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to challenge sleep to go against the one-eyed god of  victimhood: Polyphemus by way of  Redon rising, open eye ripe with stupid gazing. How dare you look at me? plural tense: now and then, to bed and back again and one more war. The oral rinse of moral sense can lift the fence of expectation, expand the dome of  tolerance. I, too, arose from the unthinkable, used to Nobody responding loud as circumstance.

It is patent to the eye that cannot face the sun The smug philosophers lie who say the world is one; World is other and other, world is here and there, Parmenides would smother life for lack of air Precluding birth and death; his crystal never breaks— No movement and no breath, no progress nor mistakes, Nothing begins or ends, no one loves or fights, All your foes are friends and all your days are nights And all the roads lead round and are not roads at all And the soul is muscle-bound, the world a wooden ball. The modern monist too castrates, negates our lives And nothing that we do, make or become survives, His terror of confusion freezes the flowing stream Into mere illusion, his craving for supreme Completeness means be chokes each orifice with tight Plaster as he evokes a dead ideal of white All-white Universal, refusing to allow Division or dispersal—Eternity is now And Now is therefore numb, a fact he does not see Postulating a dumb static identity Of Essence and Existence which could not fuse without Banishing to a distance belief along with doubt, Action along with error, growth along with gaps; If man is a mere mirror of God, the gods collapse. No, the formula fails that fails to make it clear That only change prevails, that the seasons make the year, That a thing, a beast, a man is what it is because It is something that began and is not what it was, Yet is itself throughout, fluttering and unfurled, Not to be cancelled out, not to be merged in world, Its entity a denial of all that is not it, Its every move a trial through chaos and the Pit, An absolute and so defiant of the One Absolute, the row of noughts where time is done, Where nothing goes or comes and Is is one with Ought And all the possible sums alike resolve to nought. World is not like that, world is full of blind Gulfs across the flat, jags against the mind, Swollen or diminished according to the dice, Foaming, never finished, never the same twice. You talk of Ultimate Value, Universal Form— Visions, let me tell you, that ride upon the storm And must be made and sought but cannot be maintained, Lost as soon as caught, always to be regained, Mainspring of our striving towards perfection, yet Would not be worth achieving if the world were set Fair, if error and choice did not exist, if dumb World should find its voice for good and God become Incarnate once for all. No, perfection means Something but must fall unless there intervenes Between that meaning and the matter it should fill Time’s revolving hand that never can be still. Which being so and life a ferment, you and I Can only live by strife in that the living die, And, if we use the word Eternal, stake a claim Only to what a bird can find within the frame Of momentary flight (the value will persist But as event the night sweeps it away in mist). Man is man because he might have been a beast And is not what he was and feels himself increased, Man is man in as much as he is not god and yet Hankers to see and touch the pantheon and forget The means within the end and man is truly man In that he would transcend and flout the human span: A species become rich by seeing things as wrong And patching them, to which I am proud that I belong. Man is surely mad with discontent, he is hurled By lovely hopes or bad dreams against the world, Raising a frail scaffold in never-ending flux, Stubbornly when baffled fumbling the stubborn crux And so he must continue, raiding the abyss With aching bone and sinew, conscious of things amiss, Conscious of guilt and vast inadequacy and the sick Ego and the broken past and the clock that goes too quick, Conscious of waste of labour, conscious of spite and hate, Of dissension with his neighbour, of beggars at the gate, But conscious also of love and the joy of things and the power Of going beyond and above the limits of the lagging hour, Conscious of sunlight, conscious of death’s inveigling touch, Not completely conscious but partly—and that is much.

Don't feel small. We all have been demoted. Go on being moon or rock or orb, buoyant and distant, smallest craft ball at Vanevenhoven's Hardware spray-painted purple or day-glow orange for a child's elliptical vision of fish line, cardboard and foam. No spacecraft has touched you, no flesh met the luster of your heavenly body. Little cold one, blow your horn. No matter what you are planet, and something other than planet, ancient but not "classical," the controversy over what to call you light-hours from your ears. On Earth we tend to nurture the diminutive, root for the diminished. None of your neighbors knows your name. Nothing has changed. If Charon's not your moon, who cares? She remains unmoved, your companion.

