I hope you don't mind
if I wander in through your front door
and reset your clocks to headlight savings
life requires humor he said to the lens grinders
who were eradicating global stupidity
with mass readings of children's fairy tales
same shit greater magnification was basically it
applying one clever artifice after another
one's conscience does want to hasten
the modern world along clippity clop
impediments to traffic flow were to be shot
what happened next is not in the dictionary
which is fine don't get me wrong
beats the nuts off a hunger for facts
but the world is not nice anymore
isolated pockets of apostasy perhaps
out in the bleak lizard sands hanging from a tree
but the rest stuffed with foam peanuts
that could turn you to ballroom dancing
your narrator being the test case
for daisy picking the numbers
the samples the statistics
the entire ABC unit was called in
from the chalk mines
and the XYZ crew was mobilized
from the slate quarry
his mind had turned upon itself
out of shame and envy
he had an entire city in his head
that wasn’t in Architectural Digest
honkings sirens gunfire breaking glass
compulgings and obsessities and hallucinotions
mysterias and distortoons and damplifications
may I add unregulated bowel flux
we haven't even begun to look at his libido
which had shrunk precipitously from
a roaring blacksmith's forge of intensity
to the vague expectation of an afternoon nap
better than living the prelude to a beheading
you decide if hiding in the bushes permanently
like a grinning jack in the box with a message
is the same as dancing through the forest
draped about in leaves and emeralds
pantomime after all is deception
random at first then shapes intervene
there is no random he said over and over
repetition is proof after all
they say the devil spoke Hebrew
and Popeye smoked his spinach
a contemporary exercise in
signal location
From "Engine of Didactic Beauty" available on Amazon