The Law of Spirit, Analogy Two

God's light is there to share not just receive,
like the time my mob-connected uncle delivered the Stanley Cup
into our kitchen, instead of my father throwing him out,
I wish we had filled it with harlequin ice cream and maraschino cherries
and invited the neighborhood to share a shiny cathedral of gold
for just one night. It would have looked like the Mayan ruins
to Catherwood, the blueprint for Hollywood.

The Law of Spirit, Analogy One

It turns out I paid more in taxes this year
than the ten largest American corporations combined.
Who knew?
And while I did get a toll-booth guy to spot me five cents,
I didn't get no $800 billion dollar gift like they did.
Isn't that great?
Just imagine how many more jobs and opportunities we'd have
if those corporations were allowed to fail?
Free energy, real health care, our work used for goods not debt -
how holy that it is not the way it could be -
that we can dream.

Nine Poems by Charles Baudelaire

I don't like to look back, but in honor of Charles Baudelaire's 190th birthday today, here's a sampling of nine translations from 1999.

ILL-STARRED
To bear a weight that cannot be borne,
Sisyphus, even you aren't that strong,
Although your heart cannot be torn
Time is short and Art is long.

Far from celebrated sepulchers
Toward a solitary graveyard
My heart, like a drum muffled hard
Beats a funeral march for the ill-starred.

—Many jewels are buried or shrouded
In darkness and oblivion's clouds,
Far from any pick or drill bit,

Many a flower unburdens with regret
Its perfume sweet like a secret;
In profoundly empty solitude to sit.

BEACONS
Reubens, river of forgetfulness, garden of sloth,
Pillow of wet flesh that one cannot love,
But where life throngs and seethes without cease
Like the air in the sky and the water in the seas.

Leonardo da Vinci, sinister mirror,
Where these charming angels with sweet smiles
Charged with mystery, appear in shadows
Of glaciers and pines that close off the country.

Rembrandt, sad hospital full of murmurs
Decorated only with a crucifix,
Where tearful prayers arise from filth
And a ray of winter light crosses brusquely.

Michelangelo, a wasteland where one sees Hercules
Mingling with Christ, and rising in a straight line
Powerful phantoms that in the twilight
Tear their shrouds with stretching fingers.

Rage of a boxer, impudence of a faun,
You who gather together the beauty of the boor,
Your big heart swelling with pride at man defective and yellow,
Puget, melancholy emperor of the poor.

Watteau, this carnival of illustrious hearts
Like butterflies, errant and flamboyant,
In the cool decor, with delicate lightning in the chandeliers
Crossing the madness of the twirling ball.

Goya, nightmare of unknown things,
Fetuses roasting on the spit,
Harridans in the mirror and naked children
Tempting demons by loosening their stockings.

Delacroix, haunted lake of blood and evil angels,
Shaded by evergreen forests of dark firs,
Where, under a grieving sky, strange fanfares
Pass, like a gasping breath of Weber.

These curses, these blasphemies, these moans,
These ecstasies, these tears, these cries of "Te Deum"
Are an echo reiterated in a thousand mazes;
It is for mortal hearts a divine opium!

It is a cry repeated by a thousand sentinels,
An order returned by a thousand megaphones,
A beacon lighting a thousand citadels
A summons to hunters lost in the wide woods.

For truly, O Lord, what better testimony
Can we give to our dignity
Than this burning sob that rolls from age to age
And comes to die on the shore of Your eternity?

CARRION
Recall the object that we saw, my soul,
That summer morning sweet and beautiful,
A squalid carrion along the path's detour
On a bed strewn with pebbles,

Legs in the air, like a lewd female,
Burning and sweating toxins,
Its manner nonchalant and cynical,
Its belly full of exhalations.

The sun emblazons this spoiled decay,
To bring it to a boil,
And reclaim for Nature in a hundred ways
All She had joined from the soil;

And the sky regards the superb carcass
Like a flower it has brought to bloom.
The odor is so strong of putridness
You believe you will faint from the fumes.

As the flies buzz over the fetid belly,
A black battalion spreads
Of larvae slowly oozing like jelly
Over these living shreds.

It subsides and climbs, like a wave,
Or like a sparkling surge;
This swollen body, emptied like a cave,
Seems to live and grow more large.

And this world produces a strange music,
Like running water and the wind,
Or the grain winnowed under the rhythmic
Stirring and turning of the fan.

The forms turn to dream and disappear,
A rough sketch that comes slowly,
That the canvas forgets and the artist refigures
From his memory.

A yapping dog behind the rocks
With angry eye regards us,
Waiting us out like a spying fox
For his own piece of the carcass.

—And nevertheless you too will come to manure,
This horrible infection,
Star of my eyes, sun of my nature,
You, my angel and passion!

Yes! That's what you'll be, O queen of the graces,
After the last sacraments,
When you are choked with the grown-over grasses,
And mold made of your remnants.

Alas, O my beauty! Tell the worms,
When it's you their kisses get a taste of,
That I have guarded your divine essence and form
With all of my decomposed love.

THE POSSESSED
The sun is clothed in crepe. Like you, mistress.
O Moon of my life, bundled up in shadow;
Sleep or smoke as you like; be mute, be callow
And plunge into the gulf of listlessness

I love you thus! Nevertheless, if you wish today
Like an eclipsed star bringing forth a penumbra
To strut your Folly unencumbered,
So be it! Charming dagger, burst from your case!

Ignite your eyes with the lustrous flame!
Ignite desire for the fools to claim!
Morbid or petulant, all of you is my pleasure;

Be what you want, black night, red aurora;
In my entire, trembling body there is not a fiber
That doesn't cry: O my dear Beelzebub, I adore you!

FOREVER THE SAME (Semper Eadem)
From where, tell me please, did this strange sadness come,
Rising like the sea over rocks black and bare?
—When harvest time for our hearts is done,
Living becomes evil. This secret is known to all who are aware,

This sorrow very simple, this pain not mysterious,
Explodes, like your joy, with a glittering rush.
Cease then your searching, O belle curious!
And though your voice may be soft, please hush!

Hush your ignorant mouth! Your infantile cackle!
Soul always stolen, heart always crippled!
But Death, more than Life, ties us to its wishes.

So please, let my heart become drunk on a lie
And plunge like a dream in your beautiful eyes
And doze for a while in the shade of your lashes.

