BIAS

a collection of poetry

JOHN XAVIER
“However vain and conceited people may be, the conception they usually have of themselves is
very humble; that is, they have no conception of being spirit, the absolute that a human can be;
but vain and conceited they remain – comparatively speaking. If one were to imagine a house
consisting of a basement, ground floor and first floor, tenanted or planned in such a way that
there is, or is meant to be, a difference of social class between the occupants of each floor – and
if now one were to compare being a human being with such a house, then the sorry and ludicrous
fact with most people is, alas, that in their own house they prefer to live in the basement. Every
human being is the psycho-physical synthesis planned as spirit; this is the building, but he prefers
living in the basement, that is, in the categories of sensation. Moreover, he not only prefers living
in the basement – no, he loves it so much that he is indignant if anyone suggests he occupy the
fine suite lying vacant above him; after all he is living in his own house!”

The Sickness Unto Death

When Dongshan was in [Jiangxi,] he met Head Monk Chŭ, who exclaimed, “How amazing! How
amazing! The realm of the Buddha and the realm of the path! How unfathomable!” To this
Dongshan replied, “I don’t inquire about the realm of the Buddha or the realm of the Path; what
kind of person is someone who talks about the realm of the Buddha and the realm of the Path?”

After a long time of Head Monk Chŭ not responding, Dongshan asked, “Why don’t you answer
more quickly?” Chŭ replied, “Such aggression won’t do.” “You haven’t even answered what you
were asked,” Dongshan retorted, “So how can you say that such aggression won’t do?” Chŭ didn’t
respond. Dongshan continued, “The Buddha and the Path are nothing more than names. Why
don’t you quote some teachings?” “What would a teaching add?” asked Chŭ. “When you’ve
grasped the meaning, discard the words,” replied Dongshan.” “By still depending on teachings,
you sicken your mind,” protested Chŭ. “And how great is the sickness of the one who talks about
the realm of the Buddha and the realm of the Path?” asked Dongshan.

Once more, Chŭ failed to answer. Then the next day he suddenly passed away and Dongshan
became known as “the one who questions head monks to death.”

Dongshan, Case 26
 INTRODUCTION
This is the eighth collection of poetry I’ve written. As in the present volume, most
of these have just consisted of whatever publishable work I wrote at random within
a given period of time (The two exceptions being Full Circle, a series of largely
chronological haiku organized around the four seasons, and Dead Time, what was
mostly a collection of documentary prison poems which all implausibly disappeared
from my personal effects during a prison transfer) So the obvious danger here is
that I might begin to repeat myself and, like many artists before (And after) me,
become a mechanical facsimile of the creative writer I previously was.

Conscious of this though, and still stimulated by the creative possibilities of poetry,
I’ve continued to strive for originality while experimenting with unused themes and
techniques. For example, although I’ve written a few poems about the world of
painting in the past (To the Young Tahitian Woman, Dali Says Fuck You, etc) the
reader can observe for themselves that fine art is a subject matter of particular
interest throughout this collection. The reason for this, the seed in fact, was a poem
I wrote in my last collection (1985 and Other Poems) titled “Civic Anti-Poetry”
whose opening stanza envisioned its generic city through a cubist lens. This then
got me thinking about the application of cubist principles to written art forms,
specifically the approaches of early analytical and synthetic cubism, and the result
of those deliberations ended up being the poem “Incidents Involving Commercial
Aircraft.” One of my better ones I think.

But while I was pleased with the outcome here, I remained uncharacteristically
preoccupied with the idea of cubism. During the writing of IIAC, I’d extrapolated a
certain set of guidelines which I relied on to give general shape to the work: these
being the cubist focus on intersecting perspectives, where the object is presented
from multiple angles simultaneously, the promotion of incongruity to emphasize
the dynamic reality of the object, and the reduction of form to its essentials so that
the soul of the object is uncluttered by extraneous details. With IIAC, the first of
these were used to create temporal simultaneity as well as spatial simultaneity,
something that wasn’t prominent in the visual works of the cubists I was familiar
with and something I thought was better depicted through literary means anyways.
But after the poem was finished, I felt I was still far from having exhausted the ore
of literary possibilities here. As such, I returned to it during the writing of this
collection and produced one paradigmatically cubist poem, both in terms of theme
and technique (This was “Re: Braque”) as well as a few other poems that attempted
to achieve the same kind of poetic translation for other contemporaneous visual
art movements. Clearly this kind of fascination could be indulged endlessly, the
varieties of art are without limit, but for now I think I’m content here.

As a personal aside, I should add that I wasn’t familiar with the history of cubist
literature when all this started. If pressed, I’d have replied that cubist literature
must have been produced during its original historical period, and after, but I
wasn’t aware of any significant works in this respect. Since then, after the writing
of “Re: Braque” but before completing “First Word” I did have a chance to read
some interesting poetry from that era but, of these, only Gertrude Stein’s “Identity
a Poem” was of notable worth – while also appearing to have a significant cubist
influence (And it’s probably the first Stein poem I’ve truly enjoyed)

Another motif that occurs throughout this collection revolves around the concepts
of duality, twinness, contradiction, inversion, and symmetry. As such, many of the
poems are paired; some more obviously than others. While I’m not a proponent of
dualism by any means, it should be acknowledged that duality circumscribes the
existential foundations of every form of being (Things exist or they don’t) and so
duality is rightly understood as the primary phase of any creative process. The
origination of something is always an act of division and the creation story of
Genesis supports that much. Of course, poetry and literature are lower orders of
creation, depending more on pre-existing material, but they too participate in the
basic ontological parameters of reality and so a writer will remain crippled in their
abilities as long as they fail to properly appreciate this.

Further confirmation then that self-reflection is important. And I’m not just saying
this for effect here. I often reread my own work to better understand it, scrutinizing
something different on each perusal, while also contemplating the same questions
that initially animated me during the writing process. Because I don’t often get
feedback on my writing, I don’t really know whether the full range of thought I’m
putting in to it is having any impact on those who read it; but it’s there. I’m firmly
of the opinion, and perhaps this is the minority view, that the value of art is largely
objective and that the merits of any artistic work are verifiable by the appropriate
means of analysis. Of course that claim itself demands justification but, consistent
with this, I think its own justification can be easily provided in a perfectly forthright
manner. To that end, I will try something else here for the first time.

At the conclusion of the poem sequence in this book, commentary on the sixteen
poems I consider my best will be added. In truth, “First Word” would probably
benefit the most from explication due to its numerous puns and allusions but, while
I think it’s an accomplished Dadaist poem (Or pseudo-Dadaist poem really because
it erects a Dadaist façade over a rational framework) the Dadaist aesthetic grates
against my own personal preferences and as such it’s not one of my favorite pieces
of writing. On the contrary, it was more an exercise in proving to myself that I could
meet the challenge here. Again, I still have a desire to improve my own artistic
powers, so I frequently write things that don’t gratify my immediate cravings but
serve the more fundamental gratification of greater creative development. In
short, I try to overcome my personal limits to fulfill my potential. And that brings
me now to the subject of the individual’s own prejudices.

The title of this collection comes from a prevailing interest in bias. Every manner of
choice is colored to some degree with bias and that makes the phenomenon of bias
something of fundamental importance. But an investigation into bias receives no
special protection from the effects of bias on account of this; bias still has to be
conscientiously rooted out wherever selection takes place. Bias is everywhere.
Even in the introductions to poetry collections.
ABOVE LEVIATHAN

Citadels of clouds in vaporous strife

And a monarchy of blue
Laughing over these and earth

Though the cities rise up like mausoleums

Hoarding the dead
And mortal teeth of clay
Undo the seas,
Still the kingdom does not tremble;
Mere dogs cannot be rebels

Rivers of power flow upwards, always

Good servants to the invisible edicts
Which no hand has ever written, or mouth
Ever uttered

What is left of treasure when

The heart is plundered dry?
When the prisons of undeciphered dreams
Endure although abandoned
And the theatre of ego is finally emptied?

