and something more
 
 
Tango Bouquet 



Tango Bouquet


& other poems
by Halvard Johnson



Vida Loca Books





Table of Contents

Retrospective Sonnet 
“Dark Peruvian forces” 
Best Possible Light 
Religion in America  
Northland Graves  
In Fine Fettled Sleep 
Bouquet
Lost Methodologies  
Found Sonnet:  This Document Contains No Data
Sonneto Incognito
To This Day
Pretty Honoraria 
The Uses of Metaphor
Aro(here)und 
Revolutionary Sonnet
(Com)promised Land 
Sonnet for the New Year
Some More Anthropology 
Calling All Lexicographers
Smug Amalgamations 
Sonnet Industry Shorts
Clouds of Knowing and Unknowing 
Homeland Security 
A Brave Story  
Unavailable Light
Autumnal Sonnet
Final Deprivations
Trading Meaningful Glances
Somewhere around Barstow 
Autonomous Retreat  
Stipulations
Dispersible Warmish Dance #1
Favorite California Churches
Tango Bouquet 
Bachiana  
Maximal Cachet
Found Prose Political Sonnet:  Bush Clears the Way for
    Corporate Domination
What’s Up 
Sonnet:  Lento e deserto 
Political Sonnet
Superbot Sonnet
The Jinx Is On
Short Story Sonnet 
Unseasonable Facsimiles
A Lone Gunman Is Dead
At the Treeline  
Landscape near a Landfill



This book, as always, is for Lynda. It is distributed free and without charge and may be printed out and/or passed along electronically without further permission. A few of these poems may have been previously published here or there, but most have not.























Retrospective Sonnet

Our breakfast was ruined. We worried about whether or not
we might have won had not the Chinese intervened. Our push
to the Yalu River fell into disarray while we were waiting
for the milk to pour upon our cereal, cream for our cup of coffee.

And what if the British had not been preoccupied with Napoleonic
wars on the continent of Europe, what then? What if two oceans had
not protected us for all those years while we struggled to build our
nation, our empire, our city on the hill? What if the hunters had not

come out of the forest, what then? And, as if the past were not enough
to worry about, the future brought even more worries to our breakfast
table. What if the kids, the children, proved impossible to domesticate,
impossible to place into schools that would assure them a future we

might have wanted for ourselves? What if that swing vote on the Supreme
Court had swung the other way? What might have happened then?






















“Dark Peruvian forces”
 
Dark Peruvian forces led to ideologically inverse signs,
carrying out the aspirations of an American college student
who concluded tragically that revolution was discredited
for all times and in all places. Narrating historical events
 
two and thirty years later that would leave more than ever
in exile, their doctoral theses at the mercy of the excesses
and “imposturas” of the junta. Her truculence, it was thought,
served her well, even far from known tourist conflagrations.

Back when the US was owned by Eisenhower and the Dulles
brothers, imaginary fables rose up to speak for those who knew
him, who respected him and then betrayed him, whose walks
led to clandestine meetings in the lemony afternoon of the park.
 
Younger than leftist, she’d made excellent New York connections,
notwithstanding increasingly frequent bouts of apoplectic aporia.
























Best Possible Light

Intelligent controllers agree that telecentric approaches
to the early Beethoven sonatas yield more pleasure
than twelve-course banquets ever did. When the best

of friends sit down to simple meals of lab-bound pathogens,
exciting opportunities knock on every locked and bolted
door. The cooler atoms allow themselves to be captured.

And if we can’t have that we’d have to wonder why. Or, if
not, why neighborly persiflage now fails to mend fences?
As always, conveniences morph into necessities among

those who know better than let hotheads prevail. Dance-
like melodies from the oboe answered by superheated
rising fourths from the violins. And yet? No exit strategy

will compensate for those stupid missteps at the outset.
So we’ll soldier on until, one fine day, all is copacetic.























Religion in America

Always a major force, this should not be cause for panic.
Passionate devotees of justice and the improvement of others,
eager to reach out across sectarian lines. Bitterly disagreeing
with those who say one man’s religion is no one else’s business,

we see ourselves as a chosen people, duty-bound to slather
our values over all and sundry. Faith-based initiatives,
those thousand points of light, shifting the balance of power
dramatically. No cause for panic. Improving the world

can be both fun and profitable, recasting Americans’ sense
of themselves in a light that glows about their heads and faces.
As important to life as death is, it should never be our only, or
even our main concern. Let’s leave that to others, the suiciders,

the collaterals, the ones not invited to the table. Fundamentally,
we’re all fundamentalists, this “wrecked vessel” home to us all.
