WINE OF THE RAGMEN
Often, with a street lamp's blootshot clarity,
As the wind beats its flame to irregularity,
In the heart of an old town, labyrinth of mud
Where humanity swarms like maggots in a restless flood,

Here comes a ragman, shaking his head,
Stumbling, bumping into walls, uninhibited,
Oblivious to rats, and like a poet, perplexed,
Pouring out his heart in glorious projects.

He takes oaths, offers sublime dictum,
Buries the wicked, lifts up the victims,
And under a sky like a suspended canopy
Gets high on the splendors of his own probity.

Yes, these people harassed by vexing parentage,
Ground down by work and tormented by the age,
Exhausted and broke, collapsed on a heap of debris,
Vomiting across enormous Paris,

Return, wearing the perfume of wine barrels,
With their companions, gone grey in their quarrels,
Whose moustaches hang like old flags.
Banners and flowers salute their rags,

Triumphal arches stand erect, solemn wizardry!
And in the deafening and astounding orgy
Of the bugles, the drum, the cries and the sun,
Glory comes to those drunk with love ones!

Thus passed through frivolous Humanity
The resplendent gold of wine, the dazzling treasury;
Of its feats by the throats of men it sings
And by its gifts it reigns like the true kings.

To drown rancor and soothe the indolence
Of all these wretched old men who die in silence,
Out of sympathy their sleep was made by the Divine;
Mankind, sacred children of the Sun, supplied the Wine!

METAMORPHOSIS OF A VAMPIRE
The woman however, with her mouth of strawberry,
While twisting like a snake on the embers,
And kneading her breasts on the andiron's shoulders,
Let slip these words that her musk seemed to carry:
—"Me, I have the damp lip, and I know the science
Of losing in a bed the ancient conscience.
I dry all tears on my triumphant breasts,
And make old men laugh with a child's carelessness.
I replace the moon, the sun, the sky and the stars
To those who see me without a veil, bare,
I am, my dear scientist, a scholar of pleasure,
When I choke a man in my dreaded arms,
Or when I give my neck to the bite's abandon
And my breasts, fragile and robust, timid and free
Swoon on these mattresses with emotion,
And the impotent angels damn themselves for me!"

When she had sucked from my bones all the marrow,
And languidly turned my face toward her
To return a kiss of love, I did not live any more
Except as one stuck to her side, all full of puss!
I closed my two eyes, in cold terror,
And when I reopened them I saw with a vividness,
Instead of the mighty mannequin at my side,
Withdrawing all the blood I could provide,
There trembled in confusion some skeletal remains
Returning the cry of a weathervane
Or a sign, at the end of an iron upright
That balances the wind during winter nights.

THE DEATH OF LOVERS
We will have beds of fleeting odors,
Couches deep as memorials,
And strange flowers on the stairs
To blossom for us under skies more beautiful.

Following each other 'til the last warmths came,
From our two hearts, two vast torches will pour
The reflection of their double flames
On our two spirits, these twin mirrors.

One evening made of pink and mystical blue,
We will exchange a single flash from afar,
Like a long sob, charged with adieux;

And later an Angel, the gates ajar,
Will joyously restore to life the ores,
The dead flames and the tarnished mirrors.

TO THE READER
Stupidity, mistake, stinginess, vice
Absorb our minds and drain our bodies force
And we feed our kindly remorse
Like beggars nourish their lice.

Our sins are persistent, our repentance lacking,
We will pay dearly to confess
And will end gaily back in the muddy mess
Believing our vile tears can wash the stains from their backing.

On the pillow of evil is Satan, greatest of kings, philosophers, priests,
Who continually swings our delighted souls
And turns the rich metal of our will
To vapor with his lucent alchemies.

It's the Devil who pulls the strings we press!
In repugnant things we find charms kept;
Each day towards Hell we descend another step
Without horror, to traverse the fetid darkness

Like the wastrel who kicks and bites
The martyred tit of an ancient hooker
We steal a passing clandestine pleasure
Like juice from old oranges squeezed tight.

Teeming like a million worms
Demons people our brains
And, when we breathe, in our lungs death remains
Drop down, invisible river, with mute moans

If rape, poison, dagger, fire
Have not yet embroidered a pleasing design,
The banal canvas has our pitiful fate defined
It is our soul, alas, not daring to aspire.

Yet among the jackals, panthers and hounds,
The monkeys, scorpions, vultures and snakes,
The monsters that yap, howl, groan, crawl and shake
In the squalid menagerie where our defects are unbound,

There is one more mean, more vulgar, more ugly, more cold;
Although it lets no great gesture, no great cry, free
It would easily turn the earth to debris
And in a yawn would swallow the globe.

It's Boredom!—Uncontrolled tears make the eye thicken,
It dreams of scaffolds and smoking a hookah,
You know, hypocrite reader, this sensitive creature
—brother reader—my likeness—my twin.

Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” and the Film Noir Femme Fatale

An essay in the French style.

A casual film buff would probably conclude that the femme fatale archetype – the alluring female version of what used to be known as a sociopath – is one of the two or three dominant tropes in the film noir genre. “Pretty to think so,” as Hemingway wrote in Paris, for the French terms sound and feel so much alike (apropos for the only film genre named by critics). Sadly, I am hard-pressed (or is it hard-boiled) to find more than a scattering of movies graced by this lady draped in black. Female characters become less prominent and certainly less virtuous in the film noir cycle, but the true black widow – as in real life – is hard to find. To what, one may ask, do we owe all this fuss?

As with most of the literary elements of film noir, discussion of the femme fatale starts with three pulp writers, Baltimoreans Dashiell Hammett and James Cain, and Los Angelino Raymond Chandler. Characteristic of the way they invert and re-imagine dimestore novel clichés, all three writers feature fleshed-out versions of the “lady of ill repute” character. Cain takes it the farthest, of course, essentially creating in novels like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice the gender-reversed idea of a woman solely motivated by greed and power, who ruthlessly uses sex instead of a gun to get her way (and to combat her perceived powerlessness). It’s the male characters, though, that are of the most interest. While the women are somewhat moribund, the men find, in the pulse of sexual attraction, the proclivity to become sociopaths themselves – their personalities become fractured, MK Ultra style, so they look on their deeds with both detachment and horror. The shock for 1940s movie audiences, however, was not so much the compromised man as the heartless woman. Films to that time invariably portrayed women as the moral center of the plot, the ones who subtly directed the characters to right action in the face of fear and temptations for wrong. Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity crushed that gender stereotype like a cigarette in her pointy stiletto heels, turning sex from a way to redemption to just another addiction that led, as all those movies do, to an appointment with a very hot chair.

