86. Everything Is True, if Only Once
Everything gets to be true at least once.
You could say that’s Hegel in a nutshell.
It’s simple enough that even a dunce
can understand without dashing pell-mell
through the craggy Phänomenologie
or the thickets of Science of Logic.
Former truths are subject to eulogy,
though their deaths be prolonged and agogic.
Yes, everything is true, but much is dead
and has in fact been dead for many years.
I’ve got a mausoleum in my head
with defunct maxims rotting on their biers.
Truth is, what’s true is only true right now.
Burn off that detritus behind your brow!
87. Plaintive Warblers (or, Homer as Exorcist)
Poetry is exorcising voices
which, left inside your brain, would cause unrest.
Rilke, Plath, Neruda…each rejoices
when coaxing plaintive warblers from the nest.
Rapt Ionians leaned in to listen
as Homer plucked his lyre and sang the wars,
keen to spy if anything was missing
from recitation of the wooden horse,
Hector’s frenzied circles with Achilles,
Calypso’s passion for Odysseus,
Agamemnon’s countless shameful follies,
and trials of our brave Telemachus.
But Troy existed only in his noggin.
He constructed the epics to sail through mental fog in!
88. Art as Life’s Savior and Rival
The speed with which Life reasserts itself
after a few days of contemplation -
no matter the effort I took, the stealth
with which I guarded this quiet station -
reminds me again of Schoenberg’s dictum:
“Sometimes Life is more important than Art.”
It’s vital never to play the victim
each time Life drags me away in a cart
from everything I’m most eager to do
that bears little on human survival
or putting food and drink on the table
or recovering from the latest flu.
Art is Life’s savior, also its rival.
Through me they spar whenever I’m up and able!
89. The Nonsense in Which Existence Found You
If you can’t say it in words, don’t say it.
I mean, you won’t say it because you can’t.
Which isn’t to say that you can’t shape it
into some other type of wordless rant,
which may or may not impart some meaning
either to yourself or those around you.
Existence is all about redeeming
the nonsense in which existence found you,
only some of which in words gets spoken,
while much of it remains hopelessly lost
or else hidden in a cryptic token
awaiting a language not yet evolved.
And you yourself may not outlive the frost
that will need to thaw before this puzzle is solved.
90. Chili Peppers Playlist (or, Conundra of Joys)
This evening I’ll be relaxing my brain.
Higher intellection shall take a break.
From long sentences by Proust I’ll refrain.
Japanese conjugations of “to make”
will remain subject to sustained neglect.
I won’t harass Chopin’s gnarly etude
and find my fingers colossally wrecked
on the shoals of that dreaded A minor.
Instead I’ll shift into a lower mood
with a splendid half-bottle of wine, or
a carton of my favorite Haagen Dazs
and my 8-hour Chili Peppers playlist.
Kiedis and Flea will tell of grief and loss,
of the conundra of joys that boost and ail us.
91. This Poem and Its Histrionic Departure
This poem will deserve its page of its own,
will also deserve its blank space beneath.
It’ll sit there on its deserved throne
like Yertle the Turtle atop an ocean reef.
It deserves to be noticed, just like Trump,
deserves all the attention it can get.
For it’s far less humble than Forrest Gump
or the Dalai Lama fleeing plateau'd Tibet.
This poem deserves its own fanny wiper
to demonstrate its unique privilege.
It's planning to have itself offed by a sniper.
Its devotees will make a pilgrimage
to the grave site of this worded martyr
that reached for fame through histrionic departure.
92. Metapoem
Poems like this one are metapoetic -
creations about creation, that is,
looking down on creation from above,
critical but neutral, sympathetic
guides and coaches on aesthetic matters
that accumulate when push comes to shove
in that tricky marriage of sound and sense
that each successful sonnet conjugates
within the confines of the squarish fence
that circumscribes its jokes and postulates.
This one watches its brothers like a hawk.
Sometimes it annoyingly intervenes,
chopping branches and crouching on the stalk
of its neighbor, reducing the latter’s ways and means.
93. On American Conservatism
Americans! Our conservatism
leads only and always down blind alleys,
each reactionary paroxysm
sponsored by billionaires and their allies
pushing our nation further to the right,
to government by misinformation,
to public ignorance and misplaced spite,
the rich sinking deeper into depredation.
Murdoch, Trump, and Epstein - the end results
of anti-Enlightenment conniving
that began decades before the Revolution.
And now they’re screwing in the final bolts
as more of us are seething and writhing,
darkness once more occluding our clear solution.
94. Oregonian Bird Song of ‘72
“All I know is something like a bird within her sang...”
That ascent of a 10th from B to D -
B Dorian housed within A Major…
that’s Janis Joplin pictured as a bird.
Garcia sings it slow and easily.
He has no desire to push or age her
into a past that’s gone but once occurred.
Her spirit abides in ‘72;
Monterey and Woodstock are still in mind.