Northland Graves
 
Arrested oilmen lie side by side with disciplined
car-poolers and CCNY defectors. Flagstaff tongue-
suppressors don black and avocado-striped zoot suits.

Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are. Bob’s
choice autographs of Singaporean bishops tempt
more than one to succumb to envy and covetousness.
 
Avocets leave handwritten negotiating points in wet
sand gilded by as yet unsunk sun. Callahan’s Mrs.
in cahoots with her brother bilked nonagenarians
 
in southeastern Catatonia of lifetimes of savings.




























In Fine Fettled Sleep

Between the artificial hills and the more pragmatic
wavelets, back in the analog age, mathematical proofs
proved worthless. Some angular deflections invited
trisections and later even quintisections, among other

impossible feats. Foolproof analogies calibrated our
volt-meters, reminding us of the First Law of Baseball:
There’s no Game Five after four have already been lost.
Humdrum solutions to perfectly humdrum problems.

“Das ist kein Mann!” sings Siegfried italicly, Brünnhilde
resting yet in fire-shielded sleep. What’s most remarkable
fails to surprise us any longer. All true theorums are trivial,
as she once sang. We joke about this with co-workers,

but never to the boss. And yet, keeping the door open just
a crack allows x and not-x to sweetly cohabit the room.






















Bouquet

From sodden clay
the road dropped
narrower but young

behind a wall
out of breath

a view in strange
colors, wind

of the highest
rise with fog creep

snow melt, making
out the words

the flagstone floor

*

the plastered-over fresco, some invitation
to philosophize
                        come on, admit that you’re hungry

the clinical light, the hot running water
                                                          three snowdrops
in a glass upon the table













Lost Methodologies

We begin, with the hope of making it in the movies, to arrive,
hopping off the bus at the bus station, beginning our hunt for
a good screen name, one that goes well with Mulholland. Am-

nesiacs all, we are cast in leading roles, but cannot remember
our lines long enough to finish the briefest of scenes. We forget
both our names and the names of the characters we are playing.

Embroiled in a classical quest—emotionally, then sexually—
we can’t be sure what the writer and director have in mind, since
we only get snippets of scenes, and those in a scrambled order.

Actors who play our younger selves hang around a soda fountain,
eager to be introduced to a wider audience, while we’re being made
up for our death scenes. Wild-eyed Canadians look on as we ready

ourselves for post-production interviews and commentaries that
will fill out the film’s DVD version. And then, at last, curtains.























Found Sonnet:  This Document Contains No Data

While searching without a proxy server from Beijing,
receiving search results that link to dajiyuan.com,
peacehall.com, and other dissident sites are insufficient
to trigger the “This document contains no data.” response.

For example, searching google.com for Gao Zhisheng (高智晟)
also brings up a full page of links that are inaccessible from
within China: Epoch Times, Renminbao, Boxun, Radio Free Asia.
That’s exactly what is so nice about having google.com.
It still indexes pages that are inaccessible from inside the GFW.

Once you have the link, you can use a proxy server to get there.
What gets me a “This document contains no data” error? Well, from here,
not Jiang Zemin, Bloody case of Shanwei, Zhao Ziyang, June 4th,
Falun Gong (all in Chinese) . . . So, basically nothing. “No data” may have

been a temporary stopgap, and when the sky did not come crashing down
because of Freezing Point, someone decided to open it back up again.


                (for Jim G.)




















Sonneto Incognito

If one reads without worrying, it’s utterly
gorgeous. The sort of gorgeousness one
expects from high-end trade publishers.
The right vehicle for the right job—that’s
what we need to keep in mind, no matter

what. Done as well as humans do it, small
wonders come down the pike, one after
another. Systematically changing one’s
perspectives until some final arrangement is
suddenly arrived at when we least expect it.

I think of Robert Merrill’s Escamillo and
shivers run down my back. Divergent
impulses—yoking them together. Decisive
moments we sometimes live to regret.

























To This Day

Literally dancing, the real heart
played out on the big screen
at gunpoint.

The sidewalk chanting
to curious thousands
just three or four years later.

A fact-based drama,
complete with sidekicks
and back story.

Bad teeth, bad
skin, bad everything.
Death house interviews.

Bungled bank heist.
At gunpoint.























Pretty Honoraria

Beneath the almonds, where nearby water flows,
keen throngs feverish with delight. Bizarre
commissioners lilting.

Obese astronauts promenade Wall Street,
ticker-tape fluttering all about
germicidal stalactites.

Below Norwegian freezing points,
phalangists talk senselessly,
complacently.

Electroplated testaments line
feckless semitropical cabin walls.
Cinnamon gunslingers balk.
























The Uses of Metaphor

Still, I wonder where the coffee-
colored river went, when it left its

banks behind, wandering out over
the farmy countryside,

spilling its seed at every door,
gushing out wild threats,

reaping havoc,
menacing all and sundry

as if there were no tomorrows
left behind to bemuse us, we

few who not long before had set
off for the cities way off in the haze

of distance, clambering over the low
hills that were once high mountains

clamoring for our attention, the feel of our
feet, naked on their rocky, endless paths.


















Aro(here)und

A . . . I was going to say “my story,” but I think this applies moreorless to
all stories . . . story begins with its very first word, unless, of course, that
word is placed elsewhere than at the beginning of the story. Take the word
“a,” for example—an old word, but still a useful one, a halting gesture
toward a “complete” utterance.

Around here, she was saying, we do things differently (altho
the way she said it (i.e. “differently”) led me to think
that the word should be placed in quotes. She, after all, was prone
to overstatement with just a hint of intimidation. Her mien
was almost overbearing, the verbenas in the garden

just beyond her window to the contrary notwithstanding . . . In a landscape
that almost called for swans on a stream beside a small cottage
with a cheery plume of white smoke ascending skyward
from its red-brick chicanery.

























Revolutionary Sonnet
 
To horse between the news article and the fiction
of the nearby Vázquez Mountains, by order of no one
in particular. The later murder creates an imaginary

fable, as told by American college students who will
conclude tragically. Small revolutionary episodes,
profesores unwilling to return to class after their long

lunches. Truncated ethics of resistance. Of the corpse,
no sign. Purity aureoles of central personages, less stable
than imagined. His doctoral thesis shows impostures

of the ruling junta, mysteries solved with doubtless
technical skill, manifesting ideological functions of text,
very much like creatures equipped with their own lives.

Lacking both doctrinal force and novelistic substance,
his story (of inverse sign) does him no palpable honor.























(Com)promised Land

Nothing more debased than these money farms
with their even rows of ones and fives and tens,
etc. Which leaves us where? Riding the rails,

sorting out various slaps and slams until questions
arise from which there are no exits. On the face
of it, the driver you showed to them terrorized

his riders with anthrax until taken out by some top
officials of DHS, who just prior had been lunching
(or perhaps launching) at a private golf club nearby.

Bin Ladenized Muslims knew what was up, since
Britain enabled fast-acting somnolence to devour
its shadow empire. No political scientist or historian

has ever run for president, unless perhaps it was
Wilson, and we all know what became of him.























Sonnet for the New Year
 
Pleistocene campfires flickering in the distance, deeply
rooted slogans chat it up with money barons. Medical
malpractice suits us just fine, thank you very much.
For instance, well-delivered apologies salve all wounds.
 
Partial reconciliations break step when crossing a bridge,
miraculous transformations no longer expected or offered.
Higher disease rates unrelated to education or health costs
speak volumes to our well-tuned ears.  Biology urges us
 
to seek out music in the company of other people. Yahweh
and other loud cellphone talkers gather to break bread to-
gether, airwaves atremble with salutations, with greetings.
On everyone’s lips, prospects for reelection, for theatrical
 
productions that do not close in a month or less. And soon,
all spats aside, someone texts us a toast, and all follow suit.
























Some More Anthropology

And yet tribes of gentle Tasaday remind me of primitive
falseness, of blunt manners and dysfunctional Gentiles,
regarded merely as poets parking their cars wherever
their innocent hearts desire. The apartments of exiled

dictators in which rooms set aside for lost Jews shelter
inventors of land mines and booby traps. Harping on once
familiar diatribes, non-existent Tasaday come out of their
forest, stunned by the waiting limousines, their soft

purring. Hotels and car-parks of the rich transformed
into naïve outposts of brutal mythologists, babbling
of exclusionary clauses, of forests and palaces bereft of
meaning, of privileged preserves heard faintly in the offing.