“You’re good,” the words of Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) to Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), similarly shocked sensibilities, because the man became in that moment the arbiter of morality, the mother so to speak. What sparked his compliment though was his recognition of her as someone who does what he does. He is torn not so much by physical attraction as admiration for her ruthless tactics, for it’s his soul-searching of what it means to be heroic in a corrupt world that keeps him from the kind of effortless deviousness she demonstrates. That’s characteristic of Hammett’s controlled world, where rules can be sussed no matter how depraved the human condition (for this reason I have always found Clint Eastwood’s characters as direct antecedents of Hammett’s – the way one must constantly and cleverly negotiate between the rules of the criminal and the rules of the authority).

Chandler explodes that pretense of rules – and his treatment of women serves that end – portraying a world where the cops, instead of being obstacles that must be, as part of a code, fed no information, become worse than the criminals, additional adversaries that must be factored in, as NBA teams of today sometimes must battle both the opposing team and the corrupted referees. Unlike overpaid superstars, however, Marlowe refuses to give in, or rather he’s smart enough to simply watch the behavior, and find therein the keys to his own survival. In his discerning state, all around him become robots, programmed by some evil force that is always just a step beyond his ken. It’s only when you think you know what drives people, as poor Moose did in Farewell My Lovely, that you fall.

Hollywood had little patience for these kinds of subtleties. The typical Tinseltown dish, outside of no-budget outriders like Detour (which actually portrayed a three-dimensional demented woman, it wasn’t all about the guy), was sex-kitten romps like Gilda, where the guy is just deluded by jealousy and the girl can’t help it. Rita Hayworth there and in The Lady from Shanghai may have been outside the bounds of 1940’s decency conventions, but her behavior today would be considered laughably child-like (her actual life, which included her father sexually abusing her with her mother beside them in bed and dressing her up as his 12-year old wife in public among other things, was a completely different matter).

Most noirs were standard police-procedure yarns, precursors of Dragnet, about the seedy exteriors, the night-for-night lighting, the claustrophobic camera angles, the moral ambiguity. What’s shocking today about these movies is not the diminished role of females, but the openness of police corruption. Today, woman can be as degraded, duplicitous or manipulative as a filmmaker wants them to be, but there’s still the attitude of “one bad apple spoils the bunch” when it comes to the portrayal of law enforcement. Not so for the noirs of the 40’s and 50’s, where cops routinely give in to temptation, go sadistic on crooks and informants equally, avoid risks, miss obvious clues, and in general honor the blue code more in the breach than in the observance. Movies like Rogue Cop and Shield for Murder delve deeper into the sociology of this, presenting in typical message picture fashion how those who protect and serve are falling further and further behind the suburban norm of affluence. While post-noirs like Chinatown peel the cameras back to a wide-angle look at the corruption near the top, original noirs didn’t extend the critical gaze to judges, lawyers or politicians. The all-seeing camera eye stays at the individual level and the viewer is forced to see horrible crimes committed (often involving women as victims) because the cops are clueless.

I think the reason the femme fatale has taken hold in our rearview noir mirror is due to its later development in Hollywood, with movies like Body Heat and Black Widow and extending to today’s most interesting genre, the Reality or Paranoia genre. Similar to noir, Reality or Paranoia portrays a world unmoored from the safety of morality and convention, but it goes much deeper into the idea of being manipulated in our thoughts and actions by outside, unknowable forces. The common situation of all these films (a partial list can be found here) is where the hero/heroine never knows if the dream/nightmare world he/she is experiencing is real or a manipulation of reality/perception by unknown (usually malign) forces. The sheer number of pictures in this genre, its relevance to the contemporary mindset, and particularly its eerie “true-to-life” resemblance to the glut of Monarch / Bluebeam / MK Ultra programs among Hollywood stars (these are people mind controlled to unconsciously have sex, kill or say anything on command by “masters” who’d created in them multiple personalities through deliberate and prolonged childhood sexual, emotional and drug abuse) awaits further, systematic investigation.

For today’s purposes, I’m intrigued by the power of a woman (or man) who does not respond to suggestions of love in the sincere, giving and expected 1-to-1 way humans interact – in other words, how 2-D people so often “win” in a 3-D world. That’s the essential role of the femme fatale, to disrupt the normal relation. That’s also the role of the sociopath, who pretends to care for you as a person, but behind the eyes is always probing for weaknesses of compassion to exploit. Confronting such a stark reality is what is at the heart of Shelley’s great “Mont Blanc” poem. I know that fountains of ink have gone into glossing this formidable masterpiece that reads like an homage to film noir. But it’s hard to argue with the idea that the poem exists as a sort of end-stop to the Romantic movement (narrowly defined), in which the imagined Romantic dream of being at one with nature is finally acknowledged as a delusion. Similarly the dream of love between a man and a woman relies on a ratio of giving and receiving that is forever unmeasured, because all it takes is a wink to think that that person’s very being has just been given up to yours. Birds, even branches on trees, wink, and so one is quite permitted to construct elaborate monuments to one’s ego, where everything around one is a function of oneself.

Shelley starts the poem in this vein, with the grand poetic transference we love those beautiful Romantic Poet souls for: “giant brood of pines …children of elder time, in whose devotion the chainless winds still come and ever came to drink their odours,” “holding an unremitting interchange with the clear universe of things around.” But, as he goes deeper, beyond a Wordsworthian marking of territory between the self and other, “some veil robes some unsculptured image,” and he finally must reach “remote, serene, and inaccessible” Mont Blanc:

A city of death, distinct with many a tower
And wall impregnable of beaming ice.
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing
Its destined path, or in the mangled soil
Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks' drawn down
From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world,
Never to be reclaimed. The dwelling place
Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil
Their food and their retreat for ever gone,
So much of life and joy is lost. The race
Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling
Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream,
And their place is not known.

Can you just see the lighting of John Alton or Harry Wild infuse this city?

