A BRIEF HISTORY OF LYRICISM

From a fast windmill 

joust to the

Zapruder film—

from a doomed ship 

with too few rafts

to the madeleines of Proust:

we think it's Fate conspiring 

with our truths 

to make such songs—

we assume we're

inspired—but what

are the odds

it's been you

and me all along breathing 

out the gods?

PURITANICAL FANTASY

Had a dream last night

that I could separate

the beautiful 

from the ugly

parts of my body—

and unlike

in the compos mentis bait-

and-switch of daylight,

doing so didn’t
immediately kill me.

INVOCATION FOR LIBERAL ARTS MAJORS

Just as pearls 

are less delicate, yet 

more rarified than facts,

so the artist, although
terrified, is patient 

as the windblown grit.

Call it a symbol,
a metaphor, or a lie—but 

let the statesmen

deal in worlds;
you shall traffic
in the skies.

IDEALIST HEPCAT HAS ENTERED THE CHAT

He scats
that there are no such things as 

separate events—

that he who
circulates his own blood
is the one who shines the sun.

Then he riffs that you must
see the golden
goose of life whole,

or else risk the temptation
of cutting it open.
You counterattack

that omnipotence
doesn’t have to know
how things get done

in order to transmute our
“freedom to”
to “freedom from,”

but you have to admit that,
even for a materialist, the jazz
is close enough

to say we see
independent identity
only through relation,

and that impenetrability
is just a jive word 

for drastic isolation.

GUI

The analytics
were wrong about this
evanescent present:

even though it’s 

see-through,

it’s not so plain a thing.

In fact, it’s less
of an empty glass case

than a state-of-the-art paddock
in goal attainment’s zoo;
for it acts

as the first
and the last user interface—

the only place on Earth
you can have
what it brings.

BEST BET

Sounds scary, but death 

is pure absence—

if we’re lucky.

If we’re not,
it could be
literally everything—

good and bad, all
rushing past
at full-blast, from first

to last, with
no reprieve and
no contrast.

Picture the mammoth
who went huffing
toward a tar pit—

only to get
trapped there and
gruesomely preserved.

What’s worse
than being forced 

to sleep where you shit?

A permanent habitat
made of nothing
but memory.

INTRO TO WESTERN METAPHYSICS

And then—out
of the primeval slime
of Time

which has ever been
sluicing through the grates

of Existence

crawled Structure
with that quick cement
of difficult consonants

and Practicality 

with its similar mix 

of reinforced K sounds and T’s

to ask: What is that? Where is it from?
How come? And where is it
going to fit?

Shock and Awe thought this was

the new ground 

of Reality—whereas

Diffidence saw
it was
just an emergent property

but was far too shy
to say anything—and even later on

when it finally

tried, it was 

still too polite to really 

strongly disagree.