To the Idea of the Poet, Dead, Rotting in His Order

I

We did essentialize our differences (so back off),

Turning truth into an awkward false syllogism:

I am right and true, we both said; what is right

And true – whether sepia-tone or black and white – 

Is the only way we will prevail, the only course

Of action to take, the only way to proceed,

We both said; ergo, said as a joke, we can only

Follow one path – mine – not said jokingly,

We both said.

II

If but not a thousand words;

If but not an impossible fillip;

If but not a blue guitar;

If but no logician;

If but not the empty vessel;

If but not the earth-worn boot;

If but not the still, normal life;

If but not the puffin;

If but only not…

If but never the unuttered

Tolerance, this bane, acceptance where lines should be drawn:

Our resigning critique of sand castles constricting conditional

Confluences lost when not amply abandoned.

Our coal cars, two, charred and soot-fed careened

An indolent course behind the trampoline car,

Behind the quick-dry epoxy car, before

The slatternly nailhead car but after

The acrostic armchair car – a pause:

Why train as metaphor?

III

Our time is better spent as signifier or analogy, as change purse

When not displaced transference; see here the engineer, his smirk 

And sneer a signpost of indifference for all to hear and abide.

The madrigal car turned over, pulling with it the hawks

And the three-armed boy car.  It’s not over until the anagrammatical 

Sofa sings, and the bearded lady tumps the lizard-skinned sword swallower

Onto the tiger-skin rug.  (As many in captivity as free, now extinct, almost

Incidentally.)

The conductor tolerates the state of his menagerie, calls it

Mercury or hedonized iodine, spits at cloud burst when being

Replaced doing.  Flung a craving, a caveat taped on the capital

Wall.  This train is barreling

Over the falls to its next spun destination, Dubuque or Hartford,

The bayou, the beach, the plains, buoyed

At gaps on the tracks.  The toothless smile

On the mumbling mime’s face keeps

The engineer in stitches.

IV

If but not on schedule, the caboose

Rolls under the watershed, the pump cast

In quick-dry cement, the town urchins

Lined to cheer and maybe, if the moms

Do not pay attention, have a go

At the bouncy-ball car – chugging

And flouncing the twisted tarp

With the smiley-duck face – 

A calliope tune from the Uberman review,

That cancelled radiolog from the last

Cold war’s propaganda simile.  Two

Coal cars smolder, waiting to flame

Wearing gold lamé throws accentuated

With just-for-kicks lefty berets apace

With the changing times.  Abstract truth

Displaces theorized abatement because

If but not only when – conditional

Altruism.

V

How we did away with structure, how order,

Even posted, felled us in our twitterings.

Pictures of the removed, of the harrowed,

Tiny simulacrums of disfigurements

And not only the actors and the readers,

Not only the straight lines and the devil,

Not only the faithless and the trite,

Not only the taken and the had,

Not just the beaten but the bully,

Not just the deadbeat but the mad,

Not just the darkened but the wheat – 

These too the two by two, the first

In a long line of the flimflammed – 

This train rolls to its halt of preened feathers

Splayed across the backdrop of a dire

Proscenium.  Not only the two faces,

If but not only the crossed heart where no

Moraled soul, the big top endures

Its tautologies of when our clemencies

Braced against the abyss splattered water

Fall of fur and marrow, where not tolerance

But the idea of tolerance, not truth

But the thought of the leaf, not justice

But the idea of the tree,

The point of action behind the twined fingers,

Hope to die, stick a needle in the eye

Where every line drawn is the needle

Of our collective high torpidity.

VI

If but not only to each his own has met

Our faded tracks of commandments ignored

When not rationalized – a father has no say

In the mother’s choice for the child.

Coal pushes the antiquated smack

The twice-shy conductor propels

The locomotive towards the end of the rail,

The circus always visits the same town

Twice.  We come to see the quixotic,

The driving but that steers the if, 

The elephant, the peanut, the de-

Essentialized other.  One might

As easily seek the godhead in a poem

As seek the veritable in the abide.

This hankering towards the difference

In reality, towards the reality not

The idea of reality in difference, both

Ephemeral beings for the ephebe’s path

To trample.  One might as easily seek

The godhead in song as append the hymn

To the altar.  Always search for new

Havens to hold where no train runs, no

Circus tracks its blithering wrench

To destruction if so the mother chooses

For the child.  How we seek despondency

Not knowing its name, how we seek

Complacency not knowing its name,

How we seek fictive myth not knowing

Its name, how the abortive truth

Is sought not the idea of truth but truth

Not knowing its name.

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved