Escritoire (or, This Novel World)
It’s been quite a few years, but let’s start it again –
another attempt at terza rima.
We’ll have to recall the junctures at which things bend
and resolve into folds of this structured schema -
this scrolling, lineated escritoire
to which news flies in from Longyearbyen and Lima,
right to this equidistance that isn't too far
from the epicenter of everything
righteous and good on this third planet from our star,
and capable of recording a smattering
of all that enchants us until we cease -
from ephemeral tidings to earth-shattering
developments that require angels and police.
Ah, this novel world of 2020!
Rest assured, we will find some dragons in its crease!
COVID Cornucopia
This year possesses its own peculiar plenty;
it’s an absolute cornucopia
for me, in fact, like Holden Caulfield’s rich aunty,
suffering from dementia and myopia,
who sends him birthday money every month,
fueling his search for Manhattan utopia.
Indeed, it’s granted me much thought on which to munch:
life, death, diseases that haunt in between,
decades of inspiration derived from a hunch
or hunches I had on the day I turned thirteen,
and all the happiness along my way
I’ve owed to simple axioms on which to lean
whenever life has plunged me into bouts of dismay
that serve to place my ecstasies in check,
preventing false abandon and moral decay.
To Own His Each
Yes, pandemic’s been good to me, so what the heck?
Take the good in life however it comes.
Don’t let it be an albatross around your neck.
They only look like prickly pears, those precious plums!
It’s the best response we can make to fate;
otherwise, we unravel our future all thumbs,
with our desperate fingers tied up in its grate
and destiny becoming tangled up
as we’re dumped into a cul de sac of the late.
Life doesn’t flow so much as dangle from its cup
at times. At times we need to stretch and reach.
But it isn’t far...you just need to angle up
a bit and reach out and grab it - your plum, your peach.
At least that’s what I’ve learned from pandemic,
but they say it’s everyone’s job to own his each.
Ain’t in the Bible
But of course there’s mass entertainment in panic
when people are not really all that scared
but pretend they are. The feeling is endemic
with all of us who secretly think we’ve been spared
(endemic, though the disease itself isn’t).
Concern and schadenfreude of course become paired...
until we really get sick, which isn’t pleasant.
At that point gears are switched to survival,
and self-satisfaction flies up like a pheasant
into the crosshairs of mortality’s rival.
We realize this isn’t any joke,
though Apocalypse by Flu ain’t in the Bible
and don’t appear in no words from that Patmos bloke
who will confound pseudo-Christians ‘til kingdom come -
the opiate of the masses, on which they toke.
Like Walter Mitty
But I won’t deny that at times I’m rather glum.
There’s such a thing as too much solitude,
and I need to social distance from beer and rum.
Such fair-weather friends don’t always enhance my mood
but cause me to wallow in self-pity.
I feel like John as consoled by Paul in “Hey Jude.”
But it’s good to know we’re all like Walter Mitty,
alone behind our masks and our daydreams,
alleviating monotony with witty
remarks on the idiocies that fall in reams
from the mouth of our stupid Orange Prez,
as the Dems and the Repubs assemble their teams
and cry the opposition’s lack of COVID creds,
with interns to study the latest poll,
while seeking the scoop on Trump’s or on Biden’s meds.
From the Poet’s Grassy Knoll
But they’re not the same from this poet’s grassy knoll.
I ain’t sayin’ that they’re equally bad.
Biden’s a decent man, and Trump an orange troll
who was scorned and ill-treated by a racist dad,
reportedly a member of the Klan.
On the day that they lock him up, I’ll sure be glad.
But heaven forbid that Biden’s an also ran
in November. If so, we might as well
call it quits, rechristen our nation Trumpistan,
and surrender two-four-four to a living hell -
the years it’s been, that is, since British rule.
Two hundred forty-four years since they cracked that bell.
(Yeah, yeah...shut yer trap about it. I ain’t no fool.
I didn’t say it cracked that very day.
At present it sits in a Philly vestibule.)
Nobler Topics
The dawn has brought me a new morning on a tray.
Yesterday it seems I got stuck on Trump.
Surely there are nobler topics fashioned from clay,
and I have no real desire in this poem to stump
for the Democratic opposition.
It would hardly do more than leave me with a lump
in my throat. Call it poetic superstition,
but it’s a conviction I have long held
that the topical often leads to perdition.
Its trees are attractive, but before long they’re felled,
and nobody seems to care for felled trees.
Soon no one will even recall how “Trump” was spelled,
and his trunk will fester over with swarming bees.
His wraith will set up a resort in Hell,
where Cerberus will poop on his favorite tees.
Null Set
Jesus! I just can’t seem to give it up! Oh well.
“When I talked to God, I knew he’d understand!”
So sang Fleetwood Mac. As for me, I cannot tell
the extent to which the universe may be manned
or spirited by a sympathetic
ear of divine, ecumenical make and brand
that’ll reassure me that things are copacetic
whenever I have fallen on hard times,
or administer a spiritual emetic
to purge me of repressed and undigested crimes,
as loathe as they are to quit their coverts,
though they manifest in hilarity and rhymes
and the other things Freud mentioned. In other words,
belief in me is really a null set,
beyond the conviction bread is better buttered.
