By the Sword
by Dennis M. Hammes
SCRAWLMARK PUBLISHING
Moorhead, Minnesota
The FISHHOOK Group
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BY THE SWORD
SCRAWLMARK PUBLISHING
Moorhead, Minnesota
The FISHHOOK Group
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
By the Sword
Copyright 1995, 1996, (C)1997
by FISHHOOK and Dennis M. Hammes
All rights reserved.
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Scrawlmark Catalog #DMHSWORD.ZIP
ISBN:
LCC Cat. Nr.:
Scrawlmark Publishing
1016 South Third Street
Moorhead, Minnesota 56560-3355
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
for
James Kenneth Larson, d. 1975
We only persecute the ones it's safe to
persecute.
-- Anthony Boucher
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Table of Contents
1. To J, M, PDQ, SOB, ETC
2. Amendments II
3. Armistice
4. Dry Snapping
5. Tank
6. Occupation
7. War Relics
8. Little Big Mouth
9. Widow's Walk
10. Dominion
11. Two Swords
12. P.S. 137
13. Horeb
14. Motion Denied
15. On the Green
16. Holy Saturday
17. Eternal Father
18. Night Watch
19. Class Dismissed
20. Nostriolet
21. Gargoyle
22. Wayside
23. Odysseus in Ithaca
24. Graveyard
25. Grief
26. Dead On
27. Asylum
28. "Equal Justice" Is Redundant
29. Minnesota
30. Dr. Kevorkian's Children
31. River
32. Victim
33. Foiled Again
34. If Pigs Had Wings...
35. Flameout
36. Ice Water
37. Spirit
38. Vet's Club
39. Ace
40. Ghost
41. Passage
42. On the Maintenance of Purpose
43. September Song
44. Song
45. Solstice
46. Anachronism
47. Animula
48. Concerto for Blunt Instruments
49. We Regret
50. In Country
51. Cat Fight
52. Book Worm
53. I Doubt It
54. Phenomenon
55. "Cold" War
56. Seeing
57. Sartre Suite
58. Thanatopsis
59. Turnabout
60. Memorial
61. You, Ralph Emerson
62. Owed on a Clone
63. Reflections on Fishhook xix
64. Troll
65. The Difference
66. 172
67. P.S. 31
68. Your Honor,
69. TV Guide
70. Moritake
71. A Conjugation
72. Election Tuesday
73. Purpose
74. Holy Communion
75. Our Town
76. Making Up
77. Mystery
78. Fire /Or/ Ice?
79. Incident In Da Nang
80. Dedication
81. Definition
82. Fruit
83. Planning Commission
84. Question
85. Biology Film
86. Bomb Shelter
87. Justice
88. Pastor
89. Sample
90. Strategy
91. Survival
92 The Graduate
93. Capitol
94. O. J., 1996
95. Oops
96. Pity
97. Proletariat
98. Stoppage
99. Suffragette
100. Whuffo
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1
To J, M, PDQ, SOB, ETC.
Author from the bank returning,
Spoiler of the printed page,
Here is cash that asks not earning:
Write you in a carnal rage.
Sex is come, so farewell lover,
Welcome broken words and all:
While the boyfriend rolls her over,
Your thesaurus hangs in hall.
Tell the gamester growl above her;
Write the raving anapest;
Type the tattle to discover
What it's like to be a breast;
Tell no plot, nor any story;
Let your manuscript drip beer;
Never, never, have a quarry;
Let no single thought appear.
Now no more of finger-biting:
Sex is safe from fall to spring
Curses set aside for writing
"How-To"s for that midnight fling.
Rest you, brain, and rust you, pencil;
Swede and printer, keep your pay;
Author, sit you down and stencil
Out the bouncing night all day.
* with mumble apologies to A. E. Housman
2
Amendments to the Constitution: II
The nitro-pungent whiff of oiled-gold cartridges
Sealed, long and cool, away from the Garand
Dissolves this panelled wall to fields where partridges
Fell from the long voice in my father's hand.
He raised his hand, and left for numbered ridges.
They sent his things. He's healed of blisters and
The nitro-pungent whiff of oiled-gold cartridges,
Sealed, long and cool, away from the Garand --
But left ballistics law, and other drudges,
That we will green a state paid on demand,
And smell again, when children cozen judges,
The nitro-pungent whiff of oiled-gold cartridges,
Sealed long and cool away from the Garand.
____________
/Garand/: U.S.Rifle, caliber .30, M-1.
A big, chunky weapon, more suited to
stopping the beef than shooting the bull.
3
Armistice
Seven stroppy logs of oak
Were propped along the wrought-iron rail
c That rings the hearth. Each puffed smoke
Though some scratched lumps or spat, and spoke
Of evenings on the trail.
Their cookhouse camaraderie
Was joined by feet (two large, two smaller).
Sweet rolls and two cups of tea
Mellowed the bitters poured for me
And chased scotch for my caller.
Steel and wood now weight the wall
Their outline wonce made lighter,
And slippers scuff the darkened hall
Since the captain came to call
With praises for my fighter.
4
Dry Snapping
Allow the special alloy of the Special,
Double action double checked and hollow,
To alloy the eye, rediscipline the forearm,
Last the special reflex to the bloodline,
But not yet spit the pine knots from the wall.
Practice while the bloodline is still social,
If not the species' sense of being special :
Straight out from the hollow of the gut,
Let it find the knot and barely snicker.
Do all of this until you get the point.
Hard and hollow on the wooded wall,
The knot is the bare hollow of the gut :
To be less knotted in the wooded hollow,
To slide less when the sliding foot
Presses to the ground the snickering wood,
That last the last sound one of you will hear
Is a dry snapping.
5
Tank
Does it matter, now, what kind of cannon smeared
Its blooded cargo, or who flicked its string?
The bronze-fisted arm accuses skyward,
But for death (its? theirs?), or our poor practicing?
We shattered pellets on the fearsome thing
Exhibited by the elders at Grafenw”hr,
To try the shiny bore too small for bear;
And, failing that, we shuttered it on film,
A flicker sent to bash the unabashed
With our bright, flickering moment. It was dumb;
I mean the beast, mute, pictured king of the smashed
Hill still -- well, there it is. But freshly gashed --
The one we shot at with a cub's false lust
Was one that stained the whole earth with its rust.
6
Occupation
Though we'd signed treaties, some were yet
Destroying papers, scrounging a set
Of underwear,
Or pointing pictures. None was a Jew;
Still, we'd had to have a few
To walk on air.
Deprived of their he-manly toys,
Boys went back to being boys,
Store clerks, and robbers,
While we watched so that /Bundes-/boards
Beat no dictums into swords :
The peacetime jobbers.
After the bombs and bullet scars,
Twenty years rebuilt the bars
In downtown Munich;
A split arch prods the unafraid
With victory, and that methods made
It largely Punic,
/"Delenda est."/ The always prize :
The plain applause of net-sheathed thighs.
In reborn Bonn
The browning streams turned into beer,
/Fasching/ went off with a ragged cheer,
And drink went on.
Before we sat, I and this German
Had antipathy in common --
Nothing other.
But beer-talk plucked our eyes half out,
And the new view was more than doubt
Though less than brother.
Smooth whiskey played a Scottish skirl
As each approved the other's girl
And the /Pie'ta/,
Though we'd seen neither (took our word);
And, as sublime became absurd,
Misquoted /Go"the/.
He showed his tattoo with a grin,
And I mine : these approved us men,
With hides of leather;
At /wiedersehen/, our apocrypha,
The eagle and the swastika,
Were shaken together.
My ears distort all sound. Indeed,
The whole earth howls on my right side,
Providing data;
I watch /schnapps/ dissolve my watch
To wool, as world becomes a blotch
Of bright errata.
7
War Relics
He rolls a highball, holds it on his heel,
Then wraps a kneebolt up behind his head.
The untouched frosh flesh drops its eyes to squeal
The clown-elect, a derelict half steel
Who props his tubes, then tubes himself for bed,
And wonders why Jud Frye is only dead.
8
Little Big Mouth
Then you, whose cheeks engulf the threatened chair,
Slack muscles long ignored, your belly bare,
Drew out your jackknife, quartered the last pear
To burn its guts, and sniffed that it's not fair
To foreign folk whose fathers upped and died
So I could eat. Well. You can play outside.
Because I'm here, unlicked, and somewhat snide,
They get your vote. Now, what does that decide?
We fired because they fired, and they because
We grow pears. Now of all economic laws,
"/Si vis pacem, para bellum/"s flaws
Are many, but the worst is little jaws
Whose sucking noises drive all thinking out.
You and the pear are here : eschewing clout
Won't change who kept the loot, who got to pout.
And you don't speak the tongue you cry about.
9
Widow's Walk
Those eyes pierce mine while passing by my heart,
That saw what was for twenty years.
Then this.
Erased the features are familiar
As senile wrinkles may relate the youth,
But that lithe lad I laid has laid a man
In this salt mariner; the rope of war
And twenty years squeeze off our present time
And leave me but the nominy of him
To whom I clove my troth, and that sword oath
That told him from my hearth.
Sun and the moon
Burn twenty years his friends beneath the tide
While that erased the strand to write the strand,
Removing sand to leave a little sand
As I wove.
How shall I have husband him
Whose loom has kept the strand of his own story?
10
Dominion
And death is no dominion : never over
Those who swallowed green Aegean fire
Past the gasped judgment or long terror
That shoulders straining at the callused oar,
Long servitude to pain, and thanks for swill
Were better than this genesis of self
Into the sea's quick voice, less quickly stilled;
Nor these whose blood made ribbons on the Ruhr
That minutes past trailed ribbons from a roar;
Nor hiding at a heavy hull, held out
The voice of water driven by a can
Past timidness or welcome for this union,
This bang, met with a whimper or a shout,
An end at least to fear if not to doubt.
For seeps through spring to singing in the birch
And through the thrush to animate the cat
This sea; and here the hare's precocious twitch
Or that opossum's long blind grab for half
It sees when shuttered eyes get round to vision,
The sea comes home, and articles of self
Again assemble into constitution.
11
Two Swords
/Basho^:/
Liveliest blade, /katana/'s gem
Is passed precisely through the stem,
And watch the blossoms drop like blood
In pseudotemporary flood,
They stain the ground, and scent the rain,
And fly back to the branch again.
/Luke:/
But since, to bother things in bloom,
A larva's lung is little room,
About the iris I will go
For blossoms unconsumed by snow
With one light sword and pocket fire
But not the let of those I hire.
12
P.S. 137
By the Laughing Water we sat down
And added tears when we remembered deeds :
And our guitars hung from the plum's new thorn
While they that poured our milk demanded moods
And warmed their coffee with our fathers' words.
They piled our corpses as they prodded song,
Yet shall I sing although the land be wrong.
If I forget our Concord, let my hand
Forget the cleverness it taught the pen,
My thumb abhor the stone-taught steel, and sand
Stop tongue to palate while the living ten
Abandon me to juries of children
And I forget all of your words I saw
If I prefer their corn to living law.
And law remember dogs of dogs in streets
Who stoned our fellows with our marketplace
And smeared our pages with their melting sweets :
Thou child of Congress, these the law embrace
That turning in the season of their place
Rejoice to serve you with your very own,
And sing who sting your children under stone.
13
Horeb
/From Mt. Hor the view
is one of magnificent sameness . . .
-- Robert Frost/
Upon this unslaked slate a man could write
All that he would, except this weight of light
Where space so presses particles of stone
There rose this rock, protruding like a bone.
Here ends the ease of Goshen and the Greeks,
The rice, the wine, the rouge on watered cheeks;
The ram of Egypt, the Atlantic Fault,
All space and the lunar haul come here to halt.
The rock like brambles and the light like flame
Everywhere assaults the eye the same,
And in this flaming crush my sojourn saw
The all-beginning and the end of law.
The earth still shrugs this place from time to time,
As though to shake things up as much as I'm;
Then let sun shine else megaton rocks crush,
Tumble and thrust, and break this awful hush:
The light holds this, as in a photograph;
Overexposed, as instant as a laugh
And more eternal than a rock can be,
For light was first of all that came to be.
And one man dwell on what the round world lack,
Rock has more voice than that the tall rock crack,
And one man dwell on what to make his own,
He learns the heavy penitence of stone,
And I should dwell this lordly house forever,
But for that the living rock wakes never
Because the pressure of the falling sky
Keeps weightless rock asleep. I wonder why...
For rock this bright /is/ weightless in the sun
And rises with the whirling of the dun
(Sir Isaac measured with a pendulum)
As though on fire in a woodless sum.
But light is not the whole that I confront:
Here stones assembled into covenant,
Begot that generation-prompted awe
That children reassembled into law.
The rock is weightless. Pressure of the air
Has cleft it down to pieces we can bear
And carry off to temples struck from this
With all their weight and their antithesis.
Let not the bone speak back but speak along
That holds to heart the space around the song,
For time has stitched what time will yet unfrock,
And bone will add its litter to the rock...
A kind of rock assembles into bones
That press the air to congress into tones;
The random wind blows sand to blanket shape
And yodel at the ear attempts to ape
Its other lives... Here is the start of time
Where life can find a base to start its climb,
That will not yield to pressures from the wind
Nor sway with friends to alter or rescind.
No frightful future and no aching loss,
For here there is no past to crawl across,
Only the present hour, and that amassed
As if the stones themselves could pray and fast;
And here I am and here I shall remain
Attempting time the ear cannot arraign
Between the fire and rock the heart's air tossed
And heated past the sun to pentecost
To understand one covenant alone
As changing as the statement of this stone.
14
Motion Denied
Some jokes made once when time was young
Are seconded by any tongue,
And some are stale their second time
Whether written, played, or sung.
You're not the first to try our climb
Up from the unlaughing lime
To sort the petrine polyglot
And leave your digits for your rime
Like scrimshaw in the coffee pot,
Your only art a Rohrschach blot
Repeating nothing but your youth
Uniquely seasoned with your snot.
Nor will your saging of old sooth
Brick once the pyramid of truth;
Consider that your average kitten
Will not repeat the sabertooth.
Your littleness just isn't fitten
Whether sung or played or written,
But still you think that you can clot
Off whatever you have bitten,
Like knowledge was a wound: you swat
Two words to see just what you wot;
That is the oldest joke of all.
Being smarter, it has not
Named "poem," what is only scrawl,
Nor "bravery," what's stupid gall:
Nor stay behind nor run away
Nor stick your finger up at all
The lines and adlibs in the play,
Still here you are and here you stay
To live to try another day;
To live to try another day.
15
On the Green
I've played the fields at Eton
With sweet Spring to my knees,
Without my Queen to sweeten
But by thought, such stout and cheese,
And here she matches pitch for
Pitch, and slice for slice, with me,
So what have you to bitch for,
Pilot, where the Spanish be?
The wind is lee, the yards are set
The stays are at their strain,
And it is forty minutes yet
The Thames begins to drain.
So quit your idle clatter,
Pilot; pour you some Pinot,
And all the pins will scatter
From the way you've held your throw.
16
Holy Saturday
/Winter kept us warm./
-- T.S. Eliot
I. /The Burial of the Dead/
A clap of time, and thunder ends in pellets,
Puddle of flesh that stains the whole effect.
Was all this mess necessity?
We got the point, Old Man, we got the point;
Already the flies convene to crawl the story.
/Nunei de mei, to tria tauta/ :
Field, fold, and feeling; of these three
The greatest of these is feeling, and of that
A feeling for the limit of the feeling,
A functioning shit-detector.
Old Man, making
Dust of ten number-two pencils and a morning,
Dust of dust, ashes of ashes, hope of love,
/to tria tauta/, why should I give a damn
That accident bespatters foreign place?
You doomed creators of oblivion,
Trying to hide your strychnine in old lace,
Why bluepencil with an ounce of lead
What an ounce of lead will find again?
A mystic paragraph to try to follow,
Parenthesis with one end blown away,
Your participles dangling from the wall?
Send not to know : your residence in me
Is quite as mortgaged as was in yourself.
Too much to write was what it was : the rage
That you would never finish out your page
Before the fourdrinier of flowing water
Tore off the coming-out of your most daughter,
This bint lingo.
Old Man, what of it?
The speech of children never goes from scream
Quite far enough to dinner with a dream
In one old man. At any time. So shove it.
The marvel of a dancing bear and speech
Is not that it may modulate from screech
Into Baryzhnikovs of vocal reach,
But that it pull its pucker from a peach
But long enough to thank-you. Not to teach.
Get your head out of your anal phase
Long enough to praise.
II. /A Game of Chess/
Who is that on the other side of you
You have not quite as much of in yourself?
Lady, three white pawns stand around a bishop
In which a nimble infant wants a passion.
In this the evening of our nimble passion
Whom must we suspect before the cockcrow?
By my nose, you bishop hath the look,
And /fienchettos/ him with men-at-arms
That close his corner also from yourself
While sitting out the game in splendid fashion
Staring a single line. His keep is locked;
His knight is barefoot and without a guard;
And they the while must stay their place or else
The whole fraud fall. Salute the clever boy,
How he invites the infant king to hide
Behind the walls and arms of holy mother!
Whatever the game come, he has made his place;
Crown and command capitulate, His Grace
Will never let an egg upset his face!
Four corners of the world, and four broad rooks
(Removed they can be, but they cannot spall
Nor ever sprout our ivy from a cornice)
To bound the lines of things. I hadn't thought
A wall could be so supple or so shifty.
And we'll infest it all, begging your pardon
My most milady, with the what we will.
But how shall we, whose harps are stopped with willow
Sing our Zion in an alien game
Although the game demands of us a song
The long clang of the sword gone wrong?
O my Lady, what have all these rules
Done unto us so lately? Why have we
No hope of heaven but to do again
The pieces from the box? And why have we
No hope of god to cover our mistakes
But only to begin the game again
Fresh from the crib? Behold the Lamb of God.
Methinks that bishop's nothing but a pawn
And where that leaves the king is hard to fathom :
Into the fray and have us at a song
Never the harp stopped ever or for long
For always some damned fool will find to sing
Some 'vantage of the board that swells the rout
No matter that the pieces go to box
And never to repeat the thing again
But in the opening. Behold the Lamb.
I feel a virgin, and my blade is worn
To but a foil in your unblushing service!
The play's the thing, and all our zero sum
Is all the man conserves by /fienchetto/.
He sits a pawn, promoted to a bishop,
For having learned to look along a line
And all our game be certain not to block it
Or else he's back to being but a pawn
Without the pawn's promotion or advance.
He will not dance the dance there is to dance.
/Moriture saluamus te./
But who's that on the other side of midnight,
And this the longest midnight of the year?
Who is that bishop with the frightened leer?
And must we shuttle in the same old ways,
And start again and come to zero sum
And all the pieces come back from the box.
When will this round of resurrection cease?
III. /The Fire Sermon/
The brook is wetted broad beyond its banks,
Benign in the crash of glaciers into pine,
And what is not to pine weep into prairie,
Sipped in the stalk by timid feet and tiny,
Flown in the veins of insects. What does not fly
Field, fold, or feeling, folderols of fledgelings,
Ends it here, weighs stasis, light like steel,
And objects whom the water hones to nothing.
Those these in whom the river tenders time
Stay this middle stream, pretending term,
Their world leak down the ocean sewer,
Dreams' grave and the world's one tear.
By our water we sit down and weep.
Well, Old Man, if we must haul your ashes
Haul we will.
But not on younger foreheads.
Sprinkled on the steel head of the stream
For trout to tout, and scramble of the salmon
To squirt and die and trickle to the Gulf
Where all things settle, scattered on the bed
Where bitterness may turn in time to limestone :
Steal softly, stream, lest that old kraken wake
On whom we trip unheeding in our green
And pesty dawn, that alkaline rock rise
And leach the sap out from another season.
* * *
Though all the law trip on the younger tongue,
There is no reason we should choke on ashes,
Nor bow to babes with kingdoms on their hair,
The unearned silver shrined amid their teeth.
The lilies breathe their sugar from the air
To root in silence what the next shall bear
To his uncomely belly; and the law
Out-stare no decisis of comely youth
To have its meals on time because it saw.
To the Fall of water we are no more bound
Than water is.
The river is among the stronger gods,
A god whose grip is never broken on
The dance or ashes of the lesser poems;
Silver at dawn and steel by afternoon,
Against whom every battle's always won
To lose the war :
the earth her gigolo,
Leaving of itself at every touch
To be it left in turn at every turn :
And then she to Poseidon once again
Who give away, revirgin in the rain,
This svelte snowbunny of the great divide
Revealed of all except the pending ride.
And that, Old Man, is not a store for ashes,
Shooting rapids in a bit of rubber,
Though we who worship at her fickle stuff
Come always in the very dead of winter,
And find the place unsatisfactory;
Only to leave, over hollow centuries,
Four notes from Siegfried, while the clarinet
Eddies through the /G”tterd„mmerung/.
That is no country for old men.
To lose itself, a laziness of lawyers,
White bodies naked in the low, damp ground,
Squirming through a lesser vegetation,
Scared of spiders and in awe of ants,
And rolling up the armor of its pants.
IV. /Death By Water/
The mice step often and the deer step deep.
Sweet stream lie softly while I wend my song
Or scuttling things will steal us in our sleep :
Our shore dissolves for all our way is long.
Severs the stream of time, this bag of body,
And makes now bastard husbanded descent,
And such adventure every sip a toddy,
And melts to mayflies all the were we went.
Shall skin slap skin, the sea slap rowdy sea
To wake apart by but this bag of me,
Abraded and afraid, become the god
Who leaks in at a sip.
And then leaks out.
Couldst let that be a fate to pout about?
V. /What the Thunder Said/
Hold tight and let your friend downhill;
One snow is not the winter of a man.
The water in the snow is water still
And twenty weeks will wet the whippoorwill
Into a faultless strut. The fellow can
Make up an egg from half an egg and bran,
What, he worry? the virus of an act
Surrounded by its food's as good as fact.