A few birds may still circle overhead

But the species doesn’t matter

The long-legged stars march on,

Devouring entire civilizations
In single strides
ALBION
For David

Our man at the war’s front, a sentinel

Striding atop the
Battle-shot parapets

Besieged, beleaguered, the

Forces of barbarism
An interminable throng beyond the mounded
Bulwarks of literature;
But armored in his incunabula, he
Fights on, that wonderful
Son-of-a-bitch

Old Field Marshal Gutenberg keeps

Promising him new soldiers,
And maybe one in eighty today is worth a damn;
Still our man defends the canon, still
He holds his ground against
The artillery-fall of the Philistines

Between inferno and new life, adversity

Invasions, assaults, all of

Them suspiciously united in their outcome;
The erosion of our ancient island

Among the many bodies unburied in the

Trenches though and the
Smoldering machinery of dogma,
Culture’s grizzled warrior
Keeps his post, boldly skirmishing with
Any-and-all comers

Gorgeous Albion, green and pleasant;

Our man is watching over you
APENECK SWEENEY’S WELTANSCHAUUNG

The warm metaphysics

Oozing through an unknown universe
As it unravels from
Mind to mind, ectoplasm of
Ontology stumbling
Into viral chains of inanimate
Reasoning and epistemic chemistry

And if the dream of logic

Wasn’t enough
There’s fortresses of ideology
Ready to inspire every
Form of reverence and terror

Colleges stuffed with scarecrows

Retching up their
Straw-men homunculi in
Heaving earnest
As the polite coughs of their
Fellows, other scraping effigies,
Echo through
The cold stone halls

The grey Mass of the grave

Lit with a hundred bloodless candles,
Dust and shadows
Swirling in the professor’s
Unearthly ballet

A bust of Shakespeare
On the dander-strewn mantle
Hides the bard’s lost body;
Porcelain bones, buried long ago,
Broken along
Uncommon fault lines
All while an unseen winter sun hangs
Crucified in its solstice

From the dim turret windows of

A library rife with silverfish,
The leftover children
Born to this dark Kali Yuga
Can watch the unbreathable fog,
Deliberately poisoned, seep
Across campus;
A ruining of time itself

Worst of all,
The minutes somehow
Still feel precious
AUTUMN HAIKU

Towering crane –
Its shadow turning
Like a clock hand

Goose shit and flies –

Both the same
Vivid green

My elbow –
Two flies briefly
Mating there

Spider silk –
Its last strands
Clinging to a stone bridge

Piled gold –
Yellow leaves
Gleaming in the sun

Quiet and mist

Among alpine forest –
Overcast morning
BLACK

The well of a collapsing star,

Light falling
Towards infinity

Nothing more than the

Brushstroke of a Taoist sage,
Its ink the
Crushed pigment of primeval
Darkness converted into
Ancient
Calligraphy

A romance of shadows
Formed like the branches of a tree
And silhouetted
Against the
Riddle of unclothed
Midnight

In gaps of substance,
Something more substantial
BLONDE MONA LISA

She looks just like her,

This girl who works at the coffee place
I go to sometimes

Even the way she smiles

Has a reminiscence to Da Vinci’s
Most famous muse;
The soft upward curve at the far corners
Of their mouths, an expression
Resting between
Shyness and wistfulness and a
Feeling
Close to pity

Maybe these two women share

Some recent ancestry,
Maybe it’s just random coincidence but

I wonder how she’d react

If I mentioned my observation to her?

We’ve made eye contact

A couple times and, although we’ve
Never spoken,
I occasionally get the sense
That she’s waiting for me to talk to her

(One time in particular, the look she gave me

Was very bold)

But even setting aside

Ambiguity
Here, even assuming that some
Genuine attraction were transpiring,
I know that all we see
Of each other is our respective
Surfaces

Like two paintings

At opposite ends of an immense art gallery,
Facing one another from afar

And while I have no doubt that she’s

A wonderful girl,
The museum inside of me is
Filled with dusty things;
None of which I’m particularly eager
To share

So nothing is going to happen;

Hopefully
Life will be good to her
While I continue to drink my coffees

And stare
Out the window
CHAOS OPULENT

After the blemish and famine of winter,

Coiled coitus in the thaw of cudgeled leaves
Like thumbs, all gangly and numb
And the groping roots underground
Thick with brown murder

Shattered sea shells seed the sands

Of ravenous beaches
And the flocking creatures of carrion
Quivering with slime and translucent muscles

Nature is all a roar, brutal but

Eloquent in tyranny,
Possessing the full strength of indifference,
Which is more than enough
To waste what little life its brood
Of dreaming magicians
Sigh together in lurid flourish

However far the might of human minds

May ascend, still the
Pneumatic belligerence of the unborn truth
Will return in rapid anger,
Weeding away our surplus vanities;
All our vanities

This too is a new season

And there’s always another ready
To prowl into the jail cells of
Atrophied dogma,
To free the incarcerated,
Or just cause gongs of wrongful bedlam,
Carousing in disruption
And other sacraments of anarchy
COMPANY WITH SOLITUDE

I am an apprentice of the silence, servant

To one speechless with
Enlightenment

Attendant, alert, and

Famished for any fragment of wisdom
Provided by my mute master;
I meditate in
The thrall of ordinary truth
And dissolve my mind into the mundane
Body of an
Unwhispered world

Even seeing is not seeing,

The things
Enrapturing our eyes
Are themselves specimens of illusion,
Lies effusive with false promises
And spectral conspiracies

Beyond phenomenon,
Where the bonds of common thoughts
Rot away and the
Fraying knots betray
The ancient plots of dim forefathers
Treacherously eager
To dominate the coming minds
Of so many
Unnamed generations

The void divides me from them;

Eyelids and lips shut

And all things illuminating

DENAZIFICATION

Dead Nazis are the best Nazis;

Their ugliness, underground
And the pollution of their unwholesome minds
Poisoning the dirt of things past
Rather than the air of things present

Which is not to say that you can’t

Sometimes save some miserable believer from
Their own foul creed

But those who’ve consecrated themselves

Inside a cult of evil,
Who’ve established an apartheid
Within their own hearts,
Only find release from this in death

The flood that wipes away a rotten world

Is good, indeed the best thing
Imaginable, since the putridness that would’ve
Strangled new life
Is thereby removed and
The Earth again becomes a garden
Fertile with promise

The dreams of murderous fanatics meanwhile

Are petrified things, an ossuary
Of old grievances
Glued together into decrepit idols and
Paraded around
To mesmerize a fearful mob

None of it’s based in fact but even if it had been

It would still remain undesirable

If hatred is ever true, then our universe

Is just a more unfortunate place
Because of it
DIET OF WORMS

We packaged our own corruption,

Selling it through a labyrinth of toppled mannequins

Whoring ourselves to an abstract economy,

We reduced the human mouth
To an impersonal disposal unit and
Stuck a hose into it
To pump this full of soulless agro-products
Until their owners became
Bloated and lifeless

It’s the dreadfulness of cities birthing

An endless supply chain
Of mutant orthodoxies, slithering undead
Abortions partially reanimated
Into microwavable dogmas that speak
Backwards incantations through the
Mouthpieces of sundry
Cartoon logos, bright vindictive
Hexagonal compounds of
Lethal sucrose molecules pouring
Out of these to swallow
Our young in the tsunami of slow sweet
Moloch’s saccharine embrace

Chemistry dissolving us into trivial pieces

We sing the shameless glug-glug of porcine obesity,

Spasmed with every self-loathing,
As the curdling fat in the drooping trunks
Of our bruised limbs
Makes our tortured bodies
Beg for mercy; a varicose agony
Despite the wheezing delight of the underlying
Vacuum of rotting sickness
Amputee tyrants on wheelchair thrones, we cheer
On the arena of our own wasting flesh

So who will come save us? Where will we find

The heretic priest to condemn
Our religion of self-debasement, our
Own gelatinous apathy, which swallows
Us in a devolution towards
Unnatural fiasco?

Or will our jowly prayers continue to congeal

Into the misshapen bodies of
A diabetic flesh?

Is humanity just a throng of orifices?

EMPTY

I am the dead father of abortions,

A thing
Heinous with lethal hunger

The ripe vine of this world spoils at

My touch, shrivelling and
Rotting away instantaneously;
My words are prisons that
Ideas die in, where passions starve,
As the fraud of who I am
Shambles on,
Dancing awkwardly before its
Audience of corpses

The rancid jaw bone,

Dripping off a skull’s hinges,
Splinters
Into several festering pieces
And each one
Returns more than I do

The ants and maggots have an

Honest business
But I can offer nothing even
Equal to these

I lack the courage to commit suicide

And yet I revenge myself
By refusing to live, wasting
Everything precious
As a way to fulfill my hideous
Resentments

There’s an un-crossable gulf

Between myself and all others
Meanwhile

I study cosmology
Naively

Trying to explain the flaw that

Allowed

My existence
EVENING AT THE OLD MASONIC GRAVEYARD

As the late hours of the lingering day herald

Something of Summer’s promise with
More brightness and warmth than one would expect
Halfway through Spring, I walk the winding street
That leads up a quiet, modest hill

Soon I am greeted by the open gates, the webbing of

Black iron, crested with its esoteric compass;
But there they are open, inward and welcoming,
Under the luminous blue shield of a pristine sky that banishes
Any thought of the phantom chandelier
Hidden beyond in starry crystal constellations

I enter then truly glad of heart, as pacific as

The gentle winds caressing the luscious flowers and
Thriving trees adorning this place,
Boldly crossing into the stillness of the disembarking area where
So many faded generations have returned to eternity

Complacently, I step between the stone plaques of the dead

Lying heavily on the earth, my feet bending the
Green grasses that have long ago devoured them, until
At last a headstone shared by an old married couple
Pauses me, and then the one just beside
Which shares the same last name; their son I guess

In Loving Memory Of
BRAIDWOOD
JAMES ALEXANDER BURNS
1952 – 1959
EVERYTHING WHITE

Walls, sink basins, handheld electronics

You understand don’t you?

It’s so you can
See the dirt, so that
You know where you are falling short of
Society’s standards of perfection

When we go out to the beach though,

When we sit on a large rock
Or a log maybe, we
Don’t agonize over their grime

Do we? And they’ve never been cleaned

But that doesn’t matter in the
Natural world of creation; because, in truth,
Excessive cleanliness is next
To ungodliness

It’s so obsessively superficial

And vacuous

This oppressive ideal of purity, it’s a conspiracy

Devised by the archons themselves;
Just another thing
To keep us endlessly occupied

To deprive us of the time for reflection, of the

Relaxation necessary to thinking

Sure, the rich can afford servants, so

It’s no problem for them
But ordinary people only get a few free
Hours per work day
And should these be spent
In monotonous supplication to the
Insipid ideals of
Lifestyle magazines invented by
Mercenary advertisers
And triviality peddling merchants?

