Ironic Despair

Ironic despair,
is it to be this year?

I am caterwauling, not cautermiaowing.

I have my reasons.

Insufficiency is a delight
and will be my morning constitutional.

Those rhododendrons were deliberately placed

out of order, as you were placed

out of time. Nothing stands for the reason

it is announcing (mirabile visu) to the world;

absolutely nothing is less voluble

than the octogenarian who has not even considered

the discretion of dying. You have mistakenly

placed the flaming aircrash in front of the terminal poem

in the poem terminal which has just donned

(how unfortunate and Russian for us!) Russian rollerskates

and now pirouettes in a flaming graveyard...




...Akhmatova with fistfuls of popcorn

pretends she is Pavlova.



Insensate thin hippo,

leave the poem alone!



Waffling is divine,

it is the only proof of divinity

I can see in the universe.


Leave God's waffle alone!


God does not pour syrup

on the waffles of the universe

the way Alexander Pope would,

in an English garden. I have my English garden

and I know you have yours.


Because you pimp it.

You pimp it most extravagantly,


daily, in the most embarrassing company.


I tell you this in confidence and valor.


Leave your garden before I release my whores.

They are insensate with Lustmord and Mordlust.


They will impersonate your mother at the very Gates of your Poem.


It will be a slow Recovery for you,

if you cross me in my Virtue.


Believe me when I say I only slept with Your Mother the Poem

to free you from your Oedipal cravings.


I want you to enjoy the Blind Justice of the poem,


just like a muskmelon or Ezrael Pound.


I come bearing a Cuisinart, not Tzarist sympathies.


A blind man knows certain muskmelons speak Arabic.


GATTACA is to EROTICA

as OSMOSIS is to HYPNOSIS.


Keep in mind: every time I read your poems,

I realize


"there is no such thing as a single ant...