On February 7, 1979, Pluto crossed over Neptune’s orbit and became the eighth planet from the sun for twenty years. A study in 1988 determined that Pluto’s path of orbit could never be accurately predicted. Labeled as “chaotic,” Pluto was later discredited from planet status in 2006. Today, I broke your solar system. Oops. My bad. Your graph said I was supposed to make a nice little loop around the sun. Naw. I chaos like a motherfucker. Ain’t no one can chart me. All the other planets, they think I’m annoying. They think I’m an escaped moon, running free. Fuck your moon. Fuck your solar system. Fuck your time. Your year? Your year ain’t shit but a day to me. I could spend your whole year turning the winds in my bed. Thinking about rings and how Jupiter should just pussy on up and marry me by now. Your day? That’s an asswipe. A sniffle. Your whole day is barely the start of my sunset. My name means hell, bitch. I am hell, bitch. All the cold you have yet to feel. Chaos like a motherfucker. And you tried to order me. Called me ninth. Somewhere in the mess of graphs and math and compass you tried to make me follow rules. Rules? Fuck your rules. Neptune, that bitch slow. And I deserve all the sun I can get, and all the blue-gold sky I want around me. It is February 7th, 1979 and my skin is more copper than any sky will ever be. More metal. Neptune is bitch-sobbing in my rearview, and I got my running shoes on and all this sky that’s all mine. Fuck your order. Fuck your time. I realigned the cosmos. I chaosed all the hell you have yet to feel. Now all your kids in the classrooms, they confused. All their clocks: wrong. They don’t even know what the fuck to do. They gotta memorize new songs and shit. And the other planets, I fucked their orbits. I shook the sky. Chaos like a motherfucker. It is February 7th, 1979. The sky is blue-gold: the freedom of possibility. Today, I broke your solar system. Oops. My bad.

As I was guided by the director through the thick space Of these rooms, worn sparrow brown, and strode With the August sun on my shoulders across this particular Acre of grass, nobody had told me this was the place Where you had summered as a boy.  I have weathered My fourth decade, older now than you were When you died. I can barely remember you, yet I can see You not as my father but as my son. You are age nine. The downpour divides into two massive stage curtains Parting. You bolt from the bunk, loudly racing With your chums down the slippery hill to the dock, Your cape of a towel flapping as if ready to lift you airborne. You are the smallest. Still, you always run in the front. You do not know how beautiful you are, of course, squinting Against the sun, the flame that escapes behind the gray Vapor for hours, sometimes for days. You cannot see That from the beginning it has been eyeing you from afar, That it has focused its golden spotlight just for you.

The ants came to investigate the dead bull snake, nibbled at the viscera and hurried off with full mouths waving wild antenae. Moths alighted, beetles swarmed, flies buzzed in the stomach. Three crows tugged and tore and flew off to their oak tree with the skin. In every house men, women and children were chewing beef. Who was it said “The wonder of the world is its comprehensibility”?

I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane, The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories, The news would pour out of various devices Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen. I would call my friends on other devices; They would be more or less mad for similar reasons. Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values. As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened, We would try to imagine them, try to find each other, To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other, Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, To let go the means, to wake. I lived in the first century of these wars.

I’m in the house. It’s nice out: warm sun on cold snow. First day of   spring or last of   winter. My legs run down the stairs and out the door, my top half   here typing

I don’t belong in this century—who does? In my time, summer came someplace in June— The cutbanks blazing with roses, the birds brazen, and the astonished Pastures frisking with young calves . . . That was in the country— I don’t mean another country, I mean in the country: And the country is lost. I don’t mean just lost to me, Nor in the way of metaphorical loss—it’s lost that way too— No; nor in no sort of special case: I mean Lost. Now, down below, in the fire and stench, the city Is building its shell: elaborate levels of emptiness Like some sea-animal building toward its extinction. And the citizens, unserious and full of virtue, Are hunting for bread, or money, or a prayer, And I behold them, and this season of man, without love. If it were not a joke, it would be proper to laugh. —Curious how that rat’s nest holds together— Distracting . . . Without it there might be, still, The gold wheel and the silver, the sun and the moon, The season’s ancient assurance under the unstable stars Our fiery companions . . . And trees, perhaps, and the sound Of the wild and living water hurrying out of the hills. Without these, I have you for my talisman: Sun, moon, the four seasons, The true voice of the mountains. Now be (The city revolving in its empty shell, The night moving in from the East) —Be thou these things.

Fall a scrimage of yellow leaves today All over Lincoln Park Like the mask of the Yellow Mule who travels between the next world and Tibet inside its house of glass in the Field Museum by the lake. I am carrying the night. I am carrying it as if it were a dark blue dish with stars for the dinner of the Dalai Lama. It is the sky two nights ago; Its voluptuous rich blue looks almost black before the word for blue had been invented; The clouds like continents, like huge, majestic prehistoric creatures moving in a dance; The stars are brilliant ants.  They may have died a billion years ago. I feel so happy.   It is as if I'm with my wife who's making sculpture miles and miles away on Ada Street. I like everything about her. The way an angel, say, might look upon this early autumn scene and love everything about it for its reality— These trees flanking the lagoon at Fullerton are quiet as green fish, The pale khaki maple leaf lying on the ground, its veins intricate as the practice of a Tartar cavalry, Its delicacy like the penis of a cuttlefish, The grass pale lime and brown as dreams when they are turning brown Is almost ghostly, The way the family album on the table in the livingroom has a gallery of ghosts. There is only wonder. Like the wonder in the worn thighbone of the dinosaur We're allowed to touch As often as we want on the Main Floor of the Field Museum. I bike along the lake and watch The whiplash of the waves and think, I didn't have to be here in the first place: I could have been a star: Or cuttlefish. The shadow of that tree.  Or been one of the bees of oblivion In any ordinary orgasm. If there were no moon our hearts could take its place.