Or should you spend one whole day of your

Precious weekend, toiling to make
Your house look like
Some artificial place people
Have never lived in?

You can do what you like, but I say

Fuck that
FAREWELL

I was a freed man, wayward it’s true, but striving all the same;
Living a life where I sought what’s right and dying to a lying shame

A soldier of the crown did-me-done though with none real enmity;

He seemed a friend and still in the end he obeyed His Majesty

Hearers! Hearers! I will confess, I brought this on myself;

Drawing my blade, more wild than brave, taking on the reins themselves

So farewell to you all above ground, I belong now to what’s below;

Under the sunshiny lands, as the rabbits play and the tall grass grows

A tidy bit of business – that’s all it was;

A rebel heart spilled out with the least of fuss
FIRST WORD

A mother and a father and a new child

The family ordinary enough
Respected throughout the neighborhood
Admired in passing
Discussed approvingly at church
And all the other good places decent people
Associate themselves

Everything the way it’s supposed to be

For a few months anyways

But now the child has to learn to speak

Because that mother and that father
Are waiting to tell their friends and family
How normal their child is
Which everyone agrees is crucial

And the child senses this expectation

Too with childish innocence
Vaguely aware now of an onus and a rising
Pressure to do. . . something

So then one day it finally happens

That mother and that father in their living room
Waiting, hoping, agonizing
When the child smiles and opens its mouth
And two cherubic syllables fly out

“dada”

Those mother’s eyes widen

As color stampedes from her face
While them father
Stops pacing and the non-pipe tumbles from him lip
As they both sumptuous horrified
“No,” saws that father, autumn to his knees
“Saw it like dah-dee. . . dah-dee!”
But it’s all ways two late to undo what’s bin done

Unwelcome phonemes unfolding like pay poor

They’re waives expounding out words in ex-act symmetry

da.
qa ap ab ap qa ap ab ap. .
da ab da qa da qa da ab da ab da qa da qa da ab. . .

Oar too repeat in synonymous parrot phrasing at set terra

(The quest Jinn squared a weigh)

da ab da ab da
qa ap qa ap qa
da ab da ab da
qa ap qa ap qa
da ab da ab da

In so on. . . .

Now father (farther) zeds to mother (mutter)

“Me Tzara, you Janco”
And the seedy boroughs just exploding
In laughter

They ha ha ha . . . ah ah ah They:
Weep in the pews in the hurt of their church
Spewing out the Luke worm
Book of axe be [cos] the weird was
With the farther in they’re forth Gauss pull
And the weird was
These farther hem self

The house is temple and the body My Word

Knot child knot woman knot man
Knot apple knot tree knot
The rest ore earth ore the light ore
Creation itself
But even before the world
When the deep was deep beyond deep
Deeper than depth
Literally and liturgically
Unfathomable

They’re they were

All three three three of them sigh mill [tan] he yes lee

One)

Ha Ha Ha

Try Ha

The farther (abba) the chilled (dada) the mutter (?)

The sea the sea the sea the see
Ave Maria wholly spirit
Where waves see sawing while seen like a. . .
What’s the word, Somme kind
Of toy?

An equinoctial word a thirst ending aqua

Unwheeling equanimity
And the moons left by the stallions
Galloping over the sands of history Ur the Sign [sin]
That behooves us two return two
The (ma)tter, like an Olympian hanging up
A pair of cleats

The thirst word the

First word – Ever spoken
FRAGMENTS OF WHAT WASN’T THERE

The missing pieces are what

Break them,
Gaps in an otherwise
Glad machine

Their inherited motor,

So often an antithesis to its own
Engine

Like damaged androids, they

Strive to achieve
Their best facsimiles of what they
Imagine to be human,
Searching every dismal
Scrapyard and junk vendor for
That unknown element
Which might complete them

Might, maybe

And some have tried to

Reverse engineer
The blueprints of meaning,
To build replacements
For a vague,
Though obviously absent,
Mechanism

How do they know they’re

Missing anything?
And how do we know
We aren’t?
GOING TO WAR

Office papers littered the asbestos-dusted streets,

Ghosts in a phantom landscape

As baboons jabbered and salivated across

Our wrath-colored airwaves,
Its titanic gears began to turn and the
Earth shook as it rose

Behind the usual euphemisms of defense and justice,

There the urbane
Avatar of cannibalistic Nature, with those
Dazzlingly red teeth and claws,
Smiled in exultation; adjusting its Hermes tie
Briefly too before using
A huge pair of golden scissors

To cut the glossy ribbon at the opening ceremony

For tomorrow’s new abattoir

Since then, how many legions have we

Sent sprinting into Tartarus?
And we protest our own invasions and denounce
Those of our geopolitical enemies,
Heedless of how many
Hypocrisies we have to commit
While doing so

Power and wealth are just

The plastic pieces of the game, but the prize,
The real prize, is the bloodletting

Gurgling: the great stomach of the universe

Churning the ocean to carnage, and us riding out in
Fish scale like chain mail;
A tide of paladins marching into the sea
HOPE IS A DREADFUL THING

Once fortune has turned against you, there’s

No paradise, only
The flames of a scowling seraphim
Between you and a
Lost dream

The paling beauty of everything in innocence,

Its scenery in soft light,
And the forgiveness
Of someone still uncorrupted by
Years of pain

Flesh heals like a paid debt, but

What is taken from the spirit can never be
Restored; a knowledge of
Any love or true
Desire is eternity manifested

It’s the horror of a glass prison

Where the perfection
You gave your heart to, endures in the sky of
An endless midnight; in a
Despotic mind with dungeons of memory

Yes, hope can be a dreadful thing,

An instrument of self
Torture, and yet if we liberate it,
Releasing it from our own grasping hands,
We too are freed
ISOLATING

Light creeping in through the edges of

Covered windows, the
Foreignness of its presence

Dawn and dusk are molten things

Melted into one another

Meanwhile the coolness of a flickering television

In the darkened room is like
Reason, disintegrating but faintly alive,
Amid the rising tide of full delusion

A silent pantomime of muted faces

Mistranslate the pain
Aching in several limbs at once

A return to the primal suffering of reality

What you are is nerves

Knotted together in temporal flesh,
Bones in the process
Of being worn down, like
Blackboard chalk

Each thought a trail of fine dust, a

Soul aerosolized in a series of hacking coughs

All pieces of life, floating

Into broken parts
Fraught in the humid air above a legion of
Invading wildflowers

Or the gleam of some deadly

Gemstone
IX XI

This illuminated face

Mine alone

Mirrored in clouds of dust,

The toxic exhale of a slain millennium

A wail of molten metal

Trickling down the broken carcasses

Of felled concrete, giants

Pulverized to unrecognizable ruin

And the bewildered

Wandering in fearful silence

Twins also –
Half before, half after
KIND

The people I know

Don’t want to read my writing

If I mention I’ve just published a new book, they’ll respond

With polite encouragement, nothing more

A couple times in the past, there were acquaintances

Who read something of mine
And responded enthusiastically but, curious
Though it is, I always
Discouraged their interest

Honestly, I guess I was

Always looking for an audience of strangers

To be gigantic like Saturn, orbited by a host of admirers

Who were all kept at a distance;
The reason for this no doubt accumulated
From a lifetime of
Experiences, a child somehow
Author to a man

We are dancing together, the world and I

Neither of us craving the

Other’s intimacy but
Each moved with the same music
LET’S AGREE TO KILL THE BUDDHA

All of us together; he can’t

Defend himself against so many

Let’s just put him to death

Immediately

Oh, I really want to murder him, I do…

How about you?

And isn’t the desire to destroy something

A sign of great respect?

