I look at a lot of, thousands, of things. I looked
at the beginning of it, it was fine.
One can never cross an undrawn line.
An omelet never made can’t be uncooked.
A fish already eaten can’t be hooked
again, and if offense is genuine,
then giving it to takers? Valentine.
God made the world in just six days, then booked
his lazy sabbath; the thousand million things
I saw and stared and marked as seen and good
exhaust me—no one’s ever had the eyes
that I have; jealous pharaohs, conquering kings
of yore would view my volume if they could,
but they are dead, and blind in their demise.

I let my wife have an affair. Do
I have to console her now that it’s over?
Herd my hurt feelings as cows to a rambling drover
and lead them in the slaughter season to the final moo?
Do I borrow smiles for these blues?
The heart’s the heart: what once was bed of clover
bathed in picnic light became a rover—
returns: from forlorn three, unhappy two,
would that there were some Heathcliff on the moor,
howling each knocking night, but there is not:
we’re all that’s left of the isosceles,
an unpaired angle, open-ended, or
a bad choice which worse outcome bought:
the worst of all the world’s monogamies.

decided not to give me the Nobel Peace
Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS,
conclude, henceforth, that peace? Superfluous.
Dead as doornail. Short as summer’s lease.
Folly. Fashion. Whimsy. Mere caprice.
One wants what wasn’t ever offered; thus
breaks up the band: there is no aye in us,
nor no in you—what right have you to fleece
the shearing shepherd, has and is the crook,
of what his heart desires, nearing death,
the yawning arctic dark of dreamlessness,
inert, unbeen, unbothered, very bored—
neither TV news nor shibboleth;
and so demand, before bed, acquiesce:
every glacier, lichen, stone, fjord.

They say aspirin is good for thinning out the blood,
and I don’t want thick blood pouring through my heart.
I want nice, thin blood pouring through my heart.
Who if by fire and who by flashing flood,
who as a lion and who cow chewing cud
will live, and how, and who this veil depart,
inspiring very little memorable art—
not even Richard unhorsed in the mud;
a whimpering bang, not even God and arms,
victorious friends; the markets muddle on;
the seasons pass; the new campaigns begin;
the soybeans fester in the fallow folded farms;
the Chinese era mutters, off my lawn,
drop-ships a gross of off-brand aspirin.

I am a historic figure like any vice
president of the United States ever was,
unburdened by what didn’t doing does,
lost to past defeat made victor twice,
entered lions, exited as mice,
began and thus and ended up because—
subject sentenced to mere subordinate clause,
bargain-binned below the asking price
but still, somehow, unbowed and counting on
those marbled plaudits, boring books about
that interregnum, then foreshortened run—
ruined as the ruins on the eastern lawn
yet believing, free of human doubt
it isn’t cooked, carbonized, well done.

This is not your mother or your grandmother’s
Narnia. Wardrobe? Given over to Marantz.
White witches? Joplins. Fauns all Robert Plants.
Every moon dark-sided, every brick another’s
wall; sweet Lucy, Susan, and the Blitz-fled brothers
based and taut as Flea in underpants;
that old, deep magic as a Woodstock danse—
watchtowered while one Jimi Hendrix covers
Bob. Dawn treads the sullen-sounding sea—
catastrophic loss of childhood,
kiddie parable to Judas kiss,
Lord’s lion sacrificed to Man’s IP.
The truth? The books were never very good.
But, even bad, each better still than this.

was probably the peak of human existence.
Oh Parthenon, oh Angkor Wat, oh Tour
Eiffel; oh Koine Greek, oh cellar door;
oh Mansa Musa’s hajj, oh French Resistence—
each eked-out living young adult’s insistence:
his time and place were what time tilted toward—
and every other epoch? Drab, and bored.
Oh, to see that skyline in the middle distance,
from the roof where you are drinking beer;
the editorial assistantship
your mom’s friend’s lawyer hooked you up with pays
30K; date girls but say you’re queer;
call your dad’s old Acura your whip—
all history’s intention, or its anyways.

My kid is having anxiety that mandami won.
He fears the stars will fall and blot the sun
with steamed-up oceans cooking everyone;
he cries, like dying Jesus: Dad, it’s done!
and is likewise unanswered; they’ve outlawed fun;
they’ve handed every crook and pimp a gun;
they’ll fell the Freedom Tower with a megaton
and build that mosque instead. We’ve lost, my son.
Every fear we ever feared? Begun—
a wet and cooling hotdog on a soggy bun;
a fallen woman hustled off to nun;
goodbye and finis, future, little one:
a single sailboat sinking out on the dun
dull water—swerve and shore and riverrun

When I first learned a toilet like that existed
inside the White House, I was horrified.
I took to bed, shut off the lights, and cried.
Brave men who Hancocked history resisted
tyranny for this? What sick and twisted
world where Jesus lived and Lincoln died
condemns its best man’s kingly underside
to such rest-stop squalor? We insisted
that this marbled pantheon include
the needed niches for our newborn god:
ablution, incense, alter, sacrifice;
enthroned, here-housed, untombed, and nearly nude,
Augean-stabled every day, or Moses’ rod
that strike-defies the stone, and makes it nice.

Pregnant liberal women are now taking
Tylenol just to protest President Trump,
acquired in record time each baby bump
and put to sleep the cats they’re all forsaking—
in heat to hatch a scheme of baby-making,
Hinge to hot first date to callithump,
extracted IUD to vacuum pump
to medicate the fetus that is baking,
belly-bound, neurodivergent, weird:
they will not have to come by naturally
a warbling wacko voice or odd-hued skin,
a junkie’s tremor, Norma Desmond’s smeared
bad makeup, incoherence, apathy—
our alien endings where their lives begin.