If she can be trusted by neither of us, no one is sure of her
survival instincts, once her most conspicuous feature.


(after Michael Heller)





















Calling All Lexicographers

Lord knows I’m tired of chewing on all this
just to learn how snowmobiles bundle themselves
up in grammar. Their full or adult-sized Times
severely stressed, too stressed to say they’re sorry.

Spewing abuse far from love, but at least
brumal. Subscriptions all lapsed. Ice crevasses
beneath you, beneath me. But seduction splits,
as if truth itself were at stake. Subscriptions

dropped, or at least at risk, bears drop their plans
for hybernation, fight amongst themselves—black
and white against brown until alliances shift.
Learning it all over again, tongue against teeth.

Then crashed, abbreviation alleviating our need to
spell things out, avoid undue, toe-tapping rhythms.
























Smug Amalgamations

Video ramblings
of waiflike
solipsists, hoaxers and nose-
thumbing appropriationists.

Strange confusions,
inclusions, exclusions—
difficult but less
rigorous.

Hunks of red and gray
metal, self-loathing
and celebratory ill will,
tenement dreams.

Gorgeousness conjured
up in full-scale Civil War
reenactments, otherworldly
rickshaws and cigarette

packets. Cheap muck
to rake, devoid of reptilian
splendor. Free to be you.
Free to be me.
















Sonnet Industry Shorts
   
I have a feeling I’m not the only one, but my headshots
have never been up to industry standards. Using those

of others, however, raises ethical questions I’m not yet
prepared to answer. My crown of sonnets entitled

“How I Learned to Salivate” garnered prizes galore
but failed to find quick publication. And my Harvard

degree didn’t help, though I was slathered with advice
by seasoned adults, well-meaning though they were.

I know, let me tell you, the dangers of getting stuck on
selling an image both youthful and exotic. The work,

after all, is the thing (as I’m incessantly told). Yet, if
a sonnet tree falls in an empty forest, does it even

make so much as a ripple on the cowpond of my asp-
irations? Whatcha think? I really wanna know. (:D)



















Clouds of Knowing and Unknowing
 
Expecting fathers and their favorers, long used to knowing
what to do, what not to do, consider medical evacuation
to be among their least attractive options. Familiarizing
ourselves with alternative travel plans might be wise to do.
 
Local laws and customs are no longer beneath contempt,
proper subjects only for writers and for travel agents
swimming against the tide of online reservation booking.

Handbooks of popular proverbs and sayings yield only
revisionist maxims such as “Don’t swap wooden nickels
in midstream” and “Necessity’s mother knows no laws.”

In the meanwhile, we were fiddling when we should have
been faddling. Promising stock options were allowed to drop.
Another of Peggy Lee’s sad songs. Her death was natural,
much to everyone’s relief. Not macht erfinderisch.
























Homeland Security

Large tanks marked PROPANE, lying in rows in the sun.
You’ve watched the scene in commercial satellite photos
with an aim of splitting the opposition, doing the dirty work

that needs to be done. A near-earth fly-by deflected
suspicion onto certain of our neighbors whose names you may
know or may not, refusing to believe that any court

could be objective in this matter—our zero percent market share in
gasoline pumps. The government/industry test execution team
says our new government should be a federal democracy, and money

should remain the state religion. Does that sound familiar?
Most of the delegates have been in exile for decades,
their heinous crimes against humanity almost totally forgotten.

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile petrochemical
corporations to their coming decline—those are our aims.
Sites near the town of Jumpstart, Nevada, were of a type that could

be used for making nuclear weapons, links to your future, and ours.
Visits there never complete without souvenirs from the gift shop—
you know, something for the wife and kids.

















A Brave Story
 
 
Understanding the universe and the potential for life in it,
Nikita Khruschev, in a secret speech, denounced Stalin.
In 1935, the military zeppelin USS Macon crashed and sank
off Point Sur. To this very day, it lies there, on the ocean floor.

Sarah’s pet ant grew to the size of a bus, and yet . . . and yet . . . .
Genocide in Darfur? Need you ask? Dubai, some say, has sold
its soul to the company store. Blocked from speaking in New York,
he took to the hustings in Nebraska, reading Reading Lolita in Tehran

to any who would come and listen. When things go badly, the public
does not take well to wars of choice. We know that now. Sadly,
we knew that then as well. Is flying around the world any way
to warn us of the dangers of carbon dioxide? These days, he lets

it all hang out, there in the classroom. Merely a tool of the neocons,
he hid his tutu and slippers from hostile faculty. Praise be!