It acknowledges the importance

Your target has

So, let’s do the world-honored one

Justice, and slaughter him
LUST AND VIOLENCE

surviving entwined, a pair of vices

but not just getting by,
in fact
gorging themselves on a foul table
of
horrendous urges;
desires unable to incarnate themselves
but
lingering in lung
and loin,
waiting for the day of weakness
when the whole
moral façade disintegrates
in loud ruin,
yes
the disaster that would destroy us,
a
hunger in the profound self

meanwhile

wealth is still a famished beggar

whose pleading hands wilt
into
skeletal things, appendages
unable to stir even the least passion
and prestige
as both can hardly hold
a
moment of curiosity;
lust and violence however are
not enemies
to
sneer at
does lust oblige evil?
no.
and the lure of violence?
no.
but they can pool
inside
as poisonous rage
and though
the gates remain unopened, inside: a beast
locked
in
its dented cage

even vengeful crimes

will fail to touch upon the real taste
for
destruction, a desire that
echoes still in the empty quarry
of
long depleted
principles

the heart, a cauldron

of
black bubbling tar, boiling
to
the edge of wrath

never to crest over, never

the satisfaction
of
erupting into something
awful; an event
which might redeem all those
sacrificed years
with one remorseless
pleasure
deep down
where hate is joy and
joy is hate; both ends, links
in
the same chain,
an animal
with passions in full mutiny
dragging itself
into
the cold abyss

all that beautiful young

flesh, just a taunt

trickery

where in this lure

the hidden fury claims
its
unwelcome place
in the world;
a unity of different bodies
pulling
them together

without love
MATISSE

Such savage colors! A swarm of pigments

Ready to crawl about on all fours

Howling hues loping aside the river banks

And snorting with bloodlust;
Feral hounds
Scavenging for any hint
Of plain canvass

But this is the prison-break of refreshed

Civilization, a prism unleashing
Emotion from its classical monotony

Form torn in half

Like loaves at a feast of love;
Manners discarded
Into an unhinged yawn as a restless age,
Gifted with a talent for mood,
Undoes the accretions of centuries
And returns us to our
Natural origins

Anthropophagi of their forefathers,

Full of new expression

But then the eyes smeared away, the void

Where lovers were joined
In an ineffable connection of kinship;
New and familiar

We have evolved under this regime,

The avant-garde
Of yesterday delinquent towards its children;
Redundant generations
Dancing after money and provenance
Before being
Flattened by a fallen Parnassus

So not really primitive, no;

Something else instead, without dimension
In a reversal of sculpture
Unshackling intensity to the point
Where bones disintegrate

A residue of modernity mixed

Into the vying brushstrokes of a vain palette

Paint dripping from the pillaged materiel

Of ancestral graves;
The rude artist straddling history
In their red-stained atelier
MAGNOLIA STELLATA

Something beautiful, something

Whispered

Rays of delicate stars, pale as the

Shy smiles of innocence,
Make their heaven among the branches

Divided together, floating along

A river of dreams; the
Daughters of Honshu’s heart
Sweet with promise

Nature has long ago finished its work;

The seed, formed and complete

Our brief hours and briefer years

Reveal the roots of
Creation at its most ancient;
A power, original beyond any
Mortal wisdom

So the falling petals of the flowers

Are also birth, indeed the
Birth of elements quite immortal

Gathering upon the earth

NO DUALITY

When the birds are singing

I enjoy their songs;
When the birds are absent
I enjoy the absence
OCTOBER MEDITATIONS

Autumn is the season of Time;

While Winter and Summer
Each achieves a kind of climax, a brief
Absoluteness, and Spring
Strives with eager anticipation,
The hours of Autumn shorten
And the premonition of darker days
Opens the way
To rueful contemplation

But Time itself is a season, a rest

Between grandiose eternities

As an orange hue invades the leaves,

As the air begins to gnaw us with its chill,
The encircling change here
Offers up a reminder of the immensity
Of impermanence

In the lifespan of a year, these months

Are the reprieve of maturity;
Deep in reflection and compromise,
The tormenting hungers
Of youth falling away with their usual decay,
Like overgrown vines
Depleted of an itinerant vitality

This passage, most unremarkable

It’s all countdowns within

Larger countdowns,
Indeed one total and crashing countdown
To end them all; the last unwinding
Of the universe
And each of us will live out the same
Ultimate moment,
The final ember of our own fires,
The unraveling galaxies,
And all of it in between, identical
Identical identical,
In the flawlessness of a
Revived and crucial absence

That space: for exodus

OFF ANTIDEPRESSANTS

Its yellow cover was a warning I guess,

The book I’d avoided last time
But read today
With confident expectation

My frown forming unconsciously

In its first few pages;
A curious token like a storm
Building far away,
Blemishing the distant horizon but not
Something to worry about

How can literary genius just evaporate?

It’s almost like

Someone imitating themselves;
The tone and shape and
Power of the real thing lost
For a moment,
A facsimile offered up
In place of

what?

At the same time, it wasn’t completely

Gone either; the odd line
Here and there, a
Few poems in their entirety

But I hate puzzles (Which is maybe why

I’m so susceptible to philosophy)

And, if I might be indulged the chance

To expose how deep
My own self-absorption runs,
I have to admit to the
Faint alarm that
My own hard-won talent might abandon me;
Its words, a brigade of soldiers
Not in open rebellion…
Just disappearing
From my army camp, melting
Into the night

I reacted with a kind of relief then

When I came to
The part in your book where
You confided you were taking antidepressants

Well, that explains it

And what a despicable thought that is;

One, because of
How disrespectful it is and
Two, because
It betrays a common attitude to
Mental illness that
Discourages treatment.
And yet

The feeling of vindication

is undeniable

All this time, fighting it out

In the arena of my own mind, nothing to
Alleviate

The beauty of my own

Imagined annihilation,
Nothing
To dull the madness of living without
Any barricade to death’s sirens
The windows of my mind are open to all thoughts,
Those most destructive
Not the least among them

Still, it’s surprising the price I was

Willing to pay, and paid,
For the privilege of being able to consider myself
A virtuoso;
One of Hegel’s own

World historical individuals

An ambition as pathetic as a tadpole

Fantasizing about being
The king of a little muddy pond

Because the whole of planet Earth is nothing

More
Than a cosmic puddle
But I will say
this

Being sure of your own genius is

Quite enjoyable
OWL FARM SHENANIGANS

The wisdom of the barking Luger

Mingles with the curious peacock’s jesting cries

“In a democracy, you have to be a player…”

Like a lunatic on the bongos, the music inside his

Gonzo mind supreme in its assurance;
A man who knows
What he wants and what he doesn’t,
Unlike some rube trying to buy a new car from
Their local dealer

Shielded with madness

From the lies of megaphone pundits
And chicken-shit politicians,
He can’t be sold on the official program

A man who stands alone

On his own goddamn mountain

Doing whatever the hell feels right

Without shame, without
Looking over his shoulder to see if anyone is
Following him

Yeah,

The liquor-powered survivor of some

Personal apocalypse;
Chaos’ own soldier-of-fortune

Still full of joy

PACIFIC

Asleep in sunlight;
A heart safe from troubles,
Thoughts floating
In an impeccable quiet

How easily one could laze

Across the eons…
If only paradise would persist

The world lifted up

Like a baby
Beyond the reach of difficult things,
No longer having to
Guard itself from nuisance;
Freed of even
The least wisp of
Suspicion

Today I feel I could almost

Touch the horizon
PARALLELS

I imagined her name was June

Because her arms were blossoming with
Tattooed flowers

That day, the rain had poured down

In sudden bursts, briefly
Swelling the city gutters with
Rivers, as if they’d just
Crashed over the sides of
Untraveled mountains,
And pools you might’ve found
Fetal-like in wild valleys

A world inspired into chorus, all

Raucous and gregarious,
Hissing with hearty laughter
At so many unspoken eternal jokes
But, somehow, she was
The center of it all;
A girl on a train wearing
A long yellow dress

We didn’t speak or even make eye

Contact, but she burned her memory into
My mind, perfectly, a glowing
Cigarette pressed into
The pristine paper of my
Brief unconcern

The look on her face,

Cool as the morning lotus,
Was enough

Its bones carved over eons, and eyes

Indifferent to the sun
PETRIFIED

The mouth agape, teeth protruding

From lifeless gums,
While the defeated beast of
The tongue lies
Hardened at the back of
A burrowed throat

Eyes turned to mineral

Retain a shape rounded by the
Languid eons but
Nothing glistens in them

They are not gems

And the body of the last fallen
Survivor holds no beauty;
No one is left to
Transmute tragedy into
Aesthetic nobility,
Not even some dull crawling species
To carry the hope of any
Distant future

The planet is quiet except for a few

Groaning desert winds
And the odd toxic storm
Circulating the metallic waters of
An already
Consummated ecocide

And still something endures of

The crumbling cities
Which once dazzled and
Overwhelmed the night, only now
Night, reasserted,
Has descended in majesty
To grasp the whole world in its
Cold shadow
And the oceanic dunes of
Weathered skeletons
Say nothing even though they
All look like
They’re screaming
PISS CHRIST HOMILY

by his hand
wrote holy augustine

we are born between

the urine
and the feces

most of us wailing
while sloshed
in our own excrement
each person an

offering
of filth

every new life

inglorious from the start

no less
the messiah
half god or not him too
wrapped
in placenta

slimy dripping

the body in all

its many impurities

but when some artist

desecrates a
precious tchotchke
ugh
the unworldly
tantrums erupt
the horror of the appalled
is their hypocrisy

or is our fetish of
the earthly
a treasure stored in

heaven?

well?

the answer lies

in the muck

in the
vomit and shit
and yes
piss
essential to
human
being

if the gospel is a camel

polite religion
is a gnat
POSTHUMOUSLY, I JUST WANTED TO SAY

Your appreciation now means

Very little

Life is intended to be
A living experience;
Supposedly you live day after day until
One day you’re dead

But I died more often than not;

I was dying and dying and dying to the very end

Had my work truly meant anything

To the people who read it during my lifetime,
That would’ve been something

The few polite words of encouragement conversely were like

Handfuls of sprinkled water in the desert

Worse almost

A tantalizing glimmer of success, a flower

That never bloomed

So do me a favor and don’t fantasize about my

Hypothetical gratitude
At being appreciated after my
Warm flesh was gradually denigrated into
A cold corpse

I too wanted to enjoy life

Tomorrow’s literary professors and fans are just the lineage

Of the ones who never gave a damn

A bunch of future readers who didn’t pay my rent

POSTHUMOUSLY, RECONSIDERING

A corpse shouldn’t resent its vultures

Or the indignities its epitaph suffers

Better to remain silent in respectable decay

Than yield to futile undead complaints

Those not alive, the living owe no allegiance;

And betrayal is just truth’s standard treatment

So go and die then without any grudge

At the lies left scrawled in one’s residual dust

Who cares what’s carved on your tombstone?

