Poem from earlier this year

Blog-reading public,
Here is an impressionistic sequence from some months ago I call "counter-tragic" in movement. I hope you see why.


Essays in Literalism

I

This aint no fairy tale
A woman in outdated dress
Came to bring drinks to the idlers.

The jaded captain who had swapped
His mind for matter at a trading post
Of lore, of a brute shelf of land

And of no more, with beady eyes
That had seen three copy regimes
Observed a woman's heavy breast.

Then the dumb sun akin by force
To least reflective kin set in
Logical bounds' original.

A captain sees the light ommiting form
Of a scented woman at night.
The unharmonious things his eyes omit

Perseverance of the soul
Or such will buzz about his corpse;
He ambles down dirt path.

II

A winter holiday
In a peace a few years old.
Nature hath as yet changed none

In the old general’s line.
The time is good for each enclave
To celebrate its fortune.

The old among this pious band
Know chance is due its wage of fear
The young play games on marble floors.

Those that know drink wine from stemless cups,
Those that don't hear their sonorous steps.
Nature is the stem of chance and order.

Which two appear when a drunkard
Shaking his last on the stone steps
Knocks and begs entry; granted,

Once the children are sent to bed:
Too late. Death is nor stem nor root
Of disorder. The line prospers.

III

A child is born in an old world
A prodigal from the first
Toothed in the womb, his mother says.

He steers fast from all peopled paths
Has fact for only company
But all start young and fill at first.

Life still hot and long he ventures
Time will clip it dawn to like dusk,
A brothel-go and he’s kicked out.

He sees himself walking cross a schoolyard
Knows he must leave it now. So long
Infinity in a box.

He dreamt that night he slept by the surf
With lapping waves to wake him up
And blood and salt for self and world,

A penniless self-made bastard
Shattering the bangles of his living source.
But he was never without a hearth.

IV

He was ideal in argument
Speaking little of himself,
Asking of all what they knew best.

But the argument of his life
Meanders ‘bout supposed source
As organists imagine jazz.

Secure in the twin mirages
Of stories heard, future enactment
He sits in copy rooms by day.

Each night seems the first to deviate
From a pattern thicker than him,
In fact but a city’s fixed shape.

When he’s shaken from the middle
By a wrong turn cops ask him his address
And he’s forced to name a heap of brick.

The bland ground on which nothing’s happened yet
Gives way. He blabbers of new and old
As if he knew the noun attached.

V

He struts with a girl by his side.
Friday has come bright of hue
And these same streets, once of such weight

Lend assistance to green fancy
Their neon signs signaling paths
Going far into simple air.

Folk of lore were one with air
We who aren’t are lighter than them:
Logic helps those who don’t need help.

It’s in a measured man’s nature
Not to go far enough to know
The whole thing assumes endlessness.

The next morning, after she leaves
Feeling spent, he turns on the radio
The air sways with metaphor

Whose twain terms, both half foreign death
Half of the round week’s breath
Assume little and consume much.