The Human Tempo
In the afterlife I may have a tête à tête
with the maker and express my concern
with design problems over which I often fret,
like why human beings find it so hard to learn
to properly care for their habitat
and curb their constant need to excessively yearn
for too much of this and beyond their share of that.
Human possession’s a bottomless pit,
seemingly endless like the Cat in the Hat’s hat.
Yet who can say, “I don’t like this one little bit”?
Juvenal can harp, but still he burns trash,
while Nero, surveying Rome, has a hissy fit
and plays the violin as it’s turning to ash
and the Goths get ready to storm the hill.
It’s the human tempo: Crash and burn, burn and crash!
With Brimming Carafes
Nobody likes a critique when it’s very shrill.
Like Swift, you must pepper your barbs with laughs.
Politicians supply us with grist for that mill –
oversupply us, indeed, with brimming carafes
of ebullient greed and turpitude.
Today it’s far beyond Gerald Ford’s pratfall gaffes
or Clinton’s actions that by consensus were lewd
and inappropriate for his station,
or Nixon’s private indulgence in language crude.
It’s directly proportionate to damnation -
that’s to say, cathartic hilarity
that hurls big questions in the face of creation,
such as the lack of fundamental parity
between evolutionary status
and what one might call existential clarity.
Cacophonic Clump
You, dear reader, see these products of afflatus
scrolling from top to bottom, high to low,
in a continuum sans pause or hiatus.
But I sleep in its coverts and wake with dawn’s crow
(or rather, with the sense I’ve slept my fill).
I peer from my pillow on the syllabic glow
of the little nugget I placed below the hill
in the middle of that final tercet,
then decide on the notes on which to further trill.
This morning I’m trilling as far as I can get
from the moron whose last name rhymes with Gump,
to whom bards can never repay their comic debt.
And only ridiculous words that wheel and bump
appear to rhyme with that idiot’s name
in a dense and festering, cacophonic clump.
Four and a Dozen Score
Warhol’s old saw about fifteen minutes of fame.
How did minutes become years, years decades?
This is far more time than inanity should claim!
From testimonials of his repentant aids
to his flirtations with conspiracy
theories and his muddled, jingoistic tirades,
from his fans’ misrecognition of heresy
as soothe from Solomon reincarnate...
The trouble is it’s no longer embarrassing.
Uncle Sam has ennobled a jackass, darn it,
and this does not disturb us anymore,
though we see that the king ain’t clothed in no garment,
and the world sees in him the rot that’s at our core,
the endgame of our original sin,
our ignominy after four and a dozen score.
Unlike Aesop
You can add that one to the commodious bin
of cantos in which I’ve broken my word
never to let a grimace devolve from a grin.
There’s more spite than fun in phrases like “Orange Turd.”
(I love the way that that was capitalized
by Siri, who evidently at least has heard
of the one whom in these tercets is so despised.)
You see, this thing’s a true obsession;
I shun the theme, but it keeps on getting reprised.
It’s as if I’m stuck until I’ve learned my lesson.
But it’s a battle I don’t want to fight,
I’d love to dole it out to some clueless Hessian.
Ah, the curse of the topical - the poet’s plight!
I probably won’t get killed like Aesop.
But it does cause me to stay wide awake at night!
Quinbus Trumpus Flestrin
Honestly, though, I need to cut this out ASAP
before my readers up and leave the poem.
The poem just needs to relax and put its feet up
and cozy itself out in its syllabled home.
There’s no reason for it to get bogged down
in the topical, with its ephemeral foam
that floods its alleys when the circus comes to town -
not the circus in the Los Lobos tune,
but the one beneath the emperor’s missing gown.
It’s canopied. They can’t see the naked buffoon
as up above he pisses down on them
and makes use of their canopy as a spittoon.
A grotesque repetition of Swift’s “man-mountain,”
Pied Piper of White Yankee hoi polloi,
sweating out the urine they drink from the fountain.
Like the Botched Strategem of Sir Bedevere
- for the late great Terry Jones –
You might well imagine that this is all a ploy
to reel the poem’s object in unawares,
like the rabbit in Monty Python’s spoof of Troy;
we laugh when the captors are caught in their own snares.
In fact, there’s no pinning this bastard down,
and like Mario he comes with infinite spares –
a world-historical, mortal-immortal clown
and real-world take on Asimov’s Jackal,
although no Hari Seldon exists to expound
how to save humanity from this debacle.
There’s no benevolent puppet master,
no magic machinery, no block and tackle,
no deus ex machina thwarting disaster,
no way to seize, silence, paralyze or
bury this Orange Beelzebub in plaster,
who should end his life a miserable miser.
I don’t even want him in a prison,
He’d rally the condemned like a dethroned Kaiser
and have somebody ghost-write his sacred mission,
like Hitler in the ‘20s with Mein Kampf.
I’d rather see him free, in abject derision –
forgotten, forsaken. Verloren und verdammt.
