On the Margins of the Large

Lies are the only way to understand this world
—leaves turn into trees, birds becoming skies—
‘Til finally we’d pay any price
To keep the other versions at bay
—the sky is green, as every one of us is a sun—

Our stories hang like shadows on the light of never knowing
How else can we the blind find out our way?
We tell stories to steal time—when we know there is no time,
We tell stories to steal words—when we know there are no words,
To steal the fire of who we are—when we don’t know who to be,
And to steal what we desire—when we don’t know what to want.
We tell stories to remember what we never knew at all
And to forget what we were born to never lose.

The stories wrap us up like blankets of warm judgment
Condemning what’s too painful to accept:
That the world that’s full of people cannot fit inside our block
In surrogates, in symbols, to make us think that we’re caught up,
That the clumps of dirt we gather are not distinct from earth's remainder,
That the storm won’t move too fast for any one of us to see,
That the gods we seek are closer than we know.

Our homes are lovely forgeries, we’ve built them with what we believe,
Their beams bend with the promise that some truth will fill its frame
Like spirit fills the universe of stars, and we cast from it our arch
possessive eye
On ideas spread like mushrooms, that keep alive the hopelessness,
The dark and moistened prayer for that one time that we almost saw
The Truth to come again, as if that would alone be just enough
For the myths to make us Gods enough to believe in one,
To hear in distant music a life that no longer exists,
That never existed except as what we lost before we got here,
Striking likenesses together for the palest glimpse of fire,
Exaggerated shadows and the light ever invisible.

We will not stop 'til the echo of our artificial and conditional
Conversations become the very currency of heaven,
‘Til the inhuman falseness that the Gods despise becomes at last
The reaching down in mercy that we know comes out of desperate lies.

Spleen

From the French of Paul Verlaine

The roses were always red,
And always black was the ivy.

My dear, all the times you have fled
My despair is always revived.

The sky was too blue, too tender,
The sea too green and the air too sweet.

I’m always afraid – what to wait for!
What seeps now from your atrocity?

The holly with its varnished leaf,
The boxwood sheen I am weary,

And the endless campaign of grief
And everything, but you, dreary.


Les roses étaient toutes rouges,
Et les lierres étaient tout noirs.

Chère, pour peu que tu te bouges,
Renaissent tous mes désespoirs.

Le ciel était trop bleu, trop tendre
La mer trop verte et l'air trop doux.

Je crains toujours,- ce qu'est d'attendre!
Quelque fuite atroce de vous.

Du houx à la feuille vernie
Et du luisant buis je suis las,

Et de la campagne infinie
Et de tout, fors de vous, hélas!

A Day in My Home Town

One man, his world in a sack by his side, taps the recyclables through the flap, the litter he spent the morning collecting, hearing each bottle break as it falls in the machine. He will cash the receipt and use what he’s earned for a package of cigarettes and a meal at McDonalds, where he has a coupon, ducking the cops each step along the way.

Another man taps on his computer, and a maze of mezzanine loans for boarded-up strip malls and mostly vacant office parks are marked in a key stroke as current, preserving his obscene bonus and saving his firm from having to acknowledge its insolvency. He knows it's illegal, but he also knows the IRS, if he didn’t do it, would attach all of his homes.

I sit somewhere in the middle of all this, trying to keep my heart from feeling and my mind from going tilt, for it’s important to remember that things are perfect the way they are, for these two know their choices, they know this is their journey, and they’re given what they need to grow by this and this alone.

My Computer Wrote Me a Poem

What you have is...
Aha Buslogic
Joliet Loop
Serial Console Slip
Select Vortex
Emulation
ash badblocks
busybox
cat chain chatter
clear clone
dump echo
elvis false
flash gunzip
halt head hex
dump kernel key
kill linux
length loadmap
more mount
pax ping
profile protocols
reboot route script
shared slattach sleep
sort split strings
swap off
swap on
synctail tar test
touch trace route
true tune unpack
update view
watch which yes
as root

(the above was waiting for me on my work computer this morning, with numbers, code and command words removed, and line breaks added)

The Choice to be Slave or Master, Dead or Alive

one person
can hold the world
inside the mind
or without knowing
can be the world
whole

Places

Manhattan,
such a backwards and uncivil borough
not like Rivertucky
with its rainbowthundersnow,
where you can hear the sacred symphonies
of the lizard people underneath.

Saturday Night Poetry Reading

No poem today, instead a random mini-reading (hat tip Hannah)

Merlin by Edwin Muir:



The Days Unexploded Landmines from a week ago Friday:



Off Maryland Avenue from Phoenix, 2007

Windbreaks

We think we are being watched
As we ourselves watch
Or would watch, if we could keep silent,
If the sound of the distance wasn't so acute,
The look of smoke so beautiful.

Ideas spring into being like fog
And disappear when the light dissolves them.
Why must we face reality
When we will turn it into illusion anyway?

The debaucheries of judgment
Seem so out of synch with the force
Like a tuning fork through the trees.
Transparence is all around us;
We see nothing.

The light leads the blind
Away from the need of sight.

To be set adrift, facing all but one's own mind
Or be caught in the oblivion of ubiquity;
To search for the frail orange light
In the windows at dusk,
Or be absorbed in the deepening blue.

Rain types on the leaves,
Sparrows drop as the trees breathe.
The ground is a sponge with flowing veins
Flooding down the grass unable to constrain it.

Let us go to the river, and disappear,
Dissolve like domes of bug bubble in the fern-patterned flow,
Feel the eons passing.
We would starve here if, while feeling fish twist
Through our bloodstream, feeling the cold omnipotence
Of intertwining windbreaks, we did not also
Have these tricks of perception
Which allow us to picture a net
Where we see the fish swimming.

New World

It's true the trees
don't speak of their wisdom
but the finches spread
a little of it around
on finally-yielding ground.

The bloom of mildew
and chartreuse moss,
young squirrels with rat tails
hold the dream of life
in their mouths.

A sparrow keeps a bare twig
like laurel in her beak
and waves it to towards the sky
to say "what can you do
for me now, sun?"

The cinquefoil
shows its own hue
of purple
distinct
from the barely perceptible

haze in the air
and gloss on the streams,
what seems a living earth's
philosophizing,
rocking the young things to re-birth,

like the gun is raised
but no plant
has jumped it,
for they know better than us
the structure of things.

The hills themselves
well up with love
and wear their green frills
like an outbreak of goosebumps;
the slow, slow logic of the universal mind

always between visible and unseen...
We make our new world
from shadows and glare
to keep it from seeming
too far away.

