I really wanted to express warm grattude
to the new web acquaintances I've made on here
during this trying time. Practically overnight
I got a buncha new followers as a new user, or
at least it seems like a buncha to me; then,

rather suddenly, it seems like everybody at
once stopped reading my stuff. Given the current situation,
I sincerely hope that this doesn't mean you have...
no, it's too terrible to think of, much less say.

Nevertheless, my gratitude for your recognition,
however momentary, is heartfelt and continues,
and I want you to know that I will continue to
value our association for as long as this period of
social disconnectedness lasts, after which
I will re-evaluate rationally based on a cost-benefit model.

after several consecutive insomniac nights
I was rummaging you tube when I came upon a site
inviting me to try something called asmr for sleep problems.
when I clicked there the screen went blank and a
woman with a husky voice said, “listen closely.”

that was in july, I think.
since then several interesting things have happened, or are in progress.

my cable has been replaced by dish.

my long-time therapist sent a message announcing his retirement.
However, I am attempting to evaluate whether, in fact,
he or an otherwise-named corporate entity are returning
to my bank account,
once a month, incrementally,
the consultation fees I paid him over the last 17.75 years,
in transactions tagged as “voluntary reparations (unofficial).”

Some things - Emily Dickinson, Finnegan’s Wake - are starting to make a lot more sense,
especially late at night,
but not in relation to any of the topics you would ever anticipate.
On the other hand, I can no longer unravel the plot line of
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

There are indications that I have become a hugely successful web presence,
but only in Japan;
I remain at a loss to decipher the resulting communications but
my new avatar may or may not translate as “Fool for Fugu.”

I find that feeding the squirrels in Prospect Park is very satisfying.
I devote more and more of my waking hours to this pursuit,
though they are becoming increasingly demanding and picky eaters,
rejecting nuts and random carbs while displaying an unusual
preference for radioactive isotopes of the lanthanide series.

Most important, mommy comes to tuck me in every night and help me
to sleep;
she is rather large, so only her right index finger can make it
through my bedroom window, but the way she
gently scratches the nape of my neck is very effective.
Her latest polish is tangerine crush coral.

I know you're not supposed to be discouraging
so I'm putting this in a different place on the web
so's hopefully the person I'm snarking at won't see it
but I can't help it

this person (not a HePo)
said,
in verse,
"I think the world is trying to give us a hug"

o
gee

if so,
it's the way big Lennie
hugged the puppy
in that Steinbeck book

I just called my Doctor's office
to tell them I needed a prescription renewal.
After verifying my information,
they informed me that I am dead.

This presents me with an ontological dilemma:
who am I to dispute the Doctor's opinion?
I have been wrong about basic issues before.
And in the event they are correct,
do I really need to keep taking a 10mg statin
once a day?

Is there anything the Spirit of Dead Matter would not do
To keep His Crown? Would He hesitate to
**** his enemies, his doubters, those who resembled his most awful victims –
To black the Light and ash the Rivers and irradiate the Airs of those
Lands which gave succor to his last craven opponents –
To freeze in soundless Vacuum the last voices modeling any meaning –
To steal in the night the last pulsebeats or lightward twistings leaving
In their place only brazen clockwork,
Verdigrised,
Badly made,
Maloccluded snapping cogs and the last sensations the screech of unlubricated parts seizing in a deathlock
While over the last junkyard muzak tinntinnabs-----

Hell to the Cheats He Hath Choked our respiration,
Howl for the Cheez, He Shalt ***** youse hart n sole.

The social graces necessary to
Hover weightless but apparently comfortable
Over a plurality of attitudes – or “sides” –
No one of which can be fully embraced
Without collateral damage, is what now defines
An acceptable communicator, friend or lover.
Not as we once told ourselves
A “capacity for ambiguity” orbiting like chimerical quanta
In the airy loops of your cortical apparatus,
But quite simply a very special brand
Of Tight-Assedness,
Seated directly on the dilemma’s sharp horns
With no outward sign of emotional distress
Or fakery.
Without this early-acquired skill you can’t avoid sinking
Into blatant relativism or – worse even –
Partisanship, with its unavoidable implications
That you might consider someone you meet,
With all the rights and privileges of a distinct human individual,
To be actually rather stupid.

Before they decided always to be
Perfectly honest with each other,
The inhabitants of Regulus V
Constituted a thriving, variegated community;
Now there’s a radioactive cinder.

there's basically nothing in my "stream" all day -
which if I understand this platform, so far,
means the people i follow are not submitting.

