A guy named Dave didn’t have any friends.
He was just too dreary and slow.
But he’s perky now, and demand never ends
for the man who drinks the joe.

Peter couldn’t get up early for work.
He dragged more than cooling lava.
Now the daily grind is nothing to shirk
since he started sipping java.

Tony was afraid he was far too anal;
everything had to be molto fino.
Now he’s become regular (but not banal)
with his morning cappuccino.

Mad used to sag from the momma routine:
she was all worn out by two.
By two-thirty she’d gotten it through her bean
all she needed was Turkish brew.

Ange lost her pizzazz and so of course
her husband could be no sadder.
She was starting to fear it was grounds for divorce
so she milked the fruit of the madder.

Larry told his friend Juan he was feeling depressed,
that his life was as blah as posole.
But his boredom was banished as soon as espressed
when Juan taught him to just yell out “Au Lait.”

The meaning of life can be drawn from all this
and I hope you have learned it today.
The juice coming down from the mountain is:
Thou shalt drink thy daily cafe.
 
 

WAKING FROM THE AMERICAN DREAM

There was a Rococo period of my life, when the luxurious world
Was replete with Motives, Meanings, Messages, Morals...
And with vigor I immersed myself in the American Daydream—
Colored, to be sure, with leftward leanings.
The richness of my life was mirrored, framed in guilt,
By the opulent automobiles and furnishings I possessed:
Antiques, clothing, artwork, gadgetry.
And with my wife, I lived comfortably in a generous residence—
Entertained with the flowers of American culture:
Magazines, television, concerts, cinema….

But as the years wore on our lives diverged:
she has even more house and car,
and happy I am to be rid of them.
I moved downtown to a sparse but swank apartment
—more Japanese simplicity than sumptuous chinoiserie—
in this lighter, less cluttered life
I entertained myself at parties and in bistros
and with friends and lovers.

but soon even that was a burden
and i left my job
sold my furnishings
to take a room
and work
alone.
 
 

SIMPLIFY (CHOOSE NOTHING)

A couple selects nick-knacks to buy for their breakfast room nook.
A channel surfing teenager continues to look
politician drafts subject tomorrow’s speech
wealthy man wants cabana on beach
child prays for stuff from God
youth shops hot rod
 
 

FRED CHRIST’S STORY

Full fifteen years I’ve fished this world’s brooks
and sought an answer to the ancient rime.
The first I found came from a priest cum books,
an ex-fisherman who had gone big time,
but I could see within an instant’s look
the author hadn’t really been sublime
although his words with self-importance shook.

I don’t buy that, I said, and gave him back
his book, which made him frown, and then he cursed,
and turned away, then turned back once again
to tell me something. What, I’ll never know.
 He was flattened quite gory by a runaway lorry
 which I doubt had a hand in his grand cosmic plan.

I did not drop my question, what reason
have I to exist. Then a physicist
spoke to me in voce assurate:
“All will be known at last if we but frame
our questions in a scientific way.”
He bade me follow him into dark rooms
and there for years we labored night and day
conjuring demons to split atomies,
coursing galaxies, nuking whole cities,
we boxed our half-dead cats, transmuted gold
(though not from lead, but silicon), and yet
He only answered “how,” and never “why”—
indeed, forbade me even to repose
the question that disturbed so much his own
complacent and self-satisfied repose.

A woman came there next, and said to me,
lost as I was in plaintive ponderings,
“Come, marry me, and give me happiness,
that is reason enough for any life.”
So off I went with her, to live for love.
 And love we lived until she found another
one that she thought should love her more than I.
(He didn’t but that’s another story,
another poem, and not my problem).

Alone again, I sought another love
as evidence of my too-feeble wit,
to have this lessen given twice;
but once again the same result was learned—
that people whom I loved would come and go,
none could be counted on to stay forever.
They’ll leave for a myriad of reasons:
Another Love, Important Business, Death.

I gave up on that empty path, and then
the children that I sired sought me out,
“Our lives must be the reason for your own:
devote your self unto our every need.”
and so I did, until the last left home.
They bid farewell, assured they never would
need to return.
   For when a child is grown,
he needs his own rime, needs words of his own.

Those single loves I had did not suffice;
henceforth I sought the company of crowd
I found a host of people next, in strife,
they needed help, and called for it aloud
to cure them of their urban miseries.
and so I rolled up sleeves, and followed these
back to their town to lend assistance
but there I saw such pestilence
bedlam, chaos, crime, and ignorance,
for every step I took, they took three back,
and every fire I snuffed, then two more glowed.
I fed a child, then she could go attack
another child to take away his food.

  (As ambitions go, altruism,
 may be noblest, but a truism
 says that all ambition yet devised
 can but its own self-import realize.)

This lesson was the slowest coming me
but nicely rounded off the other finds:
for not a love I found—not deity,
nor lover, child, nor even all mankind,
had ever any meaning given me,
although I see that every soul will take
to love as a sailors to the lively sea.
A loveless life is but an empty lake,
a barren wasteland, but not quite the void.
Like water, love has drowned and love has buoyed,
but love is not the bottom, ocean’s bed;
it may be the sine qua non, indeed,
but not the non plus ultra. For look, there!
There stands an evil man, who lives apart,
lives for himself; though starved of love and care;
but lives, regardless of his state of heart.

I put the question next in stilted verse,
then sat to make the work more brightly shine,
and polished it until the crowds impersed:
they came to see it glimmer, growing fine,
a croissant, ever noisy, teeming crowd,
not ceasing to recite that thing aloud.

I crafted other poems, racked my brain,
demanded heavy duty from my muse.
The adulation tricked me to refrain
from thinking that my life still had no use;
I took it for a higher order’s plan:
my art would go to serve my fellow man.…

 But then one day I saw that all that I served
was never real meaning, just a style
that had the masses entertained, a-smile,
and from their boring lives the mob would swerve,
distracted from their own sad emptiness.
I did not raise the general consciousness,
instead I filled its void it for just a while.

(Besides, my muse was working overhard,
and like so many other hopeful bards,
I’d quickly mined the best, was left with shards.)