The Compost in the In-Box

In every town the laborers stand
single-file for nearly a mile
waiting to be chosen that day
for any kind of work, while I
look on from outside of the elements,
humming through a smooth train
to a daily destination where the world
waits to clap when I discover it -
in return I must be patient
for the discoveries of others, for whom
I must clap as if I need that
for myself - perhaps I do,
the right to speak is given when you listen,
the right to act when you can prove you can stay still,
you give directions when you learn to take them -
this, not the products that we grow,
is the work - waiting like the laborers
to earn the right to sweat,
for we would turn over all the topsoil
if we had the choice, and not
recognize that all things have a right
to sit in the sun and grow - equally -
even that fat, wide-flapped leaf
that believes it's only qualified to rise
if it blots out all the light in the sky.

New York, 2012

In a flash of train sparks
the world changed
from one where I
was the only person in it
to one where I do not exist

Fiona Apple!

Posted for no other reason than I love you, Fiona

“I suddenly feel like a different person
From the roots of my soul come a gentle coercion
And I ran my hand o'er a strange inversion
A vacancy that just did not belong
The child is gone”

“So keep on callng me names, keep on, keep on
And I'll keep kicking the crap till it's gone
If you keep on killing, you could get me to settle
And as soon as I settle, I bet I'll be
Able to move on.”

"I'm either so sick in the head
I need to be bled dry to quit
Or I just really used to love him
I sure hope that's it."

There's Fiona with breakfast…


All day and all night…


At the movies…


Singing along with the oldies…


Before going to bed…


And the reason I can die now:


(Alright I know this is probably not copacetic with the library police. The videos are off youtube and the pictures are from an unnoted photographer in an unremembered newspaper from a show in Phoenix in 2006. And everything is Fiona's -- as always).

Staring at a Sunny Sky

I can't stop
stirring the dirt to powder

to get behind
what is there

it's out in the open
not seen

The Swan

From the German of Rainer Maria Rilke

Misfortune, through the not yet gone
sways his crippled way, bound
like the gangly walk of swans.

And this stopping, this no longer fastened
every morning, to the firm ground
as he becomes so anxiously fallen—:

to the water, in which he slides with empathy
and into which, with clockwork and revery
he sends to both sides waves, float on float;

wearing an unending silence and acuity,
royal majesty gaining immensity,
on glass he glides his ermine coat.

In Tom Waits World

The clown, the rebel, the outcast
busking for coin
at the Witches Brew Tavern.
His time is different than ours,
the words are different,
who he is is simplified
for entertainment.
How much smaller he will be
to overcome with largeness
the horror of their eyes.
He puts their names in his song
and stares right into their gaze.
He's proud of stopping short,
at earning what they give
and walking in a long, diagonal path
the one that disappears into the night
away from kerosene street lights,
black webs hanging as if from an eyelid.

He eats like an animal in the dark.

He's proud he can appear
at different corners
in these three
black and circumscribed blocks.

He's finally glad he's alive
when standing in his boots
with his every possession
on his back, they're the rocks
he has to carry,
which he volunteered to hold
and can let go at any time
as soon as he's ready.
As soon as he's ready
he'll save people's lives
by pretending there's no blood.

Poets and Poetry

Having even one reader is like having an encounter with God - the thought that thousands, even millions, read even one poet - that's slavery, and a reminder that with the Internet, EVERYONE will LIGHT up the sky like Shakespeare (who wasn't actually Shakespeare).

(OK I still think Rilke in German has above-average magnificence).

Marblehead to Salem Progression

The child I couldn't save
still lingers in this playyard
as the baseball tundra echoes condensation
but there's nothing I can save,
he must do this on his own.
The leagues have been suspended,
the bigger kids are grown,
the refreshment shed is locked up like a drum

But children are no longer fell behind
heads filled with festering wounds
crying showing nothing from inside;
the tree limbs only sway,
they are somewhere else.

They're with the hundred stories
that amble into Wendy's,
the homeless monastery with pewter hoodies,
men knocked down in their prime, by life
to Facebook life, now sharing memories
of lobster tails and California winters
as they wait for time to heal the wounds
and friends to share their cigarettes
and talk of joy distractions
where they weren't a none around.

He's waiting with heart open
by a closed door, though they vanish,
his friends, on the other side,
the place where shame will finally go to hide
from those who're only but a half-step behind,
with jobs and homes and wives,
those things that always are the first to go
when lessons need be learned
of living with yourself,
to sit with choices made,
the waiting to be found.

The Day’s Unexploded Landmines

I’m too deep into the dishsoap to clean the blood off of my hands,

The tragic flaws of all my friends are all my fault

                                                                              But none of my business

Though I vouch for the Navajos their right to text (“dude” … “dude”)

                                           While standing up (like painting a fresco)

         And occasionally with the phone to the sky to be closer to God

And this is admitted to the bar

                                                  As long as I let someone come behind 

To change it:
                      “It couldn’t be clearer 

                                                             The end of the world is near.”

                                It takes a village to keep the truth from being said

But it only takes one dishwater poor blonde 

               To draw white spiral monkey paw with her fangs

                               For my whole concept of free will to transform:

        “I’m so fallen on hard times 

                                                        I’ll do anything at any time”

But then she tells me she is learning how to write like Gertrude Stein

Because the way we’re taught to write as children

                                                                                    Screws us up

The subject and predicate destroy our minds

And I think how sad it is

                                         That I am hanging around with people

Who’d think this was insane instead of

                                                                Obvious.

Reverie de Reverdy

I. Translation from the French

Turning Road

It’s a terrible gray with dust over time
Wind from the south with strong wings
Echoes deaf of water in the evening keeling over
And in the wet night that gushes at the turn
voices rough and grumbling
A taste of ashes on the tongue
An organ noise along the trail
The heart a ship that bobs along
All disasters of the calling

When the lights go out in the desert one by one
When the eyes are wet as
blades of grass
When the dew falls barefoot on the leaves
In the morning newly risen
There is someone gazing
A lost address on the hidden path
The stars stretch and flowers tumble
Through the branches broken
And the dark stream wipes her soft lips scarcely unstuck

Where not walking on the clock face counts
to regulate the progress and push back the horizon
All the cries have let slip by the time they’ve stumbled on

And I I walk in heaven’s eyes on the rays
There’s a noise for nothing and names in my mind
Of faces alive
All that has passed within the world
And this gala prize
Where I lost my time

II. 1969 Essay on Pierre Reverdy by Kenneth Rexroth (heavily edited from this)

We still know almost nothing about how the mind works in states of rapture nor why the disjunction, the ecstasis, of self and experience should produce a whole range of peculiar nervous responses: vertigo, transport, crystalline and plangent sounds, shattered and refracted light, indefinite depths, weightlessness, piercing odors and tastes, and synthesizing these sensations and affects, an all-consuming clarity. These are the phenomena that often attend what theologians call natural mysticism. They can be found especially in the poetry of St. Mechtild of Magdeburg and St. Hildegarde of Bingen, but they are equally prominent in the poetry of Sappho, Henry Vaughan, Christopher Smart or the prose of Jakob Boehme.

