• Oh, don’t give me all that old crap again, all that serious unseriousness. I’ve wandered through this world of yours, wretched & wonderful as it is, & know how you’ll deceive us. Abased & homeless, that’s how. Avant-garde poetry & its rules? That’s the fucking malarky alright, I know who you are – D’Annunzio celebrating after bombing Kotar.
• And then you give us your gods, & pretend you can juggle with them, or make sense of their sloppy mucous secretions. There is only what is miswritten when it comes to these things, little crumbs of broken & half-baked significance. Bits of whatever.
• Dancing across the river am I now? I can tell you it really was a cold & muddy scrabble getting away from your bloody asylum. I won’t recross that turbid stream again, by sunshine or starlight.
• I agree I won’t forget that mountain, either, the glacial lake you have conjured up, the stark slopes down. This isn’t a land for people & our lives, but some ground for conditioned reflexes to optical stimuli, round about the time we die. Always now. I’m not dancing, I’m cursing you at this moment. I am unabased at least in this.
• unshowily sentimental
migrants taught to weep
your voices
– across the river now
paradise only for painters
what people else
we’ll never know this
• the voice of light
oh praise, yes
– some glorious dapplement
a complex surface
marred & significant
– always lovely
at the end
• what we’re doing here
oh, childlike we
all agree
crumbling cake
inconstantly
as we await
the avalanche
• we can do better
& we must
– smell up
the nutmeg
w/ vivacity
ascend like smoke
fade into
this fertile void
how many children then
this time
my little ones
oh only us now
only us at last