What, have you have got something BETTER to do
on a Saturday?
I hope it's entirely virtual, if you get my drift.

I depend emotionally on the little band of
HePo people I run after like a puppy now;
Tumblr has gone snotty-weird,
Twitter always was,
and Facebook -- is like being snowbound
with relatives for the holidays.

so, somebody please gush lyrically about
something in the next 90 minutes,
cause my Domino's order ain't coming
until at least that late.

1.Garo Yepremian, the field goal kicker,
when he tried to throw a pass (with a football)
and it flew backward out of his hand
and was run in for a touchdown by the opposing team
in the SuperBowl. I did that when I was 12.

2. Bill Buckner, the first baseman,
when he bent over to pick up the weak grounder
(a baseball) that would have let him make the final out
in the World Series in 1986, the first one his team
would have won since the Stone Age,
and instead let the ball roll between his feet
out into the outfield. I did that when I was 9.

3. Vinko Bogataj, a Yugoslav ski jumper
who fell and flew sideways off the ramp
in a tangle of skis arms and legs, and was exhibited for
years on TV as "the agony of defeat". I did that over and over
whenever I tried to move upright on ice or hard-packed snow.
I still do.

4. LeBron James, who, at the end of the last game when
Cleveland won the NBA Finals, blocked a shot by
flying about fifty feet through the air in one second
(apparently descending from the ceiling)
and flattening an easy layup perfectly against the backboard.
I did that last Tuesday night, in my dreams.

5. Lorenzo Bandini, a Formula One race car driver for Ferrari
who died in a fiery crash in the 1967 Monte Carlo Gran Prix,
which I saw on TV when I was fourteen the same day,
though there must have been some broadcast delay.
There was also a delay before two crew members
went to pull him from the smoldering wreckage,
and as the cameras watched, there was a small
secondary explosion, and they dropped him and ran.
I'm sorry if this sounds like sick humor, but
until then my ambition in life was to drive Formula One.
I've never learned to drive.

In July 1945 my Mother was 23
And worked as a clerk in the wartime
Office of Price Administration
On the third floor of New York’s
Empire State Building.

A little after 10am,
A US Air Force bomber
Blundered in the fog into the
79th floor of the building,
Killing eleven. She and her friends,
Sitting (as per air raid drills)
In the central stairwell, thought that
Germany - which they forgot had surrendered -
Was bombing them. Finally they were sent home;
From streets choked with starers and responders,
She looked up and could only see smoke and fog.
She took the subway home.

In September 2001 I was almost 49
And worked on the top floor of a
downtown Manhattan building, in
a small New York City government office,
four blocks uptown from the north tower
of the old World Trade Center.
About a quarter after 9 sitting in my office
I heard a jet plane noise go over my head,
Followed by a loud explosion; it made me
Think of a sonic boom, as in breaking the sound barrier;
But people said a plane hit the Trade Center.
I thought of my mother. But we had no air raid drills.
I sat there another ten minutes or so, listening to the news,
When a much louder crash rocked the area and
Made our building actually shake – this even though
The second target (south tower) was somewhat farther away.
The radio announcer was very upset.

Anyway, I went out and started walking uptown
Past starers and responders – a long walk to find
A place to sit, up in Washington Square Park.
At some point on my stroll up Broadway,
Somewhere in Soho, I noticed that people around me
Were standing very still and looking in a frozen way
Back down toward the site of the Trade Center.
I turned around, for the first time, and looked,
But all I could see was smoke and dust
(and a helicopter hovering).
I realized later, based on time estimate,
That was when the north tower collapsed,
Killing thousands,
But you had to be watching to realize it.
I took the subway home.

Fortunately (if you look at it one way)
My mother, retired in Florida,
Died a few years before this
Coincidental phenomenon occurred.
My sister recently unearthed a short
Memoir my mother wrote covering up to
About my birth date, early 50’s.
If I compared general trauma periods,
I guess I could list more for me but only
Because I know me better.
Against quarantine, she could put
Nearly four years of World War II rationing,
Anxiety, long lines and boredom.
Against my father, she had her mother.
Against her being female, I was queer. And so on.

UNSPEAKABLE BOREDOM.
BORUS. BORING. BORDEN. BOREALIS MAXORISUUZZZUSSS.
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZNOOOOOOOOZZZZZZZZZZZZE
EARTH,
G­    A    P   E   !!!!!!!!!

