Listen to the Devil: A Mini-Opera

I’ve never listened to the Devil… 
he’s whispering in my ear now, 
telling me about chance— play the cards, 
don’t pretend you can deal the hand… 
I never tried to deal the hand, I tell him, 
because the deck has no card with a poet’s face. 
The Devil laughs at me, dumps a load of press 
clippings in a bag I marked Don’t touch—  
………………………………………….
now, it’s so cloudy we can only perch on rigid, 
bare ruined branches. We cannot fathom 
what the surface should be, why the inelegant 
is preponderant. Red flags whip our livers. Red 
hot prods in crowded rings circle us. There can be no 
twittering hope without notions of liberty, as means 
of using flies, flying, flown over the protests on Market Street.    
…………………………………………………
When you lift a Coca-Cola, you are pulling a lever 
for entropy. The cloying tickle of high fructose corn syrup— 
all dreams dried into anodyne.  Goods may be America’s 
heart, en masse; what in them beats? Sounds of horses 
hooves, trampling down corporate dirt, all in a bone-piled 
graveyard. Sounds of whinnies, conflagrations, blinker-viewed 
social situational Waterloos, & you don’t know (they won’t 
let you) who’s standing behind who, or you. 
…………………………………………..
An old, mad, blind, despised, dying king, 
says the country. We protect imagery, say others. 
Belief is testament to goodness, rigidity
means faithfulness to a spiel we all know 
like simple algebra, and that can be equated 
to squares. We are bellwethers of chicken egg 
home fries, I am a clucking and a shucking 
and jiving, you’re alive to little red roosters 
too lazy to crow for day. No facile Geist for 
this Zeit. It’s a time for knickknacks picked up like cordite. Shoot. 
……………………………………………
No Blogosphere back-draft, 
only post ahead, into cacophony: 
wire, networks, new wild west; ropes, holsters. 
Age-old books; angst, anemic. It’s sexily red, 
moral/ethical oblivion, hemmed in, quick as spurt, 
across oceans: thermo-genic press coverage, 
safe, free; corpses, numbers, brain lotions. 
…………………………………………..
That notion, “that I’m suffering well,” 
must be in Plato somewhere, or Nietzsche— 
now, it’s in you too. You don’t succeed in laughing 
at the shard-sharp world; it’s jammed too deep 
in your throat, with suffocated senators, 
black-robed judges, tentative press secretaries. 
You only cough up butt-ends based on others’ 
words. Laughter is solely for surprise autopsies— 
of an atrophied surface, what’s under incomprehensible 
to most, who know, very precisely, just how most they are.
………………………………………….
A gift everyone gets is a Pat Boon(e). 
Death & taxes are both Pat Boon(e)s. 
Truth, as always, is less pat. Truth has 
more to do with what I really glean 
from you, which is not a political (exactly), 
is (rakishly, richly) anti-politics, & is 
conveyed by swift skin-kicks. There is no 
place for this in the full frontal assault land 
we’ve been Shanghai’d into, & 
the dissemination of which is America’s ultimate Pat Boon(e).
………………………………………..
a soul's incision 
into your cerebellum 
which i can fill gingerly, not spill
onto a nail-bed you carefully made to ensure maximum viscosity

crank & creak the senator speaks
…………………………………………….

Book #13

Turns out: the recently released Argotist E-Book The Great Recession is my thirteenth book. To me, it marks a sea-change in both how I relate to my own books and how I relate to literature in general. Those who know Wordsworth in depth have seen: the Argotist blurb for GR borrows liberally from Wordsworth's famous Preface (to the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads). It also takes a textual approach which shies away from the personal; or, as Wordsworth would have it, from the egotistical sublime. For the duration, my books henceforth will be dictated by an approach which takes for granted the at least intermittent desirability of staying "clean" of first person singular influences. This depends, of course, on context. Great Recession happens to be about transcending the personal in observational, imaginative immersion in the lives of others, starting from Plymouth-Whitemarsh. So that: those who follow my work know, also, that Something Solid is 75% written. I now am stating my intention to craft an initial 25% which does an advanced version of the tricks GR does. This, rather than making SS a paean to the personal, in a thoroughgoing way. We'll see.