THESE AREN'T THE MAGES YOU'RE LOOKING FOR

          The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
               -Francis Bacon


As inevitably as Shakespeare
showed in london
with his pitch

not to take it easy, but

to take the language pro—

so now, the role of every

subsequent poet

is surely not 

to stand up
and unscrew the sun

just to examine 
and explain how it works,
but to strip prose

of its church clothes
and send it off hunting in
bewilderment’s woods—

not to tell it 

like it is, but

to fling birds at bushes
and see what child-
ish sentiment sticks—

to honor the message,
yes, (especially
in public), but

in private, to
fetishize the muffled
mouth of art 

as hooked earth-

worms worship

before the tongues of fish 

while they chant ever on 

to their hearts

(as they must) 

in their rude, rusted 

pidgin: this rough, 

confused English. 

THE FIRST WORLD PROBLEM

Taxes, groceries, maintenance

of appliances;

most nights, having to
close your eyes
and consciously will minutes
and seconds to pass

They say
it could be so much
worse than that—

that it’s more like a limp handshake
or stiff kiss than a curse
to have so many painless
choices, it hurts.

They say that, after all,
you’re so much better off

than a medieval subsistence farmer
toiling in the rows. 

And as far
as you know, that’s
more or less true—but

even so: back then, boiling 

in the summer
sun or blaspheming at
the frozen ground,

at least one 

found—six days

out of seven—one knew

what one was supposed 

to do.

POEM FOR THE TIME BEING

Late October
afternoon light—so gauzy

and washed-out—
that it feels like we might

be inside
an aquarium

in god’s
chic apartment—only, we aren’t

the attractions; 

we are pure décor. 

It’s this elusive 

and brilliant-

ly delicate interim—
this hyper-exotic, temperamental 

meanwhile—

that’s the star.

FACE FIRST

To "please deliver us 

from fiction's 

necessary evil"

is a tricky slope 

down a bald

cliff face of "seems." 

And to declare yourself

"a nonbeliever"

is tantamount
to saying that you
don’t need sleep.

From one second
to the next, both 

feel oddly

doable—but, 

speaking of fact-

based: sooner 

or later,

every living
body slips and falls
into a dream.

LIBER NOVUS DIAGNOSIS

your results 

have just come back 

from the lab.

Just as random

charged particles
colliding in a blackbox

neither describe 

nor resolve the plot 

of anxiety,

what we’re dealing with here

is not 

nostalgia,

since nostalgia 

is a feeling
that requires a spot

in space and/or
time to which you’d want
to go back. No,

the problem you’ve got,
is worse, 

I'm afraid—and 

a whole lot less

sophisticated 

than that: it's

your past—not as 

want ad, or concussed,

or collectible,

but irrevocably
scalded and
cauterized shut. Think of it as

an Imaginal mic drop.
But to be 

more upfront: 

what you caught
is called 

mythlessness. Period. Full stop.

SEMASIOLOGICAL DIGEST

And in the beginning
wasn’t the word,

since before the word

was the letter.

It must’ve been like
a rehearsal

for rehearsal;

picture: graphemes

begetting

phonemes

begetting

morphemes

begetting

pairs of each other—

like the clean
and the base,

and the bass

and the treble,

and the troubled

and the saved,

and the pained
and the clever—

all of which, 

despite being cousins,

first mimed 

kissing, 

then loving, 

then marriage—

then, buying land 

for a farmyard and settling.

They soon mouthed
giving birth, 

and finally, toiling 

to separate 

substance
from purport—or

the wheat of the precious

little bit that matters

from the chaff of all 

that doesn’t.

WHY LIFE SUCKS

You were not expecting
a scientific
answer to this, I know—

but lately, 

it seems to take
so damn much energy

just to ask the right question,

that the mass of every well-

intentioned 

(not to 

mention simple 

blithe) inquiry

tends to collapse
in on itself and
form a small black hole.

And of course, 

once you get enough 

of those little 

fuckers all 

up in your

system, woe betide you—

because the galaxies
of every good
intention and conviction

which were floating
in the synaptic
gaps between your neurons,

alas, can’t
outweigh, outrace,
or outlast

the density 

of cynical 

disbelief—nor 

the suction 

of such deep 

suspicion.