The Thousand Natural Shocks That Flesh Is Heir To

They tried to crush
The artist within.
They did their best.
You’d bring them
Ecstasy and enlightenment,
But they took you
to be
An unlikely candidate.

Does one worry about a tree?
One worries the stretched
Limbs will fall
that reach so carefully?
That the ground will be sold
From under him,
and he’ll have no place to go,
No place to hang his hat,
The tree, when old age comes,
Particularly.

The poet is one,
Like Donne,
Who sees clearly,
And writes something simply,
From looking at a matter straight.
He understands the point
Of ecstasy,
Of the fly that ‘sucked.’
Brave fly, good fly.
Good for the fly,
And for fucking
and ecstasy.
Natural enlightenment
offered,
At a very good price.

So they beat you in the place
Where you were prone toward
Ecstasy, tell you that
You did it wrong,
Treated you like were
a weird bastard, nothing more,
Slapped your pen away
And made you work at things
other than your work,
Put you on the defensive,
Which you didn't have time for,
And which made you sad.
Made you have to crawl back,
Drunkenly at the end of the night.
Just to have your bit of day.

And having to wonder why,
And what, anyway,
Was the point
of what they had to say.
You rebuilt your mansion
of many rooms therein,
to dwell.

"Fuck you, too."
The be-dumbed
Look of baffled
Innocence,
Of one who doesn’t get it,
I shall keep.





Sirens came.
Lights flashed blue
against a wall
in the night.
Like when cops go by,
except they stopped and stayed.
I'd become
a Transcendentalist poet,
and they were taking me
away.