Soon enough she’ll fade with the morning dew.
The symbols of youth will be redefined.
They soar her up through the Oregon pines.
She’s grateful in death as she was in life.
They buoy her aloft on Hunter’s lines
into a bluer heaven where she knows no strife.
95. From Year to Passing Year
You want the year to start a certain way.
Soon it rhizomes off into new concerns.
They’re not what you planned, but you can’t gainsay
the unexpected prospects that effort returns.
By March your goals have been countermanded;
by August they’re completely turned around.
The seats are empty where June grandstanded,
and this year’s keynote speaker can’t even be found.
This pattern pushes us through the decades,
grows more distinct from year to passing year,
most distinct wherever memory fades
and the moon scrolls yellowed pages back to the rear.
But it’s great that each new year does what it wants
and pushes us out of our last year’s musty haunts!
96. It’s the Sonnet That Shines!
The possibilities and restrictions
of sonnets mirror those of every age,
though both vary from era to era.
Changing proscriptions and predilections,
fashions that wander in and out of rage,
science vs. religious chimera,
the jockeying of people and classes
for the right to own land and collect rent,
cultural malaises and morasses…
it all determines what gets thought and meant,
what can be inscribed in a frame of fourteen lines.
The same could be argued for other forms
that mirror, play, and break with human norms.
But as index, monad, prism, it’s the sonnet that shines!
97. This Mission Called Sonnet (or, Largely Fun and Aimless)
Each day we review with satisfaction
the successes of the previous day,
on the basis of which we’ll take action
and continue onwards without delay.
Likewise each sonnet builds on the former
as consequence, counterpoint, or sequel,
thus earning its room and board as dormer
here where inhabitants are coequal
votaries in this mission called Sonnet.
Each one is capped with a fitting title,
presuming a willingness to don it.
For some of them wish to remain nameless,
quietly arguing that names are not vital
to endeavors that are largely fun and aimless.
98. The Sonnet as Didactic Medium
The sonnet as didactic medium:
Fourteen lines will give you just enough room
to express a thought without tedium
or having to pad it with atmospheric gloom.
The mere addition of a fifteenth line
will push it out of didactic constraints
and cause ideation to snap the twine
of the bundled statements, evidence, and complaints.
Yes, fourteen lines are mete for “life lessons,”
for criticisms of the status quo
and asides on Renaissance themes and tropes.
No room for tirades or dull confessions,
personal attacks on an unnamed foe,
or straw men begging questions on slippery slopes.
99. Pantoum Sonnet
We read north to south, though the lines scroll north,
vanishing upwards through the hemisphere -
such words as we are destined to forget.
We never catch them cycling back up down below.
Vanishing upwards through the hemisphere,
our fading recollections make us fret.
We don’t catch them cycling back from below,
as from Mnemosyne’s watermill they gush forth.
Our fading recollections make us fret
as they remove themselves from what we know.
From Mnemosyne’s geyser gushing forth,
we’re beside ourselves like the fool with madcap Lear.
Such words as we are destined to forget,
we read north to south, though the lines scroll south to north.
100. Silly Ode to Tiresome Duties
Tiresome duties! I’ve known you all my life.
There’s always so much more I’d rather do
than put up with the many sorts of strife
accumulating as I deal with you.
Sore feet, an aching back, my empty brain,
this existential sense of hours lost.
If not for you, imagine what I’d gain!
I’d saunter through my backyard free of cost.
For I’d have someone there to hoe the garden
and fry up the tomatoes when they’re ripe.
I wouldn’t lift a finger or seek pardon
for lazing like a landed guttersnipe.
Oh duties! You have shown me what I long
for: ways and means to sing a bigger, better song!
101. The Bigger, Better Song
–with a nod to the previous sonnet–
The bigger, better song of the foregoing
announces itself to me once each day.
A premonition, a happy foreboding
that enters and exits but never goes away.
There’s always a better song up ahead.
I’m filled with joy whenever I reach it.
Were it a sermon, I’d rise and preach it!
I sing and hum and ask it to put me to bed.
But all better songs become small again;
they dwindle to a tinny bip of sound.
If and when they return will all depend
on reception that day on my small swath of ground.
The bigger, better song is here right now.
I sing it as I dutifully push my plough!
102. Borodin’s Nocturne (Love Poem)
–for Rebecca, Valentine’s Day 2026–
When I listen to Borodin’s nocturne,
I dream of running my hands through your hair
when we were young, and all I had to learn
was how to keep you with me everywhere
I went in life and know that you’d be there.
And through my eager fingers I would yearn
for us to remain in each other’s care.
Together we would watch each autumn burn,
endure each winter wrapping through to spring…
though better yet if we could stop the clock
and the time without worrying a thing
about growing old on this ageless rock,
or how many years we had left to spare,
forever running my hands through your perfect hair.
[Next: Seventh Junana (Sonnets 103-119)]
[Some Sentences: 170 Sonnets homepage]