;.cThis statement is false
;.l1,3,63,66,1,0,5,70,192,2,17,42,127,5,0,
;.l2,10,60,192,2,17,42,127,10,0,
;.l3,15,60,192,2,17,42,127,15,2,
;.l7,2,124,192,2,17,42,127,2,2,
        ONLY THE WHITTLER'S ART:  COLLECTED META-POEMS

l2

    " According to David Justice, editor forpronunciation and etymology at the Meriam-WebsterDictionary,
 
` `Meta' is currently the fashionable prefix. ' " 
l3

     Noam Cohen, :"Meta-Musings", in The NewRepublic  Volume 199 #10 (September 5, 1988 ormaybe 1989)

l1

                            Envoi 
                                 

                 rain-driven mist on the sea

                 after-sunset light
                 past grey rocks in crusted snow
                 old tracks of a deer

              Express from muddled mystic Israel
              go dirty xerox, fading into gray
              and so to all who miss your imports say
              I scarcely  meant it anyway.

                                    

Hoping for company
I try to tidy my room
neatly arranging
whatever I've stolen from trashcans
& filing away
soiled linen

                                    *cooked as good as can be
                                    it's still a turnup
                                    but can't throw it out








     Steve Amdur, P.O. 23529, Jerusalem 91234                    
                                     March 30, 1989

.p                               
*Narcissus ponders and polishes his well-wrought phrases,
then wrapt, seals his soul and falls into a love of gazes.

                                ca. 1963

----------------
If 'n my craft or sheepish art 
mask extras overused
and half my word-plays twice-told tales unfold,
the err-er, Reader, 's you:
could ever art perennially  spring
without recycling?

-----
.p
Caveat Lector #1

FUMBLEBUM's misplaced 's poems again
"Hey -- ein baya, man"
Direct-dials his Muse:
"We'll repeat dictation now, please.
----------------

Fragments, ca. 1974

Bullshit my epigrams "ain't even juvenal"....


 ....when pitter-pattering iambs serve as flats
to set the stage for literal entrechats...

 SAM ANAGRAM, whose epigrams constate this trip
is half-philsopher, too flip,
he's practiced nothing harder than the quip;
a lonely, worn-out chavinistic punning ham
who shleps from bed to verse then J.V. Cunningham

to dwell midst browning herbs just like The Fool
while crafting lines like combo shots in pool.

 ... the prick deems it a thrill if they essay a dactyl

 ------- 

Disclaimer with "Gotcha"

Nu; I too
don't always savor
these literary ...farts ....

Dear Reader:
   Neither of us under these particular circumstances
   had much choice; and poets like prophets & typists
   may claim immunity
   from responsibility
   if not prosecution, retribution, or leastways re-
   ciprical calumny.
----- 

.p
   
Principia Laconica 

say what you gotta quick
cut out extra words
& try to tie it up.
----- 

Shape and polish facets
Don't waste words
Light strikes from inside.
Gems reveal only a resolution of pressures.

-----
*I wrote this haiku
waiting for the light to change.
Stop light's lot sharper.

                     ca. 1976
-----------------

I too once
tried ['59--'61]
       to
let fly free to wind words
in unrecognized images of archaic confusion & latent despair...
Damn; done with that now;
jack back in your box.
l2


    Refs:  In a sailboat running free, one may letgo of the mainsheet, but then the  sail may flap.
     "You can let the jack out of the box, but thenit's hard to get it back in."             
l1

-----
.p
Obviously, I
evade facing or making my points by
line-padding, academic inanities,
'ahem-words' as it were, which
you who've read me must (ipso dicit!) endure; I'm
trying to plant pitons on the sun.
----------------
It's
nostalgia for rationality
  motivates this
stylistic affectation
as if with
'a decent reticence' 
one might 
slip past the bullies of our night

     Ref:  Pound, Pisan Canto # ________; & obviously Auden 
------------------------------- 

It changes nothing, of course, but
when your Child cries
(night-mares draw and quarter us)
make some light

above, or more easily below
earth's incessant surface agitation
things seem clear and calm
-----

Past facile assonance,
perhaps its the contrast
of juxtaposed -- nuances, an
incongruity of implicit voices
more captivating than this
hesitation quickstep, so-to-speak
or rhythmic rhetoric's
invitation to complicity in pretention

-------
*Ok:  after 40 years
finally can write
English, somewhat
       but
poetry's only an
ancillary language; tacked-on capacity --
the craft of packaging
trivial insights neatly.

--------
Easier to catch transparent butterflies
than poems that dart through my mind.

Poems too many times handled -- ossified butterflies.
-----
*My best unwritten phrases
sit on a top dark storeroom shelf
of reverie
closed with a cloth
that sometimes blows open.
                                           
-----
*Poems clambering like cats
to be let out:
"What's my name?  My name?  Mine!"
------
 
Doing philosophy
in the crawl-space of the attic of my mind
between the body of reason
and the skies of intuitiion....

----
Unpredictably it's those
inconsequential conglomerates that click
as if my Chick s'a Muse
indifferent to my portentiousness.