Unavailable Light

The dancing just isn’t what it seems to want to be.
Superior investment results bring added dimensions

to our whole pie. Already obvious, her remarks,
mice in her ears or not, had begun to be famous.

Even her appearances on Wall Street Week had formal
virtues beyond, and separate from, their subjects.

Dow-Jones figures dance on our screen toward what
seems a dining table surrounded by intermittant

regulars. Beside, or perhaps leaning against, a red-plush
sofa in what appears to be an investment councilor’s

living room is a well-groomed Irish setter. Lessons
in living fashionably with a pick-up parked in one’s

driveway continue on, until we are well out of earshot,
out on that limb we’ve grown used to calling home.




















Autumnal Sonnet

An undesecrated flag flew over the ballpark, where outfielders
napped and baserunners took desperate chances. Such talent
as that had not been seen since the beginning of the eclipse.

Opportunity stood on our doorstep, hand raised to knock. Embryo-
genesis, our middle name. No-fly zones at the ready in the backyard.
All sorts of guys came by for drinks, or looking for free hand-outs.

Among the missing, we were always at a loss for something to say,
something at least sympathetic, if not moreso. A designer
of aloha shirts camped on the median strip across from the end

of our driveway. “Will work for food” said his sign. Some said his
parents had married for love, but none could have known for sure.
Youngsters congregated in the front yard, choosing up sides.

We older folk kicked back in the bleachers, basking in the early
October sun, taking our game to higher levels than ever before.























Final Deprivations

Save me from the censorious widows, offshoots of the noble
branch, the “big tent” of American Protestantism. Imaginary
fables, their truculent in-laws. But why focus exclusively on
facts the average American grad student might be expected

to know? One hopes that they might someday exceed one’s
expectations, but doesn’t hold one’s breath. Ideological
functions—every text has them, so let’s be clear on that.
Trujillo’s barbarity tests the ethics of the left, although some

create small revolutionary episodes that put the right to shame.
When complete, our investigations leave five heads rolling
on a Michoacan dancefloor. Who could ask for anything more?
Finally, we didn’t know whether they’d been kidnapped

in broad daylight from lower Fifth Avenue, or raptured up,
the usual crowd of infidels looking on from a nearby lobby.
























Trading Meaningful Glances

Longing for something to proofread and for temperatures
within reason, they packed their bags and moved away to,
well, not the sea, but some quiet place in the eclipse zone.

In-crowds gathered above the house, the solar heating cells.
The Oxford presidency was up for grabs, and her long-confined
triangle was on its way to Bermuda. Finding sanctuary

in a church was a stop-gap measure, the best that that time
had to offer. Their memorial plasmas properly southern,
they found that their words eclipsed only a fraction

of the sun’s diameter. Threats and rejections were balanced
by the Palme d’Or their in-flight movie received at Cannes,
yet people looking for relationships found they had to take

some risks. Archaeoastronomy was on everyone’s mind,
from Guangzhou to Charlottesville, even in September.























Somewhere around Barstow

The Iranian assured us that all spent fuel would be returned to Russia.
The Visitors’ Center was closed, so we had to go on
without maps, without guidance. The media tried to fill
the emptiness within us, but even the launching of moon orbiters

failed to do the trick. We thought we’d settled on a political blueprint
for our nation’s future, but even that didn’t pan out, though
a conference hall full of astrophysicists had worked on it day
and night for several weeks. Either the surface had been dried out

by solar heating and maturation, or the dark soot-like material that covers
Barstow’s surface masked any trace of Arizona black ice. But still the road
uncoiled before us until we surpassed it and it slithered away behind us
in our rear-view mirror. The boundaries between counties hereabouts

were not well marked, and we usually slid from one right into the next
without warning, tours no longer being offered until further notice.
The Humans in Space Symposium had been cancelled,
stirring up a hornet’s nest of activity among those impacted.

