Complete Unknowns (or, Shredded Lore)
From Longyearbyen to Lima, Reykjavik to Perth.
Final movement. Shall it be a recap?
Or something dirge-like…say, a eulogy to mirth?
Or a soporific, a poetic CPAP,
like Dr. Seuss’s classic book on sleep?
Or a shock ending, a hammer to the kneecap,
a wolf emerging from the stomach of Bo Peep?
Ah, let it be all this and so much more!
Like Guido in 8½, I’ll take a leap
right out of the plot into Nino Rota’s score,
the music dictating the final scenes
in which the tale unravels into shredded lore -
the director no longer knowing what it means
but hoping he will make a certain splash,
the producers looking on and venting their spleens,
having built careers on confabula of cash…
Or else I’ll doff my Haas and don my Jones
and - much like the Jones in Dylan - empty the trash
and fill my verse with some rubbish - complete unknowns
that might else have been incinerated
but now are doing just fine, establishing thrones
on piles of tercets they themselves have created -
a sort of poetic reclamation
in which tropes dead through overuse are re-fated
and, arm in arm, rise up to form a new nation
comprised of words, expressions, and phrases
revived through semantic rehabilitation.
But better to focus first on that which pleases,
like a sudden switch to another vowel…
or an increase in pauses we place in creases.[1]
A Poem with No Police
There’s a strong impulse to just throw in the towel.
Can poetry obtain in such an age?
We become prosaic when we always cry foul.
How long can our tropes and figures withstand our rage?
We hang Napoleon, like Byron did.
He dies an imaginary death on the page.
Then we seal Dracula’s casque with an iron lid,
and suddenly our world is filled with peace.
As there is no heir apparent, we’ll hire some kid
whom we’ll drag out of the poverty of some crease
(a “dragon in the crease,” they’ll later say).
He’ll reign for decades in a poem with no police.
It’ll be an aesthetic solely based on play -
one method, perhaps, for keeping it up
as our real horizons turn a gloomier gray.
“First as Tragedy, then as Farce” (or, Bovine Bleats)
These pauses are dragons. On occasion they howl,
as silences can do when they are pressed -
like an angry Benedictine beneath his cowl,
or Garth Hudson blowing that fever from his chest.
Ah, the lapdogs, flunkies, and sycophants
are putting our nation and the world to a test,
emerging from the crease like an army of ants
(though maybe that’s an insult to all ants):
Internet Beobachters, ICE Gestapo plants
ready to act on his next idiotic rants -
our tragicomic Commander-in-Cheats
who governs by the seat of his unzippered pants.
In four-to-eight-year segments, history repeats,
at least in the good old US of A:
tragedy followed by farcical, bovine bleats.
The Laziest Element (or, Imagine What It Takes
to Be a Dick)
Trump was on the news today. He looked all beat up.
Imagine what it takes to be a dick!
A barrage of new lies, and they’re eating it up.
But the more his lies succeed, the more he looks sick.
Who will ever know the devil’s bargain
through which he walled himself in, brick by golden brick?
Someday academies will evolve a jargon
to analyze the means he used to trick
dupes whose noggins are filled with ignoble argon,
which causes them to be fooled in an Augenblick.
(Argon’s deemed the laziest element,
in case that end-rhyme three lines above failed to click.
I explain this so that you’ll gather my intent!
It’s also classed as “noble,” hence the pun.
Like Trump, it likes to imagine it’s heaven-sent.)
Famishing in Fame Without a Name
A scene just came to me from David Bowie’s “Stay”:
Some days are in revolt against their week,
which seems weighted down in sluggish, prolonged delay.
It’s as if they expect the god of Time to speak
and appoint them to a livelier frame.
This one is either too modern or too antique;
moreover, it’s yoked to a sun without a name.
Likewise, our time seems one without a name,
running wilder, ever wilder, without a name
despite its fame. In fact, it famishes in fame.
(Sadly enough, these two words don’t relate;
their alliterative use here is somewhat lame.)
Its cause is demolishment. It doesn’t create.
It pays little mind to the crackling fuse.
In the words of our bard, the hour is getting late.
Under Diremption
Goddammit, this poem, like all poems, is just for fun!
You might notice it’s under diremption -
a term that Herr Hegel one day in Jena spun.
You could say it grants us creative exemption -
a certain type of poetic license
that can bring indecision to full redemption.
I’m aware the reader might find it a nuisance
to have to shift the gaze from left to right.
You can chalk it up to postmodern insouciance.
