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love drops by with a jarful of ladybugs and a bigbag of Fritos has to have hotsauce on everythingeven Fritos love is unexpected tells us she originated from a roster of diagnoses as long as the unitedstatesconstitution and the lovers who came some heavyhanded all a disappointment some of them now are the ladybugspots tells us all this while we are enrapt we would follow her anywhere into the jar, down the hole she wears a sunlit halo askew when she wants to and it makes music and just like that she's out glancing at the rearview the ceiling is painted with ladybugs and it’s morning
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It isn't a question of if: We take it for granted the world will soon end. We've known this since ancient time. Any day now they will play the credits: the dramatis personae all left for dead in a . . . firestorm? A frozen wasteland? An irradiated plague-infested drought-stricken country lorded over by merciless cow-eyed scavengers? What is the so-called ended world? It stopped spinning? Is gravity suspended, all green things withered, all animals corpsed and rotting and earth become barren as the moon but for roaches? I believe the world will not end. I am certain the earth will outlive our scourge. Cheerless reassurance perhaps against the promise of extinction; all I know is: the green fuses of flowers still urge from cracks in the stone.  I rode the original surprise down into existence. From the first instant, the primal surprise, part shock, part question: What am I now? And here's Time. I know it because things move around, things made of matter constantly change their position. I wonder if it ever stops, time, if it ever does what's the difference? Somehow it seems there is goodness behind everything once we settle in the original compulsive act is generosity. We care but still can ask how minerals contain feeling? I rode the original surprise down into existence. And after the surprise, my annihilation? Am I a candle going out, or a bomb going off, a light switch or say a placental birth, messy and irrevocable? And in the end, despite my urge to compel the objects of my desire to align, the surprise will be allowed.  Pecker. I envy writers skilled enough to compose formal poems who toss off sonnets or forms I scarcely can pronounce much less execute. So I set myself to writing a formal poem (and have yet to manage it seems). No matter the form I fail often by the first line to concoct anything presentable. I find my success hinges at this point on creating my own form, which I have done: a baganellestina, consisting of three stanzas, each of which must begin with the word pecker. The poem must contain the name of the form, baganellestina, at least twice. Each stanza must be composed of a different number of lines, in no case less than seven nor more than twenty-six. The first stanza should serve as an introduction to both the form and the poem itself. The second stanza should in some way indicate the structure and formal requirements of the poem, and the third stanza—which, like the two preceding it, should begin with the word pecker—ought to digress tangentially from the subject of the poem thus far, and while prolonged technical explorations of Indo-Syraic archaeology may inexplicably be juxtaposed with casual mention of data acquisition and the seven deadly sins, these latter may at no time be enumerated, nor shall revelatory details from the personal life of the poet be divulged. The poem must once and only once violate its own form and should in every case with a verb conclude.  A man is inside a camera. He squinches one eye and peepholes at the green world. Outside outside the dream a man in the dining car of a train spills cola on his camera. Inside the camera it is raining cola. My dream is dissolving in soda cries the man. I can see green, and I will not get there, no not ever.  When he was a boy, his mother fit glasses over his eyes to help him see God. The lenses focused very far away, and went dark when he looked in the mirror. Every melty bite of this cheeseburger triggers a billion biochemical reactions-- That's called nature. It breathes my breath-- we share that job, nature and I. I can breathe just fine if i will it though I forget for days at a time while nature breathes me. Does nature make my decisions? Nature pumps my heart I think and precipitates my emotions but I do the math. Wait—is that me flexing my diaphragm, gathering hemoglobin from the atmosphere? Does nature think my thoughts? This is the seed of madness for which the lotus is the salve.  