PART ONE: The Birds Sing to Plato
How the zeroes stack up, blessedly
among the personal effects of a most public education,
or in the urns of dialogue, so achingly deployed
through shadows easily singing, then things feathered
across the lap of curious boys but if punning must replace paradox
couldn’t the caves arch a little more earthly
couldn’t the birds usurp the pings of the dead,
even if only through recitation but let’s recite our lines
into the line of lines, dearly bored
and fettered to the wall with a feeling as if proportional, however
schematic,
when wandering the vapors of a dialogue already in progress
or festering beneath another supernova
swerving from a previous edition
come to snap the necks of the servants,
their heads lolling blearily toward erudition.
Socrates (A Hasty Reply)
Bloated with sleep and olives, hesitating
within the hesitation
and lashed to the mask in a stink of wine-lees and wooly fat—
an offensive lack of maintenance
bore the brand
of rising tides and sweeping gains
but dust is light and night is must
ease an answer not worth the question
but not content with things doing just as they do,
ends up in the mush between business and work
a kind of terror
shakes the clouds free its ghostly sauce
two or three fade to flax
another settles in a ring of dirt
perforations, preliminary preparations
appointments to all-time
fortifying their positions.
PART TWO: INSIDE THE THINKERY
Upon Entering
trills and syncopations built to the vapors’ specifications,
impulse abridged
but against four walls of mirror and for a ceiling evening emptying
its helmet
the most delicate propulsive instincts form the floor one fold at
a time
vacant as a marionette reunited with the primordial behind the vertical
axis
and the steady hand of false routine ribbed and indexed to the fossils
of symptoms
and appetite grown asymmetrical via echo and nonchalance through
either hemisphere,
and still some serviceable light disinfects the surge of furze around
the breach
in the retrospective pigments to pigeons, aphorisms of image wavering
in the gelatin
but in the periphery there’s always another alphabet waiting
to be conquered
objects and distinctions rendered in oscillation an almost sensate,
almost earth
is trapped in the mirror at thirty-three and a third degrees until
cadence and diction
conspire against concepts two or three degrees removed toward a
song on the lip of a lyre
and stranded in the interruption of a serviceable lyric it is always
midday
and massive gray outside and not alone even in a footprint
and with a compulsion to black out; even the maimed come to see
that this is hard
but not rigorous, and hardly even difficult—to some it is
even indispensable
to something to come like clouds walking back toward their mothers
or eights and infinities hollowed out, anachronism usurps violence
even in its decayed
state; communications exhausts language; form crumples stasis
Aristotle in the Thinkery
Observe, a rent
penetrating reflection
oblong and static like the moon I leased
and gave away
for roots in water, head in an alien light
for another morning stalled under the robe
of postscripts invented without yet a page
only a damp melody from a tired instrument
cancels the gong-intoned consensus
twittering in from the hole in the ceiling
of some building I’d previously occupied
but here clouds drift through the bones
more private than you choosing a shiftless deity,
boil the afternoon hare and I will teach you
spare violence, exhale
but always remember
exile is an imposing form of carelessness
not to be confused with enlightenment
for example, the sky over this witchery bursts butter yellow
as for the appearance of the goddess, she comes for the company
but I need execution to be new again, so of no interest,
except as supposition, but I popped
her back into the box, after polishing the face
because reciprocity insists on a window
slight starlight, thigh of a young goat…
The Boy in the Back of the Room
or The Young Paremenides
Against the orphic the sublime against whispers
taking effect above the waist or the dark room
that requires them and if not from the core of us
from which language does the chorus come
man and child believing what they say
but if I make it up don’t I then remember
how it was before I or Plato have forgotten
what made up the maker made up my mind
but if I don’t make it, don’t wait up.
