52. Arc and Exaltations
Ending this day has been a great challenge -
a day even better than we’d foreseen,
a day on which we found peace and balance.
Such days as are always so few and far between!
It had an unanticipated arc,
replete with undemarcated stations,
at several of which we’d disembark
to arrest our unanticipations
and jolt us into doing something grand
or something small or something in between -
something decisive or something unplanned,
calibrating our distance from the mean
of the world’s and of our own self-expectations.
Let our dreams recall this arc, these exaltations!
53. With Glasses Clinking
Reasonable New Year’s expectations.
America will exhibit learning:
a pause to Trumpian depredations,
his belated chastisement and public spurning.
I‘ll finish this little book in a year.
My tennis skills will catch up with my wife’s.
I‘ll reduce my intake of wine and beer.
Our health will be free of major or petty strifes.
Netanyahu will reap his comeuppance.
The bastards of this world will slowly choke.
Putin at last will be served his summons.
Politicos will stop cannibalizing “woke.”
That last quatrain, I gather, is wishful thinking.
Let‘s suspend our disbelief with glasses clinking!
54. 2026 (or, Those Heights to Which We Aspire)
We’ll get our kicks in 2026
and have a blast circumventing our past
mistakes from which this year will grant us breaks,
having learned from the slaps and blows we’ve earned
in the bygone year. For it would appear
it‘s our habit to question, to nab at
each New Year‘s dawn for the arrow it‘s drawn
towards whatever‘s next in this human text -
that next chapter filled with tears and laughter
and the sort of life that conjugates strife
with transcendence, being with its semblance,
what’s good in ourselves with our evil elves,
our arrogance of might with all that‘s right,
troughs of desire with those heights to which we aspire.
55. Physical Graffiti
- in commemoration of the album’s 50th anniversary -
Listening to Physical Graffiti
on a long flight back to Honolulu -
an album that induces a greedy
ache for older rock. Zeppelin can fool you
with volume and salacious anecdotes
into deeming it all a bunch of crap.
But Jones, Plant, Page, and Bonham are the GOATs
of British rock that never takes a nap!
Their “In My Time of Dying” is my fave -
borrowed from young Dylan’s first collection.
Jonesey’s organ riffs sparkle off the stave
on “In the Light,” and Page’s perfection
on “Trampled Under Foot” is without peer.
Plant soars throughout, and to Bonzo there’s nothing near.
56. Best to Be Born in the Middle
Given opportunities to flourish,
we human beings often do quite well.
If early in life we are malnourished,
neglected in the home wherein we dwell,
or shunned by others by some happenstance
of race, appearance, or proclivity,
then the slim ratio of choice to chance
may limit us to base activity
serving the interests of capital
and those who have been dealt the better hand.
We’ll hardly rest or take a nap at all,
while Techbro bros are living high and grand.
But the rich themselves are a sad riddle,
which is why it’s best to be born in the middle!
57. On the Margins of Sleep (or, Oneiric Precipitance)
On the margins of sleep, thoughts are obscure.
Concept turns to affect turns to image.
Inklings threaten, while silhouettes allure.
We’re not dreaming yet, but it’s a scrimmage
between the real and the otherworldly,
what makes sense to us and the uncanny.
I come to, unsure where gods have hurled me
as I’ve been briefly resting my fanny.
It vanishes instantly, out of mind,
and there’s no reviving the bricolage
of nonsense that I’ve just experienced.
I return to the habits of my kind,
my modicum of human privilege,
and shore up once more against oneiric precipitance.
58. Broken Foreman
- exemplifying the preceding sonnet’s argument -
“Take a sprocket with you, broken foreman.
You’ll need it when they come to wrench you home!”
Rapture will include a token poor man;
the saints will roll him up on wheels of chrome.
Trochees gallop out beyond the border,
while iambs hedge their bets along the shore.
“Come on, Peter…call your sharps to order!”
I would, but I can’t flat them anymore.
Ridicule is all we get for payment,
though I’m not short on cash, I’m pleased to say.
ICE gestapo strolling up the pavement.
Let’s run inside and make our getaway!
“Jesus, I’m confused, but I will shake this.”
I shuddered and returned to wakefulness.
59. Smokescreen Poetics (or, Not Exactly What I Mean!)
These statements are patently metrical;
you really should not take them at their word.
Be they scholarly or theatrical,
it’s more important that the beats be heard,
the stresses and non-stresses clarified,
and consonants and vowels juxtaposed
to keep the sonic balance satisfied.
The truth content is seldom presupposed.
Words often merely serve as placeholders,
and that’s the virtue of non sequiturs.
On my desk I’ve stacked this pile of folders
to evade semantic inquisitors
who wish to know “exactly what I mean.”
I pull out a substitute word to smoke the screen!
60. A Tip of the Hat to William Wordsworth
Wordsworth is the champion sonneteer
among all bards who’ve ever sonneted -
greater than Sidney, Spenser, or Shakespeare,
or any continental hominid.