It’s always less a fraud than your bones
RACIST UNDERTONES

How distasteful it is to find oneself suddenly

Included in the confidences of a bigot;
The skulking sliminess of a false familiarity
And the assumption
That you would be receptive

The first thing that everyone should learn

About humanity, the most obvious thing which
Only the truly idiotic can ignore

Is that people are basically the same, everywhere

At all times and in all places
Shaped after all
By millions of years of their species repeating
The same behaviors and wrestling
With the same challenges

Organism conforms to the impositions of order,

No less us

And what do people do?

They eat and drink and sleep and fuck and love
And hate and cheat and lie and try
To be good and try to be better and all sorts
Of other things common to
Everyone regardless of geography
Or language or even
(It’s amazing that this would amaze anyone)
Skin color!

But the people who hate Jewish people

Have invented a delusion to hate
And the same thing with those who hate Arabs
And those who hate the Chinese and
Those who hate black people or anyone else
Because it’s always some
Fantasy-of-an-absolute that fuels
Moronic prejudice

At the same time it’s not always the racism

Of people who look like ourselves
That we must be wary of;
I was in a taxi once talking to a very
Friendly driver who was
Obviously from the opposite side of the planet
(In more ways than one apparently)
And they ambushed me out of nowhere with a
Jovially vile aside

As if we, members of two of the “good” races,

Could share a joke
At the expense of a third

You never know where it will be sprung on you

And lately I’m on guard against it;
Scrutinizing everyone
With newfound suspicion since
Each stranger
Is someone who might try to involve me
However vaguely
In their own racist bullshit

A paranoia then not unlike their paranoia

RE: BRAQUE

The the the

The man, the man the
Man mankind –
Humanity almost

Framed: in reality
A realty of his mind, feelings
Mankind demands
The rewind, felt felled
Falling into
Appalling detail

Curated, critiqued our

Museum: of the face
Red with the touch of Braille
Text into
Texture into
Textiles

Logo: a face split by halves,

Janus of dual profile –
Us in symmetry, dictating

Right right right right

Squared, left

Exhibited in specification

A manuscript, a scripture, a man, us

The the the

Artist, the art the
Deduction
As music as represented
In cymbals: or “pictorial facts”
Angles, unusual, strange
Framed: in the
Mind deranged, exponent to
Things sublime

And and

Music fused into timeless

Designs, framed
Into frames
Into the into and
The gallery empty now
The now
No longer, a frame

Once it was displayed, him with him

And them:
(Them) cubism
(Them) the innovators
Man and man

Artists, opposites: the

Paintings identical
Yes, you have to hand it to them
The (difference)
Here in parentheses but
A frame
Can only hold one

Otherwise the public might remember

Pissarro

And memory?
Memory is repetition, memory is
The repeating that memory
Is, that it is, that is
If what we remember retains
Its membership
In reality

Dismembered from reality

There is: no memory

Art though, well

Art dances hand in hand with
Madness
Along the edge, art
Eager
For escape

Always the frame, the eye, the rules

And order, making
Art-making artificial: hence
Ready-mades
Because (found objects) are the next subject to be
Subjected to foundational objections

What is art the man and man and… (?)

The repetition of humanity
In frame, in rewind, in
Museums with the right context, the right
Opinions and displays designed
To give us, us:
Back and forth the
Bric-a-brac curated in a mind
Like Braque’s

And brick by brick, art builds itself

Into remembrance;
The realty of art really quite something else

An architecture repeated
A memorial, a memory and
The dead artists
Who are their work are still living on;
Are surviving somehow
In our half human, half inhuman
Humanity
 sIGH

th is sin,

th is nigh t

it‘s it,

i s n ‘ t i t?

its his hints, his

s i g n s

this sh in in g

in sigh t
SĒMANTIKÓS

A false memory is not a memory

Because remembering
Entails an actual experience
Being remembered;
So there are no false memories
The reality of the unreal is different
Than the real;
But what is real?
The meaning of a thing, made
In the weave of references is also layered
By levels of time;
These striving manifoldly to sculpt
Some temporary consensus
From intent;
A relentless composing
And decomposing occurring
In parallel but merging
Towards
Odd metamorphoses
Straying etymologies
And novel inelegances in language
Like the word elegy
Less lovely now since becoming
Tainted by
Sentimental overuse
Terms and phrases suffering
Haphazard fates;
Those prospering, sustained through
Abstruse reasons, while
The leftovers, even more
Intangible in their failure, simply
Go unused;
Their inconsequence
Also forgotten
SHEELER’S CHURCH STREET EL

Sunrise in sharp divide, the luminous

Barracks of industry an anvil
Where the darkness is
Bent into long beams; a monolith
Broken by the bright morning

There is the presence of the divine here

As if evil, weighted with sloth, was still keen to sleep,
The early hours pristine and free of ill intent;
A quiet nearly paradisiacal

But this is not heaven

Even in its beauty and charisma, the dawn

Promises a day’s toil;
Providence, a tycoon relentless in their timekeeping,
Regardless of any moral ambition

The way the world trudges through its tasks,

A dedication by those
Who sense something, but only dimly

Humanity freighted to its tedious duties, trains

Stuffed with passengers
Bound to a thousand professions
And the lives they’re led to, ruled by logistics,
A governing terminus
Hush in its distant convergence

How precise and unstated

All this precision, paved and erected into
Fabricated edifice;
Art and worship in radius
SOCIAL ENTOMOLOGY

The utter lies of butterflies,

Hiding the unpleasant truth that they
Were once corpulent caterpillars

Status obsessed schemers,

Every last one of them

The humble pleas of bumblebees,

Begging for a spare napkin with their
Cheerful faces smeared in pollen

And when they really overdo it,

Multiple hind legs dangling in air

The dismaying candidness of praying mantises,

Such elegant high-brow bugs with a
Talent for vicious indifference

My dear Mrs. Mantid,

How come your husband isn’t here?

The heuristic talk of parasitic wasps,

Scholars of predation and
Each one firmly academic in their appetites

The property values in Spider Town

Plummeting when one moves in
SOL INVICTIM

Arduous sun, impelled

As like the boulder of Sisyphus
Assigned to
An azure Hades

Going fast to its

Grave, surely engulfed and
Greyer than foes
Gazed on by gorgons

Obliterating night,
Onward into
Onyx darkness, a parceled
Orpheus
SPRING HAIKU

Pooling gutters –
Silver rings vanishing
In black water

A snake striking –
The feeling like a hiss
Before lightning

Half gone to seed –

Dandelions trembling as
The storm nears

Pink umbrella –
Upturned in dandelions
At the vacant lot

Decaying petals
Piling up at the root –
Magnolia trees

Cherry blossoms –
Swirling from their branches
Directly towards me
SUMMER HAIKU

Garden stroll –
A host of raspberries
Turn to blackberries

Orange lady bugs –

Each their own
Oval green leaf

Park fountain –
I wait my turn while
The wild bee drinks her fill

Summer night walk –

Thoughts suddenly pierced
By gentle wind chimes

Bus window –
Keeping pace on the road,
A crow’s shadow

Dripping leaves –
Green sunshine twining
The tree’s branches

Clouds and sunshine –

Rainfall perfumed
With a tree’s flowers
SUSTENANCE

The liars and the honest ones;

They eat the same bread,
They bake the same bread;
Meanwhile, those who search for something else,
Starve until they tire out or die
THE INVISIBLE WHEEL

I. Returning

The agency I work for sends me to different

Construction sites all over the city;
Office high rises, condominium complexes,
Apartment buildings

Today was something different though

Today the job they sent me to was

An old elementary school in
Dire need of seismic upgrades; my elementary school,
The one I graduated from nearly twenty five
Years earlier, the one I
Lived across the street from for six

It came as quite a surprise too, I knew

The address the agency gave me
Was in the general neighborhood of where I’d spent
A sizable portion of my youth
But I only realized where I’d be working
That day, when I arrived,
Five minutes ahead of time

In the dawn of a late-winter morning

The lonely brick building, now
Adulterated with tarps and scaffolding, invoked
No strong emotions in me, merely a
Strange curiosity at the
Unusual coincidence of it all

And even when I entered the school, taking a

Few minutes break from the digging
Assignment I’d been given to wander the
Stripped-out corridors where
I’d once been a child, the place still failed to
Arouse any powerful remembrances;
I was not a protagonist
Living out some cinematic drama

On the contrary, the hollow rooms and hallways

Mirrored my own emotions;
The basement art studio for instance,
Where children’s paintings once
Hung from clothespins on a line like
Kaleidoscopic linen,
Was dusty and empty now;
A place that stored nothing more than a
Few ladders, tool boxes, and
Electrical cords
Coiled haphazardly on the
Scuffed up floors

