to get the yips.
Any small ration of anxiety
will set the hands a-flutter.
Forget the hypnosis and
meditation techniques,
focus instead on the hole,
that Freudian objective,
staring with its bad eye,
out of a perfectly manicured
jigsaw puzzle of jumbled
green elements, designed
to humble every human
who stares intently into it.
In this drama, light reverses
itself and doubt is born.
The first sob does not grate,
but makes all intoxication rise,
doom-eager, as the eagles
of blackness band and lower
their fierce, unyielding beaks.
This is the path to creation,
the dark dive, the arrow
of the mind that screams
for oblivion, even as the
handle in your hands turns
into a crossbow that cannot
find its tricky target among
the endless surprises of sand
and water and hungry stalks
of untrammeled grass. First
thing to go are the eyes and
then the distance shimmies
and one imagines whole towns
sawed apart by the tornado’s
tip, as the finger of God
touched down and the white
ball becomes an iris, a star,
a twinkle in the drain that
might guide this sparkle
of luck, this forty foot
birdie putt, this clown mouth
hoping to regain its
clumsy, clueless tooth,
laughing its black one-liners
as the dimpled orb lips
round its warm pocket
and winnows happily out.
CONTEXT
With great risk comes greater risk
and to live in the inquiry is to abandon
the safe proximity of childish expectation.
Be careful, my father says, at every parting,
as if he remembered the lesson of Cicero,
though he does not, whose head was separated
from its body politic and raised on a pike,
after a lady, not a lover, stuck a pin
through his tongue with a sign that foretold
the editorial. Enough of his eloquence, the
message read, and one would have to possess
the brain of a chickpea not to get its point.
Context is a faith that cuts both ways,
a perfectly fitted gown, and the greatest gift,
even among the gods, is the suave, authentic
remnant of silent knowing, the arched eyebrow,
the well-placed wink, bereft of seductive
diffidence, beaten clean of detached ambivalence,
robust with plenty in reserve, dense with sly
experience, and remarkably, all in—
NOSTALGIA AS ENTROPY
If, before the Bang, there was nothing, and if all energy since then
is expended in the manner best suited to return the world to that state,
then all seemingly random permutations of energy dispersal must be
attempts to accelerate the return to chaos. —David Mamet
The entire universe, the size of a marble,
exploded and is still expanding,
water moving from high energy to low,
seeks the bottom, and every being follows it.
Lincoln believed that all nations must shed
their energy, and that wealth accrued from
slavery would be dispersed through war,
downstream from the dreams of the Constitution.
True human nature is dissipation, the release
of stored light into chaos. The good old bad
old days are always in the past, blockading Cuba,
or bombing Nagasaki, humans joined at the neck
with machines. The rule book of diffusion directs
us to make treaties with the Native Americans,
because to live like Falstaff requires tremendous
amounts of fuel. Entropy never sneezes, does not
like magic or crocodiles or penicillin, hiccups only
if the planets stop orbiting around their Sun.
We want our designs to articulate a meaning
beyond
