69. Inaudible Gong
I work with the upper partials of thought,
but I’m often helpless with the basics
and cannot do better than Joe Rogan
in maintaining a reliable line
of reasoning. I easily get caught
and find myself wrapped up in a matrix
of confusions that can’t find a slogan
to prettify the chaos in my mind.
Poetry affords me the luxury
of evading others’ sophistical
justifications of everything wrong,
attacking which head on is drudgery
and can seem a bit egotistical.
It’s laudable to beat an inaudible gong!
70. Can’t Bring It to a Song
It's hard to keep up old activities
when so much in the world is going wrong
and we’re coming up short on remedies.
I'm mad, but I can't bring it to a song.
I'd like to read a book I've not yet read
and study Thai or French or Japanese;
instead, I'm stuck on lies we’re daily fed
by criminals. I am no man at ease,
am bored with Uncle Sam’s complacencies
and failure to uproot this parasite.
I envy our New World adjacencies,
who by and large are doing things quite right.
Perhaps I’ll emigrate to Mexico,
or up to Yukon to catch that auroral glow.
71. Sacramented Turds
Cosplaying Nazis. Should we laugh or cry?
Today’s AI bot says it’s do or die.
This orange asshole. Just how does he feel?
Is it a hassle to be a Schlemiel?
And are we seeing double? As it stands,
Machado’s Nobel’s now in baby hands,
confirmed with pride by JD “Spanky” Vance,
who lurks by the side of Don Schitzinpants.
What’s happening to this latter-day Jones?
His mouth is crapping straight up from his bones.
He treats Trump’s words like Satanic manna,
sacramented turds. Don’t you just wanna
see crushed in a blender his scurvy face?
South Park’s rendered him as Hervé Villachaize!
– alternate version of the foregoing –
Cosplaying Nazis.
Should we laugh or cry?
Today’s AI bot says
it’s do or die.
This orange asshole.
Just how does he feel?
Is it a hassle
to be a Schlemiel?
And are we seeing double?
As it stands,
Machado’s Nobel’s
now in baby hands,
confirmed with pride
by JD “Spanky” Vance,
who lurks by the side
of Don Schitzinpants.
What’s happening
to this latter-day Jones?
His mouth is crapping
straight up from his bones.
He treats Trump’s words
like Satanic manna,
sacramented turds.
Don’t you just wanna
see crushed in a blender
his scurvy face?
South Park’s rendered
him as Hervé Villachaize!
72. Saturday Morning Bafflements and Bric-a-brac
Increasingly it’s been the bric-a-brac
that’s occupied my brain from dawn to dusk.
Inspirational energy I lack
for penetrating deep beneath the husk
of this century and its bafflements
as to why we can’t get it together,
why there’s no way for us to scaffold sense
and reason against the lies and blather
of Xi, Putin, Trump, the billionaire class,
the media that just make matters worse,
YouTube morons who talk out of their ass,
politicos who make me fret and curse…
Modern life. There should be nothing to it.
If they knew, would Locke and Edison scream “screw it”?
73. Our Higher Course (Advice for Young People)
Don’t doubt yourself when you’ve got a good hunch.
Could be you’re onto something big and grand,
although your friends might think you’re out to lunch
and your elders dismiss you out of hand.
When I was young, they thought I was a fool
for scribbling wit and whimsy with my pen,
for distinguishing myself in the pool
by nurturing aesthetic acumen.
What you may think is just a passing thought
that has no further reach or wherewithal
may signal that you’re finding what you’ve sought
by avoiding that glitzy mirror ball
that vacuums us, with centripetal force,
off of the track we prefer as our higher course.
74. Notch in the Nexus
We’re all born with specific energies
that come in the form of passions, talents,
and sympathies leading to synergies
of human endeavor - strife and balance,
and between them tension and compromise.
Individual life is a measure
of progress with intersubjective ties
through which we contribute our own pleasure
to the happy furtherance of the whole.
Ultimately we judge our own success,
and even tyrants sense when this is null.
We strive to find our notch in the nexus
of the current state of human affairs,
not burdening it with bundles of private cares.
75. These Dratted Pigeons of the Ala Wai
I wish I could render adequately,
in pristine iambic pentameter,
how flocks of pigeons have radically
domesticated the diameter
stretching from the tableau of our lanai
out across the neighborhood park and courts
to the bike path along the Ala Wai,
showing off to us their avian sports
and…did I call it domesticating?
…change that to territorializing
filled with constant noisy nesting, mating,
and - with their shit - memorializing
a home we never intended to share
with pigeons entrusting their souls to human care.
76. It Would Be Nice to See a Poem Explode
A technique that Auden often uses:
slant-rhyme couplets. This sort of thing pleases
but can suffer various abuses
when someone like me shows up and teases
a variation causing confusion
as to this new guy’s exact mission.
Mental masturbation or ablution?
Or sound effects leading to fission?
It would be nice to see a poem explode
as the result of such an escapade.
Out of the wreckage crawls an arthropod,
a new being in search of an abode -
some abandoned dwelling to escalade
and inhabit as its carpet or garden god.
77. The Prison-House (Nerds) of Language
– companion to the preceding sonnet –
I’ve never really cared for slant rhymes, though,
which don’t make for good music, in my view.
Even Emily’s are only so-so…
I don’t have to genuflect in my pew!