About the only thing of interest there

Was a few games of tic-tac-toe
Left by bored tradesmen in the thick grime
Of the peeling walls

II. Departing

The future draws us to certain points in time

And then we pass these, everything
Receding away

For some events though

The temptation can arise to ascribe them
Exceptional meaning;
An inflated sense of destiny
Taking hold as grandiose thoughts
Swell to concoct flattering
Theories of esoteric fate, the universe itself
A thing to gratify our personal lust
For self-importance

But those are just pitfalls

Illusions feeding on illusions,

Our own egos
Stretching like shadows into the world to
Darken the way before us;
And the adversary that is the heart
Siphoning life lost

As such, I recall the story of the monk who,

When his arrival was foretold
In the dream of a villager, admonished
Himself for being so
Predictable

Even a cosmic demiurge is just

Another inhabitant bound to the invisible wheel of
Fleeing moments
THE SHADOW OF OUR SPECIES IS DEATH

Humanity drips like a poison on the earth, the slow horror of its
Being extinguishing the benign lives of
Innocent vermin, turning rodents and insects to
Dust

Grasses yellowing in the lethal halos of our footfalls

Before turning black and dead
Or pale and dead, their moisture creeping off
In fright, the life-force in things a shy stowaway
Regardless of the cargo it shelters in;
Everything equally disposable

But the human person, ah

They are famine incarnate, empty inside
And eager to share this emptiness with the world,
Embracing all

With parasitic desire, our simian arms

Sprouting leech-mouths like hairs

Humanity the
Many-tentacled-monstrosity, until recently unapologetic
About the destruction it thrives on
Although, today, some apathetic semblance
Of sorrow is offered
For all the carnage we cause

Like bricks
In the metaphysics of our civilization, the corpses are
Stacked up one by one, in a towering wall
Enclosing the future in the prison of cruel disaster
And it is

A wonderful monument
To ourselves, the centrepiece of a cemetery world
TM

Made to mark the maker, a mark

To set apart

To make known the maker’s name,

A claiming from the start

Created to support creators,

Their guard against infringing torts

Rights enumerated and protected

By the powers of the courts

This was also innovation;

An abstraction of endless property

A perpetual
Ownership over our economy
TO LIFE AGAIN

The luminous grey rain of a

thunderous Spring, announcing itself

A rain, cold but fresh, waking

our drowsing world
with its sharp insistence, splitting
the sky like the body of
a sombre tree to tear open the
pale blue fibre beneath

Revelation of light, revelation of time

preaching its harsh rebirth
to the dead lands of
a dying Winter; the grey empire
melting into earth

The sound of hail showering

the cathedral roof as the new
bishop in his grey robes
thunders from a wooden pulpit

Death is a heresy; the most ancient

And so I preach to you about rain, clamoring rain

that strikes the rocks and the
grey hearts of every wrecked unbeliever,
ready nevertheless
to crack like crazed-lightning
released with an illuminating life within;
the greyness melting away
as the trees become one with the sky and
life, extolling its sins,
redeems itself in sprung beauty

So honest and beautiful; and just rain

UR – BITCH VULTURE

She
Engulfs all the cities of the earth
In bleak crepuscular wings
And rows
Of
Luminous wolf tits
Rounding up the many stars,
Igniting these
Serpentine hearts for
Her, starving

Suitors
But this is not love
But power
Beyond
Any specimen of
Devotion

And the scrolls of your own

Torah and Quran
And the
Brittle brittle
Bones of your children
And
The crusts of
Old memories and
The vomit
Stain of humanity’s
Collective self-reflection
All
Braid her evil nest

The whirl of wasted jungles

Twisted into
Our own plutonic centrepiece, the
Feast at the cesspool
Of
Gathered time,
Ages in eras or otherwise
Accreted as
Fat

Good lard

Though one ought not

To
Blaspheme
If possible, you never know,
Investors
All of us in the
Afterlife
Market index of gods
But death,
The
Power of
Eminent domain,
Confiscating
Our
Estate

And
There in the dirt, the corpse
You, a tumult of flies
Buzzing

These rising in
Dizzying forms arcane

As her wicked beak

Divides
Your
Elements
USAGE

Quarry of the corroded face, the old visage

And diamond eyes
Sunk deep within a sedimentary
Skull, of sorts

Ymir himself, here today

Reduced to copper veins and wind-driven dirt;
Vast the metamorphic carcass
Toppled in primeval ransom where
The gods of yore
Built a world of mountains
And valleys
From their own

Slaughtered kin,
This some mangled wisdom taken from
The emblematic lamb

A coat of your body, brother!

A meal from your unwound limbs while

Foul chaos and umbra

Retreat in humble terror, sunlit lords
To reign forever
Across countries dyed-dark
With carnage

Precocious chimpanzees eating

Helpless monkeys
Themselves must bow to the divine
Brutality of mankind;
What could not be accomplished with tooth and claw
Has been fulfilled by the politician’s lisp
And the lawyer’s pen
All of screaming nature
Hangs from the torture rack of modern industry;
No less ourselves,
A merciless but patient inquisitor

There is much awesome work,

So much, that it seems
The dawn of commerce has only started;
With but one planet enslaved,
Our ancestor’s ancient cry for conquest
Is not yet fairly answered

And like good sons and daughters, we will

Probably go on killing
VEGANISM IS HARM REDUCTION

I don’t want to kill things for no reason;

And I also prefer
To avoid causing suffering

So, obviously, I’d rather

Not extinguish the life of some
Poor animal
If I don’t have to

Yes, I used to
Enjoy the taste of meat

But let’s be honest,

Steak and hamburger and bacon
And whatever
Other kinds of flesh we crave
Are all trivial pleasures
That a moral person must weigh against
The terror and pain
Their production demands

Imagine if you yourself had to pay the price

Your meal costs a hapless creature

Imagine the brazed ribs being torn

From your body,
The sausage links unraveled
Out of your intestines

Not so appetizing is it?

Veganism is indisputably a superior

Moral choice, contrasted
With the interspecies vampirism of animal agriculture
But superiority is not perfection

Even the plants humanity eats

Are often the harvest of deforestation
And other
Ecological outrages

Not to mention all the various

Things we buy
That come from destructive industry

The whole machinery of our

Civilization has been engineered with

Ruthless greed

But we can choose to be better,

We can fight against
Our own apathy
And ignorance, gradually
Gaining
The upper hand

It’s a long battle

And one that requires real humility;

As a vegan I know

I’m still a hypocrite but

Less of a hypocrite than I used to be

A hypocrite whose
Hypocrisy is
Moving in the right direction
WHITE

The corona of a supernova,

Light consuming
Our abyss

Everything beyond
The hieroglyphics of a scribe;
Each carved symbol
Being nothing
But a diminution in the
Meaning of
Uncorrupted stone

The labors of sunshine

Transformed into
A river of many gentle outlets,
While all of them still
Converge
Eventually in the great
Naked union

And in that final end,

Separated from separation
WUMEN’S BASTARD SON (Version 1)

I came to an impenetrable black wall without a gate

And, for a while, I wandered back and forth,
Searching for an opening

I could not hear the grass or the trees,

No, not even the sky and mountains despite that
All of these were shouting at me

Finally a procession of dead foxes paraded past

And they sang the songs of dogs
Which, at first, just sounded like barking

Annoyed, I hurled some stones at the animals

But they were already ghosts long before they died
And nothing could hurt them

Finally the foxes smiled at me

And the seed of a nameless flower
Tore apart my skull

Decapitated and joyous, I sat down

In front of the wall as the
Holy flames finally departed

After nine speechless breaths the

Wall then collapsed into a vanishing dust but
Now I felt no need to arise
WUMEN’S BASTARD SON (Version 2)

I came to an impenetrable black wall without a gate

And, for a while, I wandered back and forth,
Searching for an opening

I could not hear the grass or the trees,

No, not even the sky and mountains despite that
All of these were shouting at me

Finally a procession of dead foxes paraded past

And they sang the songs of dogs
Which, at first, just sounded like barking

Annoyed, I hurled some stones at the animals

But they were already ghosts long before they died
And nothing could hurt them

When I grew tired of my failure, I sat down

And scrawled my hopes in the dirt,
Waiting in the unbelief that I was lost

Finally the foxes smiled at me

And the seed of a nameless flower
Tore apart my skull

After nine speechless breaths the

Wall then collapsed into a vanishing dust but
Now I felt no need to arise
XU WEI’S CHRYSANTHEMUMS AND BAMBOO

Twins and opposites,

The asymmetry in reflection

Life and death together,

Sharing a hard light

But the shadows lying in the grass,

They’ve been waiting since the beginning of time

And there’s a madness in them,

A truth beyond us
XU WEI’S GRAPES

How do you fall in love?

It just ripens;
It drops into your lap

Maybe the day’s light is gleaming off the fruit and maybe a mist is hanging in the
vineyard
But that doesn’t matter
Beauty is meaningless
Some people want to crush beauty
Others to gaze on it without tasting
What of either?