I am inclined to believe that the persistence of this vocabulary among visionary poets is not an idioretinal and vasomotor defect caused by drugs, migraine, dissociations of personality, or petit-mal epilepsy, but a novitiate. Until rapture becomes an accustomed habit, a trained instrument of apprehending reality, the epiphenomena that accompany its onset will seem unduly important. Since only the intimations of rapture are all that most people are ever aware of, Henry Vaughan’s ring of endless light will always serve as an adequate symbol of eternity. Kerkele saw the same idioretinal vision as a very finite ring of carbohydrates.

We are dealing with a self-induced or naturally granted creative state from which two of the most fundamental human activities diverge, the aesthetic and the mystic act. This idiom of radiance becomes confusing today when art is all the religion most people have and when they demand of it experiences that few people of the past demanded even of religion. But even a visionary poem is not a vision. Unlike a poem, the religious experience is compelled and ultimate. Pierre Reverdy, for all his yearning for transcendence, knew this all too well. He is hardly, in most of his poems, a mystic poet. He simply uses a method which he has learned from his more ambitious poems, which is to distill the field to simple gestures laying bare the heart.

As cette belle époque recedes into perspective, and international literary taste has finally unmasked its shock to learn the idiom and syntax that seemed so new and strange in 1912, Pierre Reverdy stands among poets as the most Cubist of the Cubists, above Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, and André Salmon, as well as independents like Supervielle, Milosz and Léon-Paul Fargue.

Cubism in poetry is the conscious, deliberate dissociation and recombination of elements into a new artistic entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture. In Apollinairian cubism, as exemplified by his “Zone” or by The Waste Land, The Cantos, Paterson, Zukofsky’s A, J.C. MacLeod’s Ecliptic, or Sam Beckett’s early work, the fragmented and recombined elements of poetic construction are narrative, rhetorical or at least informative wholes. In verse such as Reverdy’s, they are simple, sensory, emotional or primary informative objects capable of little or no further reduction. Thus when subject, operator and object have been dismembered and restructured until the result is sufficiently piercing and tensile to cut through the reality it has reorganized, an invisible or subliminal discourse emerges which owes its cogency to its own strict, complex and secret logic.

Poetry such as this attempts not just a new syntax of the word. Its revolution is aimed at the syntax of the mind itself. Its restructuring of experience is purposive, not dreamlike, and hence it possesses an uncanniness fundamentally different in kind from the most haunted utterances of the Surrealist or Symbolist unconscious. When the ordinary materials of poetry are broken up, recombined in structures radically different from those we have come to accept as logical sequence, they are given an intense significance, closed within the structure of the work of art, and are not negotiable in ordinary contexts of occasion. Isolated and illuminated, they seem to assume an existential transcendence.

The revolution in sensibility that began with Baudelaire became a thoroughgoing syntactical revolution in the later work of Mallarmé, in curious still lifes like “Autre Éventail,” occult dramatic molecules like “Petit Air,” and above all in his hieratic metaphysical ritual, Un Coup de dés. In this tremendously ambitious poem the logical structure of the Indo-European languages was shown organically to be an inadequate vehicle for so profound a change in sensibility. Pierre Reverdy is the first important French poet after Un Coup de dés to develop the methods of communication explored by Mallarmé.

Such exploration was once the future of American poetry, but in hindsight only Walter Conrad Arensberg in his last poems, Gertrude Stein in Tender Buttons and a very few other pieces, Laura Riding in her best work and the young Yvor Winters could be said to hew to the deliberate practice of the construction principles which guided Pierre Reverdy.

Yvor Winters went on, in fact, to condemn all verse of this kind as the deliberate courting of madness. What he objected to in essence was the seeking of glamour, what James Joyce translates "wholeness, harmony and radiance," that effulgence which St. Thomas called the stigmata of a true work of art, as an end in itself. I think what Winters meant was that intense hyperesthesia of this type, when it occurs in modern poetry without the motivation of religious belief, is pathological in its most advanced forms and sentimental in its less extreme ones. It is true of course that any work of art that coerces the reader or spectator into intense emotional response for which there is no adequate warrant or motive is by definition sentimental, but I do not think that this is exactly what happens in poetry like that of Reverdy, Mallarmé or Paul Valéry, who masks only slightly the same unanalyzable transcendental claim with seemingly ordinary syntactical context that can be negotiated through general experience.

The syntactical problems and possibilities of a language peculiar to the poetry of Reverdy makes unusual demands upon the reader and translator. Reverdy himself retired to the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes in 1930 and lived there as a lay associate until his death in 1960 with only rare visits to Paris on business trips or to see old friends.

A Shorter Version of Yesterday's Poem

The outside world is under glass
Breathing circuits splash the window
The emeralds strung as lights across the bridges
The darkness fends off stars

The Outside World

The outside world pretends to love you
As you pretend you’re worthy of its love
It shines its priceless daggers
You shine your worthless smile
It feeds you anyway

The outside world has everything
It’s only on one side
The only place the unknown still is real
Its darkness fends off stars
The hand it touches itches

The outside world stays straight faced
As you try to follow its story
You laugh along at the punch line and never know
If that was the real laughter
Or was it the later one at you

The outside world never asks you on a date
But you can tag along if you act stupid
And carry drinks and smile at bragging
And cut it to the quick without real anger
And laugh when you are ribboned in return

The outside world will never quite agree with you
It always has an opposite opinion
And says it doesn’t matter what it thinks
There's no compulsion to agree with it
But still it never comes to quite agree

The outside world wants questions answered
But only with more questions
And only in a certain tone of voice
And never with the truth that is too easy
Harmony the killer must keep her virtue intact

The outside world as a circle talks in circles
It always ends at the place where it began
It calls that proof
And thinks that it defeats you no matter what you say
Especially if you do not care to win

The outside world is never out to get you
It only wants you to think it is
By changing its mind as soon as you’ve accepted
Its earlier change of mind
Which never was a change, it says, at all

The outside world is dangerous
You think it exists
It steals from your collection plate
Makes you pray to be forgiven
And never says if you are

The outside world looks different
When not holding for a photograph
It cannot stop its laughter
Or wear its mask of knowledge
The only way that you are recognized

Pole Shift

This old gray winter very soon will die
And things we thought were dead will spring to life.
The sun will wake us from our hibernations
And melt the phantom playthings in our minds.

We will no longer perish if we’re wrong,
No longer must we master bitter winds
By stacking cords of fragmentary trees
And culling books of names as if important.

No longer will the candles ward off darkness,
Our vision will not be through fogs of glass,
Our frosty breath will be as if invisible,
As structures that we’ve built of ice collapse.

We will not need the armor of bird feathers
Or need to fight for one last scrap of fat.
The gridlocks will be broken, the rivers
Will unthicken, the lakes will fill with sound.

The hardness of the ground will so soon soften,
The doors stuck shut will open, the cabin
Fever canning cellar remedies expire,
The essential oils and dried-out flowers end.

This old gray winter very soon will die
And soon our hearts will open…
We will no longer need our minds at all
And we’ll be terrified.

Land of the Rodeo Clowns

Somewhere in America
there's an Indian
not drunk
who is
laughing
at us
now.

Why Love is Consciousness

My mind
is the only thing
in my body
world
universe
that doesn't know.

Visions of Frobisher Bay

All forms on earth
are reproduced in ice,
the craggy points, the wind-smoothed dunes,
the hanging spears like frills of fur,

the ice shines on the water
and water shines on the ice
that melts inside the eye,
where the water turns to crystal.

Men in seal suits writhe
on asymmetrical islands of blue glacier
like modern dancers on the slab

across the incandescent bay
a city of puffins laughing
and a stone-clear sun so far away.

I am part of this, their eyes are mine,
my skin is this with its fissures and canyons,
the desolate end of the world is familiar
as the pavement on my narrow walk
buckled by roots underground.

I must look gently, for the fish
must learn to become the ocean.

Addendum

The rich are here to teach us that crime pays,
that shame is what keeps common folk tied down,
to have a conscience clean when you are lying
and they know it, that is how you earn your keep
and win the hearts of men.
These stories of equality, the rule of law and honor
are for the children to believe, and adults to sell
with all the passion and conviction they can muster,
for what else keeps us useful than the sense of ordained order?
What good is any virtue, if it conflicts with the actual?
Lies are more harmonious, because sweeter,
they make the limits that we crave
seem not even of our own making
but the consequence of freedom
on man too flawed to earn it.

Special Comment on Bank Bailout II

I don’t usually comment (directly at least) on news of this nature, but I’ll make an exception here…

Why has strategically defaulting and living payment free in your home become the new cool trend, like flipping condos in Las Vegas back in 2006? The simple answer is that banks are not foreclosing, and the reason they don’t foreclose is that it would force them to sell the home for less than the mortgage value. If they did this, they’d have to write off that amount on their balance sheet, which determines whether they have enough capital to be in operation (and in the case of the so-called Too-Big-To-Fail banks that own the Federal Reserve, how much money they can create from thin air to lend out at profit). According to ftimes, of the 52 million homes that have a mortgage, over 10 million are currently underwater (worth less than the outstanding mortgage), four million homes are delinquent, and two million have entered the foreclosure process (on top of the four million foreclosed upon since 2008).

That means that of the underwater homes, at the very least about six million are ready to enter the delinquency stage and begin living payment free.

Bear that statistic in mind when reading about today’s foreclosure fraud settlement between the five banks that originated over 60% of U.S. mortgages and the federal government, which has already rescued all five banks from annihilation. The settlement releases the four too-big-to-fail banks (Wells Fargo, Citi, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, along with the old GMAC – now Ally Bank) from liability for widespread and documented abuses in the servicing of loans and the foreclosure process over the past decade. The abuse came about because mortgages were repackaged and resold into investment pools with so little regard for longstanding rules on land recording that they lost track of the true owner on millions of homes. To cover up for the lack of proper title and liens when foreclosing, banks and their servicing units routinely forged, back-dated and fabricated documents at county recorder offices and state courts across the country. Furthermore, they employed “robo-signers,” who illegally signed hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of documents and affidavits without any knowledge of the underlying mortgages.

In addition, investigations uncovered massive servicing abuses, including charging borrowers with illegal fees, putting them into foreclosure while working out loan modifications, failing to honor previous modification settlements, foreclosing without just cause, and servicer-driven foreclosures, where illegal late fees and payments pushed the homeowner into foreclosure.

In return for absolving the banks of liability on the mortgage fraud issues, the settlement creates a $25 billion fund to address the problem of foreclosed, delinquent and underwater borrowers (this figure represents 3.5% of the $700 billion in negative equity in the country). Of the $25 billion, however, only $5 billion is coming from the banks themselves. The remainder is in the form of mortgage principal writedowns, the cost of which is paid by mortgage security investors, which after the government takeover of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is U.S. taxpayers. The settlement is divided three ways: $5 billion in actual cash, distributed to the states for “legal aid services” to help the 750,000 individual mortgage borrowers illegally foreclosed upon gain access to between $1,800 and $2,000 per family (roughly 1% of the average foreclosed mortgage value of $180,000); $3 billion to go toward refinancing of underwater borrowers; and the remaining $17 billion to go, at the banks discretion, to principal reduction credits for troubled borrowers.

This settlement folds numerous fraud actions at the state and federal level into it, most notably the $8.2 billion suit by Nevada and Arizona against Countrywide (now BoA) to compel compliance with court-ordered consent decrees of that amount in consumer fraud violations. The settlement also stops or at least forestalls most but not all ongoing state investigations, which in the preliminary stages had found evidence of widespread abuses, such as 60% of all mortgage documents examined at random having title errors.

Although an independent mediator has been appointed, enforcement of this decree is left to the banks themselves, based on quarterly self-assessments. Unlike most large consent decrees, this deal will not be monitored and enforced by a court-appointed master under the continuing, active, supervision of a federal court.

In keeping with the Obama administration’s consistent focus on reliquifying the insolvent too-big-to-fail banks at taxpayer (and future taxpayer) expense, the settlement clearly satisfies its primary objective of insulating banks from lawsuit costs by capping liability for fraud, and removing more mortgage liability off of banks balance sheets. The total amount of the settlement represents about 1% of loan balances in the country, less than the price of the title insurance banks illegally failed to get when they transferred the loans to a trust for securitization, and a fraction of the cost they would ordinarily have to pay to defend foreclosure challenges. If the banks were actually held liable through normal prosecutions at the state level, the liability would be between $700-$800 billion. In this settlement, by contrast, no new assets need to be committed by the banks at all, since they’ve long had reserves for such contingencies.