The next response I got did not last long,
“Enjoy it while you’re here!” a man called out.
He’d drunk so much his liver wasn’t strong
and eaten till he gave himself the gout.
And yet he told me, “All we have in life
is pleasure, take what you can find.”
He would have told me more, but then his wife
gave him some drug that shorted out his mind.
That must have been a blessing to him, since
his great excesses tortured him nonstop,
made every system in his body wince,
and made the bubble of his reason pop.

Then, finally one day I stopped to look
and see how fared you other mortal fools,
my fellow characters in this great book.
we all have just the setting, not the jewels,
so each must find his own alchemist’s rose.
Some listened to their priests, and fretted when
they clashed with other sects; but others chose
to worship joys of sex that they could find:
they plugged or unplugged, following their whims,
and sighed, or cursed, or swooned, or lost their minds
according to their fires and their fates.
 Still others played according to their hates.
Indeed, for every empty sin to name,
some cult is there to sanctify the same.
Some ones obeyed the call to gather wealth
or power or acclaim, celebrity,
to fool the rest of us or just themselves,
and others to exist in poverty,
and by such opposites of luck impress.
Still others lived for trauma and distress:
for every forward step they took twelve back,
relapsed to addict, victim to attack.

I watched life’s great parade with awe-struck eye
at how the rest of you all pass me by
to live your lives according to your will.
What rules you’ve found to lead you, lead you still.
Now some few other seekers stare with me,
astonished to have searched so long, to see...
all that’s sure in life: we’re precious fools
who seek a universal rule of rules.
 
 

PROGRESS

Off-balance is not the same as out-of-balance.
Only by leaning too far forward,
do you go from standing to walking.
 
 

LAW AND ORDER

This house was clean just yesterday.
It seems it can’t remain that way.
What of Inertial Law, you say?
Well, here, just Entropy holds sway.
 
 

HALFWHITMAN

My neurons clatter with caffeine-induced alacrity
and I absorb sensations usually unremarked;
a distinct male scent wafts sensually from my skin
in the summer heat
although other opinions may differ in this squeamish city
but hygienic and antiseptic no longer equate for me
as they do for the post-industrial corporate citizenry.
Why must we mask the musk of the human body unlike our
ancestors pre-1941 when the world was less paved-over, less
plastic, less virtual?
When men built not robots,
when skin breathed and beards grew and bodies sweated,
women aglow with the heat of the day walked down dusty
roads to buy real foods that they would cook themselves
on real heat in their own kitchens,
men dripping from their own labor in the fields or on
horses or in shops made things with their own hands
and found their value in that honest effort,
children stripped sturdy clothes off of sunned
pink or brown bodies to fling their nakedness
into cold free-flowing creeks,
families sat on porches together in the cool
evening breezes or danced together
but together always together?

Not these ghosts of women who buy
packaged frozen dinners and hide amid manufactured perfumes
not the pale flabby children who sullenly eat before
glowing screens and monitors of ghost existences
mimicking ghost adventures
not the wan poisoned men who push papers and deals
but produce nothing themselves no goods no value
no soul just paper
not the families isolated in their separate air-conditioned rooms
watching separate televisions talking separately on cell
phones traveling separately in private cars
 not nuclear families isolated from aunts cousins
grandparents neighbors strangers even from each other
and from themselves.

But not all farmers are corporate business men
growing monocultural crops dictated by software
provided by multinational banks with petrochemical
genetically altered nutrients.
Some family farms still raise real food
and some craftsmen and craftswomen still build real goods
real mothers and fathers still cook real meals
and somewhere here and there children know what it is
to swim naked in creeks and to play in open fields
Some people even know what it is to be their own masters
not beholden to corporations and mortgages and automobile
loans not imprisoned by the burden of the belongings that
they ironically end up belonging to.

When Walt Whitman took to the road and sang his electric
songs to the country and its real people
some people there were who sang back

and though voices are stilled, when I listen I see:
there are still voices singing for hymn and for me.
But to hear them you have to stop making the noise
of the clattering office the electronic toys;
to hear these voices you have to escape the status
quo of the masses, the senseless cacophony of materialism.

You have to escape the escapism.
 
 

TOWN AND COUNTRY

1. Town
I used to live in the city,
Where the imperative was, Go Out.
See the world.

Take in shows, go to clubs.
Experience life, eat fine food.
But life ends

For these people, too, and then
All that culture dies with them: all
Orchids wilt.

For that matter, what was important
Fifty years ago, is now passé, vapid.
It all fades.

So why do some live for Job Satisfaction?
Or others for Improvement Through Culture?
Distractions.

2. Country
Like everyone else in this suburb,
I spent Saturday at yard work.
And guess what?

The forces of entropy are merely
And only temporarily
Kept at bay.

And of all the problems in the world,
Whether my petty little yard is neat
Matters not.

For all that, even the children
Fed by Mother Teresa in Bombay will still
Die someday.

The most worthy design
of any person will eventually
Fall to ruin.
 
 

THREE WRONG DIRECTIONS

My folks’ home
I don’t roam
Firm we own

and their land
for girls and
needs a plan

need much done
have no fun
let’s get one

it’s all old
not so bold
leave the fold

and run down
so I’ve found
go to town

pipes and wires
no live wires
get us wired

paint and patch
no new snatch
and then hatch

throw out junk
a lone monk
code with spunk

fix the rest
save my zest
but it’s just

too much work.
for my work.
so much work.
 
 

THE FOUR UNRHYMED DRIVES ON MY PATIO

These flies that flit upon my legs have tickled me with silver
wing of decay and rotted flesh now pushing up the clover.

A thousand ants crawl in the tree to burrow in each orange,
ambition drives them to construct their aphidesque Stonehenge.

Grapes ripen in the sunlight and they swell from green to purple,
inciting lustful attitudes in flora: leafy, herbal.

The lizards start to show themselves, a-hunting now this month;
the spiders, too, to feed themselves before the autumn cometh.
 
 

THE TWO NECTARS OF JOY

The only two things in life
guaranteed to bring joy
are both liquid:

fresh dark coffee in the morning
or fragrant cognac in the evening.
(In between, you’re on your own.)

The rich black brew will reinforce
and soothe the jangled nerves
of stark daylight’s glare.

And golden brandy, liquid sun
gladdens the dispirited soul
in the gloomy dead of night.