Waters that crawl down entire mountains are trapped, imprisoned in little ponds
Still the sun frees them

Meanwhile the vines wither as their harvest is crushed

Meanwhile a man sits painting

A lunatic actually
From his nocturnal hands, night flows into ink
Distilled
He bends twilight into the shape of a farmer’s joy

Now, centuries later, I pluck the farmer’s orchard

I feast off one painting

The delicate shifts in tone and form

The grace of it all
My heart drinking his blood

Because nine is an auspicious number

 COMMENTARIES

1. Re: Braque
The opening stanza of this poem represents something antithetical to the aesthetic
values which guided all of my previous poetry. This kind of repetition, especially of
the definite article, goes against my predominantly neoclassical sympathies. It has
an aspect of careless disorder and abstruseness to it that I associate with the
writings of Stein, Samuel Beckett’s poems, and Finnegan’s Wake. Again, I have a
strong preference for precision and craftsmanship in poetry but in writing this
poem I found a deeper manner of expressing that appetite through cubism.

What’s interesting about cubism is its unique success in synthesizing the rational
and irrational. If rationality and irrationality are stretched into a continuum, cubism
seems to land exactly dead center on this. Because the techniques of cubism are
very meticulous and logical, but through its deconstructive approach it manages to
freeze the forces of chaos in its own displays. Cubism is like a photograph of an
object milliseconds after it’s been exploded; an artifact preserving some semblance
of form while simultaneously shattering it.

More thought than what might be first apparent went into the opening stanza here.
The triple sequence of “the” is an ontological reduction of the three referents, the
two men and the “man mankind” to their barest significance. The two men in this
case, what is more clearly alluded to later, are George Braque and Pablo Picasso,
who jointly invented cubism and whose work from that time period is often
indistinguishable from one another; (Them) cubism, (Them) the innovators. Later
Pissarro gets a brief mention because I have a special fondness for his work and, if
you bring up his name in certain company, people are liable to think that you’re
merely mispronouncing Picasso’s name (Manet of course is also a casualty of this)
Likewise, the stanza that begins “Art though” is primarily an ornamental allusion to
Matisse’s “La Danse” but in this case it also serves figuratively as an illustration of
creativity’s tendency to outgrow its own confines; which of course is exactly what
that whole era in art was about. So while this is a poem specifically concerned with
cubism, the animus for cubism was the same animus that fueled expressionism,
fauvism, Dadaism, surrealism, etc. In fact, you can trace the buildup of the forces
eroding aesthetic rationalism to the anti-art sentiments of Duchamp and their
incarnation in ready-mades.

As for the ending of the poem, this is a correlation of cubism’s internal tensions
with the fundamental tensions of human nature. The idea of humanity as half
divine and half beast is common enough to hardly be worth mentioning but what
isn’t necessarily that widely appreciated is the fact that human being, in its most
basic definition, entails the very opposite of its nature; inhumanity. Humanity
without inhumanity is practically inconceivable and this cleft finds a parallel
representation in some many cubist figures where the human being is depicted in
a divided fashion (Even the most serene and angelic person still has some duality
to their nature; Picasso’s “La Reve” being an excellent example of this)

2. Above Leviathan
Within the first stanza, any reader who has some familiarity with the work of
Thomas Hobbes should grasp that the theme of this poem is political philosophy.
The title pretty much gives the whole thing away. What is above power? Or, to put
it another way, power in its apotheosis transcends itself; it grows beyond power.
To add some clarity to the last stanza though, my inspiration here was the enormity
of astronomical cycles and, in the sense used here, strides refer to the pendulum
swing between the apoapsis and periapsis of a star’s orbit around its primary body
(The gravitational centre it circles independent of the Earth’s motion) The main
idea here being that Time is the negation of all worldly power.
3. Going to War
The opening imagery is taken from the streets of downtown New York immediately
after 9/11. Tennyson’s famous line about nature is then modulated in the portrayal
of a hybrid incarnation of this same violence; one that is as sophisticated as it is
brutal. Because sophistication is the highest form of brutality. Only through
advanced culture and technology can true oppression be fully unleashed; and it’s
not just camouflage either. The predatory instinct is grounded in its own sense of
natural hierarchy, the prey and the hunter, so it will inevitably have an aristocratic
outlook. But of course the carnivore deludes themselves by inferring a superiority
from its diet since, by the measures of their own esteeming of violence, sociable
predators dominate isolated ones and, as such, only through the pragmatic
suppression of their own violent appetites.

The closing stanza likewise draws a connection between the predatory and the
militant religious. The identification of ordinary people (The “us”) with fish is
deliberate since the expressionlessness of the fish that swim in large schools and
who appear indistinguishable from one another mirrors the essence of blind belief
perfectly. Meanwhile the ocean here symbolizes the dissolving of the self that is
shared by both fanatical orthodoxy and biological death.

4. Chaos Opulent
Lines two and three of this poem are my favorites since they effectively combine
three distinctly heterogeneous elements (Sex, leaves, thumbs) into an elegantly
amalgamated whole. It’s a uniting of metaphysical conceits with a potent rhythm;
a meeting between John Donne and Langston Hughes.

5. Albion
I get a lot of my books for free: either in borrowed-form from libraries or as
captured plunder taken from community book alcoves. Of course I still enjoy
visiting old book shops and fortunately there’s quite a few good ones in my area.
I’ve noticed over the years though that people who sell books often seem to be of
a certain type; knowledgeable of course but equally irascible. I imagine this is
because selling books is a financially arduous business and senior book sellers in
particular seem rather worn down by years of strenuous budgeting while
simultaneously having to deal with the boundless depths of stupidity their clientele
provides. The idea that readers are universally intelligent people is just gross self-
flattery and if the dumbest question I’ve ever heard wasn’t in a bookstore, the ones
I have heard there at least deserve an honorable mention.

Despite all this, and beyond the rough exterior that some of them might present,
I’ve found that booksellers (Or bookstore owners at least) are almost always
genuinely passionate about promoting quality literature and giving literary advice
to their customers. They are a species of soldier fighting the good fight. Admirable,
if nothing else, for their sheer resilience. So, while the bookseller depicted in this
poem is not based on any real person, he is definitely inspired by real people and
the comedic heroism presented here is more genuinely heroic than mock heroic
(While also having a tragic hue to it) Someone more like Cervantes than Falstaff
then. Also, “Between inferno and new life, adversity” is a reference to Dante and
the quoted part in the last stanza is a reference to Blake (Who likewise wrote about
Albion as a paradisiacal ideal)

6. Xu Wei’s Grapes
What immediately impressed me during my first view of Xu Wei’s paintings was the
extraordinary deftness in the tonality of the lighting he depicted and the apparent
ease with which he conveyed naturalistic imagery; the latter of these, considering
his minimalistic execution and bold errorless application, is astounding.

I haven’t made the effort to read much about him but, at first glance, he reminds
me of William Blake in unorthodoxy and precarious existence, both physically and
spiritually. They also seem to share a commonality in that both served in a kind of
transitional role during their own artistic eras; Blake almost singlehandedly opening
the gates of the collective unconscious for the west, and Xu injecting a dose of bold
individuality into a largely conventionalist, almost ritualistic, Chinese painting
tradition. Both also had a reputation for madness but in this they seem to differ
quite a bit; Blake being in person a mostly benign mystic and Xu, closer in his
personality to William S. Burroughs, a truly violence riddled man.
Regarding the closing line of the poem: this is an ironic reference to the number
nine having positive connotations in Chinese numerology (Although phenomena
like the nine familial exterminations indicates some duality here) It’s relevance to
Xu Wei is that after his patron suffered a political downfall, Xu attempted suicide
nine times in a variety of unusually grisly ways.

7. Isolating
I’ve written a couple poems now that dealt with the present pandemic but none
more personal than this one. Having gotten sick from the virus myself just before
writing it, I tried to express the sense of deterioration I experienced. Not only in my
physical being but furthermore in the feelings of disconnection and dislocation that
ensued. Something anyone who’s ever gotten really sick has no doubt noticed is
one’s own faded grasp on time; the way consciousness loses its integrity and things
dissolve into fragmentary episodes. Even the quasi-non-sequiturial culmination at
the end exemplifies the manner in which clarity itself frays apart.

8. Sheeler’s Church Street El

The a.m. commute to work is generally an aggravating experience. At least, that’s
my personal impression. Sometimes however, usually in the very earliest summer
mornings and only when one has an overabundance of time, there’s a tranquility
that one can briefly enjoy. Sheeler’s painting here seems to me to capture the
essence of that feeling exactly and the pantheistic sensibilities that often flow out
of this state find a nice double echo in the title of the painting itself (El of course is
short for elevated, as in elevated train, but one of the Abrahamic names of God is
also El, and God is customarily considered to be supremely elevated)

Elsewhere I’ve acknowledged the fact that I like to end poems with “distinctive
emphases.” To really punctuate them, so to speak (Sometimes with exclamation
marks, sometimes with question marks, etc) In this poem though, and in others also
recent, I’ve been experimenting with the ambiguous and elusive ending. “Art and
worship in radius” is a challenging phrase and is likely to meet criticism of the sort
that was initially levelled against Eliot’s “Like a patient etherized upon a table”
where, I remember one critic specifically, complaining about the lack of meaningful
correlation. As if poetry wasn’t capable of uniting the formally heterogeneous at a
deeper strata of meaning! The idea of art and worship in radius though isn’t as
illogical as it might first sound; if the sweep of a radius is understood as a kind of
circumscribed domain, then recognizing that two things belong to one radius is
simply an appreciation of the fact that, regardless of their differences, they partake
of a common sphere. In short, their habitation in the same realm, besides also the
same universe, is itself a fundamental union between them.