At the Registrar
of such and such little more need be said provided
emphasis on reality, communication will exhaust language
as you can see, not only is satisfaction not guaranteed, it’s
unnatural
like the information you requested or possession
nine tenths entitlement one long and unwieldy yellow
toward speculation or the the hello of hollow pyrics
whether or not boredom discloses the divine
margins of your accounts not withstanding
and perhaps at a time bad beginnings were billed as bad endings
not suggesting, but if you must think, think like a man of action
and act like a man of contemplation; always remember
rich or poor you have money to thank
The Birds Sing to the Boy
we do not speak greek
so hold no opinion
on Sparta or any other harm
you would or would not
consent to an enemy
other than sophistry or
solipsism or the war
against harm but we do
and don’t have arms so
don’t work with wood
not even for food and
have no knowledge of ears
what we hear we instantly fear
so many rumors of the good
The Boy at the Back of the Room Sings to the Birds
Face to the war, legs and head to the mind of Medusa
the musician of silence, moon like nothing’s hold on grief
or gravity
in phases and names lost in the mines
mine’s to lose
here in the cave
drum drop washing
all the complaints
plainly I am ready
not you
who stop to exist
the second you see me
the second me
the new seems so little to go on
with nothing to hum
no legends, no legs
and so long, we must go
toward our statues to come
Aristophanes to Aristotle: Concerning First Books
Or How I Think We Met
Man is animal, at least you got that much you got right
but as a pole it only tickles—you’ll excuse me, I was
born drunk
on what was bound to vanish, and with a swan buried
where I wanted my body, until I was coughing up lentils
while you descended a set of sudden, very short stairs
I eventually caught up with you, but how shallow, how casually
tossed about—the taffy of comparison and disclosure.
But what works, works—even though the farce of inflation
has always been with us, even as we opposed it with a confusion
gradually diluted.
There were at least two tablets. I was studying them to see if
your name or mine
had become a disease.
You were in a pond of magnets, tuning fork to your ear,
like Archimedes and his primitive lasers
but anachronism is the refuge of modernity,
and conveniently mediocrity usurps violence
speechlessness even engineering is omnipotent
compared to the task today
which is to bring coincidence
to chaos, or shun an erring child
that it may provoke the most indispensable science of misuse
but farther still to do better than our farthers
farther into the savage repartee
of dogs barking exegisis
with an emphasis
on reality as an ulterior purpose
until it’s forceps
to forced steps
a world between echoes
consciousness like love contains no instructions.
Aristophanes
The doves are flying backward, deathless
the war that’s ending
is not the present war
it’s the forehead of darkness
engraved no innuendo
only the soil is immortal,
the immortals are extinct
to condors, it’s all condors
it is not frogs.
though they are everywhere
and seem to lust forever
after the most attractive trochee
then straying toward a candor that croaks unopposed.
So this must be my last lewd rose,
swallow it whole and forgive me
or be forgiven—
it’s not how I use to work them into a frenzy of not quite
intelligence,
not quite infanticide—that they might approach the curtain
as mortals,
and if only just this once know history as the chorus—no belief
required.
Because without it, you
are free only to worship, warship, to flee,
free to be unopposed by the wrong words in the right order, save
the inevitable shallowness of the audience that learns only from
remorse
the safe have no right to saved.
A Few Words from Parmenides
Now that the first are last and the last are leaving, the living
and the dead
can never be separate, and neither are any good with endings
like what to include what to leave out which moon to choose
given that rarefaction and condensation cannot be removed
any more than zero is capable of the most austere restraint
though goddess claims to have caught him tightening his sash
as if to suggest the aesthetics of eros the aesthetics of torture
are indivisible
from eternity or the empty space scraping like antlers in the darkness
darkness glowing from the explanations which in truth were no explanation
just the irresistible aphrodisiac of sleeping back to back
with an absence growing gradually less frayed, less fringe
to justify how preferable foreign gestures are to beauty or conspiracy
but beauty is nothing but a delicate explosion
in the possibility
that all will be clear to the audience to come
the narcotic of singulars in the most circular thoughts
hidden in the mind of the victim’s victim
between what is us what is distance
but crushed knowledge and compressed drives
such as love or its dialectical equivalents
organized like a stupor
and opposed through confusion
until legislation later something redacted something turns out
wrong
but there is so much nothing and so much redaction
a row of statistics on the stone’s strange plan
leads to a hard time looking down,
so back to the horizon and up the wall on very plain stairs
down through the vapors roaring inaudibly long
and for such a long time there is nothing to do
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