2017.
(PRESIDENTIAL TYPE) December 6 2016.
(After
Jackson Mac Low's The Presidents of the United States
of
America, 1963,
using his grid)
1. Donald Trump's never seen a door
that his American
Typewriter
cannot fish-eye
into a
wall.
Call him Cochin and he'll
Footlight that
into ox
and with his trusty ox-goad
this Century Schoolbook infant will
say
not door, not
door, wall,
not door.
This Concrete Roman will mark
the heads
of contrarians in Deja Vu Serif
and in Goudy Old Style
he'll
hook weaklings
into New York
High Tower Text,
and to a watery Requiem he'll
dispatch all
vacillators
with a just word
from his Trump
Mediaeval mouth.
2. The Donald will pose in any doorway
like a Linux Libertine
with an eye
on the Playbill
while fishing
for Bank Gothic ox-strength
backing.
With Literaturnaya, Palatino Arabic and SimSun,
he will goad friend and foe alike
into
slamming doors
behind
him,
but, mark this: if he is
Akzidenz Grotesk
waiting to happen his Easyreading headlines
will continue to hook his followers -
running water for
parched Neutraface mouths.
3. Come in Ionic No. 5, the door is a little ajar
still.
DJT's
eye is firmly shut
to News Gothic, Times New
Roman
(too many fishy words) and Syntax.
Without irony The Quick Brown Fox
Jumps
Over the ox-eye daisy
in Helvetica Neue, whose tweets goad half the Nation.
The sole strategic door
is confuse and
bamboozle
but
still promise
Utopia.
The mark of a
font is its Impact
and Trump's head flits from Dom Casual
to Terminal in search of a
hook.
Tower's Stymie
Bold Condensed
is him.
Know him too
by his friends -
watery mouths
every
one -
Bastard and Breitkopf
Fraktur,
as a broken future
splints a broken
land.
PSALM FOR OLD AGE March 2018
Tonight the pull & pulse
of temporal transmitters
morphs out of stasis,
the resurrection of Eros’ bones
in sung stone & a 'membered
genital-worm of desire
conjure a mounting shimmer.
We climb towards it
in our practiced, elderly way –
bronchioles on steroids,
our deep lungs so grateful
for this airing.
Between tumescence and eruption
there’s a magma of shapeshifts,
a rapid shuffle of fantasies,
ghost memories,
as coked-up neurons keep losing
their place in the dance.
We
make up new steps, negotiate
a way between myofascial pain,
arthritic non-sequiturs
and weak bladders to hit a stride,
shed centuries and arrive
bellysouls filled
with giggles
& good will.
Selah!
POETS January 2020
Poets
are, on the other hand,
a
different kind of military,
and
when they march together
soon
make clear how unparadable
they
are.
And
don’t speak to me
of
Generals — if they had one
they
would never acknowledge
it.
Some scouts might count
among
their number, but their names,
jurisdictions,
missions are beyond
the
beginning of agreement.
You
can lead poets to water
but
they’ll keep fingers crossed behind
backs
and croak out unbaptized songs
in
different anarchies.
Given
the choice between being
on the
firing squad and the target
it’s hard to predict where the poet
will
stand. More than a few
will
choose both.
The
best words are for eating.
It
seems strange to have come this far
without
mentioning music.
Some
there are who choke on air;
others
are attracted to the radio
and let
propaganda, dressed up
as
rhetoric, erode imagination.
Some
mistakes are epic.
The poet knows that Mother
Teresa’s tears, collected into ampoules
injected
into veins will cure
nothing;
knows this
without
cynicism.
In
light trance or deep
meditation
the poet is haunted by news
that is
always stayed.
The
poet tells a lover
“These fingers. These fingers,” the poet
says, “have logged a thousand miles
in, on,
or about — the premise is —
your
flesh.”
“For each sweet
sickness a sweet
cure” the poet writes, in cursive on antique
paper
pinned to your pillow.
However
intimate its breath
the
poet does not address the poem to you.
Is that
justice? Pardon? Oh, but of course, the poet
asks
the questions.
The
poet in the corner seat
at the
window counter
at
Renzo’s Café
stirs
&
sips
as he
listens
to the
world
exhale,
watches
Grand-
view
Park’s day
unfurl