We postmoderns are prone to vagaries of flight.
This one involves unwinding into strands,
and it’s all I can do to keep them both in sight
and cater to each of their follies and demands.
Quite soon, of course, they’ll need to reconcile
before they reify into separate brands.
Our Earthly Lost and Found
I never write to offend, but just to amuse.
Sure, there are some thoughts I’d like to share.
But beyond a point solemnity’s just obtuse.
All poetry’s a joyful jouissance of the air
(I know that’s redundant as hell, by gum) -
ebullience that floats us up from stair to stair.
It’s the silliness, not the cold, that makes us numb.
The descent back to prose just brings us down.
Mundanity is so often bleak and glum.
Our feet are happy to be back on solid ground,
and now we’ll take another sort of rest
as we shuffle about our earthly lost and found.
Yes, it’s filled with highs, lows, and in-betweens, this quest
after Life and language that makes Life live
through airings that lift us up to our very best.
Aftermath (or, So Let Us Not Talk Falsely Now)
It's time these two strands return to their domicile.
We need them to clasp hands and reunite.
We’ll keep their complaints about each other on file
and expect they’ll entwine as one without a fight.
There’s so much more to contemplate than verse,
and this poem has endeavored to keep steady sight
on the world outside the poem, which has gotten worse.
That is, it’s striven hard to keep abreast
of deplorable events that we all must curse.
And I do so without trying to be a pest
with tirades no one really wants to read –
a challenge that is each poet’s gauntlet and test
(needless to say, it’s a challenge that goes unfee’d).
Finally, some closing words to assess
where we’re at right now. I’ll try to give it some speed:
Whether we'll survive ourselves is anyone’s guess.
Putin and Trump don’t leave much cause for hope.
A nuclear blast, or some other global mess
may send us to kingdom come - each savant, each dope.
In Chapter Omega, the world expires,
and with it haute cuisine, the Shakespearean trope,
all our desires swept up in all-consuming fires.
The world now sails headlong through a dire strait,
and the captains of our ships are consummate liars.
Must we be tethered to their and each next fool’s fate?
Oh, to be much more than skin and bones!
The hour, so far as we know it, is getting late.
We soon may be reduced to dead life draping stones.
Alas! We’ll never know the aftermath.
For by then we’ll be gone, long gone - each Haas, each Jones.
After Aftermath (or, Until the Everlasting Fire)
This poem has given as much as it’s got to give,
and now it’s time to bring things to a close.
Two columns need to funnel back down through the sieve
and do it without devolving back into prose.
We’ll recapitulate the major theme,
which pertains to our current dangers, I propose.
Each poem is a spastic rendition of a dream
that decenters our view of something real
by prying the stitch-work that runs along each seam.
While it’s true I’d rather focus on Spaß und Spiel,
in this one I’ve had to get serious.
To the exigence of our age do I appeal.
No time to sit and be passively curious.
This poem has placed me under some duress.
Its activity has made me delirious.
How our troubles will resolve is anyone’s guess.
Right now I’m seeing little cause for hope.
But this world we’re in transcends America’s mess
and will outlast the mistakes of our Orange Dope.
At any rate, it seems he’ll soon expire.
His legacy will be that of a shameful trope
that will haunt us until the everlasting fire.
Could be his example helps set things straight
if the whole shebang doesn't perish with this liar.
For years we’ve been aware of our possible fate
of being reduced to cinders and bones.
We don’t yet know if it’s ever really too late.
Maybe we should take our cues from the Rolling Stones,
who triumph only after Aftermath
(one of their earlier albums with Brian Jones).
Without Being Snide
It’s something I do each evening after my bath.
I’ve been preparing my wishlist - a slate
of flaws that in the next life I’d rather not have.
I know it’s vain, but how often I contemplate
rebirth without so much as a pimple.
I gather it’s exciting to reincarnate!
I’ll emerge after death looking new and nimble,
strut out on a carpet of starry felt
and find Emily, my feminine semblable,
profess my firm devotion and make her heart melt.
Together we’ll find a wormhole and slide
in a jiffy to a suitable Lebenswelt.
I’ll hustle in cosmic tourism on the side.
I think I’ll make a fine Vergilian guide!
For I’ll honor Existence without being snide.
[1] At this point the poem dirempts into two columns, which should be viewed as a helical structure. The items in the left column should be read consecutively, as should the items in the right column; the order in which the two columns are read is not important. The two columns eventually converge.
[Previous: Part Two]
[Next: Coda: And Dragons in the Crease]