A Natural Bird

1. The Latter Days

The things around me haven’t changed a bit
But I do not feel any longer the things I have felt
Nor do I chant any longer the chants I have chanted
The immutable nature of things has immutably changed.

I certainly keep on migrating but
They now have me seated in sort of an airliner.
It’s not my wings, not my ilk any longer, the terns
Have ceased to be my winging companions, a
Craft moves for me that am quietly inside.

Sky is closer than ever and through the porthole
I look down on lush landscape as poignant as never, yet
Progressing I might loll inside that crate.
I do not feel any longer the strain I have felt
Nor do I chant any longer the chant I’d have chanced
I do listen to plane ear candy. Great!
I am attended, by the aisle. Do I grimace?
Am I comfortable? Yes, lukewarm, thank you.
A slight breeze... Adjust the air nozzle, bird. Oh, I am
Still part of the living, no doubt, I am feeling
Ho-hum as hell high up over the rainbow.

Human interference mutes divine into demoniac
Silenced exertion and silent destruction
Life’s inventions dull life into less.
That’s why we live so long.

Once again perambulated.
Recurrence of early adventure, things
Haven’t changed a bit, no thing is for granted, especially now.
So, a crash wouldn’t even be my fault.
It wouldn’t be anything.


2. Plain Logics

When a plane falls out of the sky
It is because flying isn’t natural
Flying has been invented
Flying is an achievement
Achievements are reversible
Each plane dropping off the sky is a
Reversed achievement.
Life itself is an achievement
While growing old is
Irreversibly natural, though
Only science advances toward the better
Chirp chirp.

Me as an old crock in an aircraft – an
Achievement or just something natural?
An airliner crash when I’m doddery by nature:
Is this luck, or achievement, or matter of course?
Am I simply growing flier by growing older?
Tweet tweet.

My bedroom faces west.
I don’t see the morning sun, but I don’t see
The evening sun either;
It is night when I’m going to crash.
Whatever still happens, happens among the shades
I am closer to sundown than ever
I am comfortable.

Still some chirping and tweeting in the dark, you
Consummate deplumate?


April 28, 2010

Down Comforter on Analytic Couch

Generations of Gods

1. Delight of Lacking Particulars

Peeps the same age
Resemble each other that much
It is moving. Deeply stirred, if you are up to
Pierce their garb en passant and then sweep the jolly gang:

See? Naught but slightly shaded complexions and, from
Lot to lot, appendages a trifle bit chunkier or lankier.
How come, y’all aren’t siblings, are you? – Cluster
Same age, concourse of coevality, one pull date.

Expediently, life has rabbled them together
After sorting, so they can be eyed up at one go.
Very instructive. For these aren’t individuals – You
Are, since nowhere one your age seems caught inside...

But they aren’t. Mere gamuts of mood and
Assorted limbs, they are intellect’s raw material.
Glory to Father Cronus who is barfing out agewise
By copy numbers, to unscramble and single none out!


2. Refreshingly Wider of the Mark

They quite often commence on a soapbox.
Their timely babble is commonplace.
Young, tense, handsome and penniless, they’re simply promising.
Ember eyes. Give ’em a chance. They are
Ludicrous, they are just fine to replace the ancient godheads
For we aren’t in theocracy, we are democrats, always were
We choose wired youth over senectitude, it is a sheer
Question of generation. We need change.

When a son god devours, when he batters and smites
Emasculating with a sickle, man may wonder
About the changes involved. What will it bring
For the believer? He better worship this lad, period.
Fortunately, if such savior – devoid of any Greek vice –
Does not unman but confirm, still taking the sting out of his
Hoary Sire, tooth for tooth belittling in return for the bother
He durst impose upon him, sport’s forsooth more incarnate with
______________________________________________junior.

Believing in an even younger god is even cushier.
Exceptional thin-skinnedness and casual rioting usually
Suffice, fellah. – Representation forbidden or not: the more
Fresh-faced thine Almighty, the more self-evident thy prostration.
As long as adolescent beauty, they’ve the Law with them; they
May lay hands on the old and worn and re-testament at
Leisure, ’t is a win-win for all parties. Oh, ye coeval bystanders to
Olympian bust-up: at each new revelation, a tweak to gawkers’
______________________________________________profit!


3. Tube Coda

You’d bump into them underground, wherever.
Gods are everywhere. They
Especially enliven the underworld.

That bird nesting inside a poky hollow –
How come it still feels able to stir?
No claustrophobia, Chirpy, after
All this heaven? Now so utter a murk.
It keeps hatching in a womb.

Brain is where you’d encounter them.
Subway, down there, belowground.
Reminiscence of heaven
These dicky-birds. Or
Of a dark
Secure past.

I can’t think of any other desires.


April 5 - 16, 2010

The Oracle of Down Above a Glossy Upper Lip

As of late, she has a dreamy Hitler on her bedroom wall.
It is a cute portrait of Hitler as a dreamy little boy.
Sure, it is not Hitler but her middle son
And it has always been hanging there, but
It is a cute portrait of this son of hers as a dreamy little boy.
A faint yet distinctive toothbrush has appeared above his dreamy lip.
By now, they’re so irremediably estranged, it could just as well be Hitler’s.
Family has entered an era of cataclysmic destruction since he married
A greedy Valkyrie she hence refers to as her Nazi daughter-in-law.
One of those who molest their feeble spouse into taking sides.
And soon enough he chose. Call it the Aryan mattress side.
The point is that there is lots of lebensraum involved;
Disaffection menaces the subsistence of the elderly
There reigns a climate of regular ethnocide, but
Mom obviously wishes to keep that picture.
She holds that it’s a juvenile portrait and
These had been worriless pre-war
Days, long gone. Hitler too
Has had a mother.
Don’t be outraged if you
Spot him someplace on a wall.
It doesn’t mean Momma is pleased
By the way the boy’s lipfluff’s turned out.

April 14, 2010

Big Beards Before Others

Ernest Berryman as I use to call him
Because of his
Ernest beard and
Ernest end and
Ernest ways to consider the sexes – this
Mislabeled case may appeal to a certain audience
As some other Ernest did.
Yet audiences whatsoever, in my book
Aren’t a big help to Ernests.
Besides, it’s too late.
Besides, even Ernests can’t help Ernests
Let alone their beards or ends or ways considering.
But I sometimes am sort of helped out by one of them
Whatever that might mean
While another one leaves me as cold as an icicle.
Oh, Grampa Frost! This is because all
Ernests aren’t the same
Despite their
Common name.
And beard.
And end.

However, there rests – to quote clean-shaven W. –
Importance of being so; little’s told
Less is caught on
Even lesser’s without.
A little stub of warm and fuzzy succor and
The fate that would go with it.

April 3, 2010