;.cPoems, 1974-1975, only partially retyped
;.l1,6,60,66,1,0,1,65,192,2,5,10,127,1,0,
;.l2,5,65,192,2,10,15,20,25,127,5,0,
;.l3,10,65,192,2,15,20,127,10,0,
;.l4,15,65,192,2,20,25,127,15,0,
;.l5,20,65,192,2,25,30,127,20,0,
;.l6,1,78,192,2,6,12,127,1,1,
;.l7,1,110,192,2,8,16,127,1,2,
l7
=po7475
Pip preserves their trip
                           or

                               From coming and going

                                                     or Us it devours (seq.)
  IMITATION AND INCIDENTAL 

             Poems 1974-1975

l1
.p
HERZOG'S SONG

(Ref:  Bellow, Herzog (?the Rain Man)

Unmute inglorious Miltons sing
off-key, off-base and out-of-joint
at time and place I plead our case
fool for both client and counsel.

Mute inglorious Miltons fall
like lamgs to slaughter
trees in th' forest primeval
dreamed in fatuity

But few go gently to tht night:
fight bite whine scratch slam unacknowleged heads 'gainst anywall
and fall into no cadenced epitaph, no thanatoptic pip
preserves their trip

                                      (North Conway, 10/74)

-----------------
l6
Herzog as Minotaur

presupposing the shopgirl's view
'unkindly sunbs the bull
who,  impressed and pulled down some wrong queue into realms of rue
had gladly been elsewhere or other

-------------------
l1

Herzog contemplating a leap of Berryman

                   "wave bye-bye, Henry"

As wisdom dawns beyond the mind
so even ego-trippers find
their merely personal plots are told
whilst art had barely started to unfold"
yet those who know this by but half
contrive their death as as epitaph.  

[Ref:  Berryman, his protagonist "Henry"]
                 
----------------
.p
anchored at each wall
single-span suspension bridge
meets in mid-Gorge

continent apart
both dream of jumping off it
broken marriage vow

                           (1970/1975)

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

love, clear is your mind
as the shallows of a lake
on a windless day
                         (Tax Season, 1975)

--------------
.P
Sketch for shorter history of Philosophy

A footnote to Samkhya
's Heraklitus
let ying-yang's Pushme-pullyou, Strife, delight us
earth water aer fire aither -- never rusts
'cuse everything is held in place by Justice.
The everchanging cosmic egg e'er sings
vrdanya -- "thunderbolt steers all things"
the rational macro-micro aspect's logos
derivates of which continually dog us.

As SOCRATES trudged down to town
and left is his old shrew of a wife at home
so PLATO leaves this world behind
to shrewish fate, for peace of mind.

But ARISTOTLE chucked that verbiage
back to earth, to dig the cabbage
free om cjoams of time.
But ACQUINAS Latinate lectdure-notes
turned Italy
's balls to stone gargoyles.

DESCARTES
put Burdian's ass before the part
tedium to Spinoza's
dispassionate vast cosmic dance.

 ...
.p
Delia contemplatesd Kant's first antimony

   "Inasmuch as one part of space is not given through the othersbut only limited by them, we must consider each space, not in sofar as it is limited, as being also conditioned, in that itpresupposes another space as the condition of its limits, and soon ..."
              Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 413

    when as on wings of thought I fly
    to the end of the universe, bye and bye
	and stop, at some imagined boundary
	what do I see?  friend, that's my quandry.

it isn't more black 'cause I told you I've passed that
behind me, so what can there be?  I see
I must have there a red-brick wall.
	Yet restlessly the mind doth seek"
	I posit a telescope ten cents a peek.
When as on wings of thought I fly
what do I see?  Friend, that's my quandry;
and isn't it just an instatiable itch of the mind
to put endings on everything?

.p

The poet flees parolees

Bedlam holds no horrors like un-
to her graduates:  shrunk, burnt-out cut minds
slapdash sewn drugged crammed lumpily back
to spin with words their re-barred world 

-------------------
.p
EXCERPTS:
 
IMITATION OF DANTE, INFERNO, CANTO 1

      ("You could hardly being wiht a less work
        For the pompous rascallion
        Who don't speak Italian
        Nor French must have scribbled by guess work")
                                 Byron, Don Juan

Half round my wheel of karma
fell I down a maze imponder-
able; come to in no goody-goody wood


.p
Passage and lines in imitation from Chaucer's Miller's Tale,after the new English version of Lieuen Adkins'

"The Miller, that    for-dronken was al pale ...."