For you can’t count on love,
even money is a hollow blessing
both also bring discord.

And of all of this world’s pleasures
there is always some friction
to need one of these two lubricants.
 
 

RESUSCITATION

Gaze deeply in the pool
of clear sharp amber fire:
fragrant vapors rise
from the crystal bowl.…
The heat of your palm
brings the fabled enchantress to life
and she fills your cold dark soul
with the supple warmth
of youthful sunfilled days.
 
 

HOW COFFEE SAVED THE DAY

I wake up slowly in the humid heat
a stultifying haze oppresses, chokes
my brain, smothers it in shrouded pain.
Crying silently for oxygen
—for anything to clear away the daze.

Long minutes pass, I lie there still
amid the tangle of a restless night
in swollen naked limbs too listless,
without the strength to leave my torpid bed...
until the smell of roasting bean
cuts through my hellish fog like the sweet
sharp voice of rescue clarion.

As caffeine courses through my weary veins
the fog dispels, is beaten back, and then
I am my old self confident again.
Another cup; I feel some hope.
Another, powerful as the Pope.
And now at last my brain has freed the basal moors
and cast adrift up through to lofty heights
to soar with greatness till the threatening cloud
of post-lunch crash looms darkly in the off.

I’ll have to have another after lunch.
 
 

ADDICTION: A DICTION

The benefits of coffee are disputed
by experts, self-proclaimed, in every field:
it thwarts third world’s self-sufficient farms,
it drugs the masses, lures them to their yoke.

And even in the medic schools of thought
the claims are contradictory at best:
some say it causes cancer, heart disease,
but evidence of others disagrees.

One morn on drinking in the daily news
chock full of diatribes against the bean,
with dread I saw that if I loved to live
I’d have to cut this artificial pulse.

And so I left off what I had been brewing,
did not indulge myself in daily grind,
but went to work a-writing at my desk
with a new voice, coherent and undoped.

My newly youthful health as I embarked
was tempered by an uncertain ennui...
though fingers did not tremble as they typed,
my hands moved sluggishly across those keys.

The morning dragged on in sullen haze:
my newfound youth got bored and wandered off
in company of my muse. The eloped pair
bereft a shell behind; a broken man.

By three o’clock, my life had lost all joy,
an uphill trail of tears. And in a flash—
so late in my soft privileged easy life—
I learned an empathy for suicides.

At that point I could see that this privation
was not conducive to longevity.
And so, instead, I had a triple latte
and in drugged clarity was gloriously reborn.
 
 

AGING BADLY

I contemplate you, stranger, with a disapproving eye.
Your bald head’s got a pony tail, I can’t imagine why.
And you must have thought those clothes would make you
 “spunkier” than “spry,”
But truth be known, they make me think you’re just afraid to die.

I contemplate you, madam, with a disenchanted view.
Your make-up’s caked on far too thick, it looks a pâte à choux.
Mascara was invented not to be applied as goo.
You shouldn’t even try if that’s the best that you can do.

I contemplate you, mirror, with a disappointed stare.
My forehead’s getting rather high; what happened to my hair?
As long as “getting older” meant “improving,” I didn’t care
but now I’m middle-aged, the bargain doesn’t seem as fair.
 
 

L’INVITATION AU CURE

Venez, venez
Rejoiniez-moi
Quittons donc ces
Funêstes parois.

La forêt attend:
Le vert et les fauves.
Les oiseaux en chantent,
Les harmonies sauvent.

La vie dans la ville—
Secouante, folle—
Nous frappe à la molle,
Nous sonne, débiles.

On fuit comme des sauvages.
On cherche à se guérir.
Laissez là tous vos baggages.
Juste nos corps vont nous suffir.
 
(Come on, come on!
Before it’s too late!
Cross over the lawn
And flee through the gate!

The wilderness calls:
The rivers and hills,
With each leaf that falls
Each robin that trills.

For life in this house—
Clangorous, insane—
Just festers with pain,
Turns strong man to mouse.

We’ll fly to fresh air.
We’ll flee from the sin.
Leave your bag on the stair.
All you need is your skin.)
 
 

BAKER BEACH BASKING

One wilting day last summer, I rode my mountain bike
from downtown San Francisco to the sea,
past concrete office buildings, and along old stucco streets,
across the craggy hills, then underneath vast groves of trees—
wide, dark pines and stately eucalyptus—
until I reached the ocean. There, the sun
beat fiercely down upon us all. The fog, gone.
The blue Pacific glinted almost white—
soft sand aglow deep tan in solar fire.
Dismounting from my bike, I strode along
until I reached the farthest northern end
where suits and ties are not required,
and there I stripped off all my clothes
and joined the other hairless apes,
all frolicking and swimming in the waves.
That thrashing ocean and that burning sun
 made chest, loins, arms, and legs at last as one,
connected. As with all whole peoples of the Earth
untainted by such perverse modesty
seen at the beach’s other end:
the civilized remained still trussed and tied—
their Emperor’s clothes all too real—
strapped in, corseted, bound,
self-exiled from our Eden.
 
 

CHILDREN’S STORY

While at my parents’ house one afternoon
I lingered by an old bookshelf
and found within a silly children’s book;
a story, long forgotten, I’d once owned.

I saved that book to read in bed that night.
And so once teeth were brushed
and once tucked in and snug, my bedside lamp aglow,
I opened up the book to read again.

A boy’s best friend had cruelly been dog-napped.
He found him once again (no great surprise).
When I had finished reading that old tale,
I closed it with a juvenile contentment.

And then I saw, with a shock akin to awe,
my once-slender boyish fingers, thickened,
my arms were now agrown with long dark hair,
my feet now reached beyond my old bed’s end.

How strange to think that I was once a boy
who read the same words that I read tonight.
I am become a man, grow older still,
and yet within the man is still the boy....

The boy awaked now by that small book
apparently was never really gone:
just buried under time’s relentless grind,
just hidden by the jaded grown-up mind.
 
 

A CRANK CASE

Despite my sincere desire for cheer,
for enjoying life’s sweet fruits, avoiding bitter weeds,
I oddly find that I am most content
when I adopt the attitude of grump.

It’s my unfettered joy to drop wry words,
my mots not bons but maux;
I seek more likely reasons for an altruism,
and look beyond the form to find the fraud.