While one might argue a settlement is appropriate to forestall the endless rounds of litigation that will probably in the end be paid for on both sides by taxpayers, such a settlement should not actually help the banks’ bottom lines. Consider the principal reduction credits in the settlement, as one example, which socks mortgage investors (taxpayers) with the cost of paying off the 1st lien mortgage, thus allowing banks with 2nd lien position mortgages (from people treating their home equity as a piggy bank) to press home owners to stay current on those payments. This creates income, removes liability they would otherwise have had to write off, and allows the banks in turn to increase their balance sheets (i.e. print money that they can then lend out for profit).

The financial benefit to banks is so great, the fact they don’t have to face criminal prosecution for what everyone acknowledges are deliberate, systematic and endemic felonies seems like an added benefit!

As clear as the results for the banks are, the consequences for people who had their homes illegally stolen is far from transparent: who’s maintaining the fund? How do they get to it? Who decides what mortgage holder does or does not gain access to the funds? Yet the foggy bureaucratese that addresses these questions is crystal clear compared to the legal issues this settlement raises. Do banks no longer have to prove in court they are in fact the title owners? Will a document that is obviously forged/robosigned be accepted by courts going forward? And what about all the other mortgage lenders, the community banks, state banks, credit unions and thousands of small and mid-sized commercial banks that don’t receive a get out of jail free card? How does this affect the approximately 80% of houses where the chain of title is now clouded? And what recourse do investors in mortgage-backed securities have for over 300 years of real estate contract law requiring property conveyance rights being voided?

More pointedly, why have the law enforcement arms of the federal and state governments in this case surrendered any duty of office to prosecute violations of law or to defend the citizenry from crimes against their property? With such a deliberate and comprehensive violation of laws by the mortgage servicers, one has to ask why should anyone honor a contract or obey a financial statute? No one higher up the food chain thinks ‘following the law’ is in any way desirable or mandatory, so why should ordinary people think so?

In particular, shouldn’t the bulk of the underwater citizenry simply default? And there you have the end game. With the charade of home values coming back up and the dream of home ownership snuffed in a sea of red ink and tape, we have a battle between, on the one hand, banks given more of a free hand to foreclose, illegally and without consequence, and on the other, homeowners who begin to believe that one is foolish for following rules.

The brutal suppression of the Occupy movement is a clear signal of which side will be allowed to win. It is simply not allowed to complain about losing your home and life savings through the fraudulent manipulations of others, because those others must continue to reap new profits with fresh victims using the same criminal methods. To claim the victimhood of the powerless is simply un-American, for the purpose of our justice system is to provide protection for those who steal from the innocent. Those who dare point this out will be forced to confess in shame at show trials while the .001% will boast that they have been unfairly maligned, utterly free of shame. And while the mortgage foreclosure fraud is small potatoes compared to the MERS violations and the securitization frauds that are still theoretically being investigated, the indifference of the public to the bald whitewash lying of the political class and media on this makes the abstract and quaint concept of justice seem further and further away.


I know that’s the way it’s been at least since Plato’s Republic, but I feel I should say something about it while I still have the freedom to speak.

Sources:
ftense
Naked Capitalism
zero hedge

Voice

"En la ignorancia, esta's
en todo - cielo, mar y tierra - muerto" *
-Juan Ramón Jiménez

Your voice, the only voice
that breathes through these machines,
the only one that's speaking
in the stuttering of tongues,

the one that, saying nothing
has the feel of everything,
as all the heard words added up
are empty, not full.

Your voice, the only voice
that knows things, not their names
and will not separate the earth from hearts
as they spin in opposite directions,

the one that, saying nothing
tells the lives of everything,
as all conclusions only note
the thing as dead.

Your voice, the only voice
that tells me what is real,
the only one not proving
in the multitudes of truth,

the one that, saying nothing
shows we're wrong on everything,
as all the yes's conjure up
the no not overcome.

Your voice, the only voice
I hear above the noise,
the only one not anchored to a sound
that's not my own,

the one that, saying nothing
makes me part of everything,
as all talking makes an opening
I fall through like a crack.


* In ignorance, you exist
in everything - sky, sea and earth - dead

Sleeping Giants Awake

"Zuccotti Park has been taken over by Giants fans!" – Fox News New York, 2/7/12

Down Broadway, fans line the streets behind the barricades, “a Jints fan
from the cradle to the grave,"
Waiting for their beloved team, cheering everything that moves,
"everyone’s a Giants fan today,"
All wearing big blue uniforms and waving something, usually some kind
of homemade sign:
"King of New York baby," "GMen all day every day," "just wait until
next year, when they win again."
Some have camped out overnight, with binoculars to catch a glimpse
of their heroes,
Toilet paper banners like ribbons in the sky, confetti thrown from
upper-story windows,
Blue grease paint under eyes, a Giants helmet on the Wall Street bull,
The tourist bus is covered with a “Champions” banner, people take
pictures from the top.
Blue flower floats pulled by F-150s roll in to a sea of red, white and blue
stock ticker tape,
To screams of "gi-ants, gi-ants, gi-ants," red and blue balloons explode, American flags wave,
Fans look like babies seeing candles for the first time, throwing
programs at the players
Who wave, beaming, grateful, to the gotham cheers for the champions
of the woyuldd.
They expect winners here, but they treat them just like royalty, people
out of buildings whistling like birds
Just like on the sides of the streets, raising their voices so they can finally
be heard,
To commemorate a victory that can’t be overturned, marching bands
with pink and white hat feathers,
The usual fraternal organizations on wheels, traveling podiums
filled with cheerleaders,
Traffic completely stopped, the asphalt filled with confetti like snow,
The sound like jet engines revving, “they always get written off
and they come back to win,” and then, who shows up but
Police in riot gear behind plastic body shields, they order everyone
to disperse,
Shooting pepper spray from water cannons on the mob,
Arresting any who resist, with zipcuff wire, throwing them headfirst
onto concrete,
Ripping up the tents of those who’ve camped out, taking their pom-poms
and whistles
And crushing them with bulldozers, where they’re swept up by teams
in hazmat suits.
People who complain are beaten senseless and bloody
with nightsticks,
People who try to get away are kettled into side streets so they can be
arrested,
And people who still dare to wave the champions flag are tased.
In the crowd are some city officials, journalists, diplomats from other
countries,
All of them are swept up in the net and handcuffed if they resist in any
way.
Out of the melee, a few reasons are suggested: there are children in
danger, ticker tape is a health violation,
The noise ordinances have been violated, traffic has been blocked,
there wasn’t an official permit,
But the people know otherwise: they played hookey from work or school
for the day,
They dared to believe, and speak their mind a little too freely, they took
over, if just for a day.
A few peeled it back a deeper level: rooting for the giants is anti-patriotic,
Any victories for humanity must be celebrated privately.