The up started the whey-faced Miller, drunk as a lord, goosed hisprepuce round the horn & screwed his wazoo on the cocyx too; andswore by St. Cuspidor he hored a tall tail well worth o' thatKnight's pieces:
    Mine Hose dug the due war stewed and so said,
 "Cool is Bor', Sor Two-Bit 'bo; we'll first hear a silver dollarholler
"Screw ewe, beeer-spiller," quod the Miller, "I'll spill my shitor split"
"I never argue with mad dogs of pickeldymums; go tell your talltale on down to the devil."
"Gentlement " said the Miller, "I must confess that, uponatteneding to my own inflections, I perceive that I am an itsybitsy tipsy.  So if, from time to time, I seem to stick myfucking foot in my mouth you cocksuckers will, I prithee,o'erlook my lapsus linguae"  

                                       Dorchester, 1974
(Comment:  While I was working as a Tax Preparer, in FieldsCorner).

.p
l1
EXCERPT:
IMITATION:  ILIAD A (1-91)
l7
"Manie aidea, Peliades Achileus"

Oh Baby wail me up th' freakout
of ol' Peleus' Achilles
Ballbuster; dumped piercing grief on mucho Greeks
Many mighty souls hellward hurled -- aye, dispatched a lonesome train of ghosts to the devil
Heros all, leaving themselves behind in doggy-bags for
Vulture-muchies:  the god's design working itself on out
.P
EXCERPT:  Imitations from Catullus

lviii

   Ceali, our Lesbia, that Lesbia            Ceali , Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa
   that Lesbia whom Catullus loved           illa Lesbia, quam Castullus uam
   more than his soul and all his his world  plus quam se qatque suos amuit omnes
   nowadays in alleyways and doorways        nunc in quadriuiis et angportis
   brings off the well-hung songs of Rome     glubit mananimi Remi neopos
   Glub, glub, glubtit


CIV
 
   Fuckface scams up Mt. Parnassus:             Mentula conatur Pipeium scanders montem
   the Muses pick him up
       and flip him back down like horeshit.     Musae furcillis precipitme eicutnt

[Comment:  Cf. my imitation of Carmmina Burana:

     Another one is lofted up
     in a vulture's pinions     ]
l1

.P
EXCERPTS:
Old Dog Blue's Bestiary

ARTHUR  wants to be a businessman
but lacks the sense; it's no t clear how he can:
he's evidently making his amends
for getting screwed by screwing all his friends.


So BYRON'S kickEd out upon his ass
wheron did rest his fame (alack alass).
            

Just so the Princess, Grace of Porn
gentles Scorpio's unicorn.


Nuts to you DEAN tutti fruity:
how duly do you do your doty duty!
A dozen cinemas, in endless repertyory]
slop stale American hash to every preppy Tory.

                              (If you are looking for the Egress
                               flip the page; it may fatigueless)

And mini'mal cheer to you, Rich FRIZZLE
devious dumb conniving wassole*
Suck some sense fsrom a heiffer's pizzle;
thence bye-bye (dismissal, Frizzle).

Betake we must to wine, bereft of wenches
The Gallo callow poesy, etc. quenches
The breaking day plays bongo-BOGO ball off all our senses
Hell, let's excuse the booze; 'twas less pretentious

A minor cigarette-short-
winded poety
each Thursday at the Grolier holds court
wherein each piece (it is a recent craze)
must find some fault in what another says
l6

If'n my art or sheepish craft
	wrap prickly goods, and half
   my word-plays twice-tolled tales enfold, the errer, Reader's you:
   could artifice e'er freshly spring
   without recycling?


                                   With every year your rag grows thinner
                                   from feast of fools to doggy dinner:
                                   you've got my goat, and you can keep it
                                   in your Cantabridgian flea-pit.