No ruse from rosy glasses ever trick
us grumps, curmudgeons, noble cranks.
No blinders, false façades can stop us
from loving this fallen world with all its flaws.

 (Don’t be so dull to think I defend the sardonic,
 and I’d say that most judgmental people bore.
 The pessimist disease is sadly growing.
 And mocking birds well merit being plucked.)

No carp, or shrew, or squawking popinjay,
nor weasel, viper, dog of war, or worm;
a grump is like another kind of beast,
more lumbering bear, or hoary lion king:

beneficent in largess, amiable,
and loving of his fellow faulted kin,
embracing man in our half-perfect state
that he’s accepted also for himself.

On history’s fitful trajectories
don’t focus on the gaps where we fall short,
for not each partial effort is a bust...
just laugh and say we haven’t got there yet.
 
 

MYSTERY TRAIN

The person in front of me sits with her jacket backward
and over her head, to oddly cover her face
while the man behind me had wandered up and down the aisle
three times, circling his seat like a dog before finally settling in
amusing two quinceañeras across who flirt with me
openly, with their eyes, until getting off at this stop
where I watch them get into their mother’s van.

The antiseptic woman next to me reads
carefully filtered abridgments in her Reader’s Pre-digested
as her immaculate coiffure and overpowering cologne contest
whatever connection to corporeal reality she may have
and ward off two chubby demonic boy scouts
who dream of pranks to play while roaming the cars of the train—
they avoid a muscular young man with bright orange hair
and mocking upturned sunglasses
who smirks menacingly at them from a seat in the rear
near a pair of tourists who don’t seem to know
where they’re going but have boarded all the same.

A hot rod full of teenage boys sits in the
hot parking lot of the next station—
they sit sing, sweat and sway to their radio
but why are they just parked there?  they’re not
meeting anyone who got off, and we
move on to the next station, where god appears
to be playing hacky-sack with the world
in a mural under the sweeping ark of a freeway ramp
just rebuilt with seismic retrofit funds
lending irony to the imagery:
an implausible explanation of earthquakes.
 We’re passing a billboard now pushing that $100 million
flop of a movie directed by and starring a pathetic poseur
of wild but inexplicable appeal to women
and I stare at it, uncomprehending
the passengers, the stations, any of this scenery.

But, hell, I’m just going along for the ride.
 
 

RIDE THE TRAIN

So here I am on the Caltrain once again, I wonder if this is just
a metaphor for my life because it seems like I’m always en route
to somewhere that I never quite reach and when I do get to a
destination it always turns out to be just a way station so I just
have somewhere else I have to go after that e.g. right now I’m
in the Palo Alto train station which is a far cry from where I
first got on the train in Berkeley--Berkeley! my god, I used to
ride that Bart train to Berkeley once a month for four happy undergraduate years and now here I am riding the Caltrain to
San Francisco twice a week, but in the meantime I’ve taken
airplanes to Japan or buses to Boston, always with the intention
of just going on to somewhere else after, rather frustrating,
actually, that we can only travel in one direction at a time, as
a point moving over a two-dimensional manifold on a three-
dimensional planet, because all four dimensions exist; why
can’t I just sit in one place and occupy all four, that would
save a lot of effort, though on the other hand maybe that would
be like this train car pretending it could just jump the tracks
and head downtown for an espresso, when in reality it can’t—
damn it—it’s constrained to follow its one-dimensional path
through the four dimensional universe, constrained from a
radial direction by gravity and constrained on the surface by
the rails and constrained in the time dimension by a schedule
until there is only one degree of freedom left which is indeed
a valid metaphor.
 
 

AN AMERICAN LIFE

What’s universal in my life is not death, love, or crime;
far subtler are the events that occupy my time
and unheroic are the deeds in all my humble days:
low resolution living in a dull entropic haze.

Catastrophe does not take place, extremes are not the norm.
No hatred all-consuming, and vendettas never sworn.
I’ve never fallen madly for some comptesse femme fatale.
I hate to say it but I’m rather boring after all.

I haven’t made or spent a fortune, never lost my shirt,
never jumped from flying aircraft, do not boast or flirt.
Yet though my life is comfortable, it doesn’t really follow
that I am just a straw man: lifeless, blank and sere and hollow.

I don’t believe it makes a difference if it be in glory,
fortune, fame, or modesty that you invent your story.
As long as you treat others with respect that is their due,
however else you live your life is strictly up to you.

I’m happy just to spend a day with coffee and a friend.
I’d like to kiss a grandson’s cheek before my life will end:
an attitude one half Far-East, the other European,
befitting an American who’s living in between.
 
 

DIRGE

Pry that besotted body from the bed
a stiffened stinking corpse now ten days dead
the vermin swarming in it make one gag
so its own sheets must serve as body bag.

And when you throw his carcass to the ground,
his staring eyes and half-mad frozen frown
will make you turn your head, your knees go weak
your voice will no doubt falter when you speak,
 “How could a man in health decay to this?
What happened to his days of sun and bliss?
What meaning could there be in my own life,
like-damned to part from my own loving wife,
and from my children and my friends will fall?”

True, this abhorrent doom awaits us all.
But, Friend, do not lose heart, and keep your head.
Come, pull yourself together. When you’re dead
you’ll soon enough lose head and eyes and heart.

And soon enough your bones will come apart,
While you are yet on Earth, and not within,
don’t waste your time on fear of death or sin
but live for love, for joy, and live so bold
you’ll nothing to repent when laid to mould.
 
 

ON THE COMMUTER TRAIN

1. Part-Time Fantasies

My frazzled and stiff-jointed body
 is now berced by the commuter train
which carts back each weary day-worker
 on home to our families again.
Everyone in this wagon around me
 has traded eight hours for cash.
But who here would regret the bargain
 if our train were to suddenly crash?

Of the time here that we have been granted
 by whatever powers above,
how many live life to the fullest,
 drinking deeply of laughter and love?
I spent all my day on computers
 in an office of plastic-faced drones,
drinking weak institutional coffee
 in an effort to jump-start my bones.
 In two hours we earned enough money
 for food and a roof overhead.
All the rest of our pay goes to claptrap
 to fill the life of the soul-dead:
we dress in the season’s high fashions,
 our cars must be new, free of dings.
We buy gizmos and home electronics
 as fast as they market the things.