In Arroyo City, we stopped to gas up, and to check out Arizona’s claim
that it had no nuclear or biological weapons programs, a claim
we strongly doubted. Now that we pay at the pump, we never see any
of the locals anymore, and everything else was underground

except, of course, for the old, burnt-out roadhouse across the road
from the pumps. Hand in hand, a column of kindergarten children
marched by us, headed out along the road we’d followed
into town, vanishing into the heat vapors rising from the pavement

and the desert floor. Where they were headed we had no idea.
Our newly bolstered inspection team visited a former nuclear facility
forty-six miles south of Flagstaff. This, I thought, is eternity.
A policeman biking past smiled, “The ball’s in the bad guy’s court now.”







Autonomous Retreat

That hole, that vacuum, with talk and print—all oil
mergers suspended until further notice. No use to cry
outside and scream inside. It was all a sin click
here, until the storm bursts, and house is shut and still.

We share the luxury of seeing it all, building the scrub
of future sugar. Having lost and forgotten everything,
the music must play forever—allegro, ma non troppo.
Unexplained bravura, place of safe laughter.

On the reasonable shoreline, white in the air, white
in the trees. Father of wavelets, come lift your arms
with us. Given this kind of city, sand beneath our feet
like broken glass, pieces of orphaned wreckage

tossed up by the storm. Russian oil mergers suspended
by thumbs, between wetlands and the suffocating sea.
























Stipulations

Ghostly instead, they chronicle their most
horrid neighbors. Standard ground-based
tools put an end to night skies everywhere.

Newspapers promise more accurate obits
whether their subjects are living or dead.
My mother was thirty times more sensitive

than my father on all but the most august
occasions. Mac Low said, “Every text
worth reading is a manifesto.” I say,

whoop-dee-doo! Fat lazy dogs forever!




























Dispersible Warmish Dance #1

While screechy wisecrackers take to the dancefloor
of the warmongers’ mothership, I’ve got a case
of the fantods. My abalone steak’s gone

gentle into that good night, infinitesimal warheads
right there on my tongue. Jai alai frontons
defaced before our very eyes, cestas

heaped up and burned. She wants to marry a man
who tips well but not overly, who, while famous,
can dance and sing on command.




























Favorite California Churches

Church of the Sacred Cucumber
St. Vitamin’s
Santa Cuisinart
Church of the Holy Rose Bowl
St. Vim and St. Vigor
2nd Church of Santa Clarification and Mudslide
Temple of the Seedless Orange
Valley United Methadone
Iglesia de Julio
Seventh Chapel of San Andreas de Culpa
Our Lady of Dolores Del Rio
Synagogue Ben Hur
Cathedral of the Blessed Catheter




























Tango Bouquet

Hes and shes, God thought, what can I do for them
that I haven’t already done? Once we boarded their
veins up, they had nothing good to say anymore.

Tawdry mimosas sprang up on cafe tables everywhere,
and no one seems to have noticed. If brains were
muscles, then all minds could be lifted up.

Something with something always gets along for two
or three days, circling the plaza, first one way and
then the other. Eyes plucking the birds from the sky.

Someone’s corsage hung from a flagpole, dipping
and waving in the biscuity breeze. Stores open
till ten, now that darkness upon us has fallen.

The disjuncture of what men seek, someone said.
Or maybe the word was departure, someone thought.























Bachiana

Europe within, a have-based father, though more from
local to treasury once. At visual three, who knows?
Punctuated quite, that reading. Critical as any which.

Whose forebears spoke of “hearing some Book,” and yet
resisted its subjectivity. Sociolinguistics, sculpted alive.
Scores and manuscripts with some poetry in them, lying

about everywhere, everything. Harmonious inventions
springing from grandmother’s tonguebook. Conference
calls of the imagination. Catch-can phrases breed feudal

elaborations and exonerations, images on and off now.
Overarching themes putting rather some good in. Previous
expressions fund holiness. Articulate relationships trump

first-person narratives, not the first to spurn Hovercraft
values. On his nexus night, proud values seek absolution.























Maximal Cachet

Phrygia. Or maiden France
and called to Paris by
her fertile regions.

Millenium BC, believed
to stretch along that seashore’s
sandy stretches.

Asian miners, trapped beneath
a deep blue sea blue sky
blew over heads off-shore.

Antiques in dusty quarries
dug extensively along
our own lines of ecstatic nature.

In part, two parts divided
was the valley’s undivided
general nature, as we found them.

Lay further east and inland
afterward, but somewhat limited
to known as what is now.


