What senses do we lack we cannot see
The course of children with a steel-shod sled?
I giggle, Salieri, that I'm me
To hear the parts abroad from Middle C --
And that the Count accounts you better fed.
A sack of slush through which there passes bread
And years enough; but then? You can't at least
Confess enough to shock a common priest.
"Put out the light and then put out the light."
As well confess you had designed Suzanna.
The sins we give are but the sorry sight
To hide behind our worship of the night
That overcomes us not. Confess /mens sana/
You, a-Sinai, know to leave the manna
Vapor in the sun while you seek sin
Enough your sulking fellows let you in.
We heard a janissary bang a sty
And I thought him a generation sweeter;
/Allegro!/ which is he and which is I
Parading this concerto that you try?
September stems obese, bright amanita;
Here, morel hides a birch in sleeping cheetah.
These are the resurrection and the life,
Shaped by the synapse and the butter knife.
A quaver in the air : the veil is split
And looser clothes on lesser men are found
Leaning close for countenance, their spit
Made empty by the quicklimed earth I quit,
Their sense made no less noisy by their sound.
Now you must spill yourself to claim your pound,
For art is no release, but brings the grin
To all of those who'd have the tunes again . . .
Otherwise, music causes nothing.
17
Eternal Father
If one galled up and rammed, all Arthur mad
The little grins behind the belted bullets;
For my suckling sake strained long at shapes
That would or would not answer gleam from gloom
With jellied gas to kiss the bubbled flesh;
He is my father, for these fathers made
The world their gate before the senses scattered;
Who got this wheat their blood are more my blood
And I their get, my garden by their guard,
Than goat-glad fluid in the groping dark.
18
Night Watch
Three o'clock. My keys. My beeper. Rounds
Allow their sleep to occupants and grounds.
Now cave of basement : pillar, pulse, and core.
The salty breath of gypsum from the floor.
New pipes and water heaters. Hods. The tracks
Of plaster surgeons.
In a footing, cracks.
I feel a heartbeat stutter into shale
To apprehend the rending of the veil :
Three stories settling in the strata's mouth,
Slowly following the sabre-tooth.
Why should the time-pressed sediment erase
That close on midwatch, suddenly your face
Appears above your sandwich-cutting board,
Meticulously settling this hoard
Of care for my least tastebud into place
About the corners of my writing case?
19
Class Dismissed
Our celebrating men of war
Reverberate from stiller rows
Who don't know. What they're fighting for
Will settle into homely lore
Whose teachers let no word that knows
Our celebrating men of war.
Anon this blackball takes the floor
And argument creates two foes
Who don't know what they're fighting for,
But each recruits a solid core.
No speeches anybody knows
Are celebrating men of war:
Dear John comes home to try to score
Despite the sass and local blows
Who don't know what they're fighting for,
While governments that they restore,
Whose flags now flap above the crows,
Are celebrating men of war
Who don't know what they're fighting for.
20
Nostriolet
If thumbing noses, god is all
That thumbs his nose. And nose is god.
The same thing happens in the /salle/
When weapon meets the chest of clod:
The Profs can't figure, in the brawl
Just which is Berkeley, which is quad
Where tree or man had his great Fall
That thumbs his nose and noses god
If thumbing knows his god is all.
21
Gargoyle
I am the Sundays; package of eight decades
Sticky with the sauces of the sword,
Being read to by a little girl
Armed from church.
She has no language in her any look,
But reads to me what she has often learned
In the order she has often learned it.
In her the word unsaid will never speak,
Commit no age.
Her friends, her fashions, chosen by her friends,
The one because they think that they have heard her;
The one because she thinks that she has heard it;
Having no face. Her memory of face
Fades with her resentment that face
Should make design what she presumes in fits,
As fast forgets.
Her eyes are guiltless
/how should she have guile
who never sought the sticks beside the path
the /punji/ advertised unfit for travel/
And she intones her news sincerely; baths
Have washed off all the gook she found revolting
When being sound and one of limb and eye,
I bequeathed her, voting the small salt
Out of others to clear her way.
Now she bids this house against her betters
With words so printed that she bid a house
Unembarrassed at being caught wanting
A penny for the guy.
And she believes she carries as I left it
This that carried, these the rooms that dressed her,
Dress her now with all she needs to be.
Four o'clock.
I am handed coffee
That has no want nor any want of want,
No notion even that the thought of craving
Was something fashioned to accuse young girls
Of causing men to cause the fall of men,
No hint of habit, wanting any thought
That giving is for giving; taking for taking;
Each time only the voices of dolls
Propel the chore,
Soundless, fearless, satisfying nothing.
/there was a son i was to have a son
he did not come back from that other skirmish/
I did not come back when I came to this.
But she puts on my lap my recompense
Because it cannot walk and she can walk;
Because she cannot want and it can want;
Because it became somewhat my face.
22
Wayside
The roads are lettered with these names
And every place between is gray;
Their honor was to furnish flames
That light their ruins for our play,
But still their tumbled honor shames
The little slogans that we spray :
And other shrines receive the games
And every place between is gray,
The roads are lettered with these names.
23
Odysseus in Ithaca
More rare than fingers fashioned by the sword
Or callused by the cursing of their tools
Is love that chafes to bursting on its words
To supple at itself, its own salt jewel
Make fit like leather form it never felt
Though that smooth skin wear but the primal fault.
The having none with whom to share the fault
Has had more singers fall upon the sword
Than on the lyre to say what beauty felt
In breathing man; then do not fault the tools
For having made a sandbox of a jewel
When wandering wonders trickle out of words.
You do not know me. Twenty years of words
Callused to cursive pattern for the fault
Of wasting twenty years on that fouled jewel
And all my men who thought to take the sword
Was but to take up residence as tools
Have robbed my voice and rubbed my curls to felt,
And what Victory recall what the stone felt
Before it rubbed the alphabet and words
Of prig Pygmalion's cocky box of tools?
To make our dwelling on an ancient fault
Of being none until the careful sword
Found and defended here and there a jewel
Was in itself enough to wreak a jewel,
But fast forgot what its creation felt
As boys are left forgotten by the sword.
This is why we leave the sharpened words,
But is it theirs, the lawyers', or your fault
That you confound the product and the tools?
You knew the fitting out, unbeaten tools,
While these are tired of Greece, nor wear the jewel
By which we loved us, but these boys' same fault
Is dumb of how our Menelaus felt
When fit forgot him for some fitting words;
Nothing I bring, but the unbeaten sword.
The sword is the most general of tools
And not my words unfaced our wedding jewel,
But not since Aulis have I felt such fault.
24
Graveyard
I had today a letter from the Legion,
Expressing, I supposed, my country's thanks,
But addressed from a subscription mailing list
And left to who was housed behind the fence.
They asked for money to convince the troops
That freedom doesn't let them burn their flag.
And it is thirty years since I took flag
Across the pond against a foreign legion
That had for justice plenty of its troops
But not, as it would seem, enough of thanks.
(A culture that does nothing for defense
Does not stay long on any mailing list.)
Now on a granite wall's another list
Beneath a rather ordinary flag
That flies beside those crosses like a fence
To mark the graves of quite another legion
To whom are also owed eternal thanks.
The crosses too are something still like troops :
Sharpen all the tops to paratroops,
Thin them so the footmen can't enlist,
And tip them into caltrops to the tanks.
(Serve some time for vandalism.) Flag
These boys new purpose, they a silent legion
Who can't be said to ever sit the fence
And call it double mileage for defense,
This vandalism of our silent troops
Is no worse than to little that gray legion
By carving up what's left of why enlist.
And let the some watch samples of the flag
Until they see who dares first at our thanks
And who like all the rest will spend their thanks
Intimidated into undefense
Because our flag can never lick their flag
Save theirs be in like case, and low on troops.
Don't save the names for any mailing list
Though those who lick at boots will number legion.
But number, too, a legion that gives thanks
Nor posts a list of numbers for defence
For never will you see their troops to flag.
25
Grief
Why should we give our water to the dead
Who after all have lost the fight with breath?
They are ourselves, who are, and break, our bread,
And we in turn will process through a death,
And back to life, and chew the world again,
The dance of being making place of place
As any flame says, falsely, "I maintain"
And current being shouts a single face.
You who grew so far into my life
Will grow no more, but fade with other past,
All presents now without you like a knife
That cuts you from each day, an overcast,
For I have lost a portion of my brain
Until that day I find you once again.
26
Dead On
This is the day my mother told about,
This was the morning that I woke up dead.
Perhaps the problem lay in getting up
With half my stuff from yesterday still on
As though I were the making of a legend,
A small refrain in multistanzaed song.
While having made, but never being, song,
And never singing save to sing /about/
(Because that is the stuff that is a legend),
I found that legend's made about the dead
By those who think enough to carry on
Whatever indigestion they threw up.
I have enough of it just getting up,
Let alone the breaking into song
That I am trying to end my sentence on:
I've not the vaguest what I am about,
But keep on trying, lest I wake up dead
Though never to dissolve into a legend.
Now, I would like to sing about a legend,
But don't know any that were not made up
Because a working man had wakened dead
And all his fellows wanted him in song
Because it gave them less to think about:
A preposition they could end him on.
Instead, his song has carried on and on
With just enough of fact to keep the legend
One more thing they had to think about,
And how the man was not quite all made up
By that sweet power that lives in every song
And sounds quite loud enough to wake the dead.
Of course, what wakes does not look all that dead,
But has not learned as yet to be dead on
Until he learns the love in every song
And how it separates the fact from legend,
Until enough of love at last gets up
The work he always had to be about.
And comes, when he knows all about the dead,
A day that he wakes up to happen on
Enough of legend to become a song.
27
Asylum
He shuffles in the hall from meal to meal
(You hear him coming: he is so polite
Not to intrude surprise); we give his aisle
And he gives ours, and we sit down to eat.
All sauce in his life is dinner sauce.
He speaks to pass the salt and thank the pepper.
He has no thought that he is any less.
The weather is a prince. We are the pauper:
The doctors took his vitals: all is well.
His paperwork complete, his tests and grades
Tell all there ever need be of his tale;
All normalcy is in three pinks, two reds.
A shuffle like the sand wrung in the glass
And plastic ticking in the shrunken jaw,
No hint of self makes him admit to loss.
A cigarette? A game of cribbage? "Nah."
There are no flights of language that we made
When he arrived; his thought is nice, and even
Quite acceptable: all are agreed
He got great benefit from our brief haven.
I ask him how his former self can cope
(Not in those words) with psychotropic charm;
He is a bit resentful of my carp.
"I'm going home," he says; "I'm going home."
28
"Equal Justice" Is Redundant
The gavel wraps the case up for the files
But we must go on living with the fact
The perp has perped, while he lies back and whiles
In creature ease. Will he not reenact?
For punishment is not, that lays its straps
On crime's hard times or easy-stolen pelf;
"Uncommon" is but what we have let lapse,
Nor ever cruel, for crime named it itself
In taking from another man quite all
It quickly wanted, when it wanted, and
Not seeing it were kind or usual
And certainly not caring it were banned:
We're civilised: obey the law crime cried
And help ourselves to stripes across its hide.
29
Minnesota
The pike consume the little perch,
The perch consume the chubs,
The chubs eat while the minnows lurch
And nibble at my nubs.
Not fishermen alone adore
The summit of this /schtick/,
And, once home, make it model for
The body politick.
30
Dr. Kevorkian's Children
Trapped in decrepitude by modern gods
Whose worship by some ancient-sounding men
Is ignorant that "age" in those ephods
Meant /thirty-seven years/ (another ten
To toothless wisdom: others chewed the food
For those who chewed the thought and said the deed):
The hurting old seek rest, but all their brood
Want still that age eternally precede
Their little ignorance and moral sloth,
And make it crime to go and crime to help,
And, that being not enough, appoint the cloth
To blackmail soul into another whelp,
Who scorn our souls. It's /that/, that makes us loath
And that, alone, that makes us seek to live
Beyond our worth as well as past our growth,
Voting our pay, who've nothing left to give.
We have no age beyond our birth and death,
No time beyond our waking and their sleep,
No voice beyond the current rasping breath,
And no least value past whatever's cheap.
But soul's a verb, ignited by the life
And grown by ghosts from dotty to doyen;
Let have their right: let have the mercy knife
Who have no purpose but to start again.
31
River
Running off at the mouth, replaced by rain,
The river cleans a place of history,
Sucking the very rock of blood and pain
And leaving the new tenants to be free
Of what is past and better left undone
Again. By rain, the land is free of guilt,
And does not grunt with "did" and "didn't," one
With all it ever takes to grow its quilt
Of forest, field, and towns beneath the moon,
Each trying to outdo the other, gain
Being logged in plats and subdivisions, soon
To come to crowded cemeteries, rain.
And never does the river heed to this:
Field, forest, brewery are all the same,
Carried to the ocean with a kiss
That means as much as this same harlot's blame.
And once in ocean, it turns back to rain
To etch the rock of happenings again.
32
Victim
You whom fate made poor before your birth
And robbed thrice more before your youth was out
Have scratched at pennies to rebuild your worth,
But there is nothing that can still the doubt
That all the rest won't get you by the way,
That doing is worth doing, seeing, seeing,
For these won't mend, and might at best dismay
The broken toy that tried for human being.
What is it that is permanently soiled
Because of your encounter? Is it soul?
Or is the smiling universe despoiled,
And you too helpless now to make it whole?
Still soars the sun and lovers point the moon,
And flowers are for who will stoop to lust,
And you must know, as you slink past your noon,
Not one of these knows care: it's we who must.
Nor can we let abuse to spoil the rest,
Not any more than death may spoil the life;
Each day and all its beauty is caressed
By man alone, who takes the world to wife.
There is no beauty without attitude,
A disposition to be beautiful
That world reflects, or otherwise is crude:
Plants and not flowers, fact not fanciful,
Only what is, and none of what can be.
Locked in the vision of what was, and is
No longer, save in prison of that fantasy
That mind keeps fresh, but will not let you quiz,
Now you lay you down to sleep and kiss
That old excuse for daring not to dare;
We've all a coward in us, but sweet this
Is freedom from the fight, without compare.
But fear of men is not a social skill,
As fear of fists is not a martial art,
And wisdom isn't several decades' swill
All perfectly recalled, and so kept tart,
For swill won't dance, but must be kept to shape
With constant petting from a doting mind
In order that it keep the heart agape
And blinded with what it's supposed to find.
And yet belligerence is still a start,
Acknowledging world's overtures with spite:
Protection proves that you protect a heart,
But will not give the thing without a fight.
It proves that you protect a dream as well,
Regardless what the social misconstrue,
And so we wait, the other side of hell,
For that one flash of thought, when you come true.
33
Foiled Again
Now I have little to forget
Of decades told upon the keys:
The world can't tell, and Juliet,
Who looks at them, whom they abet
To mind and love, and each agrees,
Now I have little to forget,
That I will go to pay my debt
With all the rest: Eumenides
The world can't tell, and Juliet
Won't see, remove their /pointes d'arrˆt/
And I will sneeze the final sneeze.
Now I have little to forget
Despite the sermons of /belles-lettres/
That self consists in fantasies
The world can't tell, and Juliet
Refuses, but the slim /fleuret/
Is certain of my next reprise.
Now I have little to forget
The world can't tell, and Juliet.
34
And If Pigs Had Wings,
We'd All Need Steel Umbrellas
Much of what I love I've never found --
Your long blond hair collapsed around a cello
As you coax spruce into its softest sound;
Something besides your carrots in lime jello;
A one-inch group at fifty yards, offhand;
A hue more sunstruck than that mute chrome yellow;
Mo' money from my wallet on demand;
A tiny, one-ton truck that needs no gas;
A ninety-mile strikeball, underhand;
A woman whose discourse wants any sass;
A poem I didn't write, but came to me;
No sight at all of what will come to pass;
And yet I love the world for what I see,
For it's by that, that I have come to be.
35
Flameout
I click my lighter shut; the flame goes dark,
But lingers in the butt without a doubt;
Next time, the flame's the same: a little spark
Sleeps in the stone until it is struck out.
These blooms succumb to tulip droop and I
Put up the camera, for they speak of age
That were the heart of spring: a year's supply
Of life is fully spent on one week's rage.
Yet from a pattern in the bulb this flame
Aplombs next year that withered on this day,
Petal and sepal burn, and fill my frame
The same as those I shot to put away.
The quick blood stopped and memory collapsed,
Its RNA now suitable for food
Not food for thought, the art of living lapsed
Into the absence of all attitude:
But life springs from the seed, and mind from life,
And memory recalls itself in sight,
Practice, and thought, and takes itself to wife
The same as always was before the night
It slept too long, a blank when it awoke,
Nor knew itself, nor even how to start,
Until it found a little trail of smoke
That was inspired to life by this hot heart.
We know our darkness, we, the human race,
And curse the light. But anyway we go,
Our voices changed and wearing a strange face,
To stand beneath the stars and strive to know.
36
Ice Water
On a line by A. MacLeish
"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" How
Shall any be absolved the crime of knowing?
It's seeing sets a man apart, and now
There's nothing to be done until our going
To start again in ignorance and then
To strive with all to not know Galileo,
Pauling, Keats, the lilac, or the STEN --
And this is work, /de diligende Deo/.
We lie with mammon to remain the same
And friendly with the ignorance of birth;
For every animus, a fact's to blame,
And this makes worthless every little worth.
Leave off this knowing, fill your lives with those
Who do the same thing at the same time, they
Who kneel and sit and speak as one, suppose
Their copy books exhaust the living day:
Make friends with them, for none can serve a god
Who fills a life with lilacs and the bees
(Color and mechanism a shock to plod),
And bigger things more blasphemous than these:
The Pratt and Whitney turbine's perfect curves,
The air-oiled spoil of airfoils that defy
Whatever attitude that disconserves
The study of them other than by sky,
A giant Case with twenty bottoms brown,
Sprung from a common thought and not a king;
The curse falls short, for first of any down
Is always lilac, rising every spring.
Put down that book! for it will set your heart
To progress all the way from /do/ to /do/:
In ignorance, you'll never be apart
Nor ever see how far we have to go.
37
Spirit
The dust receives us but it cannot keep:
As nature templates and the spirit clings,
Our phoenix rises from the printed peep.
We have no coffin and we know no deep
Who slip to surface through the roots of things:
The dust receives us, but it cannot keep.
We wake to mothers that we wake to sleep,
Until we form our old imaginings:
Our phoenix rises from the printed peep.
Who smells a flower knows the end of sleep
As likeness throbs to what the lilac sings:
The dust receives us, but it cannot keep.
From every treatise in a tumbled heap
Comes all that memory, as though on strings:
Our phoenix rises from the printed peep.
Part obvious, the rest hid far too deep,
The new soul slumbers like the two Pekings:
The dust receives us, but it cannot keep;
Our phoenix rises from the printed peep.
38
Vet's Club
In Homer, I recall three thousand years --
Not bellies gaping to the chirping birds,
Nor friends split to the chin after our beers,
Nor yet the straddle trench half full of turds,
But just the heave of Ajax' famous spear
And other things that make a man a vet:
The fun we had with women (one most dear) --
The other times, in Homer, I forget.
39
Ace
Fear is the key, for fear alone can keep
The neck so rubbered that the seeking guns
Have no least place to hide among the sheep
That chew the sky, or in the sun that stuns
The air-cleaned sight. It is the fear makes sharp
The straining vision and the shaking hand
That firm the plane into a ringing harp,
Aluminum and aim, life's allemande
That ends in death for one, for one a mark
Beside the cockpit, bragging of brief time
That two had put aside the creeping dark
To challenge hell, perhaps go home to mime
The dance with soaring hands (that lately shook
Around the stick, but not once any Hun
Got quite so close enough to have a look):
That chore accomplished, time to tap the tun.
The work of missiles is another thing
From ground or air an eye within my eye
Seeking my warmth to spread across the spring:
Nothing to shoot and nowhere else to hie,
You roll her guts out so the tail fins creak
To stuff the nostrils of the stinking SAM
Up her own ass; it works some half the week
Or grab the loops and take it on the lam.
Above all that's to fly above your blame
Or any didoes that the math contrive,
For fear that keeps another from the game
Keeps me alive.
40
Ghost
How often must I wake up blank,
With all to learn and birth to thank;
With everything I ever learned
A thing of wind since I adjourned?
I once knew scrimshaw, how to flint,
And how to boil the peppermint;
One day I learned the shades of light,
How gravity keeps moons up tight;
I learned that little billiard ball,
The atom, isn't that at all,
But is, instead, a standing wave --
I came so far from my old cave!
But suddenly, my diaper's full,
I can't stand up against the pull,
And if forgetting weren't enough
I've lost I ever knew the stuff!
But universe bends to my crib
With unadulterated bib,
And if my mood is ever grim,
A Face that Loves my every whim
Appears above my fantasy
To find it out and give it me:
I greet each offer with critique
To keep my ignorance unique.
Now, I could keep that lonely heart,
Let petulance keep me apart
From all I've done and all I've been
And labor under my chagrin
That death will end my being or
Will let my "bounded spirit" soar,
Or I could choose the company
Of all who build my memory
And all who work beyond their youth
To leave their birth, become the truth,
And set the stuff to music so
That others try a chance to grow,
Including that especial case
When I don't wake behind my face
With nothing for the trade-in brain
But crawling through it all again.
But learning is a faster art
When I consent to leave a part
To show me all my life's results,
And warn the errors and the faults,
And not just those that happen by
But all those people's, that were I.
Of course, the observation frames
Insist I went by different names
And sometimes spoke a different tongue,
But so I did when I was young:
It took three decades just to speak,
Millenia to learn critique,
And millions just to take a fire
And put it in a box. Desire
Takes that much longer to confine
That molecules may realign
In thought that is the same each time
Or different just as much as I'm
From year to year (and life to life),
The difference a largish knife
To petulance in man or men
That owns the coming citizen
As if it were a common pimp
And levies fines unless he limp
And grow no more than common folk
And only live their little joke.