What would happen if after two hours
 I flipped off my screen and went home?
I would earn just one-fourth of my income
 but I’d have time to finish this poem.
My clothes would be from the last decade
 and I’d pass on the big-screen TV.
but I think that somehow I’d survive it
 if it meant that I’d get to be free.

2. World Cultures
The work ethic in most other countries
 is less protestant and more carefree.
The French tend to dawdle in cafes,
 the English will linger at tea.
The Mexicans have their siestas,
 in Islam they take Mecca breaks.
Brazilians break off for the bahia
 (Japanese only stop for earthquakes).
Tibetans take time out for yak’s milk,
 and you’d think that the Greeks never started
 it’s only here in the US
 that we slave like workhorses encarted.
So I hope you don’t think I’m a traitor,
 perverse, unamerican too,
when I take my nose off of the grindstone
 to smell a nasturtium or two.
 
 

A CHILD OF TRAGEDY

The pattering of tiny feet go gaily cross the hall.
And now he dares to eat a peach, and now to kick a ball.
His gleeful cry is ringing out in intermittent burst.
He’s had his nap, his diaper’s changed.
         And yet she fears the worst.

The mother looks upon her boy, her heart is deeply rent:
his beautiful unblemished skin and soul, both innocent,
will garner no reprieve from the inevitable hearse.
Her own fate she had long accepted, but a mother’s curse,
irrational, is to desire for her darling boy
a glory that will live forever. But as with Helen’s Troy
when it had opened its enceinte and thus its compromise,
when she gave birth, he had already seeds to his demise
Disease will come, the box will come,
 the worms will come at last.
She knows it will. It must. It has, to all the others past.

Yes, like the wooden horse we carry our own fate within
which soon enough will bring defeat to bones and brain and skin.
Within us all our very genes are programmed from the start:
a biologic sentence, like an astrologic chart.
How much we grow and how we think, indeed, our very sex
all predetermined by the genes, inflicted as a hex.
And then the cells grow fainter and the organs start to fail
And what hair hasn’t fallen out begins to grow more pale.
At last entropic forces take their predetermined toll:
the babe grew up, grew old, and now lies buried in the knoll.

His mother nearby mourns him not, she’s grown at last resigned.
(An oak tree she has grown, as well, there in her plot confined.)
 
 

THE GRIND

I have par-sold my life aught for tuppence.
I’ve betrayed myself for thirty sous.
Every hour of my low subsistence
has been hired to somebody’s use.

My duties are all of them vapid.
Tedium has become my career.
Occupational forces are rapid-
ly forcing joie de vivre to the rear.

On this treadmill I pause only rarely
to reflect on the gain of my work.
I would say that free coffee is barely
but entirely the only perk.

We can’t see the trees or the forest
since we spend all our time at the grind
--except for the richest and poorest
who have left the rat race behind.

That is where my companions are picked:
I do not seek out my fellow drone.
Despite proverbs that contradict
my misery would fain be alone.
 
 

THE ONLY MODERN GENIUS

The only modern genius that I deign to recognize
is he whose creativity will take me by surprise.
Prosaic puddled proses and mud maudlin mis-en-scènes
that make the first-time viewer feel déjà vu again
evoke no feeling in me but the blossom of one thought:
I’m certain if I wanted I could do as well as that.
 
 

PROTESTING WORK ETHIC

We are told
“Idle hands
 do the devil’s employment.”
So we stick
to the grind,
 and we seek our enjoyment
in the husks
that we cull
 from our meaningless toil:
all our lives
drudgery
 chained to our mortal coil.
But should you
One day shrug
 off the livery of drone,
choose to step
off the mill,
 well, you aren’t alone.
More and more
of us now
 choose to earn our subsistence
in work that
doesn’t sap
 our very existence;
and perhaps
we are not
 keeping up in the rat race,
but 40
hours a week
 is too much slaving to face.
Living life
should be made
 your main occupation.
 If you can’t
do it now
 then go change your vocation.
Sell your car,
sell the house,
 Hell, just sell your career.
Step out of
this jungle
 and you’ll only be freer.
Your only
true duty
 is the pursuit of happiness.
Just leave to
denser folk
 all this dirty business.
It’s no sin
to say no
 to societies’ chores:

It’s your choice:
your last task
 could be walk out those doors.
 
 

THE MYTH OF THE STARVING ARTIST

Stubby cold stone fingers fumble with the pen
icy breath vainly warming chilly thin flesh
whitened knuckles under dank gloves
precious body heat escaping through unsecured gaps
empty belly unable to burn enough calories:
to maintain body heat blood flow is reduced to the extremities
confined to the trunk’s internal organs
unable to extend to the hands

without 20 guineas a day
the brain’s creativity is confined to the reptilian stem
unable to extend to the hands.
 
 

THE MUSE IN THE GARDEN

I came down to the garden to seek out my muse...
You had joked she’d be rotting out in the refuse,
And I found her there under some composting burms
Lying sprawled in the humus, half eaten by worms.

I don’t think that she ever expected that I
Would have noticed her missing, or ever would cry,
“Where’s that muse? ‘Cause I need her to finish this ad!”
So perhaps when she perished she wasn’t too sad.

Anyway here she is, now returned to the earth,
And with naught to exalt her but this paltry dearth...
A surprise to no one, I am sure, that her death
Would have emptied my song of the grace of her breath.

So next spring when some new crop of wildflower grows
And in this very spot is some gorgeous wild rose
I won’t wonder much that her fertility
Had never exactly been tapped out by me.
 
 

DRIFTING

...when there isn’t any motion
when every impulse has dissipated
when all that’s left is the quiet buzzing of the unrealized,

even the simple task
of surviving
becomes a burden.