I am on the point of completing my estimated taxes for the first quarter of 2017.
Or bursting all the leptons in my body by Willpower
I burrow in Wonderbread.
Time has stuck….the last tick was in January…
my phone calendar offers views by Aeon, Age, Era, and Epoch only
(in the late Devouring Period, fish became obnoxious)

this is very profound stuff youre looking at
the best people still figure things out by thinking hard about the words to popular songs
you too should abandon all attention to the so- called “real world” (feh) and from hereon act only based on cues and secret messages from your fellow bloggers

I can only foresee the final result of complete nullity is complete chaos
a semantic plasma in which associational speed reaches infinity and transmittability finally touches down at zero
GERONIMOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

how come
the stores in my neighborhood of the USA
have no shortage of toilet paper?
Could it be that me and my neighbors
are less.........um...........
wipey than most people?

I never thought of us that way;
or could this finally be the famous
Fake News we've been warned of so many times
aha.

unlike other web platforms
this one doesn't let you post news articles
so I'll just say what it is

Two giant pandas in the Hong Kong zoo,
which has been closed for months due to corona,
have just mated successfully
for the first time
in ten
years.

If you're an animal lover like me,
you've been hearing for ever about
how they couldn't get pandas to mate in captivity
and how scientists were at their wits' end
(since the animals' actual habitat is vanishing)
about how to keep the species going.
There was always plenty of money around
to support their efforts, since giant pandas
are so popular with people! - but, somehow,
money wasn't doing the trick.

Now, finally, the ultimate discovery!
All the pandas needed was to be
SOCIALLY DISTANCED
from the tens of thousands of looooooovvvving humans
that had plagued every day of their existence
for ten years. Their financial support is good,
their actual physical presence.....maybe they can watch videos,
if the government there does not object.

the minutes of these
repetitive evenings
start to seem like cells stitched together,
i mean the billion or so cells
that are in my skin

I guess that's OK
s'long as they're getting
what they need

I wuz talking to Clyde down the hardware store
(on the phone, coz we don’t go out no more)
‘N I was kickin ‘bout how tired I am of making do,
Specially when it comes to … ya know, the loo.

He said cousin I’ll be right over with a wrench:
You won’t believe it – we got it from the French!
It’s half off for you all, they call it a bidet,
And it won’t even take me twenty minutes to fit it.

Afore I had time to say slow down brother,
He had this new pooper in place of the other
Kinda oddball lookin, but shiny and clean,
With some doodads on it I surely’d never seen:

I gotta run cuz, he goes, but don’t waste no time,
Just settle on down and you’ll do just fine!
I sez but whaddaya – heck, you’ll figger it out bo,
And I hear his truck peel out and go.

Well I positioned myself in the standard location,
And acted as anyone would in that situation.
Then I craned my neck back, looked over and down,
Took a hold of some thingie and fiddled around.

The first thing that happened wuz just-yer-everyday,
But the SECOND –

I Just Don’t Know What To Say.
How that THING took liberties with a Godfearin man
Is more than I can ‘spress, maybe the Devil can.

The next thing I remember I’m out back in the yard
-I think I wanted something heavy for to hit it –
When I heard the Missus comin back from playin cards
Yellin, What’s this Thing?
- I said, Hon, that’s the bidet.

Well she went on for a while, what a fool she took me for
And how come there was so much water on the floor;
But I talked her down nice, explained it pretty well,
And I sez why don’t You relax, and just ease yourself a spell.

And Man, before I ever heard that bathroom door slam,
I was off in my truck right out of Alabam’
But I took my AR-15 and shoved grenades in my pants,
Coz I wanna be ready when we declare WAR ON FRANCE.