Working Day With Lack of Sleep

From the time the jets overhead start brewing coffee
to the line of Indians at 4 o'clock in front of the tea machine
everyone's a flag trapped in barbed wire
staring at a darkness that isn't there.
They tidy up their little piece of the larger chaos,
thinking themselves too small to warrant sanity
but big enough to feel responsible for everyone else's stupidity.
The best expressions of their minds, hearts and spirits
are thrown in the abyss like a bejeweled virgin to a volcano
to measure its depths, which helps in the debates
between those who know enough to be dangerous
and those who don't, the peasant arguments that never end
as they wait for the decider like children wait for Santa Clause
but deciders can only decide
what they don't want
when they see it.
How the sausage is made is irrelevant, the bosses say,
winners keep their mouths shut, their noses clean,
their powder dry, their asses covered, and they learn
when to dole out blame like penny candy,
for all of it is just a game, 
it isn't life or death
not like it is for those who work
to have health care
so they can die sooner.

Beats daytime television any day.

White Crane Eating Snakes

The other is the same, somehow.
The boy is really girl, the stone another star.
We cultivate extremes but we can't escape that fact.
A trail of black always flows from the white.
A bird taking flight lives on in my mind.

Harlem Ghosts

The City brings the seedy grandeur,
The occult stonework stains,
The peeling paint on brickface,
The rust-washed water towers,

Cathedrals with their lime-green domes
Now smoked-glass auditoriums
With 50-year-old leaves and flowers,
Rooftop railings of stone,

Brick mosaics rubbed away
From smiling keystone teeth
And men with beards who never smile
For pigeons to hide under, from rain.

If we were to renew all this
It would be ruined.
The children playing in the dust
Would disappear.
The yellowed books on window shelves
Would lose their words.

The students and the poor
Must inhabit this musée d’amour,
Must pull the white blinds down
Flags of surrender
And change inside,
To salve the city loneliness
With ghosts,
To hail the love and laughter
Long denied.

For people aren’t atoms,
They are molecules
Bound in magnet likeness
Frequencies,
Those seen and unseen equally.

Last Observations before Percy Awakes

April is cruel for chimneys and historians,
aficionados of the color brown
but those who like bird scales
and pink upon their trees
are usually pleased - it's a matter of taste,
what people see in the way things appear,
the subtleties culled by the eye.

It's brave to see winter the purest of jewels
and kind to believe in the new splash of moss,
how worms and mosquitoes are vital to life
and flowers mementos of death.

For each to his own the symbolism springs,
the flow of all thought through position,
to make of a canvas as bold and as blank
as the sun on the frill ends of clouds.

The Infinite

From the Italian of Count Giacomo Leopardi

This lonely hill was always dear to me,
With hedge that blocked from view the final sun.
I’d stare at endless space and never see
A vestige of this place I knew as human

Just silence, just a quiet so profound
I’d pretend to be in thought so that my heart
Would not be scared. And as the wind
Came rustling through the trees, I came apart,

Became the boundless silence to its voice,
Became the infinite, a single mind
That heard dead seasons turn their memories loose
To make a new life singular in sound.

My thoughts drown in this vast immensity:
How sweet to be the shipwrecked in this sea.

Confessions of a Hermit Crab

The sludge of classic pop stars filters through my bones,
the snow of old sit coms,
the dot com archives of alchemy
sift like cards through library fingers
with my dreams of being a pastry chef or ball player,
the ringer of the bells at Rapa Nui.

Anything but these eyes
that take it all on
with nothing left of the inside.

They're all escaping, these illusions
that what was once within these shells
is not here now,
too precious for obtaining,
still there is no facet missing
without a form.

Talking About Cars on the Train with Frank

The ambulance chaser is a regular car guy too,
an eight-cylinder Mercedes S is his walking-around vehicle,
he has a bar-hopping Ferrari he likes to watch his wife drive
and a bunch of old muscle cars, all modified,
the floor in his garage is like kitchen tile.

Must Be Some Kind of Misunderstanding

A rainbow of rebel crocuses in the snow,
the daffodils know not to attempt
such insults to God
but Man cannot stop
His self-flagelation
for only sinners can be purified,
as out of abscess (He thinks)
tulips grow.

Nothing Opposes the Positive

I guess there are people dying
in this post-realistic world
but the only tears I see
are on the ground

like nuts in front of squirrels;
how we work to integrate
views from clouds
with rain on skin.

Deprogramming the Tycoon

I found a mogul's cigar
broken in two
next to a roadside sewer.
I lit it up as my ancestors did,
out leapt spirit and the air became healed
and centuries flew as if we were sharing
that first fire chalice between us
on that cold Atlantic beach.

Notes from Deep inside the Rabbithole

Reality keeps modulating like Barry Manilow
But there’s nothing but the usual
Sex slaves from Satanic rituals on TV,
HAARP-wave terrorist earthquakes,
Nuclear bombs on the Middle East,
The hopelessness of the controllers
Who know they have no funk
And thus no future, who know they cannot
Cross the barrier without love,
Bless them, what they call fact is fiction
And fiction just a way to acquiescence to their fact
Like Hitler was created so we’d acquiesce to Israel
And Vietnam started (like fluoride for the pineal)
To accommodate LSD
And bring forth what a recovering psychonaut might call
Trespassing on the stargate like a criminal.
Bless them how they serve God, Lucifer and us
As we feed like stocks on information
All of it subtly laced with poison
And the hand that kindly drops it will not share
The secrets on the higher step.
Bless us that we want it just like that –
We like to transform porn into the holy,
Prefer trained clones as politicians,
Want to turn the world on to our toxins.
Bless me too how I liked the mansion
With its Spanish stucco tiles on the guard tower,
The stooped and miserable insect people
Inside, how they excited me.

It’s belief that plagues the non-believer.
Are the faithful really enslaved for making belief
Matter? - when it merely sparkles, phosphorescent,
Waiting to be set free, the panther in a world of vapor
Pouncing on air and drawing blood.

The Most I Can Say for Townes Van Zandt

Autumn is still waiting underneath all of this
The plates breaking on the solitude

The wilderness of numbness
The mirrors that can only blind

Sin is all that Man is good for
That's how we live together
Squeezing out each others souls like paper towels

And yapping like Dalmatians
The answers to our questions
To please a face of stone

Oh that rock is mighty handy
To keep my ass from floating

Through the Headphones

A baby's constant cry
is forced to turn to beauty,
bent notes, fixed scales.
Expression discriminates in time
but the anguish never ends.