To what good? In my head
the cheerless cacophony of cancers:
Listen to the tuneless drone...

unending
unending
unending unending unending
 
 

NEVER CONFUSE INSPIRATION  WITH CAFFEINE

never go in a frisco coffee house to beat the beats
cuz they’re a sad bunch all depressed and gyzymy and strung
looking at the squares and the clean and the happy and
saying to themselves that life is dirty and they want to
be dirtier still so they wander the alleys the slums the highways
expecting to find their nirvana of gloom in the crackshops and whorehouses of the lower east sides but they never find exactly
what they want and even
if they did they’d probably drop it with trembling horror
because they could never handle something as normal and
establishment as “contentment”
doomed to a short life of misery and then quickly fading
to obscurity where they belong
although for that matter so does everyone they rail against

the beautiful democracy of life is that we’re all of us going there
together
 
 

THE FAMILY RECITAL

Someone had asked of him,
after the holiday table had been cleared,
“Come on, let’s have one!”
and for once he acquiesced. The shiny green vipers
that he’d almost forgotten
squirmed alert from within their recesses.
Even an outsider would not anticipate them
in the awkwardly polite settling back that followed.

He knew at least to not expect much—
not admiration, likely no support—
indeed he must have remembered,
at least dimly, what to expect.
But he rose, provoked
by their disinterest of many years,
 and something in him now set grim.
His eyes narrowed. He looked afar, in a trance,
produced one of his best:
defiantly.

Even as he was finishing, the vipers,
sarcastic, supercilious, insincere,
had nicked it and now it lay
stillborn before him.
He stared dumbly at his family
re-assuming their façade of cheer and humor.

The vipers watched carefully.
 
 

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO
 (Don’t Read Existentialism  Until After You’ve Made Your Pile)

Fresh from high school—
Valedictorian, scholarships,
The world in my hands—
I had it all figured out:
a practical, technological major
and liberal arts on the side.

But in sophomore French,
we read The Stranger;
and suddenly, I understood
The Meaninglessness.
And suddenly, the struggling
over calculus, chemistry...
What did it all matter?

To this day, I haven’t found a direction,
which is perfectly logical since now
I don’t even believe direction exists;

Many physics ex-classmates are well-off, though.
 
 

TO A RENAISSANCE EX-BROTHER-IN-LAW

The lofty standards of Genius
And the severity with which you engage your Art
Elevate you to a rank of elitism
Exceeding even my own painful exaggerations
Though I cannot hold you to these same
Personal demons to whom I answer daily;

For one, you have the saving grace of humility.
Another, what if you’re right
That there are absolute standards of excellence?
That the universe is not a democracy?
That not everyone’s effort is even welcome?

You say the “masterpiece” is beyond you—
By implication me as well—
That abstract fiend has you stopped?
I won’t let myself be stopped, too.

So I reject the philosophy in which we must
Live and die as silent mediocrity,
Paralyzed by self-criticism.

I’d rather risk appearing a noisy fool,
Talentless, than not appear at

All.
 
 

THU UNDUR TUNG

Our muthur tung wus wuns uf wundrus murth—
unuther eru when our wurds had wurth,
but now wun could usurt sum blundur dulled
our tung, benumbed it; sunk, unhulled.

Thu vurdunt lushnuss uf thu uthur tungs
with luvly culurs in thur lusty lungs
surv just to bump our dullnuss to u kurdul.
our cultur’s yungur but stuck in u gurdul:
 C’est la vie, stürm und drang
namastay, nastrobya,
besame mucho, che gelida manina,
doitashmashite, hakuna matata….

Sumtimes I hungur still for unplucked wurds,
u huntur’s gun to plundur purpul burds,
but nun cum up, thu voculs run unsung:
ours has bucum thu Urth’s wun undur tung.

Unglush is now just murmurs, bunguls,
u tundru in thu wurld’s junguls;
all numbnuss, gurguls, wurdy mumbuls,
stumbuls, bumbuls, humbul rumbuls.
 
 

JOB, HELL!

Despite elaborate objection
you go to work tomorrow
and for the rest of your life.

(Our ancestors had worse careers:
cavemen fighting saber-tooths
and serfs that didn’t live to forty.)

For those with a loving family
the bargain might seem worthwhile:
rewarded every night in coming home.

Some single people collect odd toys,
others make it their purpose to travel
or live for weekend bacchanals.

Lacking love or an expensive hobby
I fail to grasp the grasping.
Subsistence life is more substantial.
 
 

CHARRED ROLES,  CHOSE IF ALL BURNT

Cast adrift out on destiny’s wake
Having one faint ambition to slake—
An ambition no longer in science
Retributing twelve years’ misalliance.
Letters now hold the whole of my time:
Equal effort on play and on rhyme.

Some may say that my scripts are no good,
Jeer my dialogue, likened to wood,
Or revile my poetic sense
Since it’s honed on the sins of descents.
Either way I expect nothing more;
Praise is not what I’m doing this for.

Happy, people who find a career
And whose purpose in life is made clear.
Likewise, those who don’t have such a need.
But the rest of us, restless indeed:
Errant souls who can’t sate our mens sani,
Ridiculed for our unfulfilled vani-
Ty.
 
 

INCONTINENTAL

My verse has not the lyric prose of Byron or of Keats,
instead adopts the rigid pose of Thoreau, Twain, and Beats.
I cannot claim to flow with grace, organically inflect,
but carve instead right-angled space. Not dancer, architect.

I blame the native attitudes; they hinder my poor muse,
inhibiting the brazen nudes they censor from their pews.
Their protestant morality is still a force today
and even man’s mortality gives no excuse to play.

It’s continental poets whose forte is velvet speech.
Their audience they must seduce, they would not dare to preach.
 Such luscious old-world senses solely serve the sensual—
don’t share our prudish fences where the art’s consensual.

I’ve learned to mimic prurience, I cultivate it now
embrace the whole experience and use it for my Tao
And yet I still don’t understand: I have no Anglo kin.
Why protestant is my pen hand? Why runs my ink so thin?
 