But I will sing, and sing aloud
That any growing boy be proud
To blow a reed and pluck a string,
And learn with little arguing
To take the test-tube and the pen
And be again what I have been.
41
Passage
The famous eagle will not fly,
But wants his mom to bring his meat,
So though his wings are long and dry,
He screams and squabbles for the treat.
He looks abroad on foreign lands
But greets the world with hungry yawn
Until his mother understands
And kicks his ass to sky and gone.
42
On the Maintenance of Purpose
It was a winter's day in late July;
The Kitty huddled underneath my covers,
Not wanting to go out, not knowing why;
Even indoors, it was no do day for lovers:
The wind slipped through the northern window wall,
Or so it seemed, for weather clamped my face,
The clouds so low the smallest stood so tall
That he could brag of thoughts beyond his place,
And did. Nor could I gainsay what he bragged
For weather had me walking under worms,
My purpose lost, my shit-detector gagged,
My loftiest of thoughts remaining germs.
But some jerk bombs Atlanta, and the games
Go on despite two dead, an hundred hurt;
No single human falters; no one blames
Atlanta, the Olympics. They assert
The gold in every life by such a play.
So let us gain by such a show of guts.
And failure or device? TWA
Would like to know; the FBI goes nuts
Trying to find 800 in the Sound,
For something spread it here to there, and all
209 aboard are still not found.
Is it tragedy or is it gall
That tore the thing apart? We would know why.
Meanwhile we will buy our tickets, stress,
Secure that It will take the other guy.
Given that sense of purpose, can I less
Who only suffer from a bad-air day,
Continue in the doldrums of a sinus?
Far be it from me ever to say
That it's my own damned fault I came up minus.
43
September Song
The smell of winter through the fading trees
Bespeaks November, eager for the end;
The birds assemble in their twos and threes
'Til long black pipes of them wait dividend
In going south, their Spring not yet prepared
Earth's other end. There is no hint of snow
Nor even frost to see the trees all bared,
But skin knows wind, and bids the summer go
That winter have its little joke at last,
And, having done, beget the singing time
When life learns life and growing is so fast
We can forget the creeping of the lime.
44
Song
The words fit into place like bricks of sod,
A pressure here, and there a little gap;
But they will grow together, thanks to god,
And make a whole, and ever-living, trap
The Water of the mind will find a map
To other ground and places unbegun,
And make the universe its gingersnap,
Ruler of but itself and serf to none.
To breathe into these words a human voice
Gives life to both, as two perform one kiss;
One breathes the present and the other, choice
That singing live again, but hear, too, this:
The world is full of servile little men
Who want you to become their words again.
45
Solstice
The longest midnight came, and sat about,
And, finding it unwelcome, turned and went
And took the old year with it like a lout
His only girl. It's not that I resent
Long nights: the light is cheap, and coffee ample;
Plenty of lines will bear attention, here;
The Kitties want another can to sample;
The furnace lets me sit with frost so near.
But I'm holed up behind a grunting truck,
Confined to office or to living room
Like any felon who would change his luck,
And this was it. Although we but assume
Our orbit turned around (without a 'scope),
Millenia of work by those who know
Have come to almanacs, so here comes hope
Dragging a new year with it, dos-a-dos.
A little change between the shoulders knows
We've one cold snap to sit through, then the thaw
Permits some shopping and a visit, slows
The frenzied furnace and the frantic claw
That climbs the drapes to look for summer, then
Blames me for changing what's behind the door
But still wants /out/. They'll find their summer when
The other solstice gets here. Not before.
But this one is a vigil, as it was
When skin-clad Celts would sit among the clock
Of Stonehenge, waiting for the dawn, because
It /should/, they knew, have smidgened one tick-tock
Toward south and summer. Well, Welsh winters let
A man to do such if he had a mind,
But this is Minnesota, where they bet
Their spit will snap before what I've designed
Comes half to pass. And so I sit inside
And trust my other clock to let me know
That midnight and the season took a ride,
While I have tea at thirty-five below.
46
Anachronism
I should sit and listen to the wind
Make music of the draft that fronts my stove,
But I would know this weather, be frost-skinned
Just long enough to do some job, say, rove
The open supermarket for my kill
Of instant cash and cigarettes and milk,
And walk it home slung at my back, the chill
Reminding me that man and all his ilk
Had once to live like this without the down-
Filled jacket or the insulated boots,
Or plows that roved about the town
Before I ventured out, all in cahoots
With voters and their taxes (even mine!).
But I would live with nature as my tutor,
Ringed by woods, to learn their each design,
As long as there was juice for my computer.
47
Animula
Without the program, man's a piece of meat
That butts his head throughout the simplest jobs;
His ruff stands up: he growls what he would greet
For having never left the baobabs.
His careful sight inserts a /better/ world
Between the fact and he, and then his hand
Will not fit out the hole; his fist is furled
And will not loose the specter he has spanned
To gain his freedom, frightful as it is
For it will make him be all he can love
For self-esteem and worth. Instead, his quiz
Is "Lord, Lord, Lord" and "All of the Above."
His jealousy of love and its results,
Especially knowing he could do the same,
But magnifies his Lord, so all his faults
Loom small enough to fully shift the blame
And slit the goat or nail Him to a cross:
So right to have an outlet for his fault,
And none have faults like ganders on the sauce;
For him, God's Body always wanted salt.
His virtue is the sin he was too shy
To get around to tasting in the dark;
His values are all things he cannot try;
His love for life is but to disembark.
He has no self but what another lets,
Nor any purpose but to be on time;
By trying nothing, he has no regrets
And knows no height, so doesn't have to climb.
And so he plots in concert to harass
Whatever shows him up, and looms a threat
As dead things seem to move in rippled glass,
But, to his thrusts, he is the /pointe d'arrˆt/.
His teachers fed him nothing but the Truth
As they would have it, while his peers made sure
They were the only judgment of his youth,
While television saw his thought was pure;
And now his touch turns everything to shit
Because his vision shuns all ugly facts:
He's diligent to study every nit,
But takes their outlines from the lens' cracks.
He does not care: he has his law, his priest;
He has his place within his honeycomb;
He has a little flour, a little yeast;
But has a little soul, that will go home.
48
Concerto for Blunt Instruments
These shreds of fear and tatters of idea
I drag to your shy welcome of my pen,
Areek from fright, the onomatopoeia
Of teeth recalling bullets thrown at men
For pearls at pork, for being citizen,
No mind how high, begin as pediborn
As those who measure cleverness in scorn.
To take Communion so substantially
The substance of it breaks upon the thought,
The fast from knowledge broken on fallacy,
My ignorance has left me so distraught
I learned far more than others said I ought
And ducked their fists to learn it, or else took
Them on the nose on playground, class, and book.
There being no immediate solution
And knowing vengeance is a mortal blow,
I bode my time: I'd not seek absolution
From some vague sin I do not even know
But hold it to my heart, and let it grow
To its full veniality of breath
Before I dicker at the screen with death.
Description wronged (for we describe in part
And dare to taste what's guarded by a word),
There's more to this slow heaven and your heart
Than ever dreamed of breath in your choked herd
And more to heaven than any god abjured
By saying so, this place between the waters
Precious both to us and to our daughters.
But let the question put on common raps,
The arms as sinewed swear to want the deed
For wanting the conveyance and the craps'
Right roll, asserting chickenfeed
All that such a little question need.
Behold at hilts the arm become the word
Mere tides ago but voice in skull's red curd.
Then bastards who will not stand out to fight
But hide behind opinion that the law
Is what opinion pines the law to right,
Assert truth be the little that they saw
And no such thing as any williwaw.
Then neither taste nor sumer cumen in,
Utility of olive drowns in gin
To render doping copalatinate
If not so copasetic as its harm.
It does not need your succour of that hate
To short my word by shortening my arm
So that your chosen win without your charm,
Nor so unedged by what you strop as love
I might as well fight with an empty glove.
Who hated age must hate themselves in age
But for habitual contempt, that leaves boys young
Well past their primes, just capable of rage
But never of the songs their folks have sung,
In love with their own mouth with their own tongue
While nothing makes its way inside the skull
For that their little mouths are always full.
How shall I call a friend that hates my love,
Who is accused by bandages of wounds
I never mentioned, proving that he shove
Though no complaint escapes the easy bounds
Of song on song whose only sight resounds
Of lips made supple by the purse of love
And thumbs made clever by the fencing glove?
What lover hates the stained and hand-shaped glove
That in the hand's own solemn language sings
The judgment of the sword, that keeps alive
All other languages, no matter brings
All world the basest base of copyings:
Admit the devil without the devil his duel,
Admit to all the world the lazy fool.
None but the gods love. Children suck the grace
That pours from love in ample polyglot,
Then swear to kill a love so a boys' race
Not see among them what a pity's not,
For pity's all that little boys have got,
And wallows in the ignorance and murk
And needs another's supple love to work.
Now I was Hamlet at the age of nuns
And stayed the hamlet past the surge of blood
And so want Hamlet in my keep and puns
That I must arm them all. But if the bud,
Then him I would revenge is still a flood
As surging with my blood as I with his,
Whose living has no want of any biz
From me. The living live in want of it,
But shall not have it for their little pleas:
A substitute shines brightly as a teat
Until a teat be by for me to tease
And make itself quite happy to reprise,
And not want any other pay. 'Til then
Young boys and girls are level now with men,
Giving and getting in various sham coin,
Each "sovereign" by another sovereign served
And serving in his turn, each to enjoin
That none of all may rise to the deserved,
Nor shackle accident to be conserved:
And each and each, they fit so carefully
That smelly albatross, "equality."
49
We Regret...
What is so red as tulips in the snow,
So white as summer's moon above the night,
So blue's the sky between where cloudlets go?
So red, so white, so blue's your loving light.
Blue shadows peeped beneath your strutting breasts;
Red are the lips that gobbled at his skin;
White is the soul that leaped to his requests
And arched to any pleasure with a grin.
Red is the blood that watered freedom's debt
After it quit your so-white purity;
Blue is the truth, demanded /"a-vous-pretes?"/
After it made a boy a memory.
So red, so white, so blue must Country be
That would be loved by women such as thee.
50
In Country
We sort of spray the bushes with our shot.
To take the time to aim is to be hit.
To name the target is to cool what's hot.
Besides, kids have grenades and other shit.
And so we spray the bushes with our shot.
It's called "reconnaisance by fire" and kills
Two birds with just a couple dozen stones
Apiece. Or mostly. And these jungle hills
Are live with punji stakes and boobies' bones
Who left the trail. We took back the kills
That stayed right on it. But you never do
Step off the trail, or you won't go home,
One way or the other. You're overdue
And Charlie is too fast on his own loam
For you to go where Charlie wants you to.
And so we do "reconnaisance by fire,"
And sort of spray the bushes with our shot.
We don't walk on the lookout for a wire,
Be seeing Charlie where the fella's not,
And being /his/ "reconnaisance by fire."
We follow that to take a "body count."