After the Flood

Prisons of crosses
Buddhas in pens
What they have left us
Is so misread:
Bodies drowned in knowledge
Never woken up by saviors
In their minds

The City at Night

Stars above
Stars below
Love
Crosses borders
And we look
Beyond our eyes

Dinner with Silver

San Clemente, CA

The conversation turns from refi rates and whether the Lakers will repeat
to conjectures about heaven, disquisitions on the odds of later lives
as light rays or as Mumbai untouchables on the grinding karmic wheel,
or in God's jeweled home, or gone like lamps in the vastnesses of space...
The dessert arrives just in time, and the talk turns to strawberries
that grow down the street, as sweet as maple in the mist of these hills,
and how one day they'd like to go again, through the green veins in the
ocean,
to ride the Arabian horses on Santa Catalina Island.

holyhouse

San Clemente, CA

God is surely closer
than these ancient Chinese characters.
It takes years to smooth the ash like peanut butter
to a still, untroubled surface.
It takes lifetimes to memorize
all the buddhas names.
One can see inside the smoke
a sitting figure in the ebony chair.
The lady of benevolence - Maitreya and Lady Mary to name a few
incarnations - will walk out of the picture
to help you learn to shape your treasures with your hands
but her image is so striking, you hardly need her to.
A voice outside of human form speaks ancient Chinese words
only a sincere heart can understand.
Heaven through the altar
brings certain, joyous smiles.
Gift oranges are laid there
and they can heal us.

The grace of ritual, the side from which to bow,
the order that the candles must be lit, and with which
incantation...

The Gods must take off their shoes
and wait outside,
for in this pavilion,
the pantheon of worshipers
connect in love and peace
through time and space,
find faith they'll find the answers
to the riddles elders laid:
sin, error, fear,
the narrow path of right,
of duty and propriety
- to hope one day to know
the stillness that is smaller
than a molecule.
These climbers of the inaccessible mountain,
the cultivators of its fog,
who share like gum the sweetest leaves
of the rare trees in the sky.
Every sip of tea
is almost like transcendence
and soon we'll be prepared
to embrace the turning moments
without mistaken lifetimes
that compel our staining touch.

Meanwhile, the sun has turned to purple
and covered up the sky
and rolling pearls of surf bring in electric blue
on the beach's mirror shards.
The shapes of all one can want or conceive
wash up and dissolve in the flow:
strange beings, mad blossoms, sacred herbs...

The men and women disguised in white
scatter lilies and chant for dragons.
Heaven's heart refuses
to stop pumping.

The Dream Cannot be Explained

San Clemente, CA

The antiques store
someone else's memories
until a dream hits
and one pulls into shore
lost in the facets of oneself
while staring at an Orafors crystal

End-of-Year Bonfire

We drank snowjack as tax receipts
burned in the fat of the fire
with all the records of your work
like leaves of African violet
as all that you've learned and left behind
is consumed like everything real
as soon as it shapes into form.

My open heart, like this fire, nothing but desire
builds ladders made of light
from the bellows of the thinking wind -
some living crystal glistens
in the center of my skull:
these archetypes are just projections,
the snow, your face, the zebra wood,
the branching of the all into my shadow.

Afternoon Constitutional

The icons of the American empire
lord over us in the sky
while the street is full of Egyptians
who won't wear Ferrari ties.

The people have always had
all of the power
but they savored the tales
of far-away wars,
ignored the local, what's closest, most personal:
Love's irrefutable force.

Abstactius Deo Magis Vivere

The sky could be filled
with mind's endless chaos
or with the blue of spirit

there is a choice

to see inside without the words
or form by touch the equations of the blind

to gaze from behind the eternal face
or resist the inner tyrant

there is a choice
and there are consequences
but there are no costs
on either side

they grow unrecognized
as life grows
from its seed

never seeing all that's around
is only itself

Red

Her own spinning top -
there's a beauty to those storms in the sky,
the current shooting like trees,
the thunder of complaint
interrogates my turbid surface,
shaping me to some valence,
a responsive froth
that won't stay put,
that only honors
tidal promptings.

But there's another lady
inside the lake
who moves within the waves,
her eyes as large
as her heart is wide,
she whispers "always
I feel everything as you do."

The Day in Stages

Morning Solitude...
No skunk grass, no blades of sun
just February's caves and the cavepeople of New England
who boil up the slugs inside their skulls' cauldron
never to be other than a smile or word, impermeable
yet making of all dropped around them a world, to be shared:
the jerky, the gumdrops, the paraffin...
"Tell me who you are
so I may know
myself.
"Tell me who I am
so I may think of you
- what you do."
Birds and squirrels plunge their noses to the snow,
there's something unseen that nourishes
some scavenging needs to be done.
...How quickly the flesh turns to spirit,
one touch and it's gone.

Afternoon Conversations...
The pigeons on the snow,
unknowable pigeons, unknowable snow,
still hypnotize with gentle coos
of nonsense soon transformed
to consolation from the One,
for even the forms are sensing organs,
the containers are alive,
the 1's dance with zeros,
the cells birth the truth of the whole
by staying in borders
and letting the beautiful illusion flow -
everyone I know
is disidentifying,
letting go of the wheel
what they know of control -
for we have to learn the lines
and there's no script.

Evening Entertainment...
Love is too pure, too much the essence of who we are
we must, down here, turn it into a contract
with iron-bound laws
that break at the slightest of whimpers,
for when two become one, there's always another one
waiting to be torn from the wholeness,
to be taught about the body, how it must be fucked and fed
regularly (something that is not true, apparently),
and be sent, because the love of a couple is too urgent,
to the wilderness of does who go looking for the one
who will pay them enough attention, and the bucks
who pursue those easiest to lure.
Nature abhors this vacuum it created,
the desperate hunger for love,
the odds are greater when two anyone's can hook up
at random, any connection is perfection
when all can find the one,
but the secrets that are shared
in secret sacred places
have a way of staying secret
and the words turned by loving into poems
turn to grocery lists and therapist notes,
and the search for the beloved never ends
but in the meantime you can love,
you can live your vast desire into truth
and learn the limits of what is allowed,
for love's gifts are not contractual,
there is nothing there specified for you,
and when the ink you signed in turns to blood
your needs become a weight you must shake off
like water droplets sloughing from a dog,
a purifying turn
as the veil slips off from
your true, eternal lover.