of the dollmaker who built the world and you a doll made of peoplestuff. The dollmaker stuffed you full to bursting with longing and urges. So you set yourself to filling the dollhole (the funeral march of the dolls!) I was a doll for a time but now, well, I'm a whole dollfull or you grow weary or injuries add up or you lose your love of dolldom (dolling around is all we've ever known!) Awake! you suspect another way—outside the playroom still dollish but . . . lighter? the door to the playroom is: secret? heavy? What is outside the playroom you ask the other dolls. One beams you a dollsmile.  a demand made merely by the realization that you are here - We were elsewhere? You are here, on this shore that is as certain as the sand. It beckons: for some it taunts write your name. Leave a mark. Tell us what happened, how it taints you. Write it in the sand before the tide. Call it a legacy if you will-- and yes, you will, you urge and urge, All Nature urges through you saying, write it in the sand.  meet to study whether the earth will continue forever or whether the end is in sight. One scientist says the earth’s orbit spins in synchronicity with man’s ignorance so it will go on forever. One scientist says god has thrown heaven’s garbage into this hole and the weight of all that garbage exceeds critical mass so we will all be killed. One scientist who was raised in a good home says look at how many organisms coalesce and reproduce. Cell division all of nature and the deep oceans are very divine. One scientist says, shit. The first scientist who was the greatest scientist of all stands in front of the committee and says listen to me. One scientist in the back of the room pulls the fire alarm. Listen to me listen to me says the first scientist as the committee scrambles from the room. Isn’t this beautiful says the scientist whose family loved him.  You can see this. Watch the mountain. Watch closely, for some time. Watch for ten million years. Stay as long as you like. The earth heaves up a mountain. Or the mountain heaves up itself. Watching will not tell us which. It emerges. The mountain crests from the earth into the sky then crashes down, or dissolves, melting back into the earth like a great stone wave, a wave breaking so slowly. It says, I am no more solid than rain. The world urges mountains in their season urges apples from branches, urges babies from their amnion. They are of a piece. An apple is a mountain. An apple self-complicates from blossom to flesh fills with juice, drops, urges back to soil to make more apples. No one demands this, not god, it happens. You might say all of it is a verb.  hear her screaming at her sister in the backyard dragging on a clove cigarette stroking her cockatoo, a rescue cockatoo that won’t fly eats raisins and talks it says Pete is a dumb fucker it says Oh boy oh man. She screams at her sister Won’t you please I’m begging you don’t make me ask again. She heaves an unopened can of tomato paste out the screen door where the screen is torn off. It arcs over the lawn and hits her sister square in the ribs. Her sister screams back god dammit I fuckin hate you the bird jumps from her shoulder to the ground can't fly and picks its armpit with the pointy beak tip not an armpit not a wingpit maybe an underwing I can’t stop wondering what to call it while she is still screaming at her sister who charges for the back door intent I think on retribution for the sauce can attack. Stay away from me I told you I told you so many times. You fucking canned me you twat. Her sister slaps her face open palm leaving red fingerstreaks. She cries while her sister remains indignant until they break and collapse on each others’ shoulders faces in the armpits wet sobbing until she shoves her sister away. You stupid cow I hate you go fuck yourself you whore. And her sister goes out for the bird. Oh, I see. I might have brought it up. But not having to do with me, just I mean, the wind is a very deceiving thing. First of all, we don’t make the windmills in the United States. They’re made in Germany and Japan. They’re made out of massive amounts of steel, which goes into the atmosphere, whether it’s in our country or not, it goes into the atmosphere. The windmills kill birds and the windmills need . . . I mean, for the most part they don’t work. I don’t think they work at all . . . and that bothers me, and they kill all the birds. You go to a windmill, you know in California they have the, what is it? The golden eagle? And they’re like, if you shoot a golden eagle, they go to jail for five years and yet they kill them by, they actually have to get permits that they’re only allowed to kill 30 or something in one year. The windmills are devastating to the bird population, O.K? . . . So, if I talk negatively, I’ve been saying the same thing for years about you know, the wind industry . . . Some environmentalists agree with me very much because of all of the things I just said, including the birds, and some don’t. But it’s hard to explain. * Original text by Pres. D. Trump, verbatim, in an interview with the NYT Editorial Board, 23 Nov 2016.  |
Poems from Other Days
September 2021
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