9. M a t i s s e
Fauvism was an epithet that, like several other derogatory names invented by art
critics, its targets gladly embraced. Matisse was initially a member of the briefly
lived movement of fauvists and while, like any first-rate artist, he quickly outgrew
this one style, the wild colors that are characteristic of the movement remained a
permanent element in his repertoire. So this poem plays with idea of Matisse being
a “beastly” painter and the increasingly “uncivilized” tenor of the period.

Montparnasse (Mount Parnassus) is an actual area in Paris frequented by artists of

that time; including of course Matisse. A place deliberately named by a preceding
community of artists due to Parnassus being associated, in ancient Greek culture,
with the arts. The implication here is that while the newfound freedom obtained
by said artists, both painters and poets, enjoyed an immense creative harvest, this
freedom also destabilized the foundations of art so profoundly that anti-art was
born and a kind of collapse began. Here I identify Matisse with the slayers of art,
not in any condemnatory manner, but simply in deference to a perception of
continuity. From life, death. From death, life.

10. Magnolia Stellata

The spiritually restorative powers of the natural world, its capacity to refresh us on
an emotional level, obviously derives from our own basic appetites and instincts.
Despite this, we’ve created an artificial environment for ourselves we are quite
obviously ill-adapted to and the modern abundance of psychosis in our societies is
only one of the many ways in which that truth is proven.
Trees conversely have evolved in an opposite direction. If humanity is close to the
pinnacle of frustrated war, trees are close to the pinnacle of serene harmony. Of
course human beings aren’t completely blind to this though and, within traditional
Japanese spirituality and aesthetics for example, there’s a notable recognition of
said fact. This poem was furthermore inspired by a casual meandering conversation
I had with a Japanese acquaintance that at one point commented on a tree nearby;
the aforementioned Magnolia Stellata. Not being all that well-versed in botany
unfortunately, it required some brief investigation before I knew what the species
of tree was that’d been discussed earlier. But in reading about the Magnolia genus,
I came to find that it’s prevalent in both Japan and North America.

Magnolia’s are theorized to predate bees (Being pollinated earlier by beetles

apparently) and so, beyond their intrinsic beauty, they provide a logical symbol to
represent the long teleology of nature. It is my opinion, most clearly articulated in
my metaphysical work Architecton, that the culmination of a thing is contained in
its earliest creation; that the seed encompass all. Here I give expression to that
sensibility by identifying the decay process with the rejuvenation process; in doing
so, suggesting that on a universal scale, these two opposites are correlated
together and united in a singular purpose.

11. IX XI
This is a poem about the aftermath of the events of September 11th, 2001. You
don’t have to be especially insightful to predict that these attacks will continue to
represent an epochal divide for the history of the west. Those who experienced it
directly during the prime years of life had to split their lives accordingly into the
time before and the time after. The tragedy by itself was certainly traumatizing but,
even more so, it seemed to kick off a new era of increasingly adversarial politics in
America; not only was the traditional conflict there between the ruling class and
the masses represented in things like the odious USA PATRIOT Act and the vague
color-coded terrorist threat levels bandied in the news, but the animosity across
the political spectrum also began a period of heightened polarization. Not simply
between the right and left either but between the mainstream and the alternative
too. In the last few years this has become especially notable with the difference in
worldviews that’s proliferated; in the gulf separating the narratives of a corporate
globalized media and a conspiratorial opposition.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s read my work but I might as well
admit that I regard politics, and specifically as scale and stakes increase, as a mainly
conspiratorial enterprise. Those who crave power at other’s expense, which is to
say those who crave power in any significant measure, can only maximize this by
organizing in secrecy and deliberately disguising their own motives. And episodes
like the 2008 financial crisis solidly confirm as much. Perhaps it would come as a
surprise though if I added that the truth behind the events of 9/11 isn’t something
I regard as especially important to me. Not because I doubt the US government’s
proclivities for evil but because previous actions, like the bombings of Laos and
Cambodia, already reached the apex of possible immorality.

One thing I’ve noticed just recently however is that the debates between opposing
views are often undertaken in diverging arenas of information. For example, you
can find plenty of popular videos and posts online debunking the idea that “Jet fuel
can’t melt steel beams” and those who do so correctly point out that reducing steel
to a molten state isn’t required to cause structural collapse. It’s a strawman claim
however which they’re debunking. The point of the conspiracy critique here is
based on the fact that eye witnesses, including firefighters and other first
responders, have been recorded as saying that they observed molten steel while
on site at ground zero. So the debunker’s point is moot here and it’s only their
erroneous perception of the conspiracy claim, regardless of its actual merits or lack
thereof, that leads them to a false confidence in believing that they’ve proved said
claim to be wrong. Again, I have no personal investment in the debate here but I
think it’s noteworthy that public discourse is so completely broken now that huge
debates can occur in public with basic facts being neglected.

And what this is, quite simply, is a cultural divide that’s equally mirrored in the
symmetries and asymmetries of the falling of the twin towers themselves. Even the
roman numerals for 9/11 coincidentally displays this duplicitas.

12. Owl Farm Shenanigans

Trying to capture the spirit of a unique individual can be aided by their distinctive
character traits but there’s always the added risk of only obtaining an exaggerated
caricature. Hunter S. Thompson was such an eccentric however that it almost
seems impossible to exaggerate him. There’s a real risk though that he could be
oversimplified; and both negatively and positively. My sense is that while he was a
morally flawed human being, and certainly not someone to be idolized as a hero,
he was still a penetrating critic of institutional frauds who contributed a healthy
dose of mayhem to public discourse. Setting aside his actual personal history to
consider only his persona, what he provided to us all during his life was a living
example of the wild man archetype. Not with the philosophical level of profundity
as a Diogenes maybe but, as an evangelist of liberty who remained uninhibited in
his roguish countercultural glee, he was unsurpassed among his contemporaries.
And that wasn’t a small thing either. How much poorer are the existences of those
whose lives never intersect with distinctive personalities like Hunter or Oscar Wilde
or Rodney Dangerfield? Cultural figures who were uniquely themselves? So that’s
all that I was trying to portray here: the essence of the man.

13. Racist Undertones

There are certain kinds of injustice I don’t address that often. And racism is one of
them. Not because it’s not an important issue but simply because I’ve only had a
few isolated experiences with it firsthand and it’s not something I’ve researched in
any substantive way (I also didn’t grow up in an overtly racist household and don’t
typically observe it in other people’s interactions) Recently I did have a series of
chance encounters with other people’s racism though so I wanted to say something
about it in a definitive and unambiguous manner. It’s obviously self-serving but the
future possibility that my writing could be twisted and mutilated into the service of
some hideous prejudice is a fate I would loath. Pound and Eliot are two of the most
important poets in my own development but their antisemitism, even if they may
have outgrown it, was itself a sin against their own talents. Fortunately two of my
other formative influences, Alex Haley’s vivid “autobiography” of Malcolm X (Which
I read at age twelve) and my much later reading of Wittgenstein (Who was both
Jewish and bisexual) inoculated me against succumbing to similar forms of
prejudice. Which is not to say that I don’t need to be vigilant in my own opinions
and attitudes anymore; the moral individual is precisely that person who is always
conscientious about the reality of their own fallibility. Ethical being is a ceaseless
striving endeavor; treating it as an attainment destroys it.
14. Off Antidepressants
Criticizing people has never been something I found particularly satisfying. When it
comes to the worst sorts of people, it’s kind of redundant, and criticizing people in
the context of ordinary flaws strikes me as hostile. Despicable even. If there’s
anyone really worth criticizing then it has to be those we most admire. Now, even
though there’s no one alive (I’m currently aware of) who I feel actual deference
towards, there are individuals whose work or other accomplishments exemplifies
what I regard as the highest possible achievements in those areas. And this is true,
although much rarer, for me with respect to things I’ve personally devoted myself
to: poetry and philosophy specifically (My fiction, while it has a few peaks like
“Hunting Orcs” where I think I attained real mastery, is certainly something I’m less
consistent in than the former two areas)

The poet I’m writing about here meanwhile is someone who obtained wide renown
at the local and even national levels, but whose reputation isn’t commensurate
with their actual achievements. I’m somewhat bemused actually by the often
mediocre quality of the poetry that gets published in international anthologies and
literary magazines but my guess is that poetry, being largely unvalued in the English
speaking world, is dominated by relationships of patronage more than meritocracy.
Admittedly I display some antipathy here. But the objective appraisal of my own
work and that of other’s is something I’m genuinely passionate about. Poetry is a
deep art worthy of serious thought. Unclouded thought.

15. To Life Again

A fairly straightforward poem about rejuvenation. Its chief successes lie I think in
the overall rhythm and the the layered use of repetitions.

16. The Invisible Wheel

Confessional poetry doesn’t fulfill any personal need in me but if I never wrote any
confessional work I’d feel like I was shrinking from a test of my abilities. So I do
write said poems once in a while. And this one turned out pretty well.
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