FRESH

EARTH

JOHN
XAVIER
“Language had always helped us extract value from nature, but over time it had
completely severed itself from it, ceasing to echo what had once been its inspiration.
And now, just over the horizon, was a world where we too would be part of nature
language did not need. And it would be the old story told anew: language becomes
detached from something, and thus is free, finally, to eat that thing alive.”

- Andrew Lipstein
 Preface

Judged by the entire span of human literature, poetry has only just recently been
emancipated. Prior to modernism, poetry was highly conventionalized and even a
certified madman (And a genius one on top of that) like Christopher Smart, wrote
his verse in a manner perfectly acceptable to conservative stylists today. In just over
a century though, poetry has exploded with freedoms of expression that defy every
orthodox rule of language and strain the limits of semantic and syntactic tolerance.
Today, the tower of Babel seems precarious indeed.

And yet people frequently say that nothing new can really be said; neither in form
nor in content. I disagree. Poetic and linguistic novelty may be narrower in potential
scope but it’s not impossible. It’s not even more difficult than it was in the past; to
say otherwise is to insult the talent and ingenuity of our admirable predecessors
with the luxury of a smug hindsight. In fact poetry, like any art, is grounded in acts
of creative freedom and so its potential for newness will never be exhausted. We
have to put the work in though. We have to develop our own capacities for genuine
discovery and appreciation. To that end, I myself have tried to do some original
work with the poems in this collection. In ‘March 30, 1970’ for example, I tried to
capture something of the rhythms of avant-garde jazz while using semantic discord
and incongruence to impart some of its tonal qualities. In ‘Make Believe’ I used an
extremely allusive ambience coupled with punctuating moments of directness to
convey the ambience of a dreamscape under the sway of fantasy inclinations. And
then in ‘Comorbidities As’ I employed contemporary vernacular and jargon in order
to poetically encapsulate the prevailing trends of social and cultural decay. In all of
these I think I’ve had some success.

The world we live in seems imperiled by the destructive powers of its own ideas
and, in this, language and culture are no exception. But our fate is still our collective
choice. Whether we choose to build or ruin, that’s all on us.
ABACUS

Beads that can become anything

Shifted by the slightest feints past gesture

Moved in their momentous symbolisms

And these to totem for audacity

Impressive right? Its calculations, though often

Castrated by avarice

Then an amputated void for descending ages

Dependent on some selfless grain

Flourishing where none had dared to live before,

Such boons as our naivest predecessors

Deign to give, most of them consumed

By the long hours of a thankless labor, for branches

That roots will not be witness to, the unseen

Business of fertilizing corpses

As all our best actions are, dead at birth

But deviations adding up to less-minute corrections

The world, an original promissory note

Slowly delivering up its debt
a e

for aether our

breathless empire
thereafter where crafted hearts
gather to reap their disregard

far estranged the other from our

world turned to parchment burning
though groaning the untorn martyrs
proud to perish
are however forlorn at their
lonely ardor

fur and fire together in inferno create our

tired version of fear
the forest a disaster more
glorified than mourned

e a
ANCIENT CONQUEROR

So boastful was he and swift with epithets

For his enemies; brave of course, by the demands
Of public reputation, but nonetheless
A meagre leech in the pond of legend now

Epic minded, daring in act, his eyes always

Seeking out the maximums of fame
And reputation, either noble or vulgar, because
History is a house guarded by equal dogs

In the jaws of both judges, posterity rests its favor

Like a sleeping prong; twinned tongues
Becoming one fork through divided province
While their barking mingles on

Woven of course into a single growl, canine

The way it contests every bone
But made respectable through its vain traditions;
A servile beast to a dreadful master

But time commands far more than legion tomes

As armada libraries are invariably fated to be buried
In abandoned graveyards and sunken tombs;
Memory a lice as death drags across its heavy comb

The egos of heroes and leaders here are just pests

Disposed-of by a hygienic mortality;
Superfluous things easily done away with
And this, decidedly, for the better

Because nothing that’s achieved is meant to last,

Lest the past inhibit the future, those
Who strive for empires then are, in all reality,
Already vanquished by each victory
APEX SYNTHESIS

Reason reigns now as a black summer over the mind;

Such is the heat death of logic here,
Plunging the waning universe within me into
Regurgitated stasis, that
Even the wild birdsong echoes these
Familiar parameters of machine

Nature with its crude circuitry, its factory of

Cheap events conveyed in forests
Unfolding off assembly lines; the fusion almost
Incomprehensible, yet hideous

Where elements and principles stray

Beyond the semantic limits of defined domains,
There we find violence, in all its
Upset confusion, arising invariably
And eroding the old cliffs
That kept the rusting sea at bay; oceanic
Water, always hungry for its
Feast of land, continuing to carve away whatever
Solid axioms we might
Strive to take our comfort in

Because truth offers no sanctuary, truth

Is rift and fire erupting with

Primordial desire; seismic in nearly every aspect,
A thing of brute diamond, inimical

Where philosophy fits in steel containers

And allows itself to be transported,
There the industrial cartels strangle the last variable
Audacious enough to insist on a
Weird appetite for chaos and novelty
Destiny is: Spirit poured into pistons, conformed
To economic obligations, product

Fractured humanity the ore of manufacturing

Where dawn is deconstructed and
Grasshoppers vivisected, with each soft component
Individually sorted and compartmentalized

That anything should live: a quaint obsolescence

AUTUMN SELF

I am a man in the weeds; tangled up, befouled

By the grime of rancid spoilage

In harmony though with death, in a peerage

With my own future corpse;
My whole body today, the golden leaf
Ready to fall

Stripped bare by the wind, I am no longer

Attached to the bare tree;
Following the empress, I follow the emptiness
Neither entering nor exiting, a dark air
Enveloping and letting go

With equal ease

As the meat I leave behind

Dissolves into dirt,
What was broken is now reunited

Never truly separated from the things

I was made from, this individuality that was
My awkward custody, like
The walls of a lung breathing in and out;
Distance here
Part of a whole process,
The gulf elemental to a single act

I am a man of the weeds; shaped by them and free

Of any incarcerating need for escape
AVERAGE ROLEPLAYING GAME

Okay, you don’t get to make your own character

But you do get to choose your class;
No, not at level one, only after
You’ve been playing the game for years and you’re
Encumbered with responsibilities clogging
Up your quest menu

Then you can become an office worker

Or whatever
For some generic faction
And spend the rest of your character’s run
Repeating the same game loops

Over and over and…

Don’t forget that you’re not playing yourself,

You’re playing whatever the game
Needs you to be, and the other players you interact with
Will be expecting you to stay in character

Then you can participate in the same fantasy

Everyone else is helping create
And there’s no magic in this but you might encounter
The occasional monster, or a lot of them,
And yes, admittedly, the quests
Have a tendency to be
Heavy on the grinding while still offering
Very little as far as rewards go