We don't know what we hit until we see.
And usually, we fudge on the amount
To justify reconnaisance by spree.
And that's the reason for a "body count."
The juggling of numbers is a skill.
The smaller size of bullet lets us carry
Thirteen hundred for a single kill,
Get our Service medals, go and marry.
Yeah. Join the Army. Learn a real skill.
51
Cat Fight
The Kitty bumps my hand, presents his rump
For anything that I might do to it,
Kiss or kill, and gives a little bump,
His knowledge certain that we will aquit
Ourselves as always, that the game of choice
Does not include the things that harm a cat
Because they harm the doer worse. Rejoice
That this is so, that most men know it, that
The few who don't, incompetent to hurt,
But spend harm on themselves, so much afraid
Of what they will not learn they will not flirt
With what can well destroy as it has made:
For all we take, we can as easy dish
Defending any world that we may wish.
52
Book Worm
A worm just doesn't get how gross it is,
The bullet phiz, all centered on the mouth,
The writhing when he puts on his showbiz
For hook or robin, up from the warm south
For one more season's meals. And hooks impale
The convoluted gut, the tiny heart,
The sex that takes up half the shrinking flail,
And offer all to some insipid Sartre
Who will not know a value 'til it's done,
And so will never learn the way of hooks.
And hooks are such, it only takes but one.
The same is often true of certain books,
And grosser than the worm is books' abuse
That make and justify some lame excuse.
53
I Doubt It
The cat can tell what's afterbirth, what Weenie,
And eats but one, and so her race survives;
And nature puts that data in the genie,
But what about the hundred billion tries?
How many things that would have been a cat
Ate their own young, abolishing the line?
How long did nature wait for something that
Contributed her kits to her design?
If it can be design, that wastes so much
To see what works by seeing if it does,
Inventing life without the Midas touch,
And entertaining novelty because.
But entertain she does, with all that lives,
And life finds her quite entertaining, too,
Investigating just to see what gives,
Collecting just to see what will accrue.
Some men, alone, adventure by design:
May get the basics quite by accident,
But fit the parts to parts, and realign
The lot until they show their own cement,
But nature is a bitch, and strews about
Whatever lives for minutes or for years,
Leaving it to swim despite a drought
Or take a step despite its little fears.
We are the Grand Experiment in doubt.
The fish can fear, the goose can love, the ape
Convey its mind in language and in clout,
But only man stands with his mouth agape
While all the others run or burrow home.
He stands and questions that the tiger means
To have a little snack, and so this gnome
Just stares at him until the beast unscenes.
He watches swallows looping in the dusk
Doubting his father's ground-bound rules of thumb;
He thinks the air, he thinks him in a husk,
And thinks their wings stretched out in spruce and gum.
But the real trick's to doubt what we believe
Until we take its measure with a fact,
Nor quit for losing "faith" may make us grieve
For what we never had and could not act.
For centuries, we learned to fear the Pope
Because his bullies crushed our major joints;
But then we learned to doubt instead of hope,
The what it /really/ was, so far anoints
A man to "office" from among his peers
It turns him vain, and mean, and rather rotten,
And so in love with votes, and why two jeers
Explode "authority" on rocks of cotton.
For centuries, we learned the earth was slope
Despite the curve that Archimedes found,
'Til Galileo told him off the Pope,
And now we can fall all the way around.
Now if our gentle women learned to doubt
Their perfect little children's perfect lives
They'd keep the blood and throw the bastard out,
And we poor men might then regain our wives,
But all we get are gangs of little brats
Who know that their perfection is of course,
Who wreak their fantasies until all that's
Left over's teaching ethics to a horse.
Now, even horses bow them to the whip
(Which is /not/ done until the flesh is torn),
But here we have the juvenile lip
That's god's own gospel for that it was born.
A lash or two would fix the infant mind
Upon the job at hand, right through the skin;
If we would doubt a bit, I know we'd find
God sent these brats to /try/ us -- not to win.
54
Phenomenon
The phenomenal growth of a Kitty
Is much like the growth of a city,
But phenomenal growth is no answer:
Mere phenomenal growth is just cancer.
It must either submit to control
And not violate its parole,
Or the growth will get quite out of hand
And the being be one single gland
Whose function takes over the rest
'Til the heart cannot beat in the breast,
Or the wheat grow beneath katydids,
Or the city survive its own kids.
Now, those who would pander the mind
With a pap of a singular kind,
Will all swell to peculiar shapes,
Overfeeding one lonely synapse.
For the mind's a phenomenal feat,
But it grows on whatever it eat:
If you treat it to feast at the dump
It'll be nothing more than a lump.
55
"Cold" War
We waited for assaults that never came.
Not quite. Three times they massed along the border;
Thrice we lived among the woods; the blame
Flew thick as bullets. We, now long the warder
Of others' freedoms, worried for our own;
Our loss was sergeants, thinking up a chore
For hands that only waited to the bone:
We'd count their tanks, then counted them some more;
Outnumbered five to one, we dug our holes,
Chose positions for our major guns,
Sighted our rifles and emplaced our souls
To lose for certain, but to buy four suns.
The threats of the long Cold War have abated.
They never came, and just because we waited.
56
Seeing
(after A. MacLeish)
I saw a blacksnake on the floor
A few steps past the darkened door.
It leaped at me. As if with that,
The long black thing became a cat.
What changed? The snake? There was no snake.
The cat was always black. And flake.
There was a doorway; there was me;
And when I saw, then I could be.
57
Sartre Suite
The tiniest of leaves break from the bud:
Maple in miniature, /bonsai/ of the oak,
Now breeding life out of the valley mud
With not a thought for carpentry or smoke.
The tiniest of kittens' urge to live
Pummels its mom in minutes for a deal
And learns to exercise alternative,
Perhaps to eat, perhaps to cop a feel.
And then comes man, whose fear to make a choice
Begets "philosophy" that voids its "terms,"
Apologising for its very voice,
But treating man the way he treats his germs.
The growth of Nature's vegetable stuff
Is existentialism quite enough.
58
Thanatopsis
I, too, have my dead.
The first when I was nine.
They left my father's head
Uncovered by the pine.
It was too early, all
The weight of the undone
That's rolled into one ball
By any dying one:
There was living, death
Without a /billet-doux/,
And I was short of breath
With everything to do.
My best friend killed himself
For things he could not be:
Well-married, father, elf,
And free of misery.
A nephew then was shot,
The victim of youth crime.
They said that he was not
To take any more time.
An aunt died in her prime:
Her careful house was sold.
Her husband takes the time
To fish, and to be old.
And then a sister went,
"Expected," of a tumor.
"Expecting" what is sent
Is not the best of humor.
And so I've watched the clock,
Or have since I was nine,
Expecting the next shock
To lay me in the pine,
And so I try to fill
Each hour with all creation
And just as much of will
As law will let, and nation,
But everywhere I dast
'Sthat ticking of that cop
That, whether slow or fast
Will, soon enough, just stop.
Mere death is a relief,
Not any thing to fear.
Unless it comes a thief.
So, off with that brassiere!
59
Turnabout
Responsibility for choice
Hounds every freedom, shrills the voice
Of those who want the choices free
Of knowledge of what is to be.
Oh, listen to the squeaking Sartre
Who would not learn a single art
That told what choice was coming to;
Excused himself with "nothing knew."
Camus called every choice "absurd";
We should apply it to his word
And judge the boy by what he said
Was going on in his own head.
Plato said we could not know
A real thing, the so-and-so:
The dictum certainly bespots
Every one of Plato's thoughts.
Augustine wrote that God Told Him
The First and Last in paradigm.
But how did St. Augustine know
It was a God who told him so?
What test is there by which a sense
Is certain that it represents
A god, a devil, or a rose
Unless it also rub the nose?
I do not think Augustine rubbed
Quite anything he said he dubbed;
Nor did Muhammad, Moses, John,
Commit that crucial /`agion/.
And as for Plato's spite of forms,
They're nothing more than thinking norms,
The selfsame things that Plato used
To say there were none. How confused.
John Calvin stated all of Law
And /mea culpa/ when he "saw"
That there was no such thing as choice:
All things were Given by the Voice
That Johnny, he alone, could hear
As if no other had an ear.
It's not strange that John C. conceived it,
Rather that the folk /believed/ it.
Responsibility for mind
But renders most completely blind
By choice, excuses fully planned,
Like ostriches embracing sand,
So we can say "we didn't know"
When "Fate" crows, "Well, I told you so,"
As if our ignorance excused
The way our lives are thus abused.
60
Memorial
So we have come upon this blinding wall
Made of tombstone, too many names to face.
"We died for your mistake," they softly call
And each heart's trumpet stutters at the place.
The names say "we remember." And the flowers.
But here are those who never touched a wife
And those who left their wives with empty dowers,
Thank you to the politics, the knife:
But the only thing they're standing for
Instead of something gained, or victory,
Is all the ways a boy can die in war,
And each one stupid as a death can be.
The wall appears too high to vault, too sound
To blast on through, my country. /Go around/.
61
You, Ralph Emerson
I see the lilac: beauty looms in me
That had no thought of what it was, before:
A thing created just because I see?
Well, no: lilac exists, and something more:
An adding to myself, a certainty
Of good, the wish to freeze this frame in time
To have it always its first shock to me
Of infinite addition to what I'm.
The lilac isn't beauty, isn't good,
But just some cellular material
That rises when the world is right for wood
And can, some days in June, well take us all.
One thing, alone, makes lilac so gentil:
The fair and good can live alone in me.
62
Owed on a Clone
Oh, happy flakes of rock, that nightly die
And resurrect as fast, you show me how
I need not whine about my little why
But will awake, and soon, with world enow,
As crickets quicken knowing how to bitch
Their little lives that cannot find an air,
And I will waken knowing how to shit,
You come alive each morning, knowing which
To do all you did yesterday, and where
Each thing was put, and what to do with it.
And, /res augusta domi/, I shall learn
Each thing in time, that makes me as I was,
And go beyond the things that you must spurn
But not for any choice, or just because
I've fifteen senses to your paltry five,
But that I /wish/ to learn and you do not.
Nor is this due to any sort of spite:
It's simply that you are not quite alive
Though you digest the arcane polyglot
In seconds, that it took me years to write.
Twice I have transplanted your old heart
And thrice your brain, that knows to go about
My business only, for your only part,
And never did you show the least of doubt
For what I did, or what your job was then;
Your only crime, you suddenly knew more
Than I about the whole complex affair.
You do my every what, and do it when;
You do not mind the nature of the chore:
Forever shall I love and you be fair.
Forever shall I love and you be fair
When I rebuild you, that you fill my son
With all of me that public schools won't dare,
Who'll build him into something of a Hun;
For you, in building him, quite rebuild me,
Without the guilt for errors never made;
Without the sickly ache of every loss.
And what you make is still as quite as free
To learn yet more, or else, still me remade:
Be careful of this salad that you toss.
And let him take the pen or keyboard now,
He'll learn his letters, and how they are torn
By singing to the deaf, the low of brow,
And singing of emotion not yet born,
For kharma is a sentence without fault,
But writing is a sentence self-imposed;
The love of language seldom knows reward
Beyond two words that, rubbed as one, ooze salt.
But, thanks to you, before his chapter's closed
He'll see his own son take him well aboard.
Meanwhile I build a program word by word
The reader will digest in seven days:
It's been two decades and most of a third
Since I found out what laws the mind obeys,
And laws they are, the kind you cannot break
Any more than thrown mud will fall /up/
From off the face. Near thirty years I wrote,
A single program all my living stake,
My resurrection all my loving-cup
As music anchors any man afloat,
But more than music is the thinking mind
That gets its start in how to build itself
Not from its fellows, but from its own kind
That it can find on almost any shelf.
They are his parents, who ignite his thought
With things beyond the pretty violet,
That teach him law, that teach him how to dare,
That teach beyond his hunger what he ought,
As long's one thing alone receives his /"nyet":/
"Abort, Retry, Ignore" the whole affair.
Man builds on man, that built him on the ground,
But children build on what they want to be
More true than anything that they have found,
The air of such thought being wholly free,
And blown apart by any little breeze.
Air does not build a house, nor blow one down
As the wolf found from sampling at pigs;
The world is not maintained by such as these,
Nor added to. Nor any infant frown
Stand in the way where man puts down his digs.
Now, this computer is a living book,
The publication of a living man
That will digest whatever he can cook
And add his generations to his span.
They will be more than he, he does it right,
And is not one of those who need the small
To mimic stature; if he fills their cup
Before they drink themselves with every fight
He'll tell them early and he'll tell them all,
And give his children his own best leg up.
63
Reflections on Fishhook [ XIX ]
The hammer-headed cumulus are lilac to their tops,
And shrug their way to eastward after watering the crops
(This Minnesota weather is the best when it just stops).
It's hard to keep in mind when such a sunset goes on view
That nuclear explosion has produced this dainty hue
Conjointly with the fronts that make tornadoes barge on through,
But so it is. The world is sometimes vicious to the core,
But we were all bred by it and don't notice any more,
Not even when our statesmen breed the viciousness of war.
The killing and the maiming happen, yes, but not to me;
For I am far more worried by your little frown, you see,
And by the dandelions that beset my property.
So when a sunset happens, why, I welcome the ado:
I think of how I'm going to try to tell the clouds to you,
And skip the rest because I know I'm pretty vicious, too.
64
Troll
The traffic sounds go grumble overhead,
People with places to go and things to do
Going and doing. I lie here almost dead,
My lifeline shrunken to a little thread,
For none believe me any more, not you,
Your fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, aunts,
The damned literature, and you again:
In broadest daylight I could make advance,
Or step out on the riverbank and dance
In perfect safety from the sun, I'm thin.
I once comprised the darkest of /koans/
To be put down by students' utter thought,
Or taught Gruff's Gambit to who had no plans
For one lone life, leave off your many spans,
And how to win at fights you never fought:
I was the dark that had to die that you
Could live in sunlight on the darkest night,
That had to cease before you could accrue
Your fathers' world, let all alone the new,
A thing for solving by the acolyte.
How you have learned to laugh at all the dark
Things mind once dreamed, for having a "degree,"
But you have no more knowledge than a clerk:
You fill in "purpose" from another's mark
And call it "knowledge," that you but agree.
Because real men have solved your /koans/ for you,
Grown your food, made all your engines run,
Blown /panzers/, flown the Blitz, and sunk the /Soryu/;
You think they did it for that they adore you.
Now you sit above the dead and poke your fun.
But always at the back of neck are trolls,
And we have learned machines as well as you;
Now we no longer interrupt your strolls:
We travel in the spaces of your Rolls
And break you down in lonely places, too.
And in those real dark nights of all your souls
Is no one way by which to put a devil
Off his little feeding on your goals:
You live your lives by adding up paroles
And roll which way your little worlds are bevel.
I sit and laugh, for you will walk again
When Daddy's world runs out, and you have none;
For though I have grown lately rather thin,
I never die, nor wonder where you've been:
My appetite has only just begun.
65
The Difference
The kittens pounce each other, teeth and claws
So ready for the world, but held to play;
The daggers are but halfway from the paws
And softly set, so that they do not fray.
But when it comes to furniture, they grow
Vaster than emperors in a quarter sec,
To rip the stuffing from the so-and-so
To show it who's the boss, and what the heck.
The curtains, too, are not safe from assault:
They've left their hooks in all the newest crop
Not near so much because of primal fault,
But rather race each other to the top.
But when they gut each other, not a shred
Of fur is shed, nor let alone their blood,
But when they get to playing on the bed
They turn the bedroom in a single thud.
And all the while, not one of them is hurt
By all this mayhem to my little house;
Their treatment of each other may be curt,
But oh, boy, when at last they find a mouse!
66
172 (from /Thrace/)
A swing, a miss, he struck ten million out.
Nine million fumbled and the field was dry.
A two-foot putt, eight million rolled on by.
A seven-million free throw missed: no pout.
For six cool mil, the white trunks lost the bout.
A five-mil racquet stomped on by the guy.
Four-mil endorsements for the butterfly.
Three million just for finding by the scout.
The Congress "voted" not to spend a mil
On one new fighter plane (none thought them daft);
Our stuff was always good enough, before.
Our "downsized" Army's "good enough until."
(Our gangs of "youths" are far too big to draft.)
And, while we slept, our country went to war.
67
P.S. 31
Lord, let me open with a prayer
Although it's not the way of you;
But if I didn't folks would stare
And throw stones, too.
Deliver me from baby crap
Whose only input is the itch
And won't be woken from its nap
Except to bitch.
Now let my ear bow where the tone
Delivers speedy recompense
In holy silence, and the stone
Be my defense:
For the strong rock knows a voice
That must be hearkened to be heard,
And must be heard to know of choice:
Give me its word.
My enemies have feared to see
Me walk about beneath the sky,
And all my friends resented me
And wondered why.
Now I am dead and out of mind
To those who will not hear the stone,
And I must work to seek my kind
And find my own,
For there were teeth behind the smiles
And underneath the cloak, a knife:
My friends pretended at their trials
To have my life.
But I have trusted
In the working of the law,
Working to restore your rusted
Living claw.
I put my seconds in your hand
From first I knew until the last:
From those who rave about the land
I will be fast
If you are but the only one
Exists throughout the ancient land,
And make thy face to shine upon
Thy servant's hand.
Let me never be ashamed
That I have trusted in the words
Delivered while the woodland flamed
In minor thirds,
But let the stupid be ashamed
Before their little flaming cease,
And worms consume the autolamed,
And we'll have peace,
For they've the right to silence and,
If they cannot too well afford it,
Coroners will be assigned
To well record it.
Thy bounty is beyond all count
To who obey your silent word:
You multiply the least amount
Like the sweet curd.
Right in their midst your law confounds
Our direst foe: we keep on pitching
And draw your languages' sweet sounds
Amid their bitching,
For you speak in a thousand tongues
The mind can grasp, and none is speech,
And every one a million songs
With not one screech,
And love alone will translate this
To those but willing to obey,
To sharply kick or wholly kiss
With all you say,
And we will get our just deserts
For being those who only hear
But all your rockpile ever blurts
To any ear.
68
Your Honor,
District judges, tiny vents
That pass the gas of parliaments
Upon the town,
Whose many victims seldom doubt
It cleverness your infant pout-
Ing turns to frown,
At home you pouted, but you turned
To campus, where your sucking learned
To sneer and scoff us;
How different now your days are spent!
We wonder where the yellow went
When you took office.
But we don't envy you your job,
Or that it turns you to a blob
For Burgermeisters:
You sit upon a little bench
Amid the constant verbal stench
From several /scheiáters/,
With each one of them selling his,
When not a single sentence is
Within the law;
The law, they seek to circumvent
By making you set "precedent"
On their hee-haw.
And their hee-haw is only that:
There is here no aristocrat
Who owns the law
Or owns the body politick,
And so he cannot make it stick
Outside his awe
That any few can tell the rest
What is illegal or is best
For everyone,
Just who gets to impose their bets,
Who gets the office, and who gets
To wear the gun.
And, of course, who gets to sit
Just sucking artificial teat
While others pay,
And, finally, that last poor SOB
Who only works, and's only job
Is to obey.
It's fine by me if you'd be ruled;
I'll say that it was how you're schooled,
But that's by choice;
And choice is fine for you, you see:
/You/ live with it. You don't rule me
With /your/ god's voice,
And for the little friends you choose,
You might as well go suck your booze
As tell me "law,"
For I am not the least bit bound
By something that another found
Or thinks he saw.
His servants are his problems, too;
Don't think, because they honor you
I also must;
The Constitution quite forbade
Assertions that the voters made
An uppercrust,
Or stood above the citizen
Because the British /pukka gen/
Is a /Crown/ Court;
The U.S. Court's a /servant/, dude,
Whose only legal attitude
Is to support
Whatever law defendant states
Until the man capitulates
His errant biz,
Obeying him upon his hide
And never taking any side
But only his.
But you believe yourself "above,"
And at the instigation of
Some men of "letters,"
Your phony "court," and all its cops
Are busy siding with the slops
Against their betters.
It's "social" conduct, to be sure,
Wholly natural, wholly pure,
As God commanded,
But is the manner of an ape,
A wolf, a mutt with teeth agape,
Not "underhanded."
When pressed, you say the people want,
And think that this is so avant
The modern city
Must slave itself to every need
When most of them would never heed
It out of pity.
If all you think you do is count,
Go home: I'll spend a like amount
On ammunition,
For I can count as well as you,
And I am frightened, through and through,
By abolition
Of all defense against "the people,"
The encroachment of the steeple,
/The Common Law/,
The public claim upon my crate,
And the explosion of the State
That Franklin saw,
And note that you will only help
Every little mother's whelp
Turn low-class snobbery,
Despite its want of human skill
Because it can impose its will,
Into armed robbery.
A civil service always hums
By adding noughts to get its sums
And its "authority,"
Asserting that the little folk
May always carry out their joke
On the "minority,"
Because you say they've equal "right"
To everything they merely spite
When they must make it,
And help them have what they've not made,
Not borrowed, earned, or ever paid
Because you take it,
As though agreement made a man
The property of who began
His little tot up,
When every boy who makes a count
Is simply owned in like amount,
And simpler shot up:
Your bullies "own" the citizen
For what they want, how much, and when,
Until they've sacked us;
It's simplest to /obey/ their law,
And /own/ their little social flaw
For target practice.
We only make a few atone,
It won't be common, let alone
The epidemic
It is in these poor States today,
For it is /learned/ by those who prey,
And not systemic.
As always, we must zip our woolies
And take on all sublettered bullies
Who say they're lawrr:
I mean policemen of the State,
Carefully nursed since they were eight
For being rawer
Than the boys who dared to think,
And put their teachers on the blink
By asking stuff,
So when these boys were beaten up
For having words beyond a pup,
The little tough
Was smiled upon for helping "teach"
Put "discipline" within her reach
Instead of knowledge.
