The Wishy-Washy Heresies
of Our Time

a poem should not mean
But be. -MacLeish, Ars Poetica

In the twenty seventh book
wrote: dust, a native flower
the landscape hated
and decorated,
wrote about cancer, a guess
that it must have changed
something in lieu of itself,
must have been a contagion.
Began to say my doctrine
(as if this would help)
into tape recorders placed
on credenzas and coffee tables,
begins to see the embarrassing
stigmata and shoves them into
percolators one after the other
to keep the catalogue on fire.
This one is for the real baby,
aims not for the body
but the mind, is perversely
academic, a congregato
de propaganda fide ethnic
cleansing where the only
conversation contains
the lesson of the world,
the lesson of conjecture
in that world, the ecclesiast
of our kind but not the djinn.

There was an old woman
who lived in a shoe,
skiddlarinky-dinky-do
her bones lived there too.
How many exceptions
are increments*
allowed to Iblis
to hone in and feed
on these children?
My doctrine she says
into the machine, my doctrine.
I can fix anything for a while
with pebbles and string.


This poem was crafted between four a.m. and about six. It is hand carved out of superior elements forged by a group of exemplary standards. The crux (topical and mechanical) of it relies on the stability of
introducing the "machine" into a process known as extemporare phenomenology aided by the use of an actual machine to hammer out the finite details i.e. Wikipedia and i.e. to drive the points of it home. Furthermore, the use of such heavyweight terminology is secondary to theme but all the same must come across in no uncertain terms. Sadly, the wisdom is mistaken for belligerence on most levels due to the predominant theories of our time (this is the assumption of conjecture and its profound ability to mesmerize (like the old magicians in front of Musa and Firon who seemed to bundle light or improvised Houdini like escapades all the way until the Red Sea closed down albeit the magicians ended up siding with the prophet afterall...a relatively undisplayed part of that chronology)):

The enemy will continue to infiltrate Literature.
—Comrade Stavsky (head of the Soviet writers’ union), 1937

The beauty of such poems is indicative of the ideologies incorporated to create a powerful blow to the industry of "poetry" as it relates to "religion" and/or the "priesthood". Clearly, there are those who have become quite good at it and clearly, there is an innate good in the production of such decorative philosophical fancies that can stand the test of time even for an instant.

*Increments of certain length

"The SoQ/post-avant theory is a mountain of polemic founded on pure special pleading. It's "us vs. them" paranoia as convenience. Why? Because literature, art and poetry are rooted in fundamental ethical and aesthetic criteria. Inner law. And every work of art is an imperfect attempt to express that law. The effort by polemicists and literary-historical revisionists such as Silliman, Gooding and others, to promote certain forms of art and poetry on a rhetorical-collective-political basis (by which certain literary groups and trends are inherently and historically "superior" to others) is bound to fail. Because art finds its sanction only through the art itself, and collective ideologies and networks are only forms of intellectual inside trading. They corrupt the essential "work" of art -- which is to express the ethical and aesthetic problem in its own original and irreducible terms." -Henry Gould, HG Poetics

Man. Wish I would have said that.