The Virtuous Circle

Where "Jesus is Lord"
street crime can't be far away
Hell created when the natural is forbidden

The Universe City

It gives
and then it yields
a kind of breathing

that becomes
in our magnified glass
like birth and dying

unfathomable gratuity
these bones are so
unworthy of

then cruel withholding
of what the soul
deserves, an answer

the joyous letter from
a long-lost friend,
the call that's not

returned -
to learn to lean
into the lesson

to not expect
one's Lego village
in the flesh

instead, a road
without directions
without an ending

one can see
only surprises
that roll like dice

reflections
trembling
of mere survival.

A Poem Beginning with a Line by Robert Duncan

"Great Death gives way         and unprepares us."*

When things fill up, they break.
Ice breaks. Why is it tragic
for masks to slip away?
All we can grasp are containers
that serve for a time
emptying their echo
- just as death gives way
to meaning, meaning
gives way to death;
it's all a matter of sizing
the tailor measuring out time and space
as if what is surrounding us could ever fit
as if there were bolts enough of light
to cover a human soul -
we grow like nine-years-old -
into what we already are.

* from "A Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar - IV"

Wondering Whether I've Helped a Friend

A touch of light in a coal-black world
has it arrived or is it going? Who's to say
what's absorbed and what's absorbing
- they say the ones can only equal out
still, shadow size seems         insurmountable
and blinding glare seems mirrored back.
A face upon the window in electric light
just sees itself, not what's beyond it.

At a Threshold

I run my eyes over details
Letting them pass
Adjusting to sun and shadow
It all will be there tomorrow
But this morning will never return

The Museum

Dozens of seagulls crisscross the sky…
One image yields many impressions:
A circling for meat.
An energy field.
A point on the grid where I join in the dance.
An intelligent line,
Or maybe the painter is capricious,
Another Picasso brushstroke on white sky.

It came without plan. It leaves without warning.
The mind only widens.
The tracks on the ground are inside the eyes
Connecting the snow and the skies.
The chaos and structures are there to resolve,
To completed thoughts,
Encircling the whole,
Yet nothing
Is ever
Missing.

In the Space between Things

I.
Steam rises like steeples
Above the white marble,
The surfaces where once they played golf.
It’s hard to believe a place so shiny and cold,
That shows less of its life than a swaying sajuaro
Can turn to a jungle in time
Can blast sewer caps
Off ancient fissures.

The perfection of a scene that can’t move,
Of things that burn with ice when touched
That cannot change into one’s own mind
Thinking – the spinning balls of dreams
Won’t lift, they resist being
Pretended into patterning
As joyful solutions, forms of truth.

II.
How can the angels speak
and no one hear?
How come the chiseled air
becomes so sheer?
As everything I touch
breathes from my lungs
Some silent breath
with vast mother tongues
In exponentials from my arms
to harmonize
In endless loving space
to colonize
With wings the structures
of the hive
Mathematics
make it alive
With humming likeness
newly recognized
To spin the not
to vagaries of size
Expressing all the silence
in geometries
Hurtling through the cold
so fires know freeze.

An Opera of Soap

I pine for the days of blue shampoo
and mouthwash lip-gloss red,
When one could actually pour
“Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific”
on your head,
Those brave days of Binaca Blast,
Hai Karate and McLeans
Of Phisohex and Burma-Shave,
Wella-Balsam and Brylcreem,
When soap came on a rope
and Calgon could take me away
From Mr. Bubble smiling
on the back side of the box and, say
The heartbreak of psoriasis,
static cling and spotted dishes
And ring around the collar,
that once and constant crisis,
With lemon-freshened borax,
scrubbing bubbles, Ammonia D,
Like a fragrant foamy friend
who only lived to make me happy.
I pine for the days
when Pine-Sol smelled like pine
and the Breck girls were on the bottle
and only your hairdresser knew for sure,
and no one thought Noxzema
was Neutrogena, not even your sister.

The days of Prince Matchabelli
(not the Prince by Machiavelli)
flavored lipstick,
When there actually was a King Gillette,
Lord Wilkinson, Sir Schick,
When Clorox actually was made out of the sea
And Maybelline was coal tar
mixed with Vaseline,
And Pantene came from the same lab
that synthesized LSD,
And Crest, if you ingested it,
required you to call poison control
immediately (strangely not the case, though,
if you swallowed Listerine).

Who knew that using sugar cane
for war wounds ‘stead of cotton
Would lead nurses to try it
as a sanitary napkin?
And for soldiers to blow with it
their noses, birthing Kotex and then Kleenex
And, Yankee see and Yankee do,
Band-Aids, Q-Tips and Tampax,
Til Pampers begat Kimbies
begat Luvs begat Huggies begat Depends.
The first roll-on deodorant
was modeled on a ball-point pen.
Petroleum replaced palm oil
replaced whale tallow, lard and hickory
As Tone came down from Dove came from Camay
came from Cashmere Bouquet,
As Comet came from Connecticut quartz-encrustred
little Dutch girl Bon Ami;
The synthetics that came like marching bands
with names like Tide and Cheer
made her a casualty.

But now they’ve sold Niagara, RIT, Twinkle
Octagon and Oxydol,
Brillo and Fels Naptha,
Purex and Parson’s Ammonia,
The names live on forever
in a warehouse in New Jersey
But they’ve gone on to the swiffers
and gender-specific diapers
And toothbrushes that use sound waves
to kill bacteria.
There aren’t even any phosphates,
all cleaning must be green,
Even Unilever bought the farm
to save the Amazon palm tree.

A younger generation cannot comprehend
the endless human mind
That creates, creates, creates, creates
and leaves so much behind:
The hole-in-the-walls for old razor blades,
the laundry pins and strings
That glow in gilded darkness as
the fat immortal sings.

The Snow. The Train. The Door.

For someone who has really been "on the beam" lately...

Your face, that cannot keep
its secrets, that ever must
stay secret, a blue boy's
black and white -
an ageless child
without a line you are
despite the wrinkles folding down
your verse as for the winter,
as for the last time.

Your poet's eyes, refracting light
and emptied out of all but poet
pain - that shock at seeing,
that curse at being
free and beautiful
beyond.

Your poet's voice
reciting legal briefs, betrayed by
just a quaver
in the reed from being
wholly
disembodied.
There's barely a mask - there -
emotion has all turned
to vapor, which no one dares
to prove is there.

