103. Still a Week
Art slows down or stops when Life intervenes.
It’s the theme of this Junana Seven!
We’re thrust upon our basic ways and means -
that primary route that leads to Heaven
in the here and now and the hereafter,
while the shorter but secondary route
is sealed off, though we’ll survive on laughter
until we can pry back open the chute.
Which is to say I’ve taken a week off,
due to my midlife orthodontic mess -
a wire cutting into my upper cheek,
which caused me to spit and grimace and cough.
I don’t do well with pain, I must confess!
A week with no inspiration is still a week.
104. Art and Life and Neighborhood Rage
And Life intervenes again and again!
What fun is there in making loud noises
on your crummy motor bike, young someone?
Surely your world offers better choices
than screeching down the block at half-past ten,
as if your sacred goal is to summon
our neighborhood’s general rage instincts
which, as adults, we sensibly suppress
and joke on evolutionary links
missing in some folks’ DNA, we guess.
In your defense, your bike may be your Art.
You fancy you’re feeding our enjoyment
through a jolt from the ear drum to the heart,
reinstigating our sleep-deprived annoyment.
105. Our Meager Nugget (or, No One Left for Anyone)
People have had enough of each other
recently. I get this sense more and more.
Socializing has become a bother,
and there’s no one left for anyone to adore.
A great loss of respect and decency
from our homes to the floor of the Senate.
We’d all like to end close adjacency
with neighbors who’ve told us to fuck off and meant it.
And now we’re collecting guns and sabers
“to win friends and influence people,” as
that ancient sage Dale Carnegie put it.
Nothing doing! The fruits of our labors,
still lost to billionaires who wheedle us
into coughing up for them our meager nugget.
106. Daily Bread
It’s good once a week to empty your head,
to clear your brain of emotional filth
and the workweek’s accumulated dread
leftover from dogged pursuit of wealth,
status, connections, and reputation,
sometimes production for production’s sake.
It’s kind of like cerebral ablation -
turning your mind off, staring at a lake,
listening to Bach or the Grateful Dead.
Some of these sonnets are along such lines.
They’re like the Christian trope of daily bread,
on which we feed as ambition declines.
This rest is really something to savor,
allowing return to a richer self-favor!
107. One for All and All for One
This book is set at full capacity.
What I mean by that is that the design
encourages truth and mendacity,
goodness, badness, the profane, the divine,
my own feelings versus everything but,
here simplicity, there complexity,
the open-ended, the narrow and shut,
all the things that I love, whatever’s vexing me…
You reach a point in your development
at which it’s “one for all and all for one.”
You focus on the smallest element
then survey everything under the sun
in a full exploration of your range -
from the rounded and whole to the dross and the mange.
108. As They Mount Their Rising Star
The universe is teeming with life - an
assertion based on probabilities.
But it’s got no heart to thrust a knife in -
this forest we only see through these trees,
with no life for us to transplant or kill
because the distances are far too vast.
We’ll never spy beyond our windowsill
any prequel life or life for us to outlast!
James Webb, deGrasse Tyson, and Brian Cox…
There ain’t no way, they way, we’ll ever know
a non-earthly crab or lion or fox
that beings with language might like to show
to such similar beings as we are
with thoughts such as these as they mount their rising star.
109. Neverlasting Apotheosis
They’re an exercise in futility,
though one in which we frequently engage -
these questions with little utility
that are old as life itself, though they never age.
Is there a god? Are there others out there?
Is evil necessary to the whole?
Are there purposes here or anywhere?
Beyond matter and space-time are there nous and soul?
The former independent of the brain,
the latter pre-existing all that is?
Such questions as preoccupy the sane
and insane, from Roman patricians to Les Mis.
We’ve pondered them since well before gnosis.
They never end in lasting apotheosis.
110. State of the Union ‘26
Shall we owe some debt to stupidity,
the sort of which might challenge Erasmus?
Bigotry admixed with cupidity
in a trio of four-year miasmas.
For Biden never escaped the shadow
of his predecessor and nemesis,
who left him with COVID hell to harrow -
apocalypse preceding genesis
that Trump, Murdoch and Company forestalled.
The Term of Trumpian Recrudescence.
We’re hardly a third of the way through it.
We’re simply numb and no longer appalled
by each new act of moral putrescence.
If and when it will end, no one can intuit.
111. On Poetic Contrivance
Avoiding contrivance is a virtue,
though we contrive out of necessity.
I could rhyme that starting line with “hurt you”
and allow it to make a mess of me
and my desire to write another poem.
I could build on that first embarrassment
a structure serving as a makeshift home
to concenter a new arrondissement
with its own holidays and local brogue,
its landed gentry, its craftsmen, its poor,
its libraries, its public skating rink,
its kids who will go abroad or go rogue,
its literature that may or may not endure.
This poem is less contrived than you may think!
112. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (or, Kakistocratic Pros)
Everybody knows that this is nowhere -
title of the classic Neil Young album.
Israeli and U.S. bombs in the air.
Though no one wants this war, we’ll allow them
to conduct themselves however they please,
having learned squat from the last fiasco.
The Epstein Administration decrees
that the Western world from Perth to Glasgow
shall submit to regime change in Iran.
“All profits shall go to the billionaires,”
Vance spews forth with faux hillbilly elan…
to fund their asses out of their sordid affairs.
This’ll take us nowhere. Everyone knows.
We’ll chalk it up to our kakistocratic pros.
113. In a Sonnet’s Minute
The universal and the topical -
poetry books should have an even mix.
Today we must relentlessly mock all
miscreant demagogues and their dastardly tricks.
We withdraw from the now as we sicken
on whatever is evil within it.
Thus Blake turns to tigers, Plath to lichen,
Rilke to sound delights in a sonnet’s minute.
All the greatest poets have observed this -
Goethe, Byron, Dickinson, Neruda,
Verlaine and Horace at their most nervous,
and Wallace Stevens sailing down to Bermuda:
We shuffle the dire refrains of the day
with objects and thoughts that reward extended play.
114. Dreams and Prestigitation
In dreams we can do the impossible.
Not in all of them, but in a number
that end up resulting in a series
as in a string of interrelated
action films or, better yet, animes.
We’re granted a set of skills that varies
with the scene, accruing no loss at all
of power, no need for rest or slumber.
Each challenge can be manipulated
as we dash like Mario through the maze,
avoiding trolleys and giant vultures,
discovering our arms in fact are wings,
retooling flora as props and bolsters,
and prestigitating our dreamworld’s happenings.
115. Some Poems Beneath This Clock
Each day possesses its needs and demands
that press upon all of us each to each.
When Everyman wakes up, he understands
no more than the bits and pieces within his reach.
He’s like the man-apes in Kubrick and Clarke,
dumbstruck before the monolithic whole,
awaiting the knowledge of flint to spark
the myth of Prometheus and the fire he stole.
Our energy flags. We grab what we can,
and when we can, we make it something more.
We accumulate, in our brave lifespan,
enough to provide our children with goods and lore.
Our days, end to end, comprise our epoch.
Its annals we’ve stacked in some poems beneath this clock.
116. Some Meanings (or, Poet’s Amenity)
Some meanings are now unavailable
as they haven’t been recorded in time.
But these are firm and unassailable;
on some tomorrow they’ll be unearthed in the lime.
Some meanings never manage to get caught;
thus, they’re not true but only potential.
Some others with complications are fraught,
like when they appear self-evidential,
or when they slip in via déjà vu,
in which case they frequently go ignored
and unclaimed, though it doesn’t matter who
thunk them up first or how or where or why they’re
stored.
And that’s how meanings partake of infinity.
This secret is poets’ lasting amenity.
117. Reaction, Walls, and Borders
(More Advice for Young People)
I appreciate young folks who aspire
to something bigger than lazy bias.
Some adults think that escape from our mire
is reaction, walls, and borders. My ass!
I couldn’t care less if you call me “woke.”
At least that means I fucking ain’t asleep,
deluded or brain dead. Nor will I choke
on propaganda some decades and dollars deep!
There’s more to life than ideology,
no matter what some tortured brains have said.
And no confused epistemology
can prove that your bias is or isn’t your bread.
Young chucks, get out there and do something big.
You were born with promise. Don’t retrench! Don’t renege!
118. Algorithms
You can shove your algorithms up your…
okay, I won’t say it, but, goddammit,
this feed is making my stomach flutter
with images of a porno AI Hamlet.
Did I say flutter? I meant to write “puke.”
And fake nude Pee Wee Herman as the Dane.
Something comes out of my mouth as a fluke,
and Siri sends it floating down the cyber drain.
Soon they’re selling me recycled tampons
and promising a date with Sheryl Crow,
a skiing trip in remote Swiss cantons,
with fake Elon claiming he wants to be my bro.
What dangers lie in these algorithms?
What gluts, depletions, and cybercataclysms?
119. Conjugating Art from Life
Yes, when Life intervenes, we all should laugh,
as I declared sixteen sonnets ago.
We giggle and resume our dreary math
to tally our needs from the sum of what we know.
Of what is down to earth and close to home
and unabstracted from the floors we sweep.
Someday it may be featured in a poem
and cause our most cherished friends to shiver and weep.
We’ll get to Art when next we take a break
and wish to wander out some afternoon -
at wit’s end, or when sanity’s at stake
and Life’s tougher calculus is making us swoon.
All language and all enterprise is rife
with the rapt desire to conjugate Art from Life.
[Next: Eighth Junana (Sonnets 120-136)]
[Some Sentences: 170 Sonnets homepage]