5/5/09

After his manly sonorous outburst, he abandoned verse
and resorted to journals, but having mastered the form,
realized they could only be completed when he passed away--
nothing of their occasional flashes of beauty
could be extracted and reshaped into another form.

Many would not relish his remarks about restaurants or movies,
nor lend a reading eye to his tireless minutiae.
Here was truth with all its warts, no lacquer nor varnish.
Inspiration had flickered then died among their pages.
Then a pertinacious realism was born, a living testament
to how people are shaped by the ride of their underwear,
the fit of their shoes, how drink or food poisoning shaped them.
He'd held the lyrical mode in suspicion and grown fonder of satire,
and though he didn't revile past influences, grew suspicious,
settling for photographically accurate laundry lists.
Who'd know how far he's walked from his career and old beliefs,
not so much to be in a monastery as in the Idaho woods
among trailers on dirt plots -- or did his scathing rejectionist
contrarian cant reverberate from the pages of the Financial Times
or some other august organ of the finance-military-industrial complex,
or did he merely sulk at home and snort cocaine from a silver-mirrored
Army knife -- or was it a Bowie he'd been given by a Special Forces sargent
who was in league with his beliefs about the pernicious influence
of the Counter-Reformation on daytime children's TV shows.
Late environmentalist visionary who'd advocated the cultivation
of flesh jello in vats and the systematic bombing of overpopulated
equatorial countries, along with an abandonment of green technoligies
for a retrenchment into sub-Arctic latitudes abandoned by harpoon-wielding
impossibly tall and proto-aboriginal Red-Paint people?