Pantoum Number One

Are you alive or already dead?
The dream states won’t tell you what’s true
All that you hear is all you want said
All you can see is the view

The dream states won’t tell you what’s true,
What is awake and what is asleep
All you can see is the view
At some point you must make the leap

What is awake and what is asleep
Nobody wants you to know
At some point you must make the leap
From the undertow into the flow

Nobody wants you to know
What you cry on the inside for
From the undertow into the flow
To the great imperceptible shore

What you cry on the inside for
Comes revealed in every detail
To the great imperceptible shore
Where the truth only rises to fail

Comes revealed in every detail
Your own uncontainable scale
Where the truth only rises to fail
Through your own imperceptible veil

Your own uncontainable scale
All that you hear is all you want said
Your own imperceptible veil
Are you alive or already dead?

A Baltimore Thing

Arabs, they call them,
some macabre African-American tradition,
horses and black carriages
traveling from Mon Roe to Pigtown,
guys with stovepipes hats
selling flowers from the back like My Fair Lady...
Arabs, they call them.

The Reason for Karma

A new wound
heals
the old wound
in theory
but the old is remembered
as loss
and the new wound
turns old
requiring the feeling
of a blade
to remember how God
left it abandoned
and 'cos otherwise
it would not know it
exists.

Wistawa Szymborska (1923-2012)

"For others, Death was mad and monumental—
not for these citizens of the sepia past.
Their griefs turned into smiles, their days flew fast,
their vanishing was due to influenza." ["Family Album"]

Commemorating the death of a poet is a bit redundant. When most poets aren't commemorating in advance their own death, they're playing dead, or in extreme cases, practicing being dead. And then there's that whole "afterlife" phenomenon - as if it's not good enough to have glimpses into one's own immortality through the rarefied act of poetry-making, there's this business about being remembered by posterity for one's words. Silly, I know, but fortunately, the muse no likee vanity, and plays all sorts of tricks to keep poets on the up and up. And so when poets give up the proverbial Hamlet, one feels one can say what formerly one could not whisper (for fear of being the subject of a poem about being misunderstood). After all, there were all those words, more than we got out of even the best of our actual friends, and they were so intense, we really ought to believe we really knew them. Unfortunately, unless its some spectacular mythic accident that makes them pretty young corpses, it usually ends up most closely resembling those old Hollywood stars of the 20's and 30's, who expire in Old Stars Homes as distant memories to most people not as old as themselves. We feel we know them too, but after the glamour has left we realize they were only actors reading scripts, not the characters they presented as mirrors to ourselves. In death, the public becomes private, in other words, and in poets the private becomes sealed in what can only be called an articulate crypt.

This essay is supposed to be about Wistawa Szymborska, the great Polish poet who passed this week at 88, but somehow I just know that she would look askance at such memorials, for she's shrewdly memorialized herself on so many occasions that anything I or anyone else reports would be irrelevant. She's written about death as embarrassing ("Report from the Hospital"), lacking foresight ("Letters from the Dead"), falsely confused with birth ("Born"), a matter of decorum ("Beheading"), and reserved in its importance for humans instead of beetles, where it is "quarantined" ("Seen from Above"). She's speculated about suicide notes ("The Suicide's Room"), made a detailed examination of the condition of a life in the moments before death ("Alive"), interrogated people on the details of dead people dreams ("Plotting with the Dead"), and even seen the "joy of writing" as "the revenge of the mortal hand" ("The Joy of Writing"). It's almost like all of this is just so we can finally laugh at death now that she is actually dead.

But death per se is not her concern, so much as its wonderful ability to bring out the absurdity of people. She prizes this quality in all of her subjects, lovingly skewering us at our most vulnerable point, our sense of pathos. How sad that years of closeness makes lovers unrecognizable because undreamable ("I Am Too Close..."), and how sad new lovers can't be seen through the fantasy ("Over Wine"). How sad that Cassandra was actually wrong ("Soliloquoy for Cassandra") and Lot's wife was actually right ("Lot's Wife"). How sad that imaginary kingdoms have to be lost in the dustbin of history ("Voices"), and how sad "history rounds off skeletons to zero" ("Starvation Camp Near Jaslo"). How sad it is to read poetry to a room with only a handful of people ("Poetry Reading"), and how sad it is to be a world-famous Nobel Prize winning poet without the basic privacy that any writer needs ("Some People"). How sad indeed it all is, but I always laugh. How sad that she died, but still I laugh. She's like the Ellen De Generes of the poetry world, finding that thing we all know but never think rises to the level of communication, and unpeeling it with excruciating slowness and raven-like cleverness, showing in the process how even the most commonplace thing actually makes absolutely no sense.

Properly appreciating such a mind is an impossible -- albeit humorous -- task, because when the tiny thing becomes so enlarged that it is incomprehensible, the distance becomes too great. And that's the fun, laughing through the tears.

On that note I'll close with one of my favorite Szymborska poems, "Vocabulary":

"La Pologne? La Pologne? Isn't it terribly cold there?" she asked, and then sighed with relief. So many countries have been turning up lately that the safest thing to talk about is the climate.

"Madame," I want to reply, "my people's poets do all their writing in mittens. I don't mean to imply that they never remove them; they do, indeed, if the moon is warm enough. In stanzas composed of raucous whooping, for only such can drown the windstorms' constant roar, they glorify the simple lives of our walrus herders. Our Classicists engrave their odes with inky icicles on trampled snowdrifts. The rest, our Decadents, bewail their fate with snowflakes instead of tears. He who wishes to drown himself must have an axe at hand to cut the ice. Oh, madame, dearest madame."

That's what I mean to say. But I've forgotten the word for walrus in French. And I'm not sure of icicle or ax.

"La Pologne? La Pologne? Isn't it terribly cold there?"

"Pas du tout," I answer icily.

Note: all titles and quotes come from Poems New and Collected, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

Regret Over Things Once Thought As Important

To see what can't be seen
Know eyes that can't be known
For its own sake

To love what can't be loved
Feel love that can't be shown
For its own sake

To think what can't be thought
Believe what can't be true
Trust it like a stone
For its own sake

To Susan

The orange blossoms on the vines
Between our separate worlds
Are all I care to recognize
Of how my life unfurled.