And so the bullies prospered and
Went farther than they'd ever planned,
Yea, unto college
Upon a "football scholarship"
Because the college had to nip
Such knowledge, too.
There really isn't any use
For public school, but the excuse
Will still accrue
A list of bullies every year,
The "Good Old Boys" we're all to fear
For their fake winning --
Not the fight, but teacher's trial,
That pats the little bully while
He goes down grinning --
Who like to be the teacher's pet,
Whose will to fight is always set
And always hasty,
But diligently will obey
The least "authority" as they
Find wholly tasty.
And so the teachers plan their classes
To kiss these fellas on their noses
With all high praise;
These courses are required by
The doyens of the senior high
For all our days,
While art and science are "electives,"
Subject to the same invectives
From these boys,
Which means the jocks don't have to take 'em,
Audit, cheat, or even fake 'em
For their joys.
It takes a certain kind of man
To force his will, for his elan,
On "property";
A boy who had his way at home
And helps establish modern Rome
Though few agree;
A boy whose sense of being right
Lies solely in another's fright,
Which he can cause
In nearly any living thing
And so, to "rectitude," can bring
Another's laws.
Your Honor, you were only hired
To keep this boy from his inspired
Bullying,
But now you tell him your desire
Is all the law he can acquire
For sullying:
Precisely what the teacher said
When he hit others in the head
Or broke their noses,
But giving /all/ his fellows right
To plant the bastard out of sight
Pushing up roses.
Now, you command that bunch of boys
Who threaten people with their toys
So they'll obey
A group of people /you/ call "right,"
Despite the fact their appetite
Is to betray
All parts of property and mind
To those who simply cannot find
Their little fuss.
But "regular militia," sure
Address their bosses as "yes, sir,"
/And that is us/.
You'd hate to have my scrutiny
Applied to every mutiny
Your boys commit,
So why not educate their "law"
To say "yes, sir" to each they saw,
Instead of "shit,"
For that is all that law requires
Of every man who so desires
To be the law:
You rob a robber, kill a killer,
Rape a rapist with a driller,
But keep the claw
Of taxes down to home defense;
All else is private recompense
For stuff we need,
Like roads, for which we pay a toll
Whenever we may wish to roll:
It's chickenfeed,
But built the Turnpikes, paid them off
'Til they were given to the toff,
Who's in the red
For social reasons, not for tax,
If we were to examine facts
With a clear head.
And schools! In 1959,
A New York jury did resign
Our schools to brats
By finding for a plaintiff child
Whose teacher found him much too wild
And warmed his slats.
Since then, the worst have ruled the class,
The playground, the "library" pass,
Our every nerve,
The newest suburb and the slum,
And then the core curriculum,
But first, The Curve.
In every class there is a boy
Who'd give the city greatest joy
By being hung;
Why do you keep your "law" so piled
It gives exception to the "child"
For being "young"?
Just once is probably enough
To teach these kids the righter stuff
Than infant gangs;
But you assert the child has rights
To live his life by pressing fights
And showing fangs.
When all else fails, you blame the home
That any errant child should roam
Upon the town,
But if we ever try to spank,
We suddenly have you to thank,
And your best frown:
To keep a well-run living room
Costs three years in a little room
With no escape;
You teach our children we're outclassed
Until one day you lead them past
The yellow tape.
We understand, of course, that you
And all your little boys in blue
Must have some crooks
To justify your constant hoya,
Not to mention paranoia
At public looks,
So you get more police to try with,
Because you simply can't get by with
The ones you've shipped,
But must you make so many crooks?
Time was, we simply had no gooks,
For they'd been whipped
To "yes, sir," while they still were boys
And played but with their own poor toys
However few,
But Ollie Holmes pronounced us fleeced
And city councils, we're policed
And under you.
You claim to be exempt from force.
It's time you took a little course,
And learned your place:
You, whose "law" so well belabors,
Were only hired to keep our neighbors
Out of our face.
69
TV Guide
The calendar grows short, and I grow broody:
The year is toward its end, and so am I.
I think on all I know, and don't know why:
Life /was/ too short to waste on /Howdy Doody/.
I'm glad that I have seen the living sparks
That were Spike Jones, Sid Caesar, and George Burns;
But it is fall; the living season turns.
Was life too short to waste on Groucho Marx?
I never saw the Beav, and barely know
The Rifleman, or Maverick, or Kermit;
The want of /Dragnet/ didn't make a hermit:
On NET, I watched an egg to grow.
I watched /Sea Hunt/ for underwater life
And /Sky King/ for the Beech 18, for I
Was going to be an astronaut, or die.
(I failed the flight exam, and took a wife:
These verses, though I didn't know it yet.)
Then Liberace moved me to piano,
And I became more round, if not /mens sano/,
A bit more popular, but didn't get
A girl, like all the other Proper fellows:
I didn't watch the things they talked about,
Which left my social status in some doubt.
It's still in doubt, amid these reds and yellows,
For /Star Trek/ is my poison, and it's old;
I do not sling the lingo of the tube,
And, to my age, must add that I'm a cube,
For modern "drama" only leaves me cold.
Then add to all my other social torts
The fact I've only /heard of/ Kirby Puckett,
Fran Tarkenton, The Dream and how they stuck it,
Because I don't watch live or broadcast sports.
This leaves me with a social handicap
Among the folks who never do, themselves,
But count the trophies on another's shelves;
Who never fight, but say they judge the scrap.
As winter's in the clubhouse turn again,
It asks me what I've bet my life on, if
I know someone who's turned into a stiff
Or put it where I'll still be living when
The Bookmobile comes 'round ten decades on,
And one lone person, soaking in my words
Discards his fellows' juvenile absurds
To build his houseboat, fly his small /baton/
With some small cupboard having me to thank,
Continues with the being I began,
And sets a raft upon his little span
For when his cottage catches in the bank.
70
Moritake
A small green heron on a naked branch:
Japan has brought to art what she brought war.
71
A Conjugation
"To love" is strong, and most irregular.
"I love." What am I loving, but myself,
Found haply in your giving your bazaar?
"You love," and I am on a little shelf,
Displayed to world as worthy of your love
(You walking miles in snow to sit my lap
Most naked, better than the Catholic dove
To prove my grace, and not the least my hap).
"She loves," and world is brighter than it was,
For I am what she does, the all of me
Being brighter with her world, and just because.
"We love," and this is all there is of "we,"
A state that politics must try but fail,
For politics must help itself our plate
Where love is but to give, if only tail.
And thus "you love" defines an empty state
No voter will achieve by wanting it,
No politician fill with promises,
"They love" as empty as the suckled teat
That's all they left of last year's darling Prez.
There's no one loves but "I" and "I," that "we"
Being found once in myself and once in what
I choose or dare to love, a harmony
Demands a purer note of scuttlebutt
To shape itself upon the selfsame pitch,
Chords, and progressions, 'til the flesh,
So molded by the ancient joy or bitch,
Picks up the ancient sword, its reflex fresh.
72
Election Tuesday
Your Honor, give us now Barabbas,
For he is nor so scary:
His words do not jump out and grab us
Beneath where we are hairy.
That other's words seek but to stab us
In everything we suck:
So give us, please, the kind Barabbas
To see our state and cluck,
For never will you hear Barabbas
Say, "poor, you'll always have";
The other always tries to blab us
Things that do not salve.
That man has never done but crab us
And every God we whelp:
Please give us now the great Barabbas
Who does not need our help.
Your Honor, give us, please, Barabbas
Who knows just how we sup,
And please, before the other nab us,
String the bugger up.
73
Purpose
The world keeps trying to spit us off
With hurricane, with youth, with toff.
We keep returning to the seat
Where mind meets matter in the meat,
And there we grow a little stronger
That each trip last a little longer.
74
Holy Communion
They talk of "frenzy" quite as if the shark
Excused the same in men in equal dark.
75
Our Town
So much of our city is streets
Because we would barter our sweets.
So many old trees are diseased
For we planted the fastest we pleased.
So many old cables are bare
For the vermin have tasted eclair.
So many new jails are packed,
Where the criminals get what they "lacked."
So much of our houses are locks
For a man doesn't like his own socks.
So many old asses are tight
For they train the wrong dogs, and they bite.
76
Making Up
Not grace, but the pronouncement of the grace
Holds all our hearts:
Not face, but the pronouncement of the face
As separate parts.
77
Mystery
Where at noon's the ambition of that list
We made last night before we went to bed,
And left to tell a mind that sleep had kissed
What it could do on waking from the dead?
The first half wasted looking for the trowel
To primp a garden not yet overrun,
Ignored the ancient spelling of a vowel
Excused the student that he'd not begun.
78
Fire /Or/ Ice?
Your irk can vote?
I'd like you note
You can kill grass
As well as ass
And nothing know
But the snow.
79
Incident In Da Nang
The day the four-year-old with the grenade
Blew herself upon my once-best friend
A place five kinds of racist all had made
Unfit for any conscript you could send
You wiped the counter right down to the end
Where I sat with a slowly-warming Miller,
Said, "What do you hear these days from the baby-killer?"
80
Dedication
We build our houses of the stuff of plants
And praise the daily business of the ants
Who do all that they do so very well
But only raise a pebble that it fell.
But who is mocked, and who is it that mocks?
At least the ants build out of little rocks.
81
Definition
The marble is so smooth we call it beauty,
But man is wrinkled by his sense of duty.
82
Fruit
It is one thing to see
Another person's Tree,
Another thing to groan
To grow your own,
But if you do, each fruit
Will suit.
83
Planning Commission
The city lives as much as does a man,
Organic, action and reaction, shit,
Consumables, a spasm of art, a plan,
With nothing but its kids to come of it.
84
Question
Do we shoot rockets that a country rises
On a pillar of its burning, bursts
In scope and color that alone surprises,
And then repeats because a people thirsts?
Or is the only song we ever sang
The fact that we could make a thing go bang?
85
Biology Film
With Sterling Holloway to give relief
From finding what mortality's about,
The Moody Bible Institute denied belief
Its flinging paint at canvas, not its doubt.
86
Bomb Shelter
It holds in its cocoon
All foodstuffs but the moon,
And in its many books
All of our former looks.
Considering your gall,
Why come up at all?
87
Justice
Here on the prairie is no leaping tide,
Though we are sure that we can feel the moon.
Here where but the continent may ride
Moon worries rock for nothing sometime soon.
But as a lake is emptied by a spoon,
The rocks fold under or explode to heights
That someday may set certain crimes to rights.
88
Pastor
The man who said it first knew more
Than he allowed the words,
So why will you the words adore,
And let still less your herds?
89
Sample
Some hundred made me better than I was;
Some hundred others quite forbid the process.
All of the rest shared my results because
They found us "equal." Though never to my losses.
90
Strategy
The wolf has learned to blow down any brick,
But can't be every place the thatch lies thick.
91
Survival
Socrates trained men.
Plato taught students.
This difference in gen
Is still called prudence.
92
The Graduate
They make you blame your data, that your mind,
Despite your grades, is ever going blind,
And carefully don't tell you of their clout:
That "Garbage Resident" is "Garb