there is no limit to prescriptions for improvement
that say the only way to obtain doability - Condition A -
is to first create Conditions B through Z,
the lack of which make Condition A impossible.
But since Condition A is the ability to Do,
there is no explanation of how to Do
B, C, or ........ Z
before A.
Maybe the word “before” is the error.
and all of A through Z must occur simultaneously-
which, since A is logically prior,
means that  B, C, ........ Z are all actually subsets
of A.
Everytime prescriptive language uses a transitive verb,
as in “Create a...” or
“Establish a...” or
“Change the...” or
“Set up a...”
it’s referring to an imaginary world
in which forms of the phrase “To Do”
can affect real life.
There are, though, other verb forms
that are often substituted which are
less unrealistic,
as in “Fight for...” or
“Work towards....” or
“Settle for nothing but...”
the difference being that
these verb forms admit the possibility
of delayed success, compromise,
or even failure.
Then there are a whole other class
of word forms, which are
not really players in the game,
but are stuck back in a previous stage,
using not action verbs but queries
and the mass of confused verbiage
that tends to accompany them; queries like,
“What would it take to...”
We can’t really claim this has ever helped a lot;
diagnosis and treatment of the human condition
has a terrible record of failure.
But on the other hand,
the record of people saying “do this,” “do that”,
and actually succeeding in improving things
is just as lousy. You don’t agree?
Sure there have been some improvements,
we can tentatively agree - for one thing,
there does seem to less slavery now - meaning
the all-out, state-endorsed, I-own-another-human-body
kind of slavery - than there was 160 years ago.
So, who did that?
I’d be laughed right off the planet
if I said Lincoln or U.S. Grant or the 19th century Republicans.
What about people whose motives and actions
were purer? Do you really think
a finite, identifiable group of 18th - 19th-century activists
were the factor responsible for ending
international slavery as an economic institution in the West?
(Why did England ban slave trading before the U.S.,
without having a civil war about it?)
Just aligning yourself with a cause that then
turns out to get done doesn’t mean you caused it.
Remember all those hippie ******* who ended Vietnam?
Or, you may believe no end of slavery ever happened,
too many fine distinctions are being drawn,
and the world goes on as before.
If so, what does that say about To Do?
What to do, how to do it, who or what does it,
and what should we be focusing on - or,
What would it take? What would it COST to have
BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ, or in other words
How do you A?

the last life-extinguishing black night of the soul
can be commodified.

I sit here in perfect awareness,
which is perfect pain,
which is infinite despair,
and I tell you this:

This Poem is good for one large pizza with onions
on the planet Quiilo.

do you know some one or thing against whom brutal injustice was done?
find an agent

A call to action is not action
Other things that are not action include:
Expostulation rhetoric poetry
Fulmination logic contumely
Proposition dialectic philosophy
Tergiversation polemic and ideology

Actual action, he expostulated, is behavior -
Behavior that acts, he fulminated,
Actually impels or constrains the acts
Of other behavers
This is only done, he propounded,
By applying pressure to weak points
In these others’ safety or security
But acts of violence, he tergiversated,
Only spread or institutionalize violence.

Apart from physical violence, he droned on,
All people have two things they can use
To act with –
Time, and Money.
What you can do with time is specific
To your skills and situation
But what you can do with money
Has exactly two categories:
You can give it,
Or you can withhold it.

You may think withholding is automatic,
And it is, it is; but you are not the one doing it,
It is being withheld from you, in every pay period.
By far your largest charitable contribution
Is to institutionalized violence.
To attempt to withhold your money from these withholdings
Would be enormously risky, painful and destabilizing
In ways that calls to action and other forms of talk never are.
But for one body to impart momentum to another body,
It has to transfer energy, i.e. there must be a cost.

* * * * * * *

On the other hand:
It is currently fashionable to say
That we are not the same person over time
Everything is replaced every few years, personality is a myth
And according to the most advanced thinking
Consciousness is an accident that affects nothing.

In the real world, of course,
I’m the same person I was at age seven
When I first thought of myself as a person;
This knowledge is immediate and irrefutable.
We aren’t the sum total of replaceable parts,
And consciousness for most people is a long-lived thing
Not the space between tick-tocks of a metronome.

This conscious thing concerns itself almost entirely
With exteriors, which are almost the only thing to
Latch onto. But the ultimate **-hum of the exteriors
Compared to the permanent (mortal) consciousness,
Which has no good bad up down or plus-minus incentives
Gets so obvious as to become ridiculous. This is Anti-Action.
Other terms include depression, cynicism, selfishness,
Detachment, solipsism, reality.

But you must care about the others,
Or you are contemptible. Even the Buddha
Said this…right? (It was a long time ago
And there may have been many edits.)
The real and only basis for action is Love,
That is to say you must care about the exteriors
Which is to say the undeniable mechanics of the world
And what happens to those who are acted upon. You Must.

Is this knowledge immediate and irrefutable?

The tannin in tea bags has been proven to reduce swelling (baggy under eyes) and discoloration (dark circles). Either put your used tea bag in the fridge or let it cool down for a half hour. Then damp the tea bag over your eyes for 10-15 minutes. If you're looking for that extra oomph, try using a caffeinated tea bag

If old Mister Morte comes a knock-knock-knockin’ at your door,
Or just won’t lay off the intercom buzzer,
You tell that old misery one or more of the following
And you’ll be just fine.

