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So I go around in the bucket of my skull,
Free will, predestination, foot odors, love life regrets,
A clattering pipe in the wall,
Scraps of poems flaring like match heads—
In all shapes
He found a secret and mysterious soul,
A fragrance and a spirit of strange meaning.
Perhaps my bucket has a leak,
Likely some rust…
Like Wordsworth I’m more than happy
In the childhoods—
In my grandmother’s attic with a Victrola.
How odd, its needle like the proboscis
Of an insect, the platter covered with green baize
As if one might throw down poker chips instead of a record.
It was most certainly a gambler’s machine.
I’d put the needle on a fast spinning disc
To hear something uncanny…arias and folk songs
Sung by dead people.
The wind up mechanism with its crank…

Wordsworth’s shoes warn’t no dancer’s dainties
His frock possessed nothing of the saintly.
Poems will always defy the haberdash
In William’s case he also earned some cash…

**

In a silly mood just own it. Shove Wittgenstein under the sofa.
“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”

But only under the couch….

**

There are many jokes devised on couches I’m certain
And more than a few came from behind the curtains.
Of men, jokes that start on mattresses
Generally lead to fratricides….
Steal this if you must
In jokes we trust….

**
“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”
Don ’t I know it, Wittgenstein.
Let’s not drink the turpentine.
Not today at any rate.
“Don’t for heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense!
But you must pay attention to your nonsense.”

**

People on TV tearing each other apart…
Fifty years ago, people on TV tearing each other apart.
America, always like a dog at bay.
As James Tate said,
“and the Cokes were far far away….”

Shoe, I have not loved you with my whole heart;
Truss, I fear you’re coming…

Emergence of old age.

Dante: “we call shaggy all words that are ornamental.”
Ornaments of this aging vulgar tongue…
Pray the noblest words alone remain in the sieve….

For Dante, language was new—his language, the juicy vernacular. English ain’t so new anymore. “Make it new, make it new,” he cries, waving his stick. That “he” is me.

Spoon me some glottal stops, shout me some noble ballate.
Had me a literary education. Learned about recitations charmingly delivered. But by night I kicked frozen turds on the icy street. In those days I talked to anyone. Fable fable.

Gettin’ old. Just want to rest my head on the bosom of moral philosophy. Ain’t that the way of it? Start and end with moldy books.

Shall I say Wordsworth—
Skiff of mind in the shallows
All those minnows bright as dimes…

O past tense, call the goddess
We’ll stop here
Step from the boat
Walk across the lilies.

**

Passing houses in any neighborhood—“that looks like my boyhood home….”

It was said of Dante “no other poet knew how to praise or blame with such excellence….” (Was it Benvenuto?)

I walk past houses….praise and blame the memories….

**

“Love insists the loved loves back” (Dante)

Love this moment.

Yesterday I wrote about “the semblance state”—the predicament of this nation, these United States, where seeming competence has taken the place of governance. I gave no quarter to the Republicans or the Democrats. Both parties spent the last forty years greasing the engines of profits over vision, eschewing long term plans, caring not a whit about the average citizen (who we once called middle class but who’s now fallen from the wheel of fortune into the soupy suspension of the new poverty: both parties share the blame.) In the semblance state hardly anyone shoulders responsibility. There’s only pathos, raw anger directed at whoever doesn’t look like you. In this way the GOP and the Democrats (and their splinters) are un-American. Even the IWW believed in communitarian principles.

In her excellent book “American Enlightenments” Caroline Winterer reminds us that 18th century Americans held a different view of happiness than the self-help individualized notion most people cling to today. She writes:

“The happiness of humanity. Crèvecoeur’s words—and Thomas Jefferson’s far more famous ones in the Declaration of Independence, “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”—remind us that the pursuit of happiness was one of the principal quests of enlightened people. But happiness meant something different in the eighteenth century from its meaning today. In our era, an industry of self-help books reminds us that modern happiness is an emotional state of self-fulfillment and personal well-being. Eighteenth-century people would have been puzzled by our narrow definition. For them, happiness first of all had expansive, public meanings. People at that time often spoke of a happy people and a happy society. A society was happy when its people enjoyed the security, stability, and peace that allowed them to prosper. The purpose of government was to create public or social happiness by shielding the state from foreign enemies and internal threats. The opposite of public happiness was not sorrow but anarchy or tyranny. Educated leaders would be the architects of the good government that led to a happy society.”

Watching Donald Trump ignore the greatest public health crisis in history reveals the petty tyranny of a self-help mind which holds that successful people eschew any engagement with social happiness and indeed, must hate government itself. In the semblance state where most individuals believe they’re victims and that malign others are getting more than their fair share well, the happy society is not only inadmissible, it should be despised. This is why Trump spent Mothers Day sending over a hundred vitriolic, childish, toxic “tweets” while ignoring the climbing death rates in the US.

Little fuhrer feet, tippy toe, tippy toe,
Donald Trump in his “onesie” pajamas
Comfy tyrant still a babe
Late night twittering with alphabet blocks…
Niceums little baby named Trumpy Tuckoo
Sucks milk and iodine from a rubber shoe,
I’m a big boy, he shouts at nurse
And real children die in the grass…

In her excellent book “Dear Life: Caring for the Elderly” Karen Hitchcock writes: “If we are all just economic units who lift or lean, then very little is “lost” when a nursing home resident or anyone getting on in their years dies prematurely. In fact money might be saved – one less nursing-home bed to fund, and the kids can finally get their hands on the house.”

This describes the GOP’s stampede to re-open the American economy without healthcare, testing, oversight, and social justice. Think about Donald Trump, mask-less last week while loudspeakers played Paul McCartney’s Bond theme “Live and Let Die.” (I thought, perhaps they can do a mix of McCartney with Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger?”)

Like all disabled I’ve lived the effects of symbolic reductions owing to social constructions of economy and its Darwinisms. Despite what I may be able to do or can do, my blindness sails ahead of my life like the carved figurehead at the bow of a ship.

I’m one of the millions the new GOP believes is worth an early grave.

Remember the quaint old days when Barack Obama was trying to create a Romney style health care plan and Chuck Grassley said if the plan was passed it would lead to “death panels” and these in turn would ‘un-plug grandma.”? Remember? I do. Well it’s way beyond Grandma now kiddies—if you’re not rich they want you to step up and offer to die behind the counter in the dry cleaning store. Hurry up! If you drop dead more of us can get our hands on the house!

I haven’t heard Chuck Grassley speaking up. What’s the matter Chuck? Your home state of Iowa is pushing innocent people back to work with absolute cruelty and no public health plans.

As Lou Reed once put it: “Let’s get ‘em out on the dirty boulevard.”

It was the age of high fidelity and there I was in the attic with a victrola. How odd it was. Its needle like the proboscis of an insect. The platter covered with green baize, as if you might throw down poker chips instead of a record. It was most certainly a gambler’s machine. I’d put the needle down on the fast spinning disc and hear something uncanny…arias and folk songs sung by dead people. Gambling, ghosts, the wind up mechanism with its baleful crank.

We are at a party that doesn’t love us—the line is Transtromer’s. Life after life we say it. We whisper it in the Prado or in the hills above Naples where the oracle knew forsakenness. We’re at a party. Outside, Basho’s broken willow. The Cumaean Sibyl puts her tongue to the oak leaves. Numerals of loneliness scatter in the grass.