From 5/29/11 - 5/30/11

He let himself go they said
Or asked whatever happened to him.
He had they said potential
But it was potential wasted.
Someone thought they’d seen him
Outside his modest house
No one could vouch for that claim
There being no supporting evidence
For his very existence
Only rumor, which you know
As well as I do is unreliable
But can also be a sign of life
And often the only sign
Whereas the lack of rumor
Suggests life’s absence
No longer being on the map,
Not merely incognito,
No just not there.

From 5/30/11

My glottal stop betrays that I was a dockworker once.
Follow it if you may—ideas fly all over the place without being finished, without an adequate playing out of their consequences.
Around the lake I’d like to coast
A maddening succession of non-sequiturs.
The chaos of poverty is not a subject worthy of public exposure—take it from me.
Our will and resolve having been sapped by cliques
An iron gardener with an iron fist whose fingers serve as rake and testament.

After my conversion to light, I followed my new creed to the letter, upbraiding the overly tentative and feeble-witted with an attention to detail that was trivial to some, assailing the entire population of Vermont, my former home, as half-wits.

To my new mentors I soon displayed my inclination to the blooding on talk shows and editorial pages, taking this to the people in a charmed celebrity hunt in which I wielded my hunting rifle with the dexterity of an old hand, never hesitating to fire although quite often I missed. My stubbled countenance, now solidified to leather, beamed from the covers of Fortune and American Sportsman.

A pile of carrion stained my fingers once calloused from typing on old Remingtons and Olivettis as if I were some haruspex telling financial fortunes in the Julio-Claudian era. And alas, an estate-holder would become nearly enriched from the spice trade or from his olive groves in Spain or tanneries in Gaul. My hand blessed the powers that supported me as I thoroughly repudiated many of my old divisive and nihilistic beliefs, choosing instead to fashion those golden auras that glorified the personal embodiments of the imperium, never hesitant to trample the grapes of the harvest.

To the self-appointed elites, my appearance on the Hollywood Squares was the last nail in the coffin; to myself, it was a culmination and embrace of the joyous popular culture in which self-celebration is married happily to prosperity and self-esteem, both humbling and elevating at once. It meant that I wasn’t afraid to get my fingernails dirty.