Song of the Anti-Puritan
I want to be happy
on this earth
and laugh and play and run
alright with what it means to be
a little shadow
against the sun
to see the clouds swim in the lake
dissolving in the water's glaze
in love with trees and geese and friends
and the silences they make
I want to love the shapes that pass
as blessings as they fade
and feel as deeply
as days recede
days passing into haze.
On the form of the end of the world
A poet need not assume
any particular form of doom
or spend time in being anxious
that something noxious may presume
to kill us off like roaches
in a uranium cloud that encroaches
green and lethal
like some evil writhing dosage of Lucifer
on a leaden spoon.
Because though doom may be dark
and deeper than any agglutinization
of desires unfulfilled
it must arrive whether or not
we particpate in its ill will.
Which is not a sign
that its best to resign
or give up the ghost
over what we want most,
but a sign of imagination's painful limitations
in a time when we take no responsibility for hell
except to see that it destroys us well
An Alien Speaks
Poor goddamn possum
no one gives a fuck
if your possum -ass was flattened
by a delivery truck
I'm a....
I'm a real person
I'm a real guy
I say what I say
I don't know why
A poet is a person
a person is a thing
a thing can have desire
as desires must want things
So a dog becomes its owner
a man becomes his beast
a hunger is a lover
and a lover finds a thief
I am a shadow
of the love I am
I am the song
of a hungry man
I am a flutter
in the big"I am "
I'm a real person
I'm a real guy
I say what I say
I don't know why
The Mole
It's easy to be moral
when a mole remains a mole
and doesn't lift his flesh-head
to investigate the hole
but harder when he sees
that what he is belongs to others
that lust and need and cock-eyed greed
made the hole the mole prefers
The End
In the end
the end comes
In the end
the end descends
But no one knows
that its the end
if it's the end
of them
Yes in the end
the end will end
the truth will show
the silence rend
as in the end
the end begins
and ends again
before it ends
Our Violence
In the violence
that reminds us
of that peace
that we have not
the baseball bat
the pissing rat
and odd-job's hat
all in chorus,
with deference for none
sing out like guns
their nativity
the gravity
of a found remorse.
Our Fate.
We must die to transcend.
That paradox never ends.
Only at its fulcrum do our shapes unblend.
And at that point they blend again.
There three sisters weave a world without end.
One sniffles,one smiles, one greenly grins.
Loss of Self
Shades of silence
shades of grief
I lost my girlfriend
and I can't sleep.
She looked and touched
the face I was.
But now she's gone
And I'm no one.
The Sky
It ends in blues
its blue
amends.
Ontologic
Each being is
its own
to digest.
What is left
is a cognition
of the silence
in which all things
have rest.
Somewhere else
The wind doesn't depend
on our amens
for its ceasuras
or impostures
it does what it does
and just because
it doesn't care for closure
And though we will sit
and wish all day
for something to bring us
to where we are
The wind will get up
with enviable stealth
and go do what it does
somewhere else.
Humor in Uniform
It goes on and on
and we go with it.
The world burns
and the people in it.
Systems evolve
as people talk.
Dark is the dark
our darkness costs.
But that's anxiety
on the make,
its ordinance gleaming
in the market place.
A guy pays thirty years in dues
so he can do what they did to him
to you
Song
I have a little penis
that goes in and out with me
and what can be the use of it
is something I can't always see.
...But its a question
worth asking often
since its the smallest nail
in so many coffins.
The wind
The wind is high
tonight its sly
renderings double back
on its results.
The wind is adamant
in its insult.
It moves to be its self-
revolt.
But can't be.
Because it is
Poets
Poets have confusing lives.
They want to be accepted.
So they create academies where they can be invested.
And hang out all day. And collect their pay
and answer people's questions.
But when it comes to their own
doubts and sighs,
they want to enshrine them,
and don't know why.
And be the center of what it means to them
to makes a salience
of their world without end.
The Past is What The Present Allows
Is is
as was was
so as is was
was is
Negative Culpability
What is immortality
but being
without causality
not seeing
what we would insist
but being
where what isn't is
Nightmare
The shape
in the shadow
was Blake's
Soul of a Flea.
The ink
of its form
was the umbra
of its travesty
In him the lifetime
of the anti-self
appeared
Full of surmise
and a tawdry
leer
...The stink
of fidelity
in the strutting crow.
The soul of anthracite
in the unbroken snow.