Tom Clark

Then it was always for now, later for later. And then years of now passed, and it grew later and later. Trapped in the shrinking chocolate box the confused sardine was unhappy. It leapt, and banged its head again. And afterward they said shall we repeat the experiment. And it said later for that.

Poetry, Wordsworth wrote, will have no easy time of it when the discriminating powers of the mind are so blunted that all voluntary exertion dies, and the general public is reduced to a state of near savage torpor, morose, stuporous, with no attention span whatsoever; nor will the tranquil rustling of the lyric, drowned out by the heavy, dull coagulation of persons in cities, where a uniformity of occupations breeds cravings for sensation which hourly visual communication of instant intelligence gratifies like crazy, likely survive this age.

The angel asked, as his shoulders were pressed into the stone Why me? And taken away from the inhabited body, Like the lyric voice rustling from memory forests, Childhood rushes toward death, a wind in those woods, Crashing through trees, dying out, Settling like a white mist over everything.

Nice spring day off big white cloud At Inspiration Point escaping time wars Poet takes book & wine bottle up into Mist Mountains Since only available agenda is rhyming with silence Seeking window of opportunity on a wall I disguise what I have to say by sounding Chinese Such as stars are now darker and farther away They take deeper drinks because space is Drying out afraid to think own thoughts Administered citizen achieving condition of robot In public mind things not so good these days Nor in wrong run will it matter to Tu Fu

The smashed weirdness of the raving cadenzas of God Takes over all of a sudden In our time. It speaks through the voices of talk show moderators. It tells us in a ringing anthem, like heavenly hosts uplifted, That the rhapsody of the pastoral is out to lunch. We can take it from there. We can take it to Easy Street. But when things get tough on Easy Street What then? Is it time for realism? And who are these guys on the bus Who glide in golden hats past us On their way to Kansas City?

Don’t hurt the radio for Against all Solid testimony machines Have feelings Too Brush past it lightly With a fine regard For allowing its molecules To remain 100% intact Machines can think like Wittgenstein And the radio’s a machine Thinking softly to itself Of the Midnight Flower As her tawny parts unfold In slow motion the boat Rocks on the ocean As her tawny parts unfold The radio does something mental To itself singingly As her tawny parts unfold Inside its wires And steal away its heart Two minutes after eleven The color dream communicates itself The ink falls on the paper as if magically The scalp falls away A pain is felt Deep in the radio I take out my larynx and put it on the blue chair And do my dance for the radio It’s my dance in which I kneel in front of the radio And while remaining motionless elsewise Force my eyeballs to come as close together as possible While uttering a horrible and foreign word Which I cannot repeat to you without now removing my larynx And placing it on the blue chair The blue chair isn’t here So I can’t do that trick at the present time The radio is thinking a few licks of its own Pianistic thoughts attuned to tomorrow’s grammar Beautiful spas of seltzery coition Plucked notes like sandpaper attacked by Woody Woodpecker The radio says Edwardian farmers from Minnesota march on the Mafia Armed with millions of radioactive poker chips The radio fears foul play It turns impersonal A piggy bank was smashed A victim was found naked Radio how can you tell me this In such a chipper tone Your structure of voices is a friend The best kind The kind one can turn on or off Whenever one wants to But that is wrong I know For you will intensely to continue And in a deeper way You do Hours go by And I watch you As you diligently apply A series of audible frequencies To tiny receptors Located inside my cranium Resulting in much pleasure for someone Who looks like me Although he is seated about two inches to my left And the both of us Are listening to your every word With a weird misapprehension It’s the last of the tenth And Harmon Killebrew is up With a man aboard He blasts a game-winning home run The 559th of his career But no one cares Because the broadcast is studio-monitored for taping To be replayed in 212 years Heaven must be like this, radio To not care about anything Because it’s all being taped for replay much later Heaven must be like this For as her tawny parts unfold The small lights swim roseate As if of sepals were the tarp made As it is invisibly unrolled And sundown gasps its old Ray Charles 45 of Georgia Only through your voice

Always behind my back I hear The spastic clicking of jerked knees And other automatic reactions Tracking me through the years to where Time’s winged chariot is double Parked near the eternity frontier And in such moments I want to participate In human life less and less But when I do the obligatory double take And glance behind me into the dark green future All I see stretching out are vast Arizona republics of more

Wyatt, with no insurance on his own head, watching the execution of Anne Boleyn from his cell in the Tower, while beyond on Tower Hill her lovers also are executed, reflects upon his wasted virtue and now redundant innocence, rueful he ever did let his name be known beyond the door of his soul or hung his star from fate thrones.

The god of war assured King Arsounas, “Do not be fooled by words. No life is taken. Know that no one was ever born, nor does anyone die.” In the violent mini-eternity of the warrior, combat is conducted according to a ritual formal as song: no one is ever born, no one can ever die. The left-handed rockabilly guitarist whose left arm was severed by an RPG round at Dak To has come back to life in a part of my body that died long before we started to patrol this part of the river of eternal woe. His life is mine though I never lived it. The violent backwash of the rotors is crimsoned by a fine aerosol spray of blood while a loudspeaker amplifies the goddess’ excited laughter.

Whoso list to haunt could do worse than to Obtain the license, get the picture. Spook finders must find spooks to put the face, Name and space coordinates together. What is kept in the mind perimeter Retains a wild autonomy through fate. I will retreat to the precorporate. Let fate have what is fate’s and allow This spirit to slip through time’s difficult Nets with the devious fingers of A wild wind, while I run along behind.