1. I died at the office.

2. (In Transylvanian accent) Sorry to disappoint you, but I got here first and she’s mine. MINE! BWAA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!

3. Hi! Have you got one minute to talk about the endangered Guatemalan vicuna?

4. Sure, just give me a second to slip out of this body into my true pandimensional form….ssssssssssss……

5. Can’t come right now, me and hubby are quarantined….oh, it’s for him….okay.

when will someone finally say
that they LIKE being quarantined?

There must be somebody -
anchorite,
stylite,
monastic,
isolationist,
people who would rather stay six light years
than six feet apart.

Tell me how impossibly far away from me
you want to be, baby;
ooh, yeah, I'm getting unexcited.

I'm not funny and I'm not a poet
I'm obsessed with rejection
Just be yourself, they always say
When I am myself the entire human race runs screaming
from the sight sound and smell of me.

Great
the very Last thing you should do is look Needy

now explain to me how do you disguise need when you are
S
T
A
R
V
I
N
G

T
O

D
E
A
T
H

Here's an idea - accept rejection!! Own your self-loathing
you brought it on yourself after all so Use It!
"You're just a baby."
****, if I were a baby it'd be over fast

The hurricane winds are a bore
When they’ve been pushing you around
For two-thirds of a century
There’s nothing surprising about what torsion can do:
I know, I know,
It’s real but it’s all in your head, both at once,
Your collarbone is at 227 degrees toward Polaris
And meanwhile your left hip is rotating in a
Hyperskewed dimension only plottable with
Imaginary numbers, which is a problem
For peristaltic functions dependent on
Newtonian mechanics – sigh, shiver, burp,
Keep your awareness don’t fall over
BORING.
You’ve been on orange alert since Ike.

Let’s run down the repertoire of available distractions.
Jokiness? Sometimes worked in small
Person-to-person settings (you see the current problem)
But amazingly hard to pull off in text;
Mentally mugging the innocent online?
Leaves a bad taste.
Obliterating lust? Seems to have annihilated itself
Except in pain-in-the-*** dreams, the actually-asleep kind.
Guitar, or similar toys? Only fun as long as you keep finding
Novelty – which turns into, you know, work.

Drowning your mind in other people’s stuff?
This is the scary part.
Sometimes, still, for a little while; but never for long;
Not the freshest, not the most age-old time-tested brilliance;
Metaphors fall apart – the plot devices cannot hold -
You blink twice and the wind’s whipped the page out of your grip
And twisted your neck down up inside your ******* again.

So blowblowblowblowblow, babybrainballoons,
And Crack Your Cheeks,
Coz the only shred of hope is that if we all keep
Caterwauling our pissant poetic brains out at maximum vocal volume
Preamped and reverbed by global satellite systems to some
Unpredictable transhuman force it might eventually
OutShout the drone of Earth’s idiotic entropy
Kuz krist I’m bored of standing up in the wind

I have decided to write a poem consisting of hippy happy nonsense syllables
Like bunnies hopping about a field of various grasses with only an occasional poison sumac
The erratic highly entertaining motion would be illustrated by fascinating word play
Of both a phonic, or punning and a multiple-meaning, or semantic kind
Meant to dazzle the reader with the interplay of my mopping morphs and mowing semes
(That was a Shakespearean reference chucko)
And produce a nearly–lysergic storm in the grateful consumer’s contented cortex.
But since in actual fact I’ve got zero of any of this to offer,
And want nothing more but to lie back down and resume reading escapist literature,
I’ll leave this **** on the screen instead.
Who are you to judge me – the Pope?

My husband thinks he's:
a) adequate for any woman needs
b) some sort of genius in the saddle
c) God of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and France

2. If I had my way I'd have:
a) bigger jewelry coffers
b) more closet space
c) a larger cell

3. If you tell your husband you have a headache tonight, he'll probably:
a) look awkward and change the subject
b) stifle a fit of laughter
c) offer to cure it immediately

4. On your wedding night, you thought about:
a) How much smaller he was than Thomas Howard
b) How much hairier he was than Thomas Wyatt
c) How much longer you could go without inhaling

5. You prefer your hats:
a) of red velvet
b) with long plumes and a circlet of pearls
c) at least eight inches above your shoulders

6. To satisfy your husband's craving for a male heir, you would give:
a) Saxe-Coburg and Gotha
b) the blood of a hundred newborns to Satan in a silver chalice
c) listen I'm number six and he can bite me