If Jonathan Kozol did not exist, it would be necessary to invent a bettermodel.

I scan bemused this sculptured cement
built less to pasture souls in torment
than chemically abort their ferment.

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

Refs:

A:
B:        [Ref.:  Stuart Byron, a film critic who made much of beinghomosexsual]
C:       [Ref:  Marilyn Chambers, called, 'the Grace Kelley of pornography]
D:   Also Stuart Byron, at one time termed the Dean of film critics
E:   P.T. Barnum had a sign:  "to the Egress"
F:   A Mr. Frizzle, who had annoyed me
G:   Grolier Poetry shop (2 verses)
H?:   But Parody of Dylan Thomas:  "If in my art, or sullen craft"
Reference to "the Real Paper", a Cambridge journal.
L:  Lindemann Mental Health Center, Boston

.p
A Villainelle

Unprocreatic feckless 'phone
that would not goose her juices, down!
and leave to me
lead memory's
echo:
one-half my own excuse's
ghostly flash of self-abuse 

	Oh Mistress mine, looks like you's gone
	won't eat my meat nor press my briefs
 	or even feed my wit
      ...
      It wasn't, was it, something I did not?

      -- When you're hot you're hot; and when you're not you're not

	I swept the floor amd laid the bed
	cologned my dong, but to what good?
	Wouldst wanton waste thy Nature's dower?
	I even scored the pad for a hour
	or two, maybe more:
	I can't afford or find a whore
	-- When you're hot you're hot; and when you're not your not

	...
	some more or less well-stackEd bod
	bedeck my version of The Good
	...
	and all the waste sad time between
	once more seem to have never been.
	Still I sahll miss your ever-read twat
	-- When you're hot you're hot, and when you're not, you're not

                                           Belmont, 10/74  

l2
{ Comment:  A bit embarassing to type now; but some goodeffects ('down!' for slamming a phone and allusions,  egPlato, The Good, and Eliot, "ridiculous the waste sad timebetween"          

.p
EXCERPT:  Satire III, after an imitation of Chaucer

[COMMENT:  Also embarassing off-colour, but perhaps withenough witty lines & allusions -- most of the best collectedfrom previous notations -- to be worth inputting.  Anthoroughly dated evocation of the mid-70s, and intellectualfashions.  So far I've omitted various lines that were tooembarassng to re-input -- in most cases, because they weretoo nearly pure drivle.]
There is a bit of formal structure, that I may try to bringout.
The parody on Chaucer extends only to the allusion to "Whenthat Aprille with its shoures swoete / the drought of Marchhath pierced to the roote").
The motto from Appolinaire practically characterizes my life.
This was something that I wrote largely to wile away the timeat a clerical job; not someting I worked at. 



       "mais riez de moi, gens de partout, surtout gens d'ici
        car il ya tant de choese que je n'ose vous dire"
                                     Appollinaire, LaJolie(?) Rousse
                   
PROLOGUE

When drizzle April with its sooty showers
 ...
and coeds' cherries fall to sweet liqueurs
while fashionable old bags decry the moeurs
When reeking Lechyrous with his sweetened breath
limes min-skirted birds with tales of Heath; [A] and eachyounge box
lies open to the vernal equinox       

     [A] [Comment:  those lines have no allusion; I startedwith a pure fantasy, and then dropped it for parody]

when teenyboppers jazz the latest craze
and liberation's left to divorcees ...
When frigging little prigs proffer corsages
then long tale lakers head on out on pilgrimages.

STATE OF THE NATION

A tick who leaeched his way to President        [Nixon]
bleeds white a nation to make scant percent
is tracked down plucked squashed gloriously discarded
for one who's bullet-headed and retarded:       [Ford]
theough every trailer trucked across the nation
fuels inflation
still overstuffed GRAND RAPIDS, down to brass tacks
opts for an inflationary gas tax
articulationg , with his buddy RUMMY
"I can chew gum, and I am not a dummy"

[Note:  That's Gerald Ford, former Senator from Michagan. Brass tacks were used in upholstery.  Tractor trailers areused for interstate trucking.  LBJ had said of Ford, 'Hecan't piss and chew gum at the same time.'  Nixon made FordVice President on the mistaken assumption that theEstablishment would not dare let him succeed to thePresidency.]                              