A death preceding his death in the real -
a symbolic death in which he’ll be roundly lumped
with other shysters of demogogic appeal,
and no way to batten on royalties
from the latest edition of Art of the Deal,
unrepentant but permanently ill at ease,
severed from his media enablers,
and no means for establishing new loyalties.
Light Their Fire
Of course there’s much else going on in the papers.
The American West Coast is on fire.
From Oahu we can see the burning tapers.
And climate change deniers are fueling the pyre.
(Which reminds me that I’m rather eager
to mention it was Morrison who paired “desire”
with “fire” and “pyre,” though the credit goes to Krieger.
I learned this in a rockumentary.
“Empire” would have been too grand; “inspire,” too meager.)
The deniers are backed by corporate gentry,
who don’t care if the world ends when they’re gone
or if there is a 22nd century
so long as they have immigrants to mow their lawn
while supporting anti-immigration
laws and doling out sinecures to their spoiled spawn.
Obsidian Automatic
We’re ruining our tiny patch of Creation,
we humans - and yes, it’s a worn out theme.
Are we a paroxysm of God’s frustration
with himself - symptom of a loss of self-esteem
in a flagging competition with gods
of other universes? Or a Munch-like scream
that’s caused a violent ripple within the pods
of mind and matter? Are such questions raised
in the orbits of other spheres, on other sods?
And are their anthropomorphic totems dispraised
for allowing things to turn to havoc,
as on the streets protesters are wrongfully tazed,
and boys with machine guns peer down from each attic,
each one looking across at the other,
quite proud of his obsidian automatic?
Unlike Shelley
After every fifth tercet it’s another
opportunity to push the reset
button - a bit like returning to one’s mother.
You’re hoping that the next one will turn out decent,
not too far out from all that is at stake,
but not absolutely clinging to the recent.
The downside is that you can’t really take a break
or else you’re stuck with another fragment
instead of this edifice you’re trying to make
that sheds some light on the current human pageant
and adds something new to the world of verse
through a framework that acknowledges each tangent
without neglecting the whole in which it’s immersed.
Shelley, to be sure, drowned while penning his;
as I neither boat nor swim, I won’t be so cursed.
Flowing Freely off the Spool
I read “The Triumph of Life” last night over a gin fizz
for the first time in a number of years.
I remember being inspired by the finesse
and lack of trepidation with which Shelley clears
a path through the lofty thoughts in his head
with this mechanism which confounded his peers.
500 and some odd lines, but then he was dead.
Who knows if he would have bested Dante?
Thank heavens that Mary found them under the bed.
I like to read them in a quiet Andante
with the lights turned dim and the moon turned bright
and a nice carafe of acidic Chianti,
which help loosen the tercets Shelley wound so tight
so that the lines flow freely off the spool
and speak out round and clear within the dome of night.
Meridian
What if he hadn’t drowned? What would have been the fuel
to motor his tercets at each middle?
Would he have put Wordsworth to further ridicule?
What motifs would he have featured on his fiddle?
Would he have sung once more about Islam
or returned to Oxymandias’s riddle?
Would he have belabored tropes like the poet’s palm
and rug-worn abstractions like Death and Sleep?
Maybe it would have just been ditties for his mom.
Yes, I’ve got my own abstractions. The hill is steep -
the one I climb each day called Poesy
(pronounced “Poe-S-E”) - with chasms that I must leap,
into which a sudden plunge is grim and messy.
But my last resort is this simple fact:
I’m both landlord and tenant, lessor and lessee
of this home in which I enact what I enact.
I pay the rent but then collect it back,
and I decide whether or not to observe tact
and who should be offended when I get off track.
That’s the wonderful thing about a poem:
it battens on what would otherwise seem a lack
of stability when you’re squatting in a home
on which you owe a debt that’s symbolic,
as you built it yourself on the collective loam
of the language that you speak, which is bucolic
or urban, middle class or plebeian,
right-wing or left-wing, sober or alcoholic,
post-Industrial Age or pre-Arcadian,
depending on each poet’s time and place,
his temperamental north, south, meridian.
The Historied Ascendancy of the Virtual
We’re always virtual and never face to face
in any number of ways, if you think
of it. Take writing, a wholly virtual place
(and raise your virtual glasses so we can clink
upon “hearing” the sacred homophone
on “wholly” as it’s funneling down through the sink
of this fountain...or its metaphorical clone)...
a place, that is to say, in which we share
our thoughts while remaining physically alone,
you and I - yourself, myself...a Platonic pair.
Plato lived at the advent of writing,
or near it, as his cave dwellers winced at the glare,
ignorant as to the dawn that was igniting
in which men would bury themselves in books,
leading to innovations in indoor lighting
and security tech to prevent household crooks
from invading the new interiors
and plundering everything down to laundry hooks
and cushions on which we rested our derrières
while learning to love our Innerlichkeit.
Cain and Abel would abide in virtual pairs,
except when conditions would induce a real fight -
often involving bloodshed, swords and tanks
and protracted armistices to lessen spite.
It would be in nooks of libraries up on banks
of rivers that had conveyed men to death
where statements of peace and ceremonial thanks
would be drafted with commas for virtual breath
to mark pauses not in speech but in thought,
the real re-emerging as myth and shibboleth…
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