6’5 Australian TERA-CHAD
Androgenic has flown to U.S and
BONESMASHMAXXED to beat the horning band;
hunt down this Arizonan Galahad
who Holy-Grailed it as an undergrad—
celebrity to online’s ampersand,
from walk of fame to fame’s cold hinterland,
beat down, besieged and starved as Leningrad.
Imagine that, you square-jawed Soviet son:
for this you suffered, froze, ate only dog,
for this they killed the enervated Tsar?
Only to give the century you won
to laborless boys who mog, or do not mog:
you beat the Reich; they birthed Clavicular

If you need to smoke a bowl, drink a beer
or further lobotomize yourself everyday
in order to keep life’s baying blues at bay,
then I think we hebben een serieus problem here:
your boated brain is drifting toward the wier;
your loggèd lungs are in death’s dossier;
you baked the host but then forgot to pray;
you cowboyed yonder yet forgot the steer—
from seafloor slime God made eukaryote
and multiplied them into thinking minds
whose capricious nature accidented sin;
and now you burn that bush as antidote,
sunk in the couch and drawing blackout blinds
conditioned to the condition that you’re in.

Mars will start in 5 or 6 years,
so will be done in parallel with the Moon.
Got high, spent low, one late the other soon—
ambition’s wasted wallet in arrears,
and one-way ticket starved for volunteers;
youth’s astronautic dreamsong changes tune:
our Captain Kirks would rather game and goon
than boldly go. For want of pioneers
in this sublunary haters’ world I wept
for worlds as-yet unreached by colonists,
and lay in bed, and thinly beat my gold—
perhaps it was the company I kept?
That I deigned friend a few phrenologists?
I came to see and conquer. But I scrolled.

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.