You've found that place
where the glued unspools,
the fixed unsticks, the world
of you and me collapses
at your eyebrows, and you
must pick - the rhythm - up
with words imprisoned
in their heartache,
the only things still free
beyond the skull,
those last tobacco plugs
not price-tagged by the white man,
those last unnoticed flights
across the Fairborn plains
before the world believed
that it could fly.

There's too much distance - none.
You speak for me - succinctly.
I turn my ears for you - hear words
you cannot use.

Official Use Only

A man named Mohammad wears an American flag
"freedom is not free" t-shirt, and nowhere
is that sentiment more true than at the DMV,
the closest thing to prison most people ever see,
and if they don't navigate successfully its convoluted queues
some may stay inside forever, clutching at the paper
proof of their existence, praying for that magic combo-
nation of lines between proof, test, payment and photo.
The rest just conclude if they stay in one place long enough
an angel will take pity on them and open the gate,
so they wait, with the patiences of saints, the same people who,
when they are in vehicles, honk at cars that stop for pedestrians,
accelerate to reach red lights, pass slower cars with fingers.
Here, young and old, rich and poor stand together
spinning their invisible yo-yo's, staring at the yellowed travel posters
that aren't there, and wandering with eyes all a-glaze through
the vast honeycombs of things they should and shouldn't have done
today, this week, this year, their entire lives. Some break out
in half-hearted conversations, in Urdu or Farsi or Cantonese,
like a black market where access to bureaucrats is traded.
New pilgrims come in, continuously, alive with impossible optimism
while newly-minted citizens drag their wretchedly bitter
carcasses outside, to be washed clean of time once again.
They look so ordinary, these people behind the counters,
wearing glasses and happy new year antlers, with barely a hint
they're our Gods for the day, stamping our visas of infinite possibility.

Reboot

The white mortar in the city's cracks,
the snow-covered graves and factories,
the necklaces of ice hung from wires,
the re-shaping of the fields into corners:
they've waited as long as they could stand it,
their axes are sharpened and raised;
the woods in the way must be cleared.

Old Year Evening

A Carry on Tuesday prompt based on Helen Hunt Jackson’s "New Year’s Morning"

On the fourth day of Christmas the old year made a plea:
"If your love is true, you must forget me,
I’m only a night from old to new, a ring on your jeweled tree,
I must be released, to the woods, to grieve, to say to the past 'you're free.'"
"Only a night from old to new!" That’s how it must be,
The new comes in darkness, undressed of memory,
The new ones are ancient, like a grizzled baby,
The old ones’ reborn, the mulch our confetti!
We’ve charged up the cork, fermented like tea
The singular vintage, as sweet bubbles flee
And for a fleeting instant, as the circles pop, one seems to see
A glimpse of future goals and finished victory,
So much this old familiar road is cast with mystery—
The thought that sows the seed, the lock that carves the key.

The Homemade Wine of the Picaro

For Tom

Sestinas make the finest stories, so says the dramaturge
who may as well be Wordsworth
or Scheherazade for all it matters
when we hear that blizzard burying our houses.
He swears we'll wake one morning
to our knitting clubs dissolved
subsumed by a new Prometheus
with a voice like the South Wales coast
who'll speak of our predicament
to make it matter to anyone but poets.

Outside, the blizzard of scriveners
buries all our verses
but we can almost hear that voice above it
the howl of time's inferno
seething the immortal
but the cry is too familiar
that seems come from the center,
this raging out of nowhere,
it's for attention, nothing more
and would take your voice if you let it.

The quest for immortality never ends
and there's no black swan in the white snowfall
this morning, just gusts of snowdrift grit
to powder windows over
like furnace ash from hellfire smoke
on whorls of desert dunes
and statuary statuesque with boughs of hanging marble.
There's no great voice inside these swirls
just nature's inescapable poem
that makes where I sit the center of its roiling.

Closer to a Colder Point

White pigeons in December aviaries
Coo as the city grinds
Echoing sweetly from their looming perch,
The courthouse roof.
Their sound is like the love of children
Who wish to touch you
In a way no one ever can,
A sound that reminds you of how
Life gets swallowed up in joy,
How internal warmth lights the outside
And the heat prods you harder and faster and closer,
Working to the center of their eyes
By pulling at your own core,
Your only native, understanding.

Alarm Set at 2:22 AM

red moon
apocalyptic wind
another bout of significance
to contend with

in what may all be still a dream
a conspiracy of senses
acting out some blueprint
only the sleeping comprehend

sometimes I feel I can grip the wheel
only to find its purpose is in turning
what it would do anyway—
the only real thing is this song

Torque

This peculiar mutation, consciousness—
in a field where energy stills—it pulls apart
to make believe the one thing differentiates—
a splay of splinters broken off like ice

While any shadow of the whole—is only darkness,
a resting spot where thoughts can re-create.
What flares—disappears in sunlight,
the curve within a perfect bending course.

When Morning Goes Clairovoyant

The sky is coming
prisoners of sound
the slate is on its way

Freedom abounds
nothing you cannot say
all will be wiped clean away

That is the gift
no consequence given
forgiveness as wide as the sky

Prepare now your tones
the music is endless
illusions to hold and let go

Dead Man Poem

Thanks to Victoria I’ve discovered Marvin Bell's Dead Man poems and a prompt at Big Tent Poetry to create my own poem in that style.

1. About How the Dead Man Helps Out Around the House

The dead man can’t handle kitchen appliances.
He'd fast-forward to the days when butter is churned by hand.
There’s no room for the dead man with that infernal whirring motor.
Eight-track tapes on the other hand are his friend.
He unspools their gray-brown ribbons like Christo across the sky.
Billions of old teenagers dreaming, still damp with lust, turn their eyes on
the dead man.

2. More About How the Dead Man Helps Out Around the House

The dead man has no time to clean the cat box.
No flossing or scrubbing sinks for he.
He cannot bear to follow any regular routine.
He’s just no good at that sort of thing.
He’d rather wait around all day until someone remembers him.
He’ll come out then and be the jester for the night.
There’s no wisdom he hasn’t filed away for just this occasion.
He loves to poke at the wounds that kill us, laughing all the way.

