(for Christopher Isherwood)

Seated after breakfast
In this white-tiled cabin
Arabs call the House where
Everybody goes,
Even melancholics
Raise a cheer to Mrs.
Nature for the primal
Pleasure She bestows.

*** is but a dream to
Seventy-and-over,
But a joy proposed un-
-til we start to shave:
Mouth-delight depends on
Virtue in the cook, but
This She guarantees from
Cradle unto grave.

Lifted off the *****,
Infants from their mothers
Hear their first impartial
Words of worldly praise:
Hence, to start the morning
With a satisfactory
Dump is a good omen
All our adult days.

Revelation came to
Luther in a privy
(Crosswords have been solved there)
Rodin was no fool
When he cast his Thinker,
Cogitating deeply,
Crouched in the position
Of a man at stool.

All the arts derive from
This ur-act of making,
Private to the artist:
Makers' lives are spent
Striving in their chosen
Medium to produce a
De-narcissus-ized en-
During excrement.

Freud did not invent the
Constipated miser:
Banks have letter boxes
Built in their façade
Marked For Night Deposits,
Stocks are firm or liquid,
Currencies of nations
Either soft or hard.

Global Mother, keep our
Bowels of compassion
Open through our lifetime,
Purge our minds as well:
Grant us a king ending,
Not a second childhood,
Petulant, weak-sphinctered,
In a cheap hotel.

Keep us in our station:
When we get pound-notish,
When we seem about to
Take up Higher Thought,
Send us some deflating
Image like the pained ex-
-pression on a Major
Prophet taken short.

(Orthodoxy ought to
Bless our modern plumbing:
Swift and St. Augustine
Lived in centuries
When a stench of sewage
Made a strong debating
Point for Manichees.)

Mind and Body run on
Different timetables:
Not until our morning
Visit here can we
Leave the dead concerns of
Yesterday behind us,
Face with all our courage
What is now to be.

Breathe in loads
of innumerable blades
of memory erasers.

Ah, the feeling
of being lost within
your own thought.

Wishing for just
a brief break— from time
and its fast pace (or
if possible, let it
stop. Let the world
stop).

There are familiar places
you can’t get used to
and sometimes
it will all just fade
with experience,
lessons, and

your most beautiful
mistake.

My head feels like cotton.
My limbs are made from wool.
My heart is plastic.
And my soul is easily burnable wood.

Poets have to be melancholics?
Well ****.
The Earth does not contain a soul lacking bleak thoughts.
Thoughts that we pertain that drive us crazy and carry out the drive spitting those thoughts into words.
however,
they're killing us.
They swallow us whole and we feel trapped in the belly of it with slimy walls of hatred.
Once there, it is easiest to sit in the stomach and let it digest us and dissolve us apart.
But what if one day we just turned our minds to realize that the stomach is connected to the tunnel up the mouth providing a beacon of light.
After that odyssey one should write about the courage and faith it took to escape the dark, gloomy stomach.
As if praying,
I was taught by a reverend long ago to pray in the dark times,
and to pray in the light times.
So whether it's dark or light or maybe just gray,
write about it.