Not to shun an instant,
or institution, but by "foundation"
he meant the beat and the bass
in the basement --
superstructure --
Your instructor, her soup,
Sure and strict,
A stricture.
Come and command.

I wonder about Austria. Is it anything like cancelled Czechs?
Do pigs fly? Is there a stranger there, to complicate
the one in me? Or must I rearm my filling station?
Can we trust otters to indicate us
(who seem us only in the evil rush), our
end never stooping to think? Oh, I was so right around you,
my sonnet birdcage, once. No, cats' tails immersed
in the frozen swamp are about all I have time for.
The daylights are so Polaroid. Yet time is often self-
centered. At least that’s how it feels to me.

I'm kind of your average American
I studied at Hollywood College
Becoming incredibly knowledgeable
Reading theory night and day,
“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And
This corrodes even the knowledge
Of why it has become impossible
To write poetry today.”

Yes, but something’s slant with this direction,
The oppressed and the oppressor are not equally obscene.
If the young are allowed laughter
can not the experienced leave night omens.?  
“Perennial suffering has as much right to expression
as a tortured man has to scream;
hence it may have been wrong to say that after
Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.”  

Alone in his room
Mom asks what’s the matter
“Even the most extreme consciousness of doom
threatens to degenerate into idle chatter.”

I am concerned with that venison in America
But the juice is soured.
This weeping as I wanked out of control,
After breaking cross-haired whims,
Galloping backward and forward, ahead the past,
Behind the unfamiliar future,
What were we doing, or were we,
The mattress, the limber of lice, or of loves
We were measuring olives, continually?
A moon soon to be forgiven
In crossed girders of past, hip Brooklyn charcoal
In this peeping that has sized you again?

an edge, the Double facet
becomes a gEometry--
but each petAl ends in
    But if it enDs
but love is at an End--of roses
              cementiNg the grooved
                       colD, precise, touching
               columnS of air--The edge
Crisp, worked to deFeat
     cuts without cuttIng
                            edGe and the
                           figUred in majolica--
        from it--neitheR hanging
    From the petal's Edge a line starts
    glazed with A rose
                              infiniteLy fine, infinitely
                                      It Is at the edge of the
itself in metal or porcelaiN--
          laboredness--fragilE
    makes copper roses
         meets--nothing--renews
           nor pushing--
         penetrates space
                       petal that love waits
             plucked, moist, half-raised
              rigid penetrates
      Sharper, neater, more cutting
so that to engage roses
  Somewhere the sense
               steel roses--
            that being of steel
          the broken plate
The fragility of the flower
           the Milky Way
The place between the petal’s
        The rose carried weight of love
       The rose is obsolete
        the start is begun
     unbruised
    What
whither? It ends—
without contact--lifting

The fundamental things apply
Or that proud Aragon bent low his head,
is Achilles possible side by
side with powder and lead?

We met at the bar and I formed a new band
With their feet full of tar and their head full of sand
Yes, I got a desert in my toenails,
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!