Found Prose Political Sonnet:  Bush Clears the Way for Corporate Domination

When George W. Bush says that he wants to spread freedom to every corner of the earth, he means it. But, of course, the president who turned Soviet-era gulags into secret CIA prisons in order to do God-knows-what to God-knows-whom isn’t talking about individual freedom. He means corporate freedom—freedom for the great multinationals

to extract everything they can from the world’s resources and labor without the hindrance of public interest laws, environmental regulations or worker protections. Bush’s vision of a free world actually looks just like the corporate globalization agenda pushed by a succession of American presidents in institutions like the World Trade Organization.

But this administration yearns for freedom too much to leave it up to trade negotiators. Unlike his predecessors, Bush isn’t content to use carrots and sticks and a liberal dose of arm-twisting to advance that agenda. His administration has made the neoliberal policies euphemistically referred to as “free-trade” a centerpiece of its national security policy.

Bush is willing to use the awesome force of the United States military
to guarantee the freedom of the world’s largest multinationals.


[Source: Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on May 5, 2006, Printed on May 7, 2006]
















What’s Up

Duddy wakes up from a nap and takes things seriously
for a change. Luther’s mad as hell cuz he can’t change
Jews into Christ-huggers. Junior’s out chugalugging

Gatorade laced with vodka. Mom’s in the kitchen
roastin’ taters. Uncle Joe’s up on the roof, banging
his head on the skylight. The dog’s asleep on the bath-

room floor. Auntie Vanessa’s putting on her face again.
Wherever we go we is with us. Nobody knows the color
of sky. The trouble I’ve seen. Uncle Moses has taken

to parting his hair in the middle nowadays. No one to
blame but himself. Melanie’s sister’s hung out to dry.
It’s the best of times, the worst of times. Tempus fidgets.


























Sonnet:  Lento e deserto

Lopped heads keep their crowns above water, suitable for eating
abandoned songs. Aphotic members of the family read riot acts
to Sousa marches. Reservists razz dentists wielding drill instructors

and tongue suppressors. Troubleshooters’ ascetic sidekicks (magma
cum laude) duel beside peevish peers. Yerba maté notwithstanding,
his chest was covered by a carpet of soft fair hair. As the small store’s
customers lined up in numerical order, his wife collapsed, and he

shouted, “Is there a ventriloquist in the house?” Numbingly familiar
retirees, mountebanks and obstetricians, other-directed as ever, pursue
teensy weensy annoyances across some neighboring field. TV stations
plunk down hard cash for new episodes that will enhance our pneuma.

Birth parents watch idly as their children vanish into young adulthood.
Whimsy, having no immediately obvious right to exist, seeks out those
of similar dispositions. E pluribus unum—a dream once dreamt.
























Political Sonnet

The Benited States slides into inflexination and extreme
wastes, time-consuming work with thoughtful, angelical leaders
to develop an ecologically grounded approach to Palestinian
rights. Broadening the base for thoughtful, though never anti-

podean, B.S. policies. Similarly, engaging evangels in foreign
policy discussions can lead to surprising climate change that
disproportionately affects the poor, and that Christians have
a moral duty to rail against, help deal with. Meanwhile, slave

raids against unChristians in southern Alabama have gone on
to focus more on U.S. exceptionalism than liberals would like,
and they, most likely, care more about the counterintuitiveness
of B.S. foreign policy than most surrealists prefer. But angel

power is here to stay for the foreseeable future, and is sometimes
even necessary in this wicked or, some might say, fallen world.






















Superbot Sonnet

This is the sonnet that will worm
its way into the dark interior of your
body, your soul. It will check out

your psyche for both strengths and
flaws. Its pale artificial flesh will
slither a zigzag line into recesses of

heart and mind that never see the light
of day. Essence of silicone looking
around, not taking no for an answer.

Upon emerging, the superbot sonnet files
its report: “Eerily lifelike” it finds you.



























The Jinx Is On

I still feel like I’m in a dream. Misdirection and other
anxieties overtake me. Americans in Erbil arrest
Iranians at an increasingly rapid rate. The jinx is on.

Space probes on Mars, they say, are looking for
the wrong forms of life. Good dreams, not nightmares,
for the first time in years. Everything here is alive.

