This is Lord Randal.
"Take down my books, mother," the song says.
And I hear sound rain across the sacred tablets.
Graffiti between music and speech.
Take them down for I am alive today
with keys under my fingers.
The computer, a gray toy.
Semi-automatic code behind the plastic
spraying a lichen like display.
Autonomous wash of power down the drain,
prismatic, pissed away to ease the painful suture
where the tip of the tongue meets the tip of the iceberg.
Language drowning the minute it's at rest.
Before I could read, I heard you more
earnestly than any poetic maker sore foot in the snowy heights
pursuing the self ape-like, alp-like.
I mean, let the pines do what they want.
Squirrels leap, clouds work on their memoirs all day.
Still, will never undo artificial life.
And I hear something similar happened
to you, and to your you, and to her before that.
All the way back to the history bogs, where stenographers lie,
waiting and writing degrees zero.
Take them all down.
They won't stay on the shelves anywhere anyway.
Some are blankets some are bars some are sunlight
all bodies