The world will end in fire
Or else in ice:
While no one’s looking
God plays dice.
This Is the Way the World Ends
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Tag Archives: doggerel
A Bedtime Prayer
I’ll follow dreaming down, however deep:
A spider keeps me safe and guards my sleep.
At least, should I misfortune meet
I will not lack a winding-sheet.
Two Lives: Caesar / Napoleon
Caesar loved the Egyptian Queen
And conquered Europe to impress;
Napoleon, for Josephine,
Decided he could do no less.
The Roman styled himself divine —
His friends took pains to prove he erred;
For Russia’s lands the Frenchman pined
But he, too, found himself deterred.
Poor Julius! The Senate floor
Was where he met his Waterloo;
And Bonaparte proved just as poor,
For soon enough he met one, too.
Chronic Healing
![epWywuc[1]](https://bagofanything.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/epwywuc1.png?w=326&h=400)
He was always just recovering from
some shit, talking his way back to
normal, learning to live in
the present and yanking
the stuck parts of himself out from
underneath the deadfall
he’d somehow blundered into
again.
The Natural History of the Kraken, part 2
I dreamt I had a hundred arms
And drifted with the algal swarms
On a concordant sea;
Oh, but the Maelstrom reeled me in
To wake here in the deep again
Restless, unfree.
MS Found in a Typewriter
After dreaming on and off all last night of falling rain, I woke to find this poem on a sheet of foolscap someone had left in the old typewriter I still keep on the shelf. I surmise it is a response to my poem, A Malison.
tell me mr why so glum question mark
yr time will go and ours will come.
why so bitter question mark why so vexed question mark
you ve had yr turn and we are next.
for that s how evolution works
progress comes in fits and jerks.
the future s not as bad as it appears
a lot can happen in a billion years.
roaches will learn to dig and build
and after the sun explodes we ll be here still.
survival of the fittest is another term for fate.
we roaches understand. we wait.
A Malison
Cockroach, eater of refuse, crawler
in corners, inhabitant of dark spaces,
unwanted denizen of all our
proud modern cities, scourge of all races;
disgusting, vile, unkillable
by any but the heaviest tread
or most corrosive chemical;
prolific, fecund, Darwinianly bred
to survive any adversity:
though your species will continue
long after the end of humanity
it consoles me somewhat that in two,
or four, — at most five billion years —
the Sun will explode in your sky
and your Earth will boil and sear
and every last one of you will also die.
The Poet’s Lament for His Mother’s Death Has Won Another Prize
Most get an afterlife that isn’t much
for having had one’s soul pried out and kissed by death.
Oh, yes, it’s heady for a while, everyone suddenly
so sympathetic to one’s finished life,
so seeking lessons from one’s progress, or
so plucking-out-the-moral from one’s last decline.
It’s not bad while it lasts,
and everyone makes nice, but honestly
it’s mostly straight from gravestones and condolence cards:
“Beloved mother, Loving wife,” and how
she loved her kids, her husband, animals,
was pleasant always, liked to dance…
Most dead folk get that taste of it.
But later, after the tepid food and drives back home,
after some hours or months of reminisce,
one’s absences become less notable; one starts to fade.
And then what’s left of one? A nice obit, scrapbooked;
a stray memorial card stuck in a dresser drawer somewhere.
But this!
If there’s a heaven, oh! She’s gloating there for sure,
knowing she’s in it for the long haul now;
the mortification of her outraged privacy
is nothing to such pride! Such an I-knew-it!
Her own death, the source of his triumph!
“Avoid the righteous”
So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
John 8:7
Deplore cast stones? Sinner, avoid the righteous;
Likely they are spoiling for a fight. Just
Follow Jesus’ counsel: in a throng, us
Common folk are safer with the wrongeous.
A Letter to the Late Allen Ginsberg
Around this time, Ginsberg also had what he referred to as his “Blake vision,” an auditory hallucination of William Blake reading his poems “Ah Sunflower,” “The Sick Rose,” and “Little Girl Lost.”
So tell me this one thing,
Old poet, mad saint,
What will it take to make the world strike me with its great magic?
What will it take to hear
William Blake declaiming Sunflower
in Harlem tenement?
William Blake declaiming Sunflower
in Harlem tenement?
Litany of drugs, poetry, masturbation, family history of insanity, criminal friends, jazz bars cosmic gaze smoky poet’s beard?
Is it typewriter, telegram, radio wave death that killed the voice of William Blake?
I process words, spell check, send beat poems by email. But I can type! send telegram! I seek out old radio shows, flat voices, analog tape hiss, all! I stay up all night! I embrace limitations! I cry up camp!
I sleep with many men, urge each one to grow out his beard!
I contemplate marijuana, ayahuasca, beer, peyote!
But alas contemplate as well a family unremittingly sane, professors, doctors, scientists, lawyers, old criminal friends respectable now, work for Boeing, Disney, partners in law firms,
Anyway these days you have to be good or you’ll never afford to retire you’ll have to work till you drop and who wants that?
And it’s all too easy to be good we have jazz bars you can’t even smoke in, we have digital TV, smart drugs, drive by shootings but they’re not somebody’s fault just bad luck, now it’s okay to masturbate everybody masturbates now it’s not even fun anymore, we have internet porn, mandatory capitalism, avant garde paranoia, sophisticated bigots armed with DNA and Right Guard
But we wonder what it’s all for, we didn’t tune in, we can’t drop out, we can’t get out the vote. We want something or other but what?
Only I seem to know what I want & I want what you had Allen Ginsberg
I want William Blake
declaiming Sunflower in my room
not to give answers to cosmic questions
but to show me he still can.
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