There’s no point really looking at the reviews though

Since you’re going to be playing it anyways
But, honestly, it’s not for everyone;
If you check out the user statistics, there’s a few people
Who just quit before the game clock ends
Because a lot of the content simply isn’t fun
And, if you get too many bad dice rolls in a row,
The game stops letting you level up;
Forcing you instead to live like an NPC so that
Others can enjoy themselves

Sure, it’s a free game but you will end up

Paying for it with your life
BEFORE ENLIGHTENMENT

Zen is about no longer having anywhere to hide,

The entangling forest utterly clear cut

Facing the mirror then, but not even the mirror;

Here our own reflection is also gone

And religion and philosophy and science too,

Similarly ours; puppets we still operate

So we won’t find our freedom in these; true liberty

Being unburdened by any desire for control

As peach blossoms fall and pebbles roll, just

Like that: a clarity uninvolved
BINARIES

Either and othering our way through lifeless living;

The thoughtless mind as crude disjunction,
Foisted into its solitary joust
Where there’s no real sense of self or
Unconfined incarnation

But weighted with the superfluous redundancies of this,

Untethered as it were to an immediacy
Via which one might go beyond such insulation

Wider cognition, wider passion

To embrace that which releases us from our
Private envelopments;
A heterodoxy to compromise
With all the insistent suggestions of this static time
Where in which so many cannot undo
Their singular bondage

Contrast that now with someone devoid of oppositions

And you’ll find no symmetry in the other half
BIRTH RIGHT

Who to rule and how, wondering not

By a graduation of antiquities, the interregnums

Where different regimes added
Their interludes to history; such majestic
Anaesthesia as this, that the feral nature of all ancestry
Might, however rarely, partake of peace
Gratefully, though brief

Against an opponent populace, the opulence

Of palaces and advantaged classes
Unhindered by the hapless malice of resentment
Or the other hundred grievances
Agent in unending sequences of outrage
But ultimately uneventful;
These pleasing no one but those common pundits
Supposedly made uneasy by the so-called
Ominous dominion which has
Obviously benefited humanity so greatly

Blessed oligarchy, yes; attesting to aristocratic origins,

Confessing its supremacy over
Morbid democracy, that atrocious thing

People, like an oily liquid, polluting public discourse

With their majority demands; not knowing
Their proper place as servants, but rather roused and adamant
To parade a sham of damages
Levelled at their betters, though such obscenities
Are beyond defending

What a beautiful fetal authority we offer, pure of course

And still, the abortionist hordes
Organizing to undermine us, why? When they
Could just surrender to our superiority
COMORBIDITIES AS

As this disease is logistical, clustered

In the warehouse of the body
Where the index of impending demise vacillates
Like the price of gold
Inside a bullion exchange

As when I don’t want to look at the world

The way it actually is, addicts
Sprawled in sunshine but the cold
Doing its harsh work

As for the psyche guarded in its attendant neurons

When the self is sold off altogether, a kind
Of emotional land assembly;
The private equivalent of the fourth estate, like
Its sociopolitical counterpart, already
Bartered away, left
To the schemes of the most
Depraved, in us
Or outside us, the same mirror of incest
Purified to putrefaction

As like the rotting fruit in Eden where

The burning seraphim stood by in rigid sentry

As microplastics polluting
Fresh and salt water equally and
The prevalence of these
Offering our scientists a gauge for oozing exposure;
Toxicity like heat
A relativistic value so, as the former
Increases, what once
Felt toxic doesn’t anymore

As the horrors spring up, dense like pox

As our strobilation produces lifeless clones to feed
The surgeon’s hideous knife:
Nana-san-ichi Butai, Nana-san-ichi Butai

As the river turns black and oily

With the charred segments of the immolated dead;
We still find the faces of friends and family
Churning in the tainted waters,
Slackened-jaws gaping
In spinning relation to lifeless eyes, white
But empty, like the holes almost
Of a bowling ball

As the sound of multiple songbirds hitting glass

Interrupts actuarial serfs
In their dreary office cubicles; not
Entirely dead, the prey
Inside the python, exhausted

As age is visible in one’s own hands, the firm and beautiful

Imperceptibly ruined over soft decades;
A cheap kind of clay
Squished by childish designs

As it goes on, all of it, the bill increasing;

Larger and larger, swelling
Until it becomes truly unpayable
CONVEX : THE MIND OF TURMOIL

Are so the thoughts, happenstance

In necrotic umbilicals
Like the angelic to tongues searching from
Haggard pythons, glue-eyed

Plain in their fragility, these surmises persist

As alembic entities translucent
With ego, and the ash of carbonized grief
Hirsute inside the seed
That withers into dry dejections
Dangling so freely

Sly impressions, wry subjectivity

Preserved by cavalcade
Too disposable to haunt any living relative:
Pleistocene hierarchies regardless,
Even those

We have our soaked munitions still, an outpost

For rats and beetles in full
Fealty to chaos, erosion, disintegration

Where your grandfathers gave up old age

To feed the rot of unnamed trees
And weeds too ephemeral for anything but the
Dead worlds of photographs, it
Was the beginning of the deciphering for
Whatever time was
Left to come, the seasons arrayed
In a temerity reminiscent
Infomercial knives, inverted blades
Undisturbed in
Wide grammar blocks

Genius a species of rapport with silence

The pause is the invitation the opportunity
Youth was waiting for even
Before birth and afterwards, shameless in its
Urgency no matter how perverse
This becomes, this
Is no more than a pale echo
Half fossilized

Via my mechanisms of memory, evolved

From the lowly abacus
Once biologically equivalent to
Saddest bacterium

Delectable be nihilism, this insouciant infection

Operating by strange cost and rite

Utopia for a vial of blood, Hamlet’s charter

How the families intermingle
Like ticks
On the hide of several regimes
Like ticks,
Crawly insistent bastards to the last
Opaquely superfluous

One must suppose, if one is so inclined,

To do so for whatever reason
Or even as a whim and that despite not needing
Any justification, no because it’s quite
Commendable to be your
Natural self, but yes, given that
One needn’t suppose

A complete arc goes full circle:

{A complete arc goes full circle}
The arc is no more
In torture the dove betrays the nest,
The wasp their hive
And all specimens are pinned
In degrading shapes but
This too was always a part of nature:
Disasters ancient as stars

Where I am an admirer of is the prototype

Surgical in a consequence of its own existence:
Defined, an exclusion of refuge

But give me your ballet, you maimed dancer

DEER LAKE IN AUTUMN

The first time I saw it, I wandered down a forest trail

Entirely unaware of what waited below
And this, carpeted with yellow leaves, each step
Was faintly treacherous but
Through the trees, what wonders I saw
And these, gathered with their
Own sound, half hush half whisper

Were still just preparation for the view to come;

But soon the brilliant sky, a turquoise dome
Over its corresponding lake of mirrored jade where,
Gauzed with silver mist, the air
Hung still and patient with the world

And there, at the water’s edge, were marsh grasses

Jewelled with dew and diamond spider webs
As the bright noon brought forth
The swoon of nature today,
Here, without any reserve of glory

That a thing this enthralling, by sheer chance,

Might finally find its way to me
After so many years; the sweet pang of this
DILEMMAS OF INSOMNIA

The regime of night barricaded beyond glass

In vertical planes of outer limbo

As tranquility is scentless, textureless

Where sculptured power entombs without design

These oval tables, equidistant islands all,

Segregate the asocial strangers

Drooping over coffees like frozen waterfalls;

Lethargic too with their siphon eyes

Videos whose light cannot bleed into the uniform

Luminescence existing as if anvil

Upon which silent hearts are hammered

But, by in large, not for art or other soulful purpose

Only the conveyance of the hours continuing on

This brute being and solid unbecoming

And as empty as such midnight space can be, that

Comparing well to the void within
DISCLIDEAN

Worlding inimically shaped to the

Spiritual habitations of human beings;
Things of deranged angle
Allowed to bring about abysmal contortions of mind
And find purchase in careless nightmares
Egregiously tessellated

Construct a facet with blood and skin,

Let those elements be
Disembodied into abstract convolutions that
Project unfamiliarity upon our most
Intimate spaces;
Such are these convergences of atrocity emerging
Into summations unencumbered by
Even the most elementary of hospitalities

A dimension of ghosts, circuit

In torsion to some pseudo star that gives no light
But only serves a gravitational input;
Elongated in chains of horror
But never feeling, only the harmonic of this
A kind of sinister relic

Hyperbolic the hopes of some few remaining

But their trajectories naturally
Do not compute, those paltry nullifiers
DOOMED

The plant in the crack, the offspring flung out

As randomized seed to seek
Some scrap of vanishing time where
Orthogonal confines suppress
These pale roots of miming leaves

Vegetation slowly triune with despair in kind

Born empty, earnest, and unfeeling;
Mindless life, plight

Like the zeitgeist, a circumferential vice

Without reverence or affect
Where wandering phylum infest a warzone
In Yeatsian cones, the erogenous
Unknown a hot tongue
Wrung from twisted nuclei, medicinal
Nehushtans suggesting
Some absurd or wordless why

Ply the concrete, mutely physical

By performative extinction, still residual
In the palm of historic man, a hologram
As his feet sink into the soil
Where the phantom deity demands their toil
And now, he too with absence
Accrued can seek out the truth through
Ultimate diminishing

This tree, the sum of all our ancestors

And us, mere branches
Weighted with burdensome fruit and flowers
So not even as unfettered as saplings
No: each degree of freedom
Urgent only within the confines of these
Mundanely crafted coffins
ELIJAH’S SPIRIT

In fire taken, in fire on Earth

Where the feet of a prophet are a divine map
Arranged across the dust; the path
Itself, invocation to follow, whether by kinship
Or subtler connection though who
Can say? Nevertheless the zeal of spirit
Here is indeed supreme in its mysterious capacity to
Devour petty mortality and raise this into an
Incomprehensible zenith

In this day though, the empty chairs

Remain, reminders of that which has not yet come
And may never in one’s own lifetime; as far
As we might feel ourselves
From heavenly things though, our election
Into theophany is only
As distant as one man giving out
His breath to his people

Winds, unintelligibly eloquent, like a war

Of whispered words flowing through gigantic lips;
The cacophonous voice of infinite
Creation, naturally apocalyptic and destroying
Though, through this, redemptive

We are that which exists in adumbration;

A faint shining in the darkness
Like the swan still inside its egg, almost unrecognizable
But there, itself and onset
EMPTY COFFIN

Sleepless in an amniotic purgatory

Where rooms and body succumb to altering shades
Both ghostly pale and grey

A cavernous history underneath our arid skin

Where the human exterior
Divulges its trompe l’œil origins; persona
Segmented into
Wilted decorations

The petals of past incarnations

Like pages of the Talmud arrayed in starry order,

Each meticulous letter
Consecrated in a fragmented tome
Sepulchre to an unborn scroll;
An interrupted continuity of course but this,
Being no worthy matter,
Its happenstance holds none
In fetters

We do not live here, there is no life here;

Shut in such houses, we do not
Abide, regardless
Of how convinced we are

Time is full of impotent persuasions;

Laughably full of these
ENTOMOLOGY AS A THEOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Studying insects, we draw nearer to the divine because

Observing ourselves in this, we glimpse
Something of how our limitations must appear
To one with astounding perception

Every tiny creature we see is really just a reflection;

The light refracted through eternity
Where, by curious mirroring and lensing, we finally appear
In another form to our own higher selves

Because all life is topologically equivalent

No matter the amount of
Transformations needed to obtain this; seeing
Them truly, we see ourselves truly
ESP: I, ON AGE

you are one year older than me;

we share the same birthday, summer children
both of us enjoying
the longest day, the kindest
weather

and I almost feel I’m able

to anticipate your thoughts, so intimate the
sense of shared deception, species
such as we are, neither
completely human but clarified by the obtrusion
of lucid purpose, the inescapable
necessities of cold fact

the way idealism goes, awkwardly,

that’s nonetheless a bright omen of maturity

letting the superfluous die, within us

such that worn-out skin
unravels in a single warping sheet, a bridal veil
almost ourselves but only thinly so
as innocence marches
right into a granite crematorium

euthanasia, like the digital trajectories

trailing the icons of icbms
where the outcome is beyond analysis but still
mutually assured

far more often than apocalypse, the petty

business of useful gossip
and data collated into groaning reports
that, if they ever see the light of day,
are so thoroughly redacted no one could confuse them
for intelligence; disclosure
its own level of the game and here too
the farmed fish mostly
red herring

I live my life like a piece of garbage

dragged around by the wind
but this is not all that opaque now is it?

in youth any person has several selves and aging

means killing these one by one;
a symbolic initiation mirrored in the more concrete kind
shared by your brethren, the comforts of
the cocooned dissolving
into a thing now adapted to reality

somehow I’ve found myself in this place, awakening

after the locusts have already stripped
the trees bare and only the fading scent of lost blossoms
as a trace of what once was; relics
to be bartered by the prince’s bastard heirs

let’s be psychics, astrologers

enjoying ourselves heedless of time’s infirmities
since these make up our inescapable
inheritance; burdens
even greater than a tarnished citizenship
stained by banqueting wraiths

the black fruit, dry and fringed with the fuzz

of hairy molds while the meals
have long become a bed for maggots

we are that generation; this is

our own work
FIELD EQUATIONS

Pure ambiance without

Any meaning;
Like a massively multiplayer world somehow
Unpopulated and serenely so

Confession is less interesting than silence

So when the experience is
Liberal with us, we soon lose interest
And when we are
Liberal with ourselves, we too
Sense the absence
Of real enthusiasm in the things

Or people of course, though the boundary

Isn’t as great as normally assumed
Being that
Normal assumptions are
By far the worst

Normality so impeccably armored

Against all diagnostics

Normality the invader of so many

Consolatory dreams
Should these stray outside their nocturnal
Reservations; dreams the true
Indigenous self, a liberty
Obscenely lost

\\\\ \\ \\\
Each force has an angle and function
Assigned to it by a tantrum god
Without record
////// // /
I might add, that by observing entities
One can devise alternatives
So that where
Actuality gets a toehold
Close behind are the most absurd
Imaginings, vectors

Tracing their conceits directly

On unguarded minds

||| //// / / / __
___
GALLERY

I.

