One is avid but in a
Hurry to finish.
Life is where you can’t
Believe what your friends tell you
About your haircut.
Men prefer women’s
Bodies to their souls because
They change more slowly.
Poems are like farts:
Other people’s stink; one’s own
Have subtle perfume.
Going to the loo
At a party is like death:
No one misses you.
Was it Heraclitus
Who said you never
Get the same haircut twice?
My skills as a thief
Have enabled me to steal
What belongs to me.
The library of
The inner self publishes
No glib synopsis.
So obscene in the
Strainer of biography,
The warm cheap detail.
The pointlessness of
Principles: to keep you from
Behaving badly.
Too frivolous, we
Are betrayed by our depths; too
Deep and we get bored.
To consider what
One wants is to go in a
Hundred directions.
Human risk, wretched
Human purity: nothing
Unsubtractable.
Forty-nine years old and
I made it without
Killing anybody.
At least life is brief:
It holds your face in the shit
And then lets you go.
Chaos eats outward
At the compact order in
The heart of chaos.
My daemon uses me
To read every book
I can get my hands on.
It was the poets
Who invented God, after
Which they swallowed him.
My vulgarity
Is all that stands between me
And my suicide.
The avant-garde is
Founded on the fairy tale
That art moves forward.
Who has not changed channels
In belief that the
Broadcaster felt the blow?
I think of Homer
Or Shakespeare and I want to
Weep. And some women.
Naiveté and
Cynicism: pups in the
Same noisy litter.
The laughing gods weren’t
Aware of being gods. That’s
How we got caught here.
Consciousness grazes,
A random velvet sweeping
Animal muzzle.
We try to make artists,
Like our own children,
Into ourselves, and can’t.
We seek the poet
Who’s right all the time, but who
Could bear to find him?
The moment we have
A feeling it has always
Been exactly so.
With an adequate
Stomachic one has no need
Of philosophy.
We neither transcend
Nor identify ourselves.
Something prevents it.
The humiliating
Message: you can’t think
The thought that brought you here.
What is poetry
But poverty, the will in
Tight circumstances.
The serpent holds to
His lines, shouldering through the
Maze of his pattern.
Very pretty. But
Imagine having to feel
That way all the time!
Oh, my fuck-eat-drink-
Swim-sleep-write-feel machine, do
Not abandon me!
Seducible high
Spirits meld with statements, and
Are contradicted.
There is no diversion.
Diversion itself
Engages our passion.
Claustrophobic confession:
Try not to
Characterize me, I’ll scream.
He descended into
Hell to write these things.
And it ain’t over yet.
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