    
STATE OF THE STATE

(On MICK DUPLICITOUS my spleen is spent:
 too mean for satire; narrowed past contempt.)

[Note:  That was Mike Dukakis.  He proved such adisappointment to liberals, having opted for fiscalrestraint, that they abandonned him in a protest vote. Unfortunately, the protest went too far; Dukakis lost to areactionary.]

STATE OF THE CITY

A morning smog on Megaopolis falls
as sucked-off fags emerge from shithouse stalls

    [Comment:  Since Eliot tried for shock value in theopening loines of Prufrock, I figured I show how easy it isto trump the shock]         

Daybreak broadcast news burst out to greet us
per suit:  avengers of th['aborted foetus

[A poor comment on the anti-abortion movement]
l7
Ars populi ex auto radio tells
of restless one-night stands in trash motels
whilest every mudflat-stranded prig and bigot
cheers despair by cursing nig and faggot.
The gentle stench of overflowing sewage
blends medieval Paris in this new age
Passed through intestined subways wage-slaves go,
returned to change, but scarcely slake their woe.
The Evening Globe lies spread against the sky        [Boston lobe; Prufrock]
anesthetize on earth the polity
As pseudo-Engluephil's disdaiing Eliot
go soak their heads in soaps within the telly set
we leave thee, Reader, nightsight of the rest
 and drunkards hail the Marikesh Express
           
STATE OF THE ARTS:  MOTION PICTURES

The Age names Woody Allen Satirist
for turning all that's good, as gold, to piss
and glutted movie-goers quest diversion
while poling each new hole's now called perversion
as Hollywood's the set of all the famous
whose consciouness has centered round their anus
while plastic bi-guy heros go for trips
broke queers repent & preach Apocolypse 

    Lenny Bruce, resisting evil
    flushed'is mind down to the devil

TRIVIUM

When Grammar to the Ladies-Lib Lunch's churled
and Rhetoric to PR's kisser's hurled
whileDialecktic's red in Worker's World

QUADRIVIUM

When mathematic's been computerized
Astronmy's the cracker-jacker prize
and music's slopped up mega-amplified
(so callow youth and maid now seek seclusion
midsts cities' mega-tin-can-tonned confusion)

SCIENCE

Now million-dollar protons miss the mark(s)
and run in circles, searching for Quark(s)

MEDICINE

Scrawl fallen angels, crawled from bedlike rack
"OUR LAST POSSESSION'S DIGNITY, GIVE BACK!"
l1

[Note:  That was in reference and to and honor of Carol RobinsMyers -- she had quit work as a Systems' Analyst, I supposebecause in those days progrmming could take over and digitalizeone's mind, and went to Belize, in Central America, to learntextile-making.  There, apparently, she contracted lupus, andbecame a dialysis patient.  She was tireless in working forPatients' Rights.  I last heard of her from Hartford, in the mid80s, where she had an inherited apartment building. 
She was most sensitive to the indignities inflicted by a medicalestablishment on dialysis patients.
It was no easy matter, because kidney failure clouds the minduntil the blood is purified.]

PSYCHE'S PLIGHT

Now see the Priest Profane:  Psychologist
whose word to struggling mankind is:  "I'm pissed: --
He's bent to focus everything that's real
into statements prefaced:  'What I feel ___________'
for everyone of means needs be linclined
to either blow, or shrink, or both, their mind

That Kilgore Tsrout of Finance, STEWART MOTT
needs cut his gifts in half, and goes to pot
l2

[A timely allusion entirely trivial.  Kilgore Trout is acharter in Vonegot.  I forget who Stewart Mott was.   I hadno reason to imagine that he took up marijuana smoking; butit rhymed.]
l7

COOKERY

An epicure regrets the fad for Setzuan      [Spicy Chinese food]
(a culinary zap that so upsets one)
                                                                
ATHLETICS

While jock-stropped popinjays, from Riggs to Namath
titillate the rubes who made them famous
l4

[apart from opting for 'stropped' rather than thegrammatic 'strapped', that line has nothing tocommend it]
l1

REPORTAGE

 ...
Let journalists, who credit naught they hear
bluster in their artificial beer
endeavoring, with a manly show 'f profanity
to re-inforce the myth that all is vanity.
         
POESY

When bread; booze; broads are disjoint entitites
poor poets take to rhyme, in time like these
and pitter-pattering iambs serve as flats
to set the stage for literal entrechats.
Now every working jerk-off clerking climber
whiles way the o'er paid day with jive two-liners
While hippies who had never heard of Yeats
redo each day at least his occult feats.          
The academic style is rather jumpy
like nicotinic tense bad humping     

[N.B.:  For a parody of that style, eg Creely, I prefer

       the duck bobs
       bottoms up
       like a well-known poet with hic-
       cups]
l7
In verse, as painting, that old New York school
is sooty introspective ersastz gruel
for wordsmiths, so long fueded  with their their tools
they faign th'arcane, so 's not t'be known for fools
and ape mis-mate ideas with mis-matched syntax.
	Pre neo-Gothic spinisters look to Plath
	and sigh, to make a better epithaph.
Hereditary lion Rober Lowell
crafts poems less like Fabrege eggs than coal
   the piddling rococco poop of Pope
Pope constipated English, quoth Durell
but this heap of borken images likes me well
one fain made all of history a vortex
to mask the astral madness in his cortex           [Pound]
	From the imprint of his dies                 [Auden's eulogy for Yeats]
	teach the freeman how to prise
	the Dancer from the trance                   [Yeats]
	of loco logos writ on soda water             [Eliot]
	regurgitate of boubalasian mortar
and teach us all to write as well's that
superficial facile Anglophile
(hicktown bigot upmobile)

Parodied parody parodied.  Unreal.                 {Eliot, Waste Land]

THE POET'S OWN STATE

l1
SAm AnagraM, whose epigrams constate this trip
is half philosopher and half a wit; too flip
out every solitary rhyme
he's practiced nothing but the quip in time
He'd like to hide his light jest like a Fool
wile building lines like combo shots in pool:
a lonely bached chauvinistic kpunning ham
who schleps from bed to verse then J.V. Cunningham
to fish for quips in black holes of the mind.
He translates Latin French and Greek with fsreedom
(might do slightly better could he read 'em)
and imitates the casual cracks of Byoron               
whose longueur works he skipped as just too tirin'
Each twisted phrase, from infantile to vicious
he can't let go , though couplets repetitious
and set, in lieu of simple tales , a plate
of one more gutten rotten whale o'state
With liter'y fit so dry, he's stuck in schemes
  to salt his Muse's tail with sweated spleen
and use her reined so tightly and so ill
  'the prick deems it a thrill if they essai a dactyl'
Despite so many coupled lust'n'fears                 {Yeats: "Rage & song"}
he can't havae more than 3 or 4 ideas:
	One wheel of Being, 7 spheres, and Deity
	grammatish exegesis dressed in imagry         
His melancholy bent'd be less dyseptic
if he say how to climb by dialektic
up that ladder built from Platon's plans
that Wittgenstein envisioned slip his hands.
	He caps each poem, like home-brew beer
	when all the lines stop working.

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORALITY

Come MERTON OF THE MOVEMENT, to the fore
Proud armband flashing, as in decade yore
Here rearguard Squire now -- (but soft! she goes)
led (Of faithful lap-dog!) by the nose
His every rise and fail is made report of
that chatter deem  him suitably supportive
His apologia (folks, that's his defending')
is:  'I'll pay any price to get mmy end in.":
For fallen man knows whole the world's a stage   [Finnegan'sWake]
where he must re-play tales of lust and rage
No screeds outworn strive to define what's real  [Wordsworth]
each input thought needs put ont 'What I feel'
with no more art than fits a cheap computer
(obliter dicta, dare none confute 'ere)
emotions simply good and bad and anger
when ecstacy's required, just go bang her
	So bachelors, from lack of chance to give
	play at art, and find it hard to live
as cats and chicks, exhausted of splilt cream
pick up and riff and split and long to drream
despairing love, float oceanward on tears
"and be a long time unremembering".   [Appolinaire or Marlamee]    But meanwhile one must staff deserted station
and keep up with pro forma fornication
Thnough sometime lords of ladies intellectual
bow out, unamnned by bawds' love; gay boys, ineffecutal.          