Paradise

I.
On one side of the island
The people borrow books and leave them in the rain after reading
them.
There is always a shortage of cigarettes, wine and heroin.
Everyone goes unattended, like unwanted prostitutes,
Their canvasses continually erased and redone,
Reams of writing blotted by furious ink,
Discordant sounds annulled by clashing tones,
Clay obsessively reformed...
Every resident looks with all of his hope at each passerby
As an angel who will finally retrieve him,
Then looks a moment later with all his hatred
At a world full of cruel neglect.
Meanwhile, the resident looked upon goes through the same paroxysms
of reaction
As the miracle becomes a curse again and again and again...
Yet, each may see in the gleam on the tar the luminescence of his own
unique dream,
Jottings on discarded paper may end up the words to a forgotten song
That may entrance a dancer whose angular moves may become a
preliminary sketch
For a cartoon burned for warmth.
Their impoverished cries and wails of rapture fade into the sky
And, although they pray to it, they know the statue on the mountaintop,
Its back turned to them, is not their God
And will never decide among them.

II.
On the other side of the island
Strange lustrous fruits are never picked,
Sapphirine lagoons are never found,
And blinds keep away the glare of great red skies.
Everyone strives in vain to have the same plain face,
The clothes range in color from pumice to slate,
And even the poems seem exactly the same
(Although each volume is wrapped lovingly in gold-leaf binding).
Everything spoken is understood, as if borne from heaven,
But stray thoughts are considered an indulgence and immediately
forgotten
And they go back to building their tabulations and collections
And boiling down fat ideas into delineations as fine as the sand.
They are sublimely successful, yet unhappy,
Feathery beings weighed down by obligations,
The never-ending sum of parents, peers, children, the harsh, invisible
God,
Not to be swift or be strong, but be friendly and patient,
And this is never rewarded, never successful, never enough;
But as long as they sit at the table and smile
They are always welcome to eat
The tasteless food served on small beige plates.
Even if they were not told not to look at the face on the mountain
They would not want to.

Musings on the First Snow

The Inca Empire relied on mummies to make their wars,
The strength of spirit preserved in bodies proved invincible.
Opposing tribes who placed their bones on sacred mountains
Awoke to find the Incan mummies in their place, and gave their ghosts.
The Inca kings would never leave their legacies for sons,
They held on, & made them earn new lands of their own within the one.
And when the droughts came they would entomb their finest children
Alive within the mountains, fed herbs that would preserve them.

So it is, today, with those we call celebrities,
The chosen from among us are entombed for us to worship.
In every field of human skill we laurel our immortals
To sing or sling a ball for all our garlands and our cheers
As we sit like tone-deaf cripples on our couches dreaming we
Could somehow be like them if only the breaks had come our way.
The pantheon of kings and queens looks on from mausoleums
That each of us keeps lit in a corner of our living rooms.

Meanwhile, a billion sacred shapes have fallen from the sky,
Each one a seed to plant unique geometries of healing,
Who've come at night to change the way the face of Earth appears
And, as boots merge with crystal, the way it sounds, the way it feels.
Everything familiar's now touched with a holy white robe
That overhangs with silence all the things we used to know.
Let's stop before this beauty, for it's all we'll see of us
Transforming and invisible, the blessings of the endless.

Tom Brady's Hair

No one saw this coming
the dominance this year
how effortless it moved the ball
through beasts and schemes and snow,
so strong and multi-layered
so perfect like Apollo,
with nods to every football decade
of hair: the shag, the crew, the mullet,
from Bobby Layne to Willie Joe
to something once barbaric,
like the first white guy to wear a pink tuxedo
no quarterback dared pull this off before,
and it's well-thought-out, superb in all its details
it's not a tawdry gimmick or a trick,
no pseudo-Rastafari braids or Polynesian fro
it's a coif of the messiah
that jostles in the wind
like Jehovah's very breath.

No one saw this coming
this Samson per Giselle,
no one imagined Belichick
would have his finest hour
in the autumn of his career
by whispering, from his concrete-colored hoodie
in his impressionable prodigy's ear
"this off-season I need you to concentrate,
put the work into your hair."

A Hello to Cid Corman Across Time and Space

Nothing silent
is independent

Nothing sacred
kneels and prays

Nothing mortal
stops its growing

Nothing changeless
ever stays


Nothing dreamed of
needs believing

Nothing speaking
knows what's heard

Nothing missing
lacks in feeling

Nothing whole
is ever filled

Everybody Needs a Hobby

The greased-dish spiral wave transmitter
He uses to talk with the aliens
Caused static while "Family Ties" was on TV,
So his wife, who'd defended him
Unflinching against an army of non-believers
Ordered him to stop all communications.
Funny, he thought, the adjective used to describe the great,
"Uncompromising." Had he not engineered
This frail rig through compromise alone?
First he had to delete all his delicious references
To politics and sex and religion and race, for these things
Annoyed the visitors. Then he had to retranslate his own voice
To an inexact symbolic rendering that took all gestures from his words,
And he had to pay off the neighbors
With tales of his own insanity, the evil twin voices in him.
For every minute of contact, he would spend
Hours dredging through the wiring, hours
Giving the world back to his loved ones,
For fear that this new one would crush it, and him
Not a part now of either, but a medium between the two.
The happiness of one is so desperately sad for the other
The walls of sacrifice must be built,
And once he had done that, he could settle in with his web
Of recursive-spin generators and barite transmitters
And start to destroy himself,
All for the chance to touch,
To give himself up to it completely,
A force that asks only the ultimate compromise,
That he keep it to himself,
For silent accord is glory,
The secrets of the future are revealed
Because they will stay secret,
Because he knows they can't keep.

Other humans see only pretensions of glory in his silence;
They don't want it revealed so much as they want to know why
He won't tell,
What would shrivel in the light,
Where the aliens are either child's toys to be discarded
Or they are all that he has.

Aha, he thought, the compromises of one man
Within the world, not even,
Except in his own mind, opposed.
Imagine what it would be to fight,
To no longer look at it as a hobby,
To dare to spread his shit in sacred corners,
His perverse act mocking our vocabularies, killing our priorities
With its dauntless proposal that this way, his only way, exists.
Somehow, if he denies defiantly enough
He removes the choice
But to conduct air raids on his occupied villages,
To nail him for drinking, tax evasion, for the crimes of his
And everyone's past, not to show him, but to keep him
From the rest.
It rarely works. There are always the aliens
To rescue him from man
As they rescue themselves
From him.

Meanwhile the police would warn that capitulation
Would be to treat him as beyond human,
And that violates general policies,
And we can't make too many exceptions
Or the world becomes a jungle,
And there would be no more doubt about angels.