----------
-----
      
  "to instill a work ethic in people culturally averse to labor"
          The New Republic, May 16, 1988

like me, I guess
I should write a poem around that line 
but ---

-----

Touch and Go

Touching lightly on life now
in only the community of ideas

cede words authority
admire their acrobatics

 -----
.p

 *The Poet Speaks

Seriograph.
masks within masks.

----------------------------------------------------------------

*Kafka in a Condo

My envoy gallops forth
but
ours in an age of retrospective magnanimity:
one offers him a fresh
l7
                          pony
                                a burro
                                         a kangeroo
                                                     with a fresh-pressed clown suit
                                                                                      & a bucket of booze in a pocket or 2
l1

so, breathless, he casts forth at your feet
a message, of sorts.

-----
*Portrait of the Artist with his Creditors

The Chef regrets
that certain pushy pigeons
claiming kinship
have insist upon sitting
in the buffet
rather inadequately disguised
as tomatoes.

-----
*Aspects in Amber

I'm not here.
These, my affected reflections
crudely confront you
pretending identify;
imagine what dialog you will,
I'm out.
So I say.
          
                    (Summer, 1989; Cf. Zelaney, Amber series)
-----
 Caveat Lector Detour

to let my poems' titles sometimes lie
on bottom
	(that this their or her)
as punchline 
             is

     :Fixing the Sin of Lilith

                                   top!
Refs: Heb. tikkun, a complementary rectification, trans. "fixing".
       According to Midrash, Adam divorced his first wife, Lilith,
       because she wanted to be on 
.p
 

Upon diembarking, the Yekke said firmly:   "This language is notfor me."

ridiculously, it's
this
intricate inventory, vocabularized
dab'ra-ve-abra of transmutation
continually eluding me

     (subtlies easy as wind in the trees
      e.g. the, tempi, say
     pause
           and sudden volubility
        (waves breaking over rocks)
     wistful eloquence of gesture
          (mountaineers ascending around trash)
     and syntax logical as building stones....


--------------------

No
need to know
new
language
to tell cowpies' plop  
nor ken a con-job.
-----

Yankee Yekke Weltanschauung

An intricate network 
of lies defines
as perimeter, parameters, or wha'-['ch']a-ma'-call-
it
civilization or what-have-you
of passion, that,
id est the 
incomprehensible, unmentionable, intolerable
or at least or best
beast, what one can't stomach,
imaginary treife...


.p
Lines written outside the Jerusalem Plaza Hotel (5-Star)

Kafka's Everyman had it easy;
a sea of well-intentioned aides
shielding an honest boss.
But pity we poor poets please
so eager to be seen
we drop each offering down a black hole
and hope a friendly shidduch catches it.


    Cf.   "Damn your tranquilizer
           Now every time I try to drop a note to my soul
           A cherub floats by on a pink cloud
           and catches it in a gold wastebasket."
                                  (Sept. 23, 1963.)
-------

Quintessential Meta Nonexistent

I'd like to die quick
so I can be published posthumously while I'm young
but with my luck
they'll have chucked this all out with the trash.
 
END.

.p
Satires of Literary and Philosophic style

 ...words climb like mistaken snakes
rhyme, and decline pretention
slaked  -- diddly
shit or crap
compounded, it's the sound
counts,  and when
words unbound abound
who wonders where
the contents went.
                      Berkeley slums, ca. 1963


---------
(From 33 Variations on a deviled egg)

Looking for bugs
the duck bobs
bottoms
up
like a well-known
poet with
hic -
 cups.
-----                                              
Lines written for Gene Frumkin's Creative Writing Class at theUniversity of New Mexico, Alburquerque, New Mexico, Spring 1967.

Where shall I m'aMuse displa~y?
Her little ass must itch & shake
if he high on the grass we take;
& Placitas' stones won't fit poems w
                                     e
                                       l
                                         l
                                          .
                                           .
                                            .
I will not Carp at where her lay is told.....
etc.
---------------

l7
After Attending a Poety Reading at the Historic Grolier Bookshop in Cambridge
l1                                       

*Betake we must to wine, bereft of wenches.
The Gallo callow poesy etc. quenches.
The breaking day plays bongo-bo~~ngo ball off all our senses.
Hell, might's well 'scuse the booze; it's less pretentious.
                                           (ca. 1974)

--------------
.p

*What I learned at the Philosophers' Convention

We seek
a bright white young man
properly stoppered
to measure fearless ideas through a bottle dropper.
Not like these, please,
that rant, pant, rave, and wave-
r, tipsy--top-
sy, the Raggedy Andy and Mopsy'
s of acadanemia; we
deem decorum seemlier
and procreate a proper pecking order
of minds intense and dry as typewriters.

                          (ca. 1965)

-------
Notes from something similar, 1989

Pecking ordered peacocks competing for a place in the zoo.
Polyphonous variations & rhapsodies on a theme.
Starlings contemplating a giant loaf of bread.            
Like tring to jump onto a greased plastic horse on a merry-goround.