 

SOCIETY OF MYSTAX

The hirsute lip accessorizes many famous faces
and seems to add an insight to their psychologic cases.
I find I favor one right now, and yet that’s not sufficient;
to make it be your icon you must choose a form propicient:
Errol Flynn’s swashbuckled, David Niven’s suavely smirked,
Tom Selleck’s looks quite manly and Clark Gable’s clearly worked.
Chaplin’s jaunty little brush was comical indeed
(verboten now, for Hitler made it symbol of his creed).
Stalin’s looked tyrannical and wrought-iron infernal
though similar to Teddy’s which looked somehow more paternal.
Louis Quatorze and Pete the Great both made theirs autocratic.
The thin black line of MLK showed one more democratic.
Militant, I’d say, describes the bushy part of Bismarck.
Arcane, severe, and mean would hit old Gorki on his mark.
Wild, yet wise, a true sage-brush, was worn by Mister Twain,
like Einstein’s, so the genius often looked a bit insane.
Lesser famous physicists like Dirac or Max Planck
wore lesser famous facial hair betraying lower rank.
Walt Disney cut his fatherly and charming, almost magic.
Contrast with Nietzsche’s: overwhelming to the point of tragic.
And oddly those of Faulkner, and of Williams and O’Neill
resemble in a melancholy you can almost feel.
Nor can it be coincidence that Stevenson and Kipling
both wore the same; their boyish prose is hewn
 from the same stripling.
The wisp on Joyce’s lip betrayed the man as academic.
 Nabokov’s so tortured that it must have been endemic.
Fauré, Flaubert, and Molière all look typically French.
Brassens’ is folksy and suggests wry mocking of some wench.
They tell me Proust had one as well, although I can’t recall it
perhaps he dipped the madeleine in coffee to emoll it.
I won’t bore on with Borodine or Grieg, theirs lack the fame,
and even Hardy’s, like his prose, did not relect his name.

Boy, take this as your warning: if you want to make the cash,
don’t go half-way, but cultivate a signature mustache.
 
 

THE FALL FROM THE CLIFF

Yesterday I walked down a street in my old college town past a man on the corner in front of a cafe/bakery who was handing ut pamphlets such as I instinctively avoid so before I was even near him I had already steeled myself against what was surely yet another loony liberal loudmouth until I was close enough to realize that in fact the old guy was an aspiring poet selling odes or maybe merely trying to pique passers-by with them though in me he didn’t inspire literary interest but instead a shudder of loathing and deep sense of pathos that someone could think their photocopied snippets of rarefied prose might ever be read which led to an even worse suspicion that someday I might be reduced to doing the same thing in yet another installment of Life’s Plan to Make Me Eat My Words which is an ongoing humility project of the Department of Celestial Works that to date has seen me have to work in organic chemistry and also statistics and also in San Jose and a host of other lugubrious perditions that I had once sworn never to succumb to the irony of which so bitter as to make me ponder that there may indeed be some consciousness in charge of the universe after all though not a benevolent one and suddenly the simpler explanation hit me that perhaps these curses that I had once sworn never to allow have become reality exactly because they were etched so clearly in my memory and that perhaps the very revulsion they inspired in me is what caused them to become the most salient option when I’m later stymied and groping for a new course in my ascent of life’s craggy cliffs just as climbing a real cliff makes you nervous only because at any point the easiest next move is always to throw yourself off...
 
 

5 miserable maggoty rotten little playwrights you should read

good god amighty i just got finished reading a bunch of plays by five different playwrights and i’ve got to say there wasn’t a cheery word in the lot of them not one and is it any wonder i find myself steeped in dreariness and negativity with that kind of depressing reading i’ll tell you they make dante’s inferno look like a sunday picnic they make my own whining about life’s little hopelessnesses look like a stroll through disneyland in comparison but then that’s not surprising considering the first of them was good old samuel beckett himself who is so pathetically angstry that i bet he’s too irritable to even keep waiting for godot anymore because his endgame and his play without words were a pretty piece of absurdist nihilism i can tell you and what’s more i don’t even recommend them unless you think you’re suffering from an over-abundance of happiness which is precisely what was not the case for the protagonists in the plays of jean-paul sartre including the flies and the dirty hands having already read no exit i didn’t dawdle there even though included in the book and knew it was snivel grist which pretty well sums up harold pinter’s home-coming too although there was nothing absurd or nihilistic about it it was just flat out vile--vile and devoid of grace or charm and in consequence every bit as miserable and louse-infected as o’neill’s the iceman cometh which i’m sorry but i still don’t see why the drivel has any staying power it should have died a quiet verminous liquor-sodden death as soon as it was written but inexplicably its abject ratty little name lives to the point where i wonder if there isn’t more poetry in the title than o’neill put in all the whole of the play although whole is hardly a word i would use to describe it more like hole play or even hell play which seems to be the dominant theme running through those works and was obviously picked up decades later by sam shepard who i thought from his movies was going to have something redeeming to say but it turns out he just had another pathetic situation peopled by despicable characters except for one beautiful and nice young woman who is the girlfriend of the young man the rest of them murdered when he was a baby which leads me now to want to write a play about a wholesome oung lad who has lived a rich well-adjusted life and foolishly thinks he wants to write a play until he starts reading all of the quote masters unquote and realizes he just doesn’t have enough angst to fill two hours of stage time.
 
 

ONE UPSMANSHIP

1. Why do I have to catch the biggest fish?
Why must I be condemned to such a wish?
When someone is a better man than I,
why do I then resent him, wish he’d die?
I know what healthy competition means
and that the drive is programmed in our genes,
but I resent this need to dominate
and hope I’ll learn some grace before too late.

2. If someone’s prose is more composed than mine
I’m sure his singing isn’t quite as fine.
If he’s just had an encore at the Met
my watercolors can console me yet.
If his are hanging in the Guggenheim
I’ll dream that mine will also be, in time.
If he is younger than me by some years
my better looks may still allay my fears.
If he was asked to model once for Vogue
my math degree from Cal will still the rogue.
If he is on the faculty at Yale
I have one final better that won’t fail
None with that talent could make time for friends.
We’ll see that when this party for him ends.
 
 

PLEASE SEND THE END OF THE TREND

I hope that there will come the day when slavish dedication
to passing literary fads of cliquish convocation
give way to greater world views, to tolerance for those
who do not spew nonsensical and self-ironic prose.

The current voice imperative is veiled visual verse,
so full of stillborn messengers alike to Trojan hearse:
their uniform iconoclasm just an oxymoron
and emptier than all the foibles they’ve declared their war on.

The old cliché that silent men are taken to be wise
has been mistakenly applied to those who speak in guise.
But if a poet doesn’t join these liberating herds
he might as well have written his pen ultimate for words.
 