I’ll try less clonazepam and more of the other stuff.
Sentenced in absentia for crimes against pizzeria
managers, he took refuge on Mogamigawa, a Japanese

oil tanker soon to collide with the USS Newport News.
Zoo animals on Prozac, it’s been found, still chase
their tails for hours on end. Lawyers representing

detainees at Guantánamo, now on a federal hit list
despite good faith efforts to have their names expunged.























Short Story Sonnet

His license for fuzziness expired, Beckham turned to direct
action. Vagaries of time and fashion overwhelmed his innate
good humor. One admired the worst things in him, as though
he were some neo-clinical monkey. Kidnapping adolescents
became his “thing,” turning ransom money over to favored
causes: Zimbabwean rebels, and so on. Ten cases of eggnog
abandoned by a food bank provided some sort of sustenance.
Somewhere along the Limpopo River, Mugabe’s thugs over-

took him, ran off his “boys,” and began to make clear their
demands. Late one night, a chest-high mud wall providing him
some cover, he made good an escape into South Africa, where,
meeting a wandering troupe of American evangelicals, he came
at last to find Jesus. Back in the “world,” as Americans called it,
he blissed out in Brooklyn, shoelaces tied and ready for Heaven.


























Unseasonable Facsimiles

So deeply buried within the culture, these twins,
these eyes that each mirror images of the other.
Cult classics from the 60s reinforce our ideations,
encouraging, if not requiring, some sort of closure.

Not that he was scared to fly. He’d done it before,
a thousand times, earbuds hidden. Toxic chipsets
scattered all around, landmines for the rummagers,
pomo replicators, even in plastic suits and gloves.

Copiers coping with rivers of information, always
reminding the family matriarch of her roots that
need dyeing. A pair of Roombas roaming around,
impossible to tell one from the other. Expansionist

sentiments, left on the livingroom davenport, slip
down behind cushions, pocket change for the ages.
























A Lone Gunman Is Dead

The university, struck. Classes cut short, one in critical
condition, others in critical thinking.  Monumental pro-
portions overwhelmed everyone. Chaos erupted. Ambu-
lances hustled, bustled. Some victims shot in classroom.

Critical conditions at multiple locations, spokeswoman
transported to microphones. Gunshot wounds and injuries
reported and treated. Worst school shooting, some said.
Four patients transported. One person killed at 7:15.

Lots of students going crazy, running around. Gunshot
wounds and other tragedies. A residence hall near a drill
field and stadium. Twin shootings, worst in US history.
One person killed and others injured, then, two hours

later, many others. Only one gunman, on a rampage.
Killed 32 people, not counting himself. Single shooter.






















At the Treeline

Exacerbated trees lined up along the far horizon,
spelling defeat for the nearby townspeople, ready
at last to speculate openly on their failure to elect
competent ministers and sheriffs and deputies.

Dismantling the silences around them, voluntary
amnesiacs filled in missile silos and adjacent
barns, as though no one were out there to threaten
them, their way of life. Rifts between generations

became more pronounced, threatening their pre-
consumerist idyll. Yet still, we take our daily
bowlful of lies and, adding milk and a sprinkling
of sugar, force it down. Leaflets fell from the trees.

The sky above, as hostile as ever, its deep blue
more incongruous with each passing moment.
























Landscape near a Landfill

Addicted to fog and roiling seas, to dark Moroccan streets
and scorching deserts, we wondered what she saw in him.

Obligate anaerobes mingle with pearly everlastings, and yet,
theory weary true believers produce more words every day

than wannabe muses dared to hope, black jobless figures
at historical lows. How many words must a man put down

before you can call him a man? Mom and pop therapists
convene in Decatur, Illinois—deep clashes of intuition,

bad news for novelists. Our steam engine, the microchip.
We hitched our star to a falling wagon, depending on

your point of  view. Generous Americans dropping peanut
butter and jelly sandwiches on Afghan wastelands, miles off-

target. Dangerously prolific, modernism’s project comes to rest
at last in a field of biblical prophecy, finally open to question.





















Also by Halvard Johnson


Transparencies & Projections (1969)

The Dance of the Red Swan (1971)

Eclipse (1974)

Winter Journey (1979)

G(e)nome (2003)

Rapsodie espagnole (2003)

Changing the Subject (with James Cervantes) (2003)

The Sonnet Project (2004)

Coyote’s Engines (2004)

Theory of Harmony (2004)

The English Lesson (2004)

Guide to the Tokyo Subway (2006)

Organ Harvest with Entrance of Clones (2007)



 

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