Immortalizers' thickenings —
In hindsight no surprise
Against the love I let — for you
Dissolve in private skies.

Orcadian Hymn

“The closer I come to knowledge of myself, the more certain I feel I am immortal, and conversely, the more certain I am of my immortality, the more intimately I come to know myself.” – Edwin Muir

The recently discovered ruins in Brodgar, Orkney, thought older and more complex than Stonehenge, remind us of Orkney's mythic status as a lost paradise, one elucidated by its two greatest poets, Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown.

From Scara Brae to the Ness o' Brogdar
Fairies play and mermaids appear
With the kelpies and the ghillie dhu,
The finfolk of eynhallow and the seal people
While creels are woven, trawlers battened,
Cold winds hold us to the stone
That holds it all, but never mocks
Our unknowing. The holms all come and go, so too
The smoke from which comes forth the scrying face,
Our own, on the other side, smiling through the salt
And icicles on our nostrils. We are free as gulls
But tethered to the buoys, repairing traps and scaling mackerel,
Trying not to let our pity show, as we haul indifferent eyes in sacks
To kitchens eyed by cats, but everybody else with jaws as final
As the rocks before the sea.

The skerries can’t be seen without the white gull screak,
The tides cannot come in without the creak of wheels on docks.
In the caves sentinel witches converse with spirits drowned,
By the churches clean as drums, with gravestones like teeth broken,
Fallen down, laundry roars in the wind, immortality in every edge.

Endure things long enough you learn to see,
There always is an opening for waves,
So it is with our souls, sustained by
Endless drownings, constant hunger, bone-chilled cold
--And the warmth we find from the other side
Joining us for all we have to give:
Undiminished love, an endless stock of faith,
Gratitude that ferments into grace.

Changing Cast of Morning Clouds

The clouds have been woven to herringbone wool
and all I do is paint them;
The band plays it funky to rev up the morning
and I fit my soul in the bass line;
I react, like the well-oiled machine I am
to the news and gossip of the day, the terms used
convey me to a place not quite there, not quite here.

Illumination comes as the white sun through clouds.

I was responsible for my own unfoldment once
—I left the scene of the crimes,
demanded my own holy vista,
drove off the clothes and the ideas I wore,
stood alone at a rippling, glistening pond,
but the people I had hurt came back in time
to show me the damage I had done,
responsibility created fault
because I let the childish looking go
to move toward something larger.
My love was not quite strong enough
to overcome condemnation.

So here I am, on rails at fixed times,
providing the insights expected to those
who'd cry every night to be heard—
an intricate fabric, a singular thread
moves to disappear—knowing the sun
rewards failure, and there's always a hope
I can lose everything
again, and the next time
the ruins will be pure
beauty.

Glimpses of Ubiquity

The sun through the trees transmits sacred geometries
turning this place of flesh, in its flash, back to blueprint.

The only part of us not at one with the universe
is our consciousness, yet consciousness is the one entire.

When the ancients painted eyes on stones
it was not so much to help them see
as to remember that they could.

Behind Door Number Three

Children must leave childish things behind,
they must grow up to find their mothers.
Every human can be free, the key is to surrender,
ask help to be autonomous, to wake up to the dream
by learning the truth from its teacher, the lies that built our world.

The sun through the trees transmits sacred geometries
turning this place of flesh, in its flash, back to blueprint
and we remember how the stories and songs needed a home,
how movement needed a form to measure itself around
like the earth could seem so still hurtling in exponentials.

The only part of us not at one with the universe
is our consciousness, yet consciousness is the whole she-bang.
How can we think of our lives being different from our ideas,
or our planet being different from a black hole or quasar,
or of horses, say, distinct from rocks?

When the ancients painted eyes on stones
it was not so much to help them see
as to remember that they could.

Turn Black the Mirrors

Turn black the mirrors
to look at myself,
Peeling back layers
of miserable doubt
Before I see how I am held
in the warmest embrace,
From the vantage point of a God
it seems, is what it takes
What would be, if not for the mind,
an instantaneous realization.

Blue Sparks at Dragon Night

Everything can be reconciled from a place of self-loathing;
if one looks enough at the broken hall of mirrors one becomes
what one fears, and says "I told you so."
Ah, the payoff,
the short-circuit vision into heartlessness, so one doesn't
have to think but one's a fool to show respect because
one isn't treated with the respect that one deserves
as one was taught to treat every other
(with verbal and physical scars to prove it).
And so there's the slow burn of frustrated expectations,
the fire that says "it's mine" in a wind that scatters coals,
expecting others to be other than what they are
(and helping them see just how far they fall short),
it's this game of fair play, once given as a promise
in lieu of another hug, it becomes an addiction
with its thumb to the world, where everything's a gift
and justice is not of this realm.

Humans are the creatures incensed they can't get what they want
and the ones who keep forgetting they are royalty

And then the anger comes, and it burns inside the viscera,
the dull aches of another's pain inside
as he feels the whole thing slip away from his grip,
he should get what he gets without pitching a fit,
he knows this, he knows what he meant
was not close to what was expressed, whatever truth
was there is forgotten in his shame. He feels estranged
and paralyzed once again.

Humans are the beasts who maximize their advantage because they can,
and the ones who surrender with the compassion of the Gods

Meanwhile, on the other end of his wrath,
they wonder how far it can go,
how softly they must walk on the eggshells,
how quickly they can mend what's torn,
they dare not say that conversation is inaccessible,
dare not express the confusion of their pain,
time is too short to utter any words, words that can
cut unexpectedly like glass.

They feel like victims, powerless, mute,
as if it's all their fault, misunderstood,
just like that ogre in the other corner,
the one now crying too softly to hear, for love.

Humans are the animals who kill to prove a principle
but mourn a passing they never stopped to know

Redemption Train

For Jesse

The redemption train is already waiting
Waiting for you to take that walk through the rain
There's so many roads but there’s only one station
Where all of us pray you will find the way

The redemption train is forever boarding
With sinners forgiven who wash themselves clean
They fall down to their knees for the power and glory
They’re worthy enough for the grace they have seen

The redemption train has one destination
The place we are waiting with love in our eyes
To share all your tears and sing your salvation
The love of the Lord is just you in disguise

The redemption train is already waiting
Waiting for you to walk through the rain
So many roads but there’s only one station
Where all of us pray that you’ll find your way

Replacement Parts

Our human stars
that light the night
below the absent sky
give up their secrets easily,
some love they wish you'd buy

displayed behind
the lamps of chrome
that flood the darkness gray
so you can find your way around
the frameworks of the day.