 [A tour de force, coined elsewhere:  Byron, in Don Juan,  tooksome credit for a triple rhyme:  "But oh you lords of ladiesintellectual / tell us but truly, have they not hen-pecked youall?"  So this is a quadruplue rhyme.]


(Swandsong's abstsracted passion on the shelf
is what was left by elfish selfish shellfish.)

THE POET INVOKES THE SPIRT OF THE AGE

Now raped Belinda to the toilet falls                      [Pope]
and bcaset-off Fresca's stuffed in lower drawers     [T.S. Eliot]
as Porter's daughter LIBBY Zeitgeist brings          [T.S.Eliot]
t'enfold the latest juices from these springs.

Libby!  In some other time or bard:
a lazy laughing Jenny of of the Yard
more sinned upon than spinning;
*or blushng  violet, born to flush unseen
from Marxist wrath, or Leninistic spleen.

The Womens' Show, viewed A.M.; on TV
takes sanka, then the latest therapy
(a pre-game confidnete's phone-call pays
if she inspire, and he approve, her lays)
distressed by freed libido rather week
each harlot's art lends charm to her technique
 ..
Her agon contraceptive and abortive
neeods suitors sail through e'er they're deemed 'supportive'.

Sucked dry by neo-Calvisints repression
uncomely wedlock soured her confession
 
Proud Alimimony, and the lesser debts
see here that nearly all she needs, she gets   [Rolling Stones]
as Harpy, Shrike, and Woman Scorned
lend her archetypes forlorn)                   [Jung]

	...

The Red Squad's nightsticks knocked her all awry]
(her plumbing don't work right unto this day)

[That was a line from an article about protest politics, about awoman beaten by police during a demonstration.  It was the RedSquad, then headed by Sonford Garelick, that watched,  verygently , over us in the early 60s, when I briefly led the SPU]



Displaced to politic, a vanguard radical
who takes for dialectic, household squabble
Perusing every article to see
an Alphonese/Gaston paly of 'he or she'
dogmatic Marxist masks for these defeatist
petty bourgeoise Leninist elitists.
Reducing every quest to basic station
makes a paradigm of constipation.
  ...
Redeemed by self-assertivenss from erros
her self-crowned flag, long last, claims Mt. Veneris
 ...
*So prematurely superannuated
chicks check in to looney bins for kicks. 

[An interesting stress of iambic pentamenter]

Awoke to mermaids' voices, Libby drowned          [TSE, Prufrock]
on seas lysyrgic, on some sea-coast town
and had her hair bobbed:
*The chick who could not get no satisfaction    [Rolling Stones]
stands reborn a person:  Hail Affirmative Action!

See her! at her first, apprentice post
trailing coffee cups like Morely's ghost   [Dickens, Xmas carol]
poor lumpy Libby, shrunk by minds eclectic
screws the boss, and swoons on her Selectric.  [typewriter]


Now every Jill a capitalist will be
set free to screw each other fiscally
wiled manhood strapped on like a Woolworth's handbag
Scant sense of playing, none of fair or foul
makes of 'le monde d'affairs' a basement sale'.
A 'women's group' suppots her in her work
reconstitued sewing-circle jerk.

All _____ but emotion, of that they are sure:
feed pieties to plants; the poor, manure.
Transcenent yoga gets here safely high;
in every heaven Loge's reserved; bye-bye.

'
                                              Sout Boston 11/75
                                                Belmont 11/75
.p



NEW SHORTER POEMS
l7
To those who would repraoch him for his grammar

                           'Aint''s quaint
                           'Isn't'? -- 't isn't.

Dialogue between two persons dealyed in tdraffic by the vehicle of a Trotskyist folk-singer

                            "Van Ronk!"
                            "Honk."

Imitation:  ad te omnis caro veniat:
  don't fret; you'll get all the meat   (1951)

Villon's reply to Dr. Jonson

                             hang
                             loose

.P

