,
I noticed that the slope was littered
with the optimists. But as I lived I wasn’t quite alone
in misbegetting love and mis-conceiving laws.
Addictable to goods, one still admires the good
while, full of will, we wheel upon
a planetary whim, no more than
incidentals in a sunscape: gravity-employees,
tissue-issuers, and slaves of rhythm. It is utterly
impossible to say
how (charged unto combustibility) the cherry petals
are not just a dummy’s decoration—something to forget
ourselves in, paparazzi-flashes or perfumeries
of pink. A jilter and a jiltee aren’t distinct
inside the litter’s heap: their mothers indiscriminately lick
the little nodes and navels. No, he wouldn’t ever
love me, in so many words. He’d maybe lay
a hand on me, asleep.
The Song of Skeptomai Lou
Old wives, I wish I could
be one of you. Instead
I am the born old maid.
Old maid emeritus,
let’s say—the squid
whose erudition hugs
too many clams at once—
heart full of ink. With my
verdichter’s digits, I could practice
having crushes. But appetites for permanence
went whirring on. So did the ring
of close calls (all collect). Even the elders
wrecked their roadsters, just to have one
date with the tow truck. Drivers loved
their doctors into deep intensive care—ah, why
go there—old wives! I did remain intact,
was checked, rechecked, racked up, A-plus—
that’s better than perfect, right? That much,
let’s say, is understood. (I’m speaking
Old Grammarian, you’ll recognize,
where something understood
is something missing.)
Missing Meaning
The mystery of speaking every day
So plainly from a face she cannot see
Unsettles her unless she can forget
The things she knows and sink back into
What she means. (Her times
Seem overfocused
On the frame—wire-rimmed or
Tortoiseshell—and nothing
Taken at face value. The skeptic
Backs his watch, watches his back,
That much is given.) But
The View-Master’s skewed
By a hairbreadth or eyebridge:
There goes heaven.
Good Old God
He’s a hoot, with his flips of the nickel,
his penchant for law, and his playing with volts—
let the lovers be struck! (It’s his joke, on our dime.) And by Jove
what a backside he turns! And by gum what bedeviled
expressions! A scowl full of thous, and the gene pool
is shot. “Thou shalt flower for moments—and rot
for the rest—being flesh, being given to
lust. Say you wanted an ocean of
feeling, or time? Here’s a puddle to
come from, a crack and a crotch.” He’s a hoot,
don’t you think?—there above the commotion, just
finding the bright side, just
winding his watch. . .
Half Border and Half Lab
Customs and chemistry
made a name for themselves
and it was Spot. He’s gone to some
ou-topos now, the dirty dog, doctor of
crotches, digger of holes. Your airy
clarities be damned, he loved our must
and even our mistakes—why hit him, then,
who did us good? He’s dead, who ought
to be at home. He’s damned
put out; and so am I.
When blue is carried through, the law is red.
When noon is said and done, it’s dusk again.
The greed for table makes the greed
for bed.
So cave canem, even stars have litters—little
lookers, cacklers, killers. . . Morning raises up
the hackled men. (Among our ilk, what’s milk
but opportunity for spillers?)
He saved our sorry
highfalutin souls—the heavens haven’t
saved a fly. Orion’s canniness who can
condone?—that starring story, strapping blade!—
and Sirius is just a Fido joke. No laughter shakes
the firmament. But O
the family dog, the Buddha-dog—son
of a bitch! he had
a funny bone—
Domestique
Surfaces to scrape or wipe,
a screwdriver to be applied
to slime-encrusted soles, the spattered
hallways, wadded bedding—and
in quantities astounding (in the corners,
under furniture, behind the curtains)
fluff and dander spread by curs