The Pleiades
are liquor stores
to help you stagger home,
Orion leaves its office on
so you can eye its tomes,

and street lamps
are the zodiac
connecting Gods and men
and bedroom lamps the planets glow
as days begin and end.

We bring our essence
closer in
and dance in spacious rooms,
the universes we once rhymed
can safely now resume.

Two People Talking

The affairs of state are such intimate kisses,
the ravenousness inside only hinted at in the pictures.
We can hear the malnourished mistress but we never see her face;
the concessions that they press are someone else’s pillow talk.
Their wars disturb my sleep but they are merely lover’s quarrels
where neighbors can make out a phrase or two,
and the unreciprocation, their contempt for our distress
is but a whispering note in a high-end dinner date
to complement the wine.

I look into your eyes and tell the history of all that is,
and the total past is prologue for our talking,
and we solve whatever problems there are festering
because we care to understand each other's viewpoint.
As we talk, people watch us eagerly from the aethers
and we smell the scents of heaven that imbue their evening rooms.
What we do seems to matter more to them than public speeches
for the real is the only thing, the only thing that matters,
and no one can forget that they are real.

Crazy

I walk through the mist
in awe of the glistening snow at night
as the dharma of rain soaks my skin.

While the others are driving, splashing my shoes
I walk the two miles to my home
in my own cold baptism.

There is nothing in these homes for me
with their warm TVs,
there is only this chance

that another word waits around the corner,
a new rhythm to capture from the pleadings of rain,
a different sensation to coax from the winter dark.

Grey Day

I. Observations
The blank sheet of snow
Is already turning grey
As the portentous sky
And rooftops of slate,
The now-trodden paths
And the grid of the highway,
The branches of trees
Where the junco birds play,
The fog from the breath
As it billows away,
The smoke on the river,
The stacks and the chimneys,
The switches and platforms
And sides of the train,
The tall office towers
And the window frames,
The fences and pipes
And satellite plates,
The bridges and schools
And commercial displays,
The stacked blocks and wet stone
And graffiti base paint,
The clock hands and tire rims
And locked storefront grates,
Garage doors and steeple tops,
Antennas and fire escapes,
Concertina and chain link,
Derricks and cranes,
Swingsets and air vents
And factory gates,
The water in cylinders
Seen through the rain.

II. Meaning
Grey is the stigma you must overcome,
The mud in the search for the truth,
What are the ashes but what has been?
The elegance of loss, the gunmetal wisdom,
The vicissitudes of sophistication,
A mind too heartless, a spirit confused,
Polarities neutralized, purities soiled,
Sharpnesses scraped away,
To accept without discernment,
The shine that is unyielding, that pulls all inside,
What can, in a moment of sun, be undone.

A Sunday in Greenwich

Behind the red barn with its rooftop of snow
in the white home older than the revolution
a book of Aeschylus is pulled off the library shelves
to peruse perhaps while the owner is waiting
for an answer to his latest email.
Greece has only so many islands to give
they must offer him something more tangible
if they expect his small claim on their distressed debt
to not be litigated in a favorable court;
without rights at par and a generous recovery waterfall
he can paralyze the global bond market and they know it
or will learn it by afternoon's end.
As he waits, he takes breaks from his monitors
to cheer for his teams, who both make the super bowl
through the most fortunate bounces of the football.
He must make a call, the game will be fun to attend this year,
he resolves as he reads the happy report
how Newt won by running against the elites.
He takes his Xanax and Crestor
And reads briefs before his usual blissful sleep,
unaware that the Black Water Dragon
now emerges in the darkest of skies.

Snowblind

lilac snow
violet sky
white
can't yet
be seen

for the light
inside of us
has not yet risen

we're not clarified enough
to see it
purely
just its fractures
seen uncertainly
as if they were the vapor
of our dreams
stories in the static noise
that make us feel our lives
are not our own

when white
is certainty
the law that is alignment
the pull that keeps us
tethered
to the stars

Black Angel Suite

First a translation of Eugenio Montale’s “L’angelo nero” (Go here for the original Italian plus an alternative translation by the great William Arrowsmith), then an original poem on the same subject…

I.
Angel of black
restore me in soot
under your wings,
I can scrape past the combs
of thorns, the illuminations of the ovens
and kneel down
on the extinguished embers
if ever there remains some fringe
of your feathers

small angel so dark,
not heavenly or human
angel who is visible
changing different colors
and different forms, the same
then not the same, in the rapid flashing
tale-spinning your incomprehensible

black angel unveil
but do not kill me with your radiance,
do not clear the halo of fog
imprinted in my mind
because there is no eye that can withstand the headlights,
angel of coal that will shelter
inside the chestnut seller’s shawl

great ebony angel
dark angel
or white, if I, tired of wandering
took your wing and felt it
creak
I could not recognize you as I do
in sleep, waking in the morning
because it’s easier for a biped or a camel
to fit a needle's eye
than distinguish the false from the true,
and the burnt part that’s left, the lump
on your fingertips
is less than the dust
on your last feather, great angel
of furnace and ash, miniature angel
chimney sweep.

II.
Angel of black
with invisible wings
fill up my lungs with your flickering
grime, angel hobbling
in vagabond clothes
chanting toothless hymns,
cover the pipe steam too bright as it ascends
mirror my prayers too black
to comprehend, so the thought of death
is overwhelming, the sense of loss almost real,
let the burn of injustice turn the sky to ash
before it reduces
to blue and confusion,
let me know my sins and see in you
their retribution
and mercy in your hideous cloak.

O angel walk past me in fur
skirting the unknown with vampiric gait
and disappear, when your eyes
have laid their eggs in me
to purple smoke, the blackened
acid sweet leaves
of what's no longer
in form
and there's no life at all in the gargoyles
just the thought of you
as if you exist.

Don't desert me, black angel,
I wish to forget
that the world is service and thought
is endless,
let me grovel with turbid fanatics
who all harbor secret doubts
and a thirst for vengeance.
The sulfurous burn
of the paper and names
as the borders get blurred,
encendered,
how you endure the fire’s play, resolute
pit, cast-iron charm.

Why I Don't Mourn the Loss of History

"There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago." - J. Robert Oppenheimer

Euripides is speaking in this brook
As is Joy Formidable;
Both are preferable to the no voice that we hear
Contradicting all our yes’s.

Cultura, the tiny leaf off the tree that we saved
Is all we have left of our vanity
In the raw perception of the moment,

Where the rise and fall of countless lifetimes
is now transformed into our soil, our water, what we are,
a mulch where anything can grow
but seeds so precious they must drop from unseen birds.