 

A DRAFT ON THE PATIO

the tiles lay haphazardly
uneven
amorphously polygonal
now closely set, now with large gaps between.

Last month, in energetic spurts,
I’d placed them more or less where they should go
roughly.
I knew that this first pass was just
to get them down while I was of that mind.

And now the Autumn rains are here
to loosen up the soil underneath
and so I’ve come to finish out the job,
arrange the squares in orderly array.
I’ll make mosaics of wet shattered shards:
Like second drafts from lubricated bards.
 
 

BERKELEY

You asked for a poem on Berkeley
but I warned you, you wouldn’t be pleased,
for you have to remember I fell from that place
as an archangel fallen from grace.

Alive, with a power, I’d entered,
my self-esteem over-inflated
from having excelled through four years of the hell
of classmates all publicly high.

Then the self-proclaimed Athens of Cal
—West Campus of Tokyo U.—
found me no better than just mediocre
in contests for every écu.

My prose there was flayed without mercy
by grad students all world-classed;
my science was flunked and my math was debunked
and even my weirdrobe surpassed.

After three years of ego deflation
and another sequestered in France,
I ducked ceremony, had my degree mailed,
just grateful I hadn’t been failed.

So now when I visit that place
and I see some bright hopeful young face,
I inwardly groan that the poor fool appears
how I must have, back seventeen years.

Academes crushed the hope from my gizzard,
from my craw they sucked out all ambition,
tore my identity up like old sheets,
shot my verve with their bright ammunition.

So when I am asked to hoist Berkeley
and rejoice its existence in song
I respond with what’s left of my shattered voice
I think that your choice here is wrong.
 
 

INDOLENCE

I awoke grudgingly in an indolent haze
dragged from unbeing by bright noises outside
and the light
which glared into my eyes though I covered them tightly
made me sweat, made my bedroom glow hot.
The window was shut,
and the air was oppressively stuffy,
the bedroom filled with exhalations—
the faint toxic smell of carbon dioxide—
or perhaps this taste in my mouth comes from last night’s wine
which has dried my tongue, robbed my brain,
still shrouded, sluggish,
burdened with the secret knowledge of genius,
unable to reveal it.
 
 

THREE ABSTRACT DREAMS OF A FOUR-YEAR-OLD

1. The Straits of Granite Teeth
Sent forth from rocky shores, a fleet
now burdened with the precious store they hold
must cross through treacherous straits to go back home.
Four captains know that at one narrow lane
his ship must be directed without flaw
and at a fast clip, with a steady hand
escape the mawing shoals on either shore.

At last the lead ship slips out to the lee
and hoists the mainsail, leaping through the strait.
The course is good; three other captains see
just how he holds the rudder, sails and weight.

And now the second sets his dangerous course.
The steadying wind may promise him fair ride
but untamed Nature is a dangerous force
and drags the ship to ruin’s rocky side.
 The vessel suffers terrible collapse:
the hull caved in, three masts all snap like twigs
the crew dumps into lifeboats as
the last two captains shudder in their wigs.

But third and forth both show a wiser eye
and sagely hold their ships until quite sure.
They smoothly sail through, and with a cry
Rejoice that Fortune favored them to her.

2. The Bowling Alley
The bowling ball was carefully laid
in arced trajectory
along the polished wooden floor
toward the one pin’s sweet spot
but inexpert hands have overshot the spin
and now it rolls straight for the gutter.
The second ball was truer aimed
and crashes definitively, obliterating the pins.

3. A Super Man
The Super Man flies headward on
through planetary games,
asteroid classes,
In and Out of Grown-up Obligations.
And from each moon that he has used
as resting point and relay
his mighty legs propel him ever forward.
His near collisions daunt him little—
and nothing dampens the exhilaration of each extended free
flight
through space

If only
the dreaming boy could live his life like that.
 
 

HIS NIGHTS OF MORTAL GLOOM

How did it all begin?
When did the blameless youth succumb to sin?
From what fantastic realm the nightmare born?

I only know that he was once
a bright and cheerful, comely boy,
of brilliant eyes, aglow with rosy dew,
and quick to laugh, like other boys,
or to be lost at play for hours,
or gleefully swim naked in the sea
unencumbered with our clothes or cares.

But as his skin began to sprout with hair
and as his plump young form—all boyish innocence—
began to grow more sexual, firm and taught,
it’s then the nights of mortal gloom began:
the visitations from the darker side
of serpent demons from an ageless hell.

He did not know what one event had been
that made his sunny youth become so dim,
but now he dared swim naked nevermore:
afraid to show his body in the sun,
some inner voices mocked his unclad limbs.
And neither could he simply play again.
For as he played, the demons deep within
demanded, had he better things to do?
Plagued with obligations
and requiring a reason to exist.

These demons mocked him twice at every fault:
once for the fault itself, and then again
for cowering when they confronted him.
And every night they came back for revenge:
snatched up the youth in their relentless claws
and brought him to the precipice’s edge,
paraded him unclothed through city streets,
 imported for his torment jeering girls.
They made him miss his classes, take exams
for classes that he didn’t know he had.

Then in his tortured state he found some hope
and haven from his plight in cloudy drug,
and then he saw how he could hide at will
and his own rabid demons briefly kill.
But when those clouds of peace would drift away,
the demons came again in fearful force,
accusing him as cunning vipers may
of wantonly polluting his own mind,
and shirking his responsibilities.

He had to give up hiding from those beasts
or else take up the hiding every day
like some that he had known, in ragged pose
with outstretched hands a-begging on the street.
But he had learned one thing from his drugged clouds:
how to ignore the demons of the night
to rout them in a flash of lucid light.

In nakedness, he learned again to swim
while demons hovered uselessly above;
He forced himself to play again with friends
in temporary obligation treason,
and play with women at the games of love.
Until one day he found a love so dear,
they married and they made themselves a life.
And though the demons hovered ever near
he fought them off with baby and with wife,
who gave him daily with their love,
his reason.
 
 

 TO THE VOID

You, my poem, my beauty, my precious child,
whom I have sired with a heart of dying blood,
whom I engendered with a damnèd mortal touch,
who one day too must disappear in fading light,
slouching to the void:

I pray for your forgiveness ere you go
my vanity in bringing you here so.