I know a couple of old buildings
might could be torn down or fall
anyway and maybe could be restored
or given a new make-up you know
but there they are as old as they are
and you look back at their youth
as a time when such things are done
as you and you watch the years age them
and a coat of paint in the Mexican way
could go over them or the way we do with pictures

here they will ring bell
and stop chime and they no clapper
have and all the world no crapper
have well they can go to hell

fame is such diminished
things now
and you will recall no doubt famous things
that have meant someone you things
disappeared one is autre
chose nowadays
a better stoolie or
something

well I will recall
the fame of something else
for the moment
yes yes I can tell you
here it is
I can see but clear
it is a moment soon
to be come yes
it is here
there is the fame
of the whole moment
there it is

my friend he says to me
take two cigars (I take one)
take these two cigars and light them
(so) and puff the smoke out like this
up in the air (I follow) and then you see
like is this sea or ocean maybe
well I tell him (the serious look)
it’s the crabs anyway and we laugh
and so (the joke’s not yet) behold leagues
and miles and miles and miles undersea

my friend it all goes to
this ah behold it goes my face
before my face before it goes
to my yours my face your ass
it goes and my goes and it goes
for my face and for your ass it goes

“the look of love is in your eyes”
and everywhere else on you
that is your love your servile thing
it obeyed you but not me

the King of Erl goes dryshod
in spite of what you may have heard
what Mr. Lincoln have we any?
no smokn inna palace

picking the brains of my cousin
the aesthete saith who giveth life
or his critics or the paraliteratus
who puts it all together on my head

and the bums come along saying it was rightly
(here it was again the necklaces and card parties)
to be against lavender jade and coral here
and there and upon my saying heretofore
the wizards blanching mime the sullied tricks

here an interlude

I write as my running pen dictates
or vice versa not the dialectics of sense
critics my home is not su casa stay away

bless me Sir for I have sinned
says the fellow

it could have been me

but it would have disadvantaged
my imaginary landscape

laughs the fellow

I am at a loss having done this
three hundred thousand times before
like a Restaurant Row man
before the turnaround

ah there’s an only joke

at the end of the arm is the hand
it grabs you
a very convincing proposal
hiding you and my world

Americans don’t want to ask or know what
the hell they’re reading or spectating
or why things are as they are
they have anti-depressant drugs for that
a tender mercy

you couldn’t account for it any other way
I’m telling you
the impossible unmentionable stupidities
the hard glazed grin

a hard problem and in the universities
they talk about art
the same old story

Nietzsche preferred the Opéra-Comique
to German prose and they blame him for it
The Twentieth Century

the Magi at the infant Christ
weigh Herod’s position
during this interregnum

for if all art should come to this
a fashioning out of fashion then
the abstruse questions face us plain
in Philosophy Departments everywhere

and if the poles of history whirligig
a fainted memory if only this memory
were instead of any other history then
why should we do this writing of Philosophy?

we do not in this veritable Cokeyne
but sift these books and profitless conspire
at marshals of being and fodder of vultures
to justify whatsoever plain we fill
with our tired recollectional Ethics and Good

to perspire in this expectation were less than vain
the artist says if you say art is dead
conceptual philosophizing what have you written?
and we go back to Kant or whosoever to admire
the structure of thought as a decorative emblem
of our thought let’s look at it this way
a steel-structured building faced with granite
cut to look like paper hasn’t much of mind
still less of life so can’t be called a concept

we don’t know what either are so no deciding
we have books decide that for us once was this
then that the ébonistes of Louis Quatorze
turned to lighter woods and so did Monet

Odes are there for who desire them
and written still by the hand that cares to
but on the shelf or in the street we miss them

but we do serve to justify the rank metonymy
which says our praise or blame’s the thing itself
our lack of worthwhile selves reflection and our wit
a nominative framing of the Academy for blind tourists

put to these questions from pillar to post we fly
to incunabula of first reasons and the other lesser cause
which knows defeat and calls it acclimation of the will
and clamor of asses and palm fronds in the square
we fly from upwards to non sequiturs and reason

for there is a need and then a means a locus
and variety of winds there is a quality of love
refers to necessity and the big old whoring globe
magnatical receives or does not there is philosophy
in a nutshell I see Buddha floating in oh yes
why not or Moses or the pale distract Ophelia

flack and correspondent glean the straw of CEO bricks
Babylon etc. you see the line of gracious reasoning
there are others we have been there done that offshored the T-shirt
private myths public woes and weals yes weals and then
a patient excursive commentary and commercial expatiation
see we’ve Nietzsche round again who couldn’t stand the stuff
and here we are in The New Millennium promoted as barbed wire
like Schoenberg’s music unto them as have no ear
the century is gone like a journalist’s decade
abstracted shelved and named to suit the purpose

Rimbaud the most precise of all the poets had a pen
and centrified the whirl of collocations in his view
as patiently as could be wished and has professors
to argue him down not for his life nor yet his art
for what know they of either save by misdirection and lust
but for the mere precision of his pen as this must be
in plannings dials mercurochromes and yet is other
than the plan in mind so inspiration if you call it that occurs
at length unto the mind of men of mind and fills
the vacant spaces like a bronze or something else
philosophy is this link of mind to life this yoke
we barter for ourselves if not for tenure

Pharaohs and all of them looked upon Hebrews
as a people without gods and the Hebrews saw
a culture shifting from mere animal worship
to a world of men and women and creatures so
men have shown a strong resistance to some
middlemen and terms but there are factors
that escape the finer conditions of our expectation
walleyed wander and become another economic standard

these are the diverse examples you can find of
mobile worlds observed from relative inactivity
as you have seen the Paris of Eiffel not that of
Guillotin for example so wonder is at a premium
if you speculate in thought about the nature of speculation

pompous gyroscopic attitudes just don’t pay off
the way they used to not to know what there is to know
doesn’t mean what it used to mean if you know what I mean

I on the other hand see the big deals here as a lever
you depress to get the result outside of this you see
the apologies of Misery and hosannas of Unsuccess

I rarely wonder about the underworld though it
must have its agios agoras currencies and news
that sparkles like a dreaming wunderbar Wonderbra
you keep your hopes up with or something else
that might have occurred to you a mere recall of wind
a spreading of history or just a jumble of words that
scores across a field of grass or asphalt and goes home

model theories of economics simply call for trade
and with it neighborhood and vacuity of tension
I am bidden to observe frankly I regard this as my duty

for what is a medium of exchange if not a purpose
to live and fulfill it has a round figurative nothing
that calls and calls whistles at us round the clock use me