Back over on YouTube, the FermiLab guy says that what we can see about
The underlying geometric structure of the universe says it’s perfectly flat –
Which he says is PROOF that it’s curved and infinite, because only a tiny section
Of a really immense curved surface would look flat. It couldn’t really be that.
Eye ee, flat.
Of course somebody paid him to say that. If FermiLab said “Turtles” at this point,
Most of us would go with it

Oh my but it's good some time
to lay out and let flesh do what it wants without
prodding or interference - while you're elsewhere -
blink, scratch, wake up and
look around, asking yourself

what were those feebs fulminating about?

addendum much later after tea:
Resignation is definitely not the
most popular public position one can adopt anymore nowadays
But if you, personally, are one of those
who have officially and once and for all decided to
Live Forever -
Citizen, good luck and give'm my regards.

The City of Brass,
you can still hear it calling....
one last click - then another -
silence.....long, long......
then one more, almost muffled by the tons of sand

are earth's dominant life form, having converted the atmosphere from 5 percent to 21 percent oxygen and thus totally reformed the shape of everything.
anyway, anyone who would name a poem after a virus is a prevert.

you make me woozy

My sister’s a mister. She cares for her plants,
Her orchids from Cuba, Tahiti, or France.
She grows lovely children entirely from scratch
In homemade production runs, two to the batch.
She teaches the women of her little town
To belly, to yoga, to boogie on down.
She’s always found living alone such a bore;
A harvest of husbands – she’s on number four.
She drives a Miata with careless aplomb,
The very ideal of a hot soccer mom.

But me, I was thinking of how to invent
A Booker prize novel to cover my rent,
Or lysergic rhapsodies for the guitar
Or finally learning to drive in a car.
The hours spurted onward in skips and in bounds,
Years twirling away down a hole in the ground;
How gently appalling my ultimate fate,
To grow wispy white whiskers, and sit on a gate.

She spins on the dance floor like wind on the wing,
To Western and Latin and Manhattan Swing;
Her elegant limbs grace the South Jersey beaches,
And people go mad for her raspberry quiches.
Her daughter (my niece) with her blue eyes so dear
Sets the upper crust of Baltimore on its ear,
While her brother my nephew is cutting a swath, (um)
Through the au courant circles of fashionable Gotham.
That’s my sister, triumphing wherever she goes,
And she never had anything done to her nose.

But me, I was dreaming up world-shifting rubrics,
Or imagining screenplays to shame all the Kubricks;
My ****** could make you explode in your jammies,
And my song lyrics won theoretical Grammys.
Of invisible kingdoms I was the past master,
I walked with Elijah, I lunched Zoroaster.
Yet somehow I find myself at this late date
With my brain in the clouds, and my *** on a gate.

there seems to be
a strong preference
among the hottest, most feverish poems on here
for ones where the first line
is less than six syllables

The robed and turbaned guides lead us
Station to pillar to post
Here the last puddle of sacred blood outlined in platinum,
There the stray knotted whipstroke picked out on the
Mudstone wall in jasper and rarest peridotites
- Change yer shoes for the final hill to the death sanctum,
Last sonatina set to begin, with eye max.
But, but here monsignor, what’s this minor
Scatter of comic beaks ‘n bones off to the side in shadow,
This fouled corner irrigated by ninety-nine generations of
Three faiths and their pets?

- Pay no ear, it’s got no voice or at most
The scalded steamkettle hiss of a dying gull,
Was never no human language
Nor saw anything really seen
And those what claim to have dug up gored pieces of value
From under there just kissed the *** of madness.

We (as far as I can remember)
Started out to recreate a sane conversation
In which facts of all shades and shapes would
Simply emerge and connect themselves into
Acting structures.

There was a phase in which
Burgeoning ways and means of
Unearthing and spreading these bits
Occupied and riveted most attention;
Followed by something – Fear? Sense? –
Expressing as allergens to ungrounded factoids
And structures acting not from meaning
But obviously from the hindbrain.

After who knows how many rounds of
Lunge feint riposte I found my little self in a
Small drifting group which seems mostly set on
Maintaining through and despite all that something
Uniquely value-added – esthetic, mimetic, cosmogenic or
In any case fertile in cross-breeding ways – is going to fly
On be nurtured and eventually cover the terraqueous globe.
But there seems to be a tacit condition set in this local world,
That the “novel factoid” stream from ongoing earth-21st century
Goings on be ignored. Which begs the question of why do we need
1,200 geosynchronous satellites to do this.
Or –
Was that my drift?