I like to rhyme as perfect as I can,
even if I have to cheat now and then
so that things proceed according to plan,
depending on all that I plan to pen.
Of course you’ll say I’m just playing with words.
Well, it’s true, I play with words and their shards.
Like composers manipulating thirds,
we play with our material, we bards.
Just think of us as language’s prison-house nerds,
plundering the treasury, evading the guards!
78. As Clio Runs for Cover
The century didn’t work out as planned.
To say it fell short of expectations
would represent a gross understatement.
The much bruited End of History
that had been summoned as if on demand
vanished amid feeble protestations.
Historians were hauled off the pavement
and put to work on the new mystery
of where, when, and how it had all gone wrong.
Meanwhile a joker arose in the midst
of endless discussion and took over,
gathering around his person a throng
of shameless sycophants and idiots.
Now Apate reigns as Clio runs for cover!
79. Clio and the Sham Dawn of Posthistory
Clio had briefly thought she could retire
and feast on ambrosia with the Titans.
Humans were said to have figured things out.
But their situation in fact was dire.
That pact with fate that calms and enlightens
had been disturbed by a lingering doubt.
“Have humans learned to live in peace and share?
Or is this New World Order just a scam?
And their climate. Dirty beyond repair?
The lion cannot lie down with the lamb,
lacking pastures to lie together in…
and much else on which such peace would depend.”
Clio sighed. “This all seems like dusk, not dawn!
How soon their “History’s End” has come to an end!”
80. Domino Fall (or, ICE Slipping on Ice)
—composed upon the news of the third ICE murder in Minneapolis—
The orange joker told them whom to hate,
bundling their misplaced animosities -
bad fruits of indolence. None were innate.
Misfortunates bore the atrocities:
prolonged imprisonment, deportation,
public humiliation, loss of life…
It seemed more and more a broken nation -
a domino fall into widespread strife.
Of course it didn’t happen all at once;
a slow fall taking place over decades,
sponsored by ignorance and billionaires,
led by this “charismatic” orange dunce.
It’s fun to watch them botch their escapades.
See ICE slip on ice and fall on their derrières!
81. Our King of Presidential Interlope
National discontent breeds restlessness;
I’m often restless as hell, I’ll admit.
Somehow I’m on anxiety’s guest list
and can’t get my name removed, goddammit!
It seems I’m a poetic conduit
for current griefs and latest discontent.
This newest rage…I’m quite bonded to it.
My oeuvre shall not become a monument
to lump-in-the-throat human impotence!
Poets from the first have trafficked in hope.
But we’re up against abject diffidence.
This King of Presidential Interlope
has half of us enthralled, half of us cowed.
He’s doing the shades of all demagogues quite proud!
82. Mahler’s 9th in Honolulu
Amid this chaos, there’s still Mahler’s Ninth.
I’m hearing it today in Honolulu.
That Adagio with themes intertwined…
then afterwards it’s pho on Kapahulu.
The first movement is cosmic plenitude -
all that’s bad contained within all that’s good.
The second: bumpkins clumsy, harsh, yet shrewd -
Till Eulenspiegel, maybe Robin Hood.
Movement Three: an intractable burlesque
filled with Austro-Hungarian Weltschmerz -
both deconstructed fugue and restless rondo.
The grand apotheosis of a quest
and counterexample to Conrad’s Kurtz:
Movement 4 - both swan song and mortal smorzando.
83. What I Don’t Want to Hear Tonight in Mahler’s Ninth
I don’t want to hear it as elegy,
although it’s very easy to do so.
I’d rather hear abstract analogy,
or jaguars in a painting by Rousseau.
I don’t want to hear the desperate gasp
of our civilization on the wane -
the offspring of Adam, Eve, and the asp
funneling Hellwards through Acheron’s drain.
Still less do I want my own century
supervening in my rapt enjoyment.
I’ll accept love, disgust, and venery
as mete for interpretive employment.
But nothing, please, of our current malaise
in the U.S. of A. in its ugliest phase.
84. Andante comodo
(or, What I Really Learned from Mahler’s 9th)
Everything that is has happened before,
and this includes all of us - we women, we men.
Each time we die, we ask, “What’s more? What’s more?”
We’ll understand when Now retreats to Then
and what is To Come rests firmly within our ken.
And that’s to say we’ll reach another shore,
another again, again and again -
each a new custom house on an infinite tour.
And yes, we’ll trod through filth and sin and gore
within and without our small, milky glen.
We’ll redeem ourselves at times, though we won’t
know when.
What we can’t recall will return as lore.
And while human concerns may howl and roar,
they’re just a drop in the ocean. Amen. Amen.
85. Glum Junana
I’ll admit this junana’s rather glum;
I’m submitting it with my head bowed down.
Like our nation, it’s shadowed by this bum,
this narcissist, this orange clown.
Ain’t no one left, it seems, to put him down!
Our Congress has been rendered mute and dumb.
The media just whine and balk and frown.
Fareed and others bang their blown-out drum.
This horrid game is less-than-zero sum.
Please help us, Clio! Help our world, this town!
Don’t falsify our story! Don’t keep mum!
Chronicle this shit to evil renown!
Not much I can do besides clean and air my nook.
On the bright side, I’m halfway through this little book!
[Next: Sixth Junana (Sonnets 86-102)]
[Some Sentences: 170 Sonnets homepage]