And that’s not to knock Dante or Petrarch,
whose stuff I only know through translation.
To English bards I confine my remark.
I say this to avoid remonstration!
But seriously, Wordsworth is the best.
His sonnets top 500 in number
and together comprise a treasure chest
of sooth on life from birth to final slumber -
14-line miracles of sound and sense.
His influence on this opus is quite immense!
61. Art and Exaggeration
Exaggerations are the only truths
in psychoanalysis, Adorno
said, and it’s true in other discourses.
We bards at times are warned to hold our horses,
although our ballooned conceits have borne no
threat against such laws as protect our youths.
The marlin that I boasted I put back
may have been just a flounder, it is true.
That oaken chest was but a gunnysack;
that azure sky, a rather dingy blue.
What Teddy really meant, in fact, was Art:
It blows things up to test the sacrosanct.
It also knows when not to crack a fart,
which is why Art’s reputation has never tanked!
62. Grave New World
We determine our own reality.
Philosophers may tell me, “No, we don’t!”
But sure we do, and it’s our malady
that we can will our freedom though we won’t.
I’m talking fake intelligence, my friends,
which honestly has got us by the balls -
this artifice on which our world depends,
this plane on which our planet now revolves.
A substitute for what we knew was real,
for everything that now we’ve left behind.
We’ve rented rooms in it with mindless zeal,
ignoring all the traps with which it’s lined.
A child, indeed, of our determination -
this post-reality, this post-creation.
63. On Sonnetary Play and Prosody
A line of iambic pentameter -
a perfect line like this one, that’s to say -
cuts through the poem a mean diameter
and helps concenter sonnetary play.
Trochaic lines are often subversive.
This one barges in with savage footsteps,
like block print intervening in cursive,
or Graham Chapman mimicking Nazi goosesteps.
For variation you insert triplets -
a dactyl here or an anapest there;
the count of beats may fall from pent to quad.
Extra syllables, like turkey giblets,
can gravy a line to make it appear less bare.
The challenge of sonnets: to keep their feet well shod!
64. Poet’s Propensity
I’ve always tried to find the poetry
of every time and place that I’ve been in.
I’ve shrunk like Emily to Nobody,
allowing me to better listen in
on discourses that frame our modern world
and tensions as we struggle to survive
our incapacities and brash mistakes
with which our history is pocked and pearled,
in spite of which a number of us thrive
on the limited sense that wisdom makes
of the universe and our human blip
within mystery and immensity.
We’re a single moment of an infinite trip,
the documentation of which is poet’s propensity!
65. “And Now for Something Completely Different…”
“And now for something completely different…”
I’ve long regarded this classic motif
as an action plan for deliverance
from outworn expressions of love and grief,
or – as with the case of Monty Python –
from dull imperatives of convention
such as narrative continuity,
patent forms through which meaning is siphoned,
the insistence on ego-intention,
which threatens art in perpetuity…
Sometimes there’s a need to swap out the form,
(and obviously this book isn’t that);
sometimes it’s a transgression of some norm
of what can be said in verse about this and that…
66. ICE Barbie and Spanky Gerbils (Minneapolis 2026)
What post-reality will the bastards
test our credulity with this morning?
See jackbooted thugs mount chutes and ladders
to ransack homes and lives without warning.
Now ICE Barbie ascends her podium.
She’s underscored with a Nazi slogan.
Vance has swallowed heaps of imodium,
spews verbal shit in defense of pogrom.
I call this meat puppet Spanky Gerbils;
he looks like Our Gang’s Spanky with a beard.
From faux hillbilly to JD Goebbels,
he’s more satanic than we even feared!
We Americans will go about our day,
some oblivious to the price we all will pay.
67. The Songs That Fill My Head (or, Through Text and Tune)
I cherish all the songs that fill my head.
Without them life would be devoid of joy -
a diet of air and unleavened bread
with nothing to sweeten my wars on Troy.
They’re living things. They eat, they sleep, they scheme.
They intercept my plans, my wants and needs.
They sonify my inner ear and stream
a soundtrack for my varied moods and speeds.
I’ve curated this 60-year collection.
I can’t tell where I end and it begins.
It underlies my acts and introspection
and documents my triumphs and my sins.
I cannot gauge how much these poems are strewn
with all the lives I’ve lived through text and tune.
68. Another Seventeen
And so concludes another seventeen.
They broke into this new year sharp and lean!
Some of them are reserved and quite serene;
some smell like they’ve emerged from a latrine.
One’s unaware we’re in the Holocene;
another thinks she’s Mary Magdalene.
Some caught their share of boos from, sight unseen,
those Muppet critics in the mezzanine.
While most of them were nice, a few were mean,
when all they did was pout and vent their spleen.
Some quarreled, and I had to intervene
when one of them hauled out a guillotine.
So here they are - the old guard with the green,
the common with the few and far between.
[Next: Fifth Junana (Sonnets 69-85)]
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