Memory, an empty museum

Nothing alive inside

But the dust does not fall here either

No sense of time or decay

Invades this place

And there’s something so comforting

In the lukewarm air here

II.

Pain departs

Agony a kind of dynamo only

Possible as action

Where desire doesn’t stir, nothing

III.

Real darkness is what exists behind the eyes,

Looking unhappily at itself

As absence is given shape, the urge

Hunger, that species of circumference, unable

To reach inside itself
HEALING IS FORGETTING

Healing is when the wound goes away;

Even the faintest scar is an incomplete recovery

And yet how often does this world

Encourage the [self-identifying as a victim?]

Never has humanity had more doctors of the mind

But never more psychoses and neuroses either

Society is sick, civilization is sick, culture is sick;

Now medicine means the “management” of disease

In its perpetuation, an endless regimen of

Pharmaceuticals and therapies

Yet how did people heal in the past? They moved on;
They just didn’t let misfortune define them

Whatever terrible things have happened to you,

These are not burdens you need to carry

You can use trauma for perspective or to guide

You in aiding others with the same

And still, no abuse, no tragedy, has to be

Incorporated into your heart

Whatever’s happened to you, none of it defines you

Though many will readily pigeonhole people

By their worst suffering, explaining in a friendly way

That this or that person is a “survivor”

Which isn’t healthy. Only apathy overcomes;

The pain, receding and incidental
HIBERNATION

This long autumn, a duvet of dusk

Spread thin across the coldly blowing grass where
The perforations of tired crows
Scrounge with dubious appetite for something
Veiled by incidental trial: fey morsels

Maybe, and what would be despised before

With an unimpressed eye today
Has the aura of good fortune and so something like
Weary gratitude suddenly corresponds to
Moments, however bitter those are

Hatred can be a kind of cored rock, far below

Mere roving topsoil and seeing
This, acknowledging it, the effort of a lifetime; enough
In fact to exhaust the un-buttressed self
Hunched over in ordinary strife

But who doesn’t sometimes dream of sleep?

As the aqueducts of eternity sate
Our urban hearts, that metropolis of ugly pragmatism
Gives way to bucolic trivia; procrastination
Never more startling in its lust
HIS HAND IS THE SEA

And so he waves and, as he waves, his wrist

Tilts side to side with the force
Of the waves, the waves animating his lonely hand
The way a buoy rides the bulging ocean
Because each wave surrenders
A portion of the tide, each wave expresses
Fractions of current, and there is no passion here
In the waves, the waving is not bound
To greetings or goodbyes, it exists as a kind
Of separate oscillation, peaking
And subsiding as equal ephemera, each wave being
Identical more or less, waving
Like an ordinary nondescript appendage,
Fingers splayed like sea spray, but the pieces still
Tethered to one another, waved
In organic unison, because the act of a wave
Leaves nothing in opposition
Since the water becomes one thing so too
The human body must be one thing, concentrated
Where a hand is the focus of the will
Surging in specific incarnation, the hand too
An instrument of a wave
Unwound from the incommensurate deep,
The wave is not him but it is his
And the waving a phenomena of outline perhaps
Where he is like the accumulation of water
Undergoing waves, waving at things
He himself cannot encompass the way the sea
Cannot completely encompass either, there is this
Act of waving realizing itself on the surface
But despite the nautical externality of this there’s
No discovery really, just the act of waving
And the sea crashing on the shore
Or continuing on out towards the horizon
In which nothing is ever truly held
HOUR OF LIGHT

Bleary the dawn but gorgeous in its own

Electronic way, the morning
Unfolding as indelible polygons, the power source
Feeding illusion, suddenly unplugged;
Surplus astronomy fading
Into the unknown but sovereign
Celestial monolith

Under the veil of the world, there utopia

Clefts its violet chrysalis; now
Newly wayward but never farther from regret
Since this unfinished freedom is still
Orthogonal to ritual meaning

Shapeless perception done, a home

As ancient as the cyclone but here even the coliseum
Quieted to introspection; humbled in this,
Its mass of utter resurrection

Arrival at last, the trials of the past forgotten

For a beacon fresh with exhalation
HUMAN ELEMENTS

The universe can absorb my full genius

Without the least perturbation

I’m a mid-sized microbe in a municipal pond

Unable to stir even the tiniest ripple

Wherever witches and demons appear,

These are simply private terrors

Privately created; I am not adversary enough to

Inspire stratagems from celestial powers

How frail this flesh and grandiose the ego!

That my mind could even imagine

A heaven threatened by an ignorant thing

Like me; what a narcissistic hell!
INFINITE THE DOORS

Some say this is the world of death, and I can

Tentatively agree; but then they’ll say
God is murdering us by the millions, and then I don’t

Who’s to say human immortality isn’t automatic

At its point of spiritual clarity?
Existence here, corresponding to essence

Because maybe we die by our own failures;

Just as mundane confusions
Often have their lethal consequences

So too, an arbitrary and self-perpetuated void,

Proportional to our own dishonesty,
Being enough to provide a fatal obstruction

What death is, is an absence of eternity right?

But then look at your own life:
Where’s the hunger for eternity in there?
INSIDE A DARK ROOM

A million eyes or more, never mind

The bastion of blindness

Not a sinking island, a whole continent diminishing

Along its crumbling edges, the earth
Descending underneath;
Back into the kingdom of the leviathan
And the roar of the dinosaurs,
Unready to become bones, will be silent still;
Ears pounded to absolute deafness

While Enoch and Puhua are uploaded

Out of the machine, this is into
Nothing more than another layer of sediment

However rarified, outer space is

Inherently airless; travelling
Farther the seeker invariably comes to some
Uninhabitable place;
Such is the beginning of wisdom, the
Dreadful end, so-lacking exit

Here, take down the patriarchal gods who gave us strength

And perform their astral castrations, yes

The old zodiac is the next sacrifice, mountains

Shattering over troglodytic heads;
Like children in the rubble of some clandestine air-strike,
We need not acknowledge these actions,
The bureaucracies responsible
Being well-versed in the benign business of
Ritualized cover-ups

Redacted the engorged dictatorships, the whoring violence

We cannot count the bombs we own so let us
Estimate them in casual approximations;
Some say this-many thousands, others say that-many
Thousands, but we can
Work backwards from the casualties
With which we impress the whole world, a lethal genitalia
Brandished like aroused bedbugs: because
The bleeding is so erotic

If horror is error, yet the ardent territory

Gratifies our tumorous hearts;
Not even any newfangled ugliness, just the ancient ongoing
Mangling where the fangs of tangled vipers
Drip their amber venom, vaguely
Honey-looking; hexagonal
Encryptions for the number of the beast

The demiurge is a geriatric man, wearing a worried

Frown on his face, trying his best to keep a grip on things

Nearly incandescent with sweat

And ambient light,
The fissured vein on his forehead throbbing;
A fading lightning strike
Upon that epidermal sheath of cranium

But the loss of sight | amaurosis fugax | can only last

So many billions of years before
Vision recovers itself; the hung strings reappearing
As the developing photographs materialize
Too, ornaments like the tow lines
On some paused kite;
The musculature of gunmetal clouds, ionized
With atmospheric wrath almost

The outside, the bared interior: us,

Fortuitously unfolded
INTRUDER

How many lifetimes must I live as a fox?

If the cost of a single lie is thus,
What hope have I of ever being free?

I die and start again; an eastern Sisyphus

Rolling the boulder of my soul
Toward a bleak mountain of buddhas

So many, I could not believe enlightenment

Had saved so many, and yet
Here they were: an unearthly gathering

Like toys heaped in a corner, and I said to one

“Tell me the error of my ways”
And he did, perfunctorily, sans affect

When I die now, I have no hope of certainty

But, freed from this, perhaps
Last year’s snows have finally melted
LITERATI

Delighted they’re sure for a lifetime

Of evenings spent gossiping with toy strangers
As the oblivious clichés
Are exchanged, along with promises
Of future get-togethers;
Because one must be politic, mustn’t one,
To guard one’s career prospects

To be able to talk about books of course is essential

But even more “essential” is to be able
To talk around books, to put
These books in their place and demonstrate your
Mastery over them

Literature, my dear, exists to gratify us

As an ornament of our affluence
Just as, in Eden, nature existed for Adam, so now
Culture exists for us; banish the thought
It might cost you anything!

(Of course the morals of the Bible are also fiction)

Only the most wretched and gauche will suggest

That you should embrace the possibility
Of pledging yourself to a disaster;
The unrewarded undertaking, however romantic
And noble, is not something
Any of our kind would be so foolish
To follow, no: never

Those unfortunate ones?

Yes, I suppose there’s a few of them who’ve
Crept into the canon
LIZARD COCKTAILS
A response poem to Andrew Lipstein’s ‘The Vegan’

Greener than any money and as flat as

Magazine advertisements;
How might we reconcile ourselves to such reptiles?

How? They procreate inanely, breeding

Wherever the sun is idiotic enough
To warm some black rock, some island haunt such
Cold blooded beasts can
Find their mindless pleasures in

It’s obscene but still, undeniably urgent

On an obsolescent globe ridged with

Tiny mountain ranges;
These the Himalayas, these the Peruvian Andes,
Differences nearly indistinguishable
To our traceless fingers not
Running exactly, nor walking as animated
Hands might do, but
Gliding; yes, that’s right, gli-ding

The urbanity of deceit here, the well-tailored

Deceptions from depths which
Cannot be measured by bodily means;
Like the rule of thumb
With which a man once beat
His precious ones

Intoxicated, naked, insane;

All these are synonymous in some sense
If the world is allowed
To adequately unravel itself

We fall apart, but they never do

It’s not even the scales then or the flickering tongues;

It’s their mute alien silence
LUCRUM SACRUM

Perverse of course, odious even;

What has long been the law of the land, still
This can be shameful

Behold their host of sleazy rationalizations

Founded on fiduciary “responsibility”;
As if any form of poisonous behavior was fine
So long as all the parties involved
Wore expensive suits and ties and did
Absolutely everything they could to get themselves
And their friends paid

The bonds of morality, ripped apart by

Frenzied masturbation; no one
That concerned really about the fraying social fabric
Except some impostors who themselves
Are also just in it for the money

Gilded churches, godless temples, proof

The beast runs free in our aeon;
Our system an animal with cannibalistic hungers,
And its children our own, these being
Lined up today for
Sacrifice to a loveless deity

But are we not enjoying ourselves?

MAKE BELIEVE

Shall the stone tower be a lonely place?

Its high balcony, open to the tall mountains where clouds
Gather like stairs, sunset
A shy pond of delicate memory

Freedom for the wings of the hawk, space enough

That acrobatic tongues can hold
Young listeners spellbound; in innocence,
As senseless as it is, still
The green vine flowers for dour minds, sharing
Some resemblance to our own
Fondest recollections,
Things too joyful to even mention but
Living on in loss, like moss

Upon the cold stone, life so humble and soft

It’s almost purely decoration

But let’s populate our stories with both

Heroes and villains, creating
The stuff of drama and strife, allowing our own
Conflicted impulses to lumber on;
Sleepless as legend
Despite its darkest throng

No more will nightmares impair us, these

Like captured hornets glaring
From the glass jars they’ve been imprisoned in

Helpless enemies since there’s none

To rescue evil; as when the bandits have all been slain
And peace returns to the countryside again,
Where the stone tower stands
Alone on the horizon, and people relax

In dreams the maiden of truth comes, offering

The unobtainable for free
MAN OF BUSHIDO

Mishima said, when confronted

With the choice between life and death,
Instantly choose death

Because there’s nothing alive anymore

For those enslaved by life

In the faintest splinter of fear, an eternal

Prison arises; the paralyzed mind
Overcome by its own lust for comforts and
Familiarity; the poison of attachment
Seeping through the body,
Turning one’s limbs into stone

Living without doubt or hesitation though, that’s

The essence of Bushido

The ensnared ones conversely are those

Clinging to their own skin like
A father left with the ashes of his murdered children;
They weep insanely, tears
Stained black with the dust of the dead

Elsewhere, a blade falls along its edge, dividing the

Entire universe on either side
And so we each have a choice: to be either
The scythe or the grass, because
There’s always this act of cutting; the void
Endlessly revealed

But then each moment of honest concentration

Frees us, however temporarily,
From everything else; seeing the emptiness
In this world, the fulcrum
For our liberation
What the masters practiced in the mountains,
The samurai sought in war; by fire
And horror and all the demons of hell, proof that
However mortal we may be,
The fearless are truly beyond demise

Beyond dishonor’s reach; and their victory

Already achieved, in acceptance
MANIAC’S RETORT

Hypocrites of bureaucracy,
Greyed normality

You condemn the passionate ones

And then go to the movies
Or play your vintage records and bask
In the ecstasies of art

Who creates that beauty for you,

You gluttonous parasites?

I’ll tell you who; it’s the ones who try to sleep
With their hearts
Beating out of their chests

Those assaulted by amazing inspirations

And hopeless with new ideas

But you see their struggles and smile proudly,

Feeling oh so justified by their injuries

Because you and your muted kind

Created a grotesque world
Governed by conformities, and not because
This did society any good, no;
The whole sickening creation here
Was simply predicated
On your own embarrassed incapacities

You couldn’t be free, so you anathematized

Freedom; you couldn’t dance

So instead you bought up all the music

MARCH 30, 1970

Unctuous as alley shade, fraught fingers commencing

Their hustle while a tumult from
Business-riddled streets spills past in
Psychedelic brouhaha

This is the kingdom of the crackdown, a bazaar

For creeping hungers unwound out of their initial whispers;
Intent reveling on the edge of cacophony

Nixed metaphors in hassled cities of psychosis

Please advise.

Ghosts formed by rapid havoc from doses of lysergic acid

Torn between comforting norms
And the tumors of light in military arrays

UFO-like street lamps hung as anatomized chandeliers

While a screeching trumpet demands
Its paranoid soliloquies; somersaulting crescendos
Where, as the music unravels, so too words
Unravel in parallax with
Art stripped down to its barest engine

Vertigo: freedom now like sepia-witchcraft crisscrossing

Rusted ironwork; expectations
Deflected by misdirection, a metronome returns

But only temporarily, unintelligible voices

Taunting the urge for meaning

Misbegotten-suave crooked and discarded,

The cold placenta flattened
On the floor and this isn’t a site to be old;
In an intersection hiatus, doubt forming like a chrysalis
At the syncopation of nocturnal traffic pulsing
In translucent darkness, every atom
Balanced on the mirror’s face, so simple in its imitation
While both mountain and abyss;
Giving in to extra-sensory-perception, jive
Unfolding from the serpent’s tongue
As knives hung upside-down reflect the glint of hissing steam
And the flames of restaurant kitchens
Surrounding fresh culinary victims prepped tonight
To be boiled alive, they might
Strive to die but cannot help being caught
In Nefertiti’s eyes

Please advise.

Guitars groaning at odd intervals, almost primal in their patterns,

But there’s the frisson of an unspoken promise too
Threatening to come true

A sub-Saharan argot, hybrid with European lexicons,

Twisted together to say the unsayable,
And yet the paths continue to coil in on themselves and overlap
In precise phrases punctuated by
Both blasts and echoes, the dichotomy
Between these never resolved, never fully brought
Under control, the mutating urge

For chaos adopting innumerable forms, reshaping itself

As easily in steady baselines as anything else

Horse reminiscent, a fixed gallop

For the whole herd as the hooves drive up dust
From the desert floor; while there need not be outlaws still
There are outlaws, armed and bandoliered
Out there, ever eager to raid
And crime is just fine; any moral vertigo
Purged in the virtuoso

Order unable to catch up to innovation; putrid chronicles

The fuel of sudden bonfires where creativity
Dances in erratic circles, weaving
A shameless joy on the plaza stones of
Soft percussion and rough horns halfway to mourning
But somehow still celebratory

Please advise.

An avant-garden abundant with such intoxicants,

The dauntless savant goes on
Unhaunted by slaughtered orthodoxies

However obnoxious and inauspicious a moment can be,

It’s only in the context of history that these
Reveal how they’re redeemed;
Unbalanced scales corrected by the added weight
Of unforeseen inventions, meteoric
Novelties descending out of nowhere and
Fusing in amazing ways

Tradition itself the instrument to be manipulated

Please advise.

Living in this zone of dissatisfaction,

Destruction has a home here
And the hodgepodge of a lawless aplomb dominates
The bleached skulls washed in saltwater
Shores; gone the thoughts
Of more where the no longer ominous door

It’s an immaculate new dawn

ME(DIA)

News about myself:

The intimate details of my life
Available for my own personal consumption

Zero distractions to interrupt

An endless self-absorption, so fulfilling
It literally has no peers

Just me and everything I enjoy

Enclosed inside a spherical mirror where
Reflection creates fulsome replicas

And every truth about me should be generous

Because the story of my life is greater
Than an assembly of facts
MYTHS OF EVIL

Though something will destroy me

This doesn’t make it evil;
Lions will destroy me but lions aren’t evil.

Supposing evil is real however,

What defines it? By what tortured, obstinate axioms
Does the traitor betray their treachery?

I can think of one: dishonesty

But not the frauds of haphazard adversaries,
Those moral distractions

Rather, the delusions we incubate within

To flatter our own worst weaknesses
And make virtues out of otherwise obvious flaws

The way a teenager’s long hair

Might be worn to hide an unsightly scar, so too
Adults still in hiding from themselves

But where the stakes are so much greater!

Life on earth is little more than
A deadly search to find the evil within.

It’s like any other thing where you get one chance
Except the prize is finding yourself;
And failure, perishing in total darkness
NOT CONTEMPORARY

Naturalness is affective where being natural

Becomes another ambition; that is
Itself no different than every other form of theatre
Whatever any aesthetic prejudice says

Professors will tell their students though to write

Without affect, as if there was no affectation
In this and, even as they insist on modernity’s freedom,
Unrolling their fattest scrolls of academic law

Each age’s revolts calcify into the next’s institutions

As the encrustations of order cool over
The lava eruptions of liberty; hardened skins
Of course devoid of heat and light

Themselves only the discards of energy, fossils

Of others’ genius, raised into authority;
Which is why it’s always better, creatively speaking,
To stand outside one’s own times

By straddling the present, one foot in the future

And one foot in the past, one may find
Oneself in better company; the silent camaraderie here
Offering blessed membership in immortality
NOVEMBER FORGETTING

Many died of course but, after them, the outrage

That towns across the country were
Emptied of their young men
Sons and husbands left unrecovered where
Foreign soil would break them down,
Afraid and unafraid alike

Dying by their disposable thousands in battles

Unfathomable to future minds, scales
Once mythic made grimly real

In such cruel numbers, never had there been

Greater sacrifice for obscurer reason;
And answers unforthcoming

So naturally the anger of the people ensues,

Justly aimed at a superfluous war
Cavalier with obscene costs

And to save themselves, to deflect the rage

Away from them, our tycoons and
Politicians devised this:
The poppy, taken from a poem, employed with
Clerk-like duty to erase the ledgers of
The slaughter from public gaze
Which worked, as anyone can plainly see;
Each Veteran’s Day the amnesia
Renewed for another year

While adjacent to the polished headstones

Where the war-dead lie, speechless
Eternally, we too stay silent

Dishonoring them by letting the fraud live on

In their stead, in place of living men;
Quite satisfied it seems
OOTHECA

That maternal shape, so exotic

To the minds of those
Primate on their colossal thrones

So fragile its embodiment, so soft the thing

Alive in its own minute way
Exuded for some dreamless promise
Origin in root biology;
And they have curiosities, though these are perhaps
Offensive to self-conscious beings gifted
With innumerable privileges

For an existence that fraught and stressful

However, is no sympathy due?

Some part, some scrap drawn from such

Enormous resources as those
At the disposal of the judge; surely any miserliness
Here is still self-debasing given the range
Of obvious trivialities
Which consume so much energy
And produce
So little empathy

In even the smallest continuities of life

There are marvels, silently
Awaiting appreciation by ourselves
Or others

Forms manifested without flattering prejudice;

And yet still, oddly beautiful
OURSELVES THE TREES

One wind to shake the leaves

And break the twigs that loosely fall;
Through awe the thaw
But let the ache stay raw and scar
As want; the haunted heart,
However fraught, need not avow its
Constant thoughts and crawl
In sobs and grave distraught; there
The brave are born anew
As bared to all, and tall, though few.
PALESTINE

Your raped body lies naked now, your babies

Dreamless in an infernal silence

Too unspeakable to describe, where the dust will be

Sobs like dripped-ink, staining earth

Forever as the thousand lies of beauty fail

And happiness, disproven too

Sorrow, robes for an imam who must

Dwell somewhere beyond hope; in places secure

Against tortuous joys; adopted by war though

This was never meant to be your father

And this world’s killers share a single birthright plus

Two piles: one bullets, one prayers

While not a person, still you bleed a holy land

Unholy by the milking of the dead
PERSPECTIVE

In the fragments of who I am

Everything is mercy

If briefly, coyly and fleetingly,

These relaxing thoughts

Are but temporary awards,

Still; they are mine, yes

After so many years of struggle;

A moment, genuinely calm

Beyond me, the world waiting

With, no doubt, all its usual ordeals

But I have had this moment now;

The proof, hereby obtained
POOR DAN

Angry man Dan, who’s twenty times better

Than any poet in the land
And somehow, oh man, nobody big
Seems to give a damn

And though I’m no special fan of the man’s poems;

No, though I’m not of the acolyte camp,
The clan of the meagre few elect
Famished for his light like moths at an outdoor lamp,
I can understand the man’s
Enraged candor about his career’s torpor;
Being treated to an unwelcome mat,
Like a tramp, by the grand order of the literati
Could sour almost anybody

The man is irate, understand? Because literature

Today deserves to be panned; a rampant
Conspiracy peddling intellectual sham and only our man,
The man Dan, can save it from the grave, yes
He alone, if anyone can

But, oh man, the hourglass is losing sand

And the man Dan battles on
Besieging the castles chattering-ivory towers
With a mind that’s like a battering ram; ramping up
The abuse of a most literary kind as
Solely he can, the man, the savage champ

Unafraid of crying babies, he’ll

Kick over their prams, yes this untanned Dan,
Even if that means
Living on the cultural lam, and just because
It needs to be done, the business
With the babies since they
Are all so bland
His autoerotic critical talk and, what some
Might call rather ridiculous onslaughts,
Are really the pinnacle of human thought;
Yes this has been confirmed,
And by the very man

Here I was, once so smug thinking

I was twice as good as anyone else but man
Even then I’m still
Not a tenth the poet of Dan
PREDICTIVE TEXT

Yes, ‘get togethers’ is a real thing. No, I didn’t mean tog ethers

In the past, we’d sometimes have to

Wrestle with our tongues
To figure out what we wanted to say

Now we still do that, but we also

Get to wrestle with technology insisting it knows what
We mean even better than we ourselves do

Sure, sometimes I find it helpful

When I misspell something but, even then, it usually
Suggests the wrong word more often

And now I find it frequently sabotages me;

Its programming seeming to dislike
The content of my thoughts

What an ingenious dystopia we’re slowly constructing;

Its tools of future censorship, so subtle
They manifested first as aids
PURE NEGATION

Words are childish but, living in a childish world,

We may play the games of children

Nutrition and flavor though, these are not mothered

By the intellect; because she is barren

And Liberation is just another serpent, coiling

Its victims, choking their natural life

So after all our books and idols are engulfed in bonfire,

Quickly throw in the bonfire too
QUID NUNC

Things being precarious, all of it

Fragile but graced by imparted composure
A degree, kindly calmed
This stuff is good practice, death
Impending as it does

Not with unusual severity, danger in fact

Posited only, circumspect
Even now with my posturing liquidation, wolfish
Perhaps in some illusory way, edging
Towards intimidation
As a bit of perverse solitaire
Siren by some lonely odalisque, stowaway
In the disarray of lust, resignation
Tempting and nice
Where the scaffolding of politeness
Ameliorates
Our ugliest edifice

Sum this malice can I, by finite notation??

For me today, okay
It is a rather tolerable amount
Life, enormous with racketeering
And extortions, it admittedly wears the rubber down
So that even in middle age: Surprise! You
Need new wheels to fit
An outdated model, maybe not
Obsolete yet, but soon

You could almost write a letter to yourself

Forgiving punishments
Self-inflicted with the eager aid
Of smug ignorance
It’s clarity and exhaustion: vaguely one
SELF.EXE

C:\ LIFE \ cd knowledge

C:\ KNOWLEDGE \ self

‘self’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or

batch file.

C:\ KNOWLEDGE \ dir/w

[.] [..] [AIMS] [DESIRES]

[FACTS] [IDEAS] [IDENTITY] [MEMORIES]
[PEOPLE] [QUESTIONS] [SCHEDULE] [TASKS]
CONCERNS.BAT INSTINCTS.BAT MIND.SYS PROCRASTINATION.TXT
SLEEP.BAT WHY.EXE YOU.TXT

C:\ KNOWLEDGE \ identity

C:\ KNOWLEDGE \ IDENTITY \ self

‘self’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or

batch file.

C:\ KNOWLEDGE \ IDENTITY \ dir/w

[.] [..] [ME] [PERSONA]

DOUBT.SYS HISTORY.TXT PRIVACY.BAT SECRETS.TXT
REFLECTION.EXE UNKNOWNS.TXT

C:\ KNOWLEDGE \ IDENTITY \ me

C:\ KNOWLEDGE \ IDENTITY \ ME \ dir/w

[.] [..] SELF.EXE SELFAWARE.TXT

C:\ KNOWLEDGE \ IDENTITY \ ME \ self

‘self’ cannot be run because the program is already running. If you wish to run the
program, please terminate the program before continuing.

C:\ KNOWLEDGE \ IDENTITY \ ME \ selfaware

Current date is Mon 10-16-2023

Enter new date:
Current time is 18 : 44 : 49
Enter new time:

The person that is you SOS (Sentient Operating System)

Version 1.38 Without (C) Copyright EARTH Corp 4.54 Ga, Universe 13.8 Ga

Self and its related concepts are aspects of the actually authentic condition of an
individually existing being that, in this case, has human and other characteristics.
Conditional to a sense of one’s own identity is a distinction of self that, like other
perceptions, is neither inherently true nor false. Rather, self is a surface category
of reflection properly invoked as a heuristic means for expressing valid distinctions.
Because of this though there is no “authentic” self to find or activate; the real self
is pervasive in all states and conditions, it being nothing more than what is essential
at any given moment. Which is why those in the lineage of Bodhidharma have
achieved success here by not only detaching from the extraneous and superfluous
but then detaching from even that preoccupation with detachment. Self, when it is
recognized as the immutably essential, ceases to be a concern and the authenticity
that follows this realization is a new satisfaction and imperturbability independent
of external conditions. In other words, enlightenment.

C:\ KNOWLEDGE \ IDENTITY \ ME \ cd desires

C:\ KNOWLEDGE \ DESIRES \ distraction

Running distraction.exe. Note that the time wasted here is not recoverable. You
are getting older with every passing second. Soon it’ll be too late.
SOUL CONJECTURE

Patience of icebergs after castled immanence

Gives way to the tremulous concave
Of odd axioms in manifolds abysmal, tripartite the axis
A type of saddle for equilibrium: aloof in liberation

Monastic the measurer, feted but undefeated

By the stratagems of matter, either things material
Being abandoned or absorbed into
Ethereal realms of inquiry: thesis and error
Quarreling from a quorum
Almost divine in its disintegrations

An infinity full of waiting maelstroms where their

Hypostatic maws masticate even
The second-best minds of passing eras but
Somehow the first prevail, so
Inspired, wondrously in abstraction

Therefore, one who can dive, who braves the deep

And crush of oppressive darkness
Can have their solitude rewarded, validated
With incandescent discoveries

A salvager, a human was, stretched into

Some curious membrane of inquiry;
Their symbolic entity, a trove for flames eternal
SPLIT DECISION

My soul has cauliflower ears,

Or the spiritual equivalent

Does that make me a champion?

No, but maybe I’m ready for my pro debut

And a rival is already waiting for me,

Waiting alone in his corner

My opponent dancing, shadow boxing

As I climb in through the ropes

A fight that’s been a long time coming; Vegas

Still trying to figure out the odds
TENEMENTS

The rustle of cockroaches in scattered paper,

Cold air thrusting through the cracks
Like ghastly knives; these hideous buildings,
A species of malnourished geese
Still laying copious eggs for landlords

Rot is thick in the musty air, a mildewed stench

Even deliberate corruption could
Not invent, such is the pedigree of this
Decay; what cannot be
Forgotten, to much-dismay

Powers that despise us do not relent

By their invisibility or our distraction, the task
Of undoing continues; piecemeal
Destruction like hard brickwork, adding
To the total ambition of ruin

As the factories of Time manufacture

New defects, these buildings join in the business
Of leeching off their tenants;
Each human machine taxed to please
Pyramids of inhuman hedonists

Where every infant psyche drowns in trash,

The whirl of swelling garbage
A kind of hustler at the door, pleading
So nicely to unlock this, but that’s
How its victims are taken

If not screaming the sirens still call out

On behalf of those born dead,
The cage door waiting at their mother’s cunt
For the mewling child, whose life is no less
An afterthought than that of poultry
THE ONLY WAY OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD
Parmenides to Heraclitus

He isn’t flying because he doesn’t have wings

And somehow this makes us
Poor terrestrials quite self-conscious

As a nest existing in all its component twigs

Suddenly separated and alive;
Dismembering its way into future unity

For these and other artless tabulations since,

Their orgasm and abiogenesis
Falls upon us as another errant feather

And the hatchling is squirming back inside its

Dull shell while the white shards
Reassemble into something: not an egg
THEY DO
For the poet Robert Okaji

The words live on, they do

Even those like refracted sunlight or fugitive shade

Fading away on old withering pages,
Survive in transformation; a chemistry of
Meaning underway where
Brute signals, tingling strange retina,
Amalgamate inside
Foreign brains and become
The substance of new thoughts, however
Subconsciously

The universe is a place of constant transmutation;

All its elements altering every other
And the totality of this a startling preservation
Of each incarnate thing;
The one divine body, immortal

Because what death is a part of cannot die

And as much as death
Shares in this, so do we; coequals

The fullness of infinitude is that the infinite

Is continued by its fullness,
Not one jot or tittle will be lost;
Within each seed of wisdom
The whole tree of wisdom survives forever,
Rooted beyond time

One only needs to consider poetry

Where does poetry exist? Not in the shape of letters

Obviously, not in the idiosyncrasies
Peculiar to any given language, but rather in
A greater meaning, though elusive, still
Common across eras
And countries and peoples; meaning independent
From its motley temporalities

So the universe is a translation device;

Its most unrecognizable changes, just the shifting
To a different language
Where the essence remains inviolable
And untouched

Maybe not in forms we can comprehend,

But the words live on; in the lives of others and
Elsewhere, more mysteriously
URBAN FUGUE

Catacomb Manhattan:
Arterial lanes correcting the artifact of buildings
Inverted into emptiness; roots
Unjointed to the terrestrial,
Discard-exoskeletons utterly desiccated

Human pedestrians contorted,

Piled in autumn leaves; a dry-surf scratching
As the rustling-probes of
Mindless air
Investigate with avian diffidence;
Talons clawing at the dirt,
Scavenging (of
a mercurial indecision)

City hall is the whale fall where

The darkness feasts

Light, an alien presence, summoned by oceanographers

For their voyeuristic enterprises;
Here the footage is excluded from the final
Documentary, such dreary
Predation deemed as uninteresting

Each highway, another harvested limb or

Organ kept frozen
Next to nameless cadavers

Ambulances trapped in traffic congestion, red sirens

Radar for the trauma, as mortal passengers
Bemoan the price of survival
While their towering claustrophobia
And terminal agora
Fall, like dust, on tombstones
WOMEN’S HAIR

It wasn’t until I was much older

That I gave it any mind

Before then, hair was just a thing planted

Mostly on top of people’s heads;
And it could be
Fine or unsightly but never
Significant

Hair had no allure for me: none

Like anything with age though, if you’re

Lucky you’ll start to
Be more appreciative, pleased

So now when I see a woman with

Tight intricate braids, I can admire those braids;
And when I see a woman with
Impeccably straightened hair, I can admire that too

Hair can frame the face, like a halo

Or it can highlight the neck, in velvet waves
Symmetrically uncoiling on
Either side of a classical column;
Hair is soft sculpture
And art and it adds life to human
Presence

I remember taking this Dutch girl I dated briefly

To a comedy show, and I can recall
Nothing of what the stand-ups said on stage
That night, but the way she
Combed her hair for our outing:

It was something special, let me tell you

XUEDOU’S LAUGH
Measuring Tap Collection, Case 54

What’s in your food pouch, you beggar?

Without even checking your own baggage you pester
Others with your hungers
And make absurd demands, screeching like a
Newborn bird, insistent of course
That someone else should digest the truth and feed this
To you in regurgitated form
But, when Muzhou does this for you, how
Do you respond?

Probably by staring blankly at him

You clueless hick, you
 OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

101 Selected Poems – General poetry collection

1985 and Other Poems – General poetry collection
Acheron – General poetry collection
Aegis Noise – General poetry collection
Alchemist City Stories: Abridged Edition – Short story collection
BIAS - General poetry collection
Essays on Art and Literature – Essay collection
Essays on Philosophy and Culture – Essay collection
Full Circle: A Selection of Haiku – Haiku collection
I, Narcissist – General poetry collection
Koan of the Dog Buddha Temple – Fictional koan and other Zen writings
Literary Reviews - Essay collection focusing on books
Occult Forces – General poetry collection
Political Apocrypha - Treatise on political philosophy
Prae Scriptum - General poetry collection
Selected Poems: 2006 to 2020 – General poetry collection
Society in Hell: Part One – Novel
The Architecton – Philosophical treatise
The Gestalt Prism – General poetry collection
The Plague Covenant – General poetry collection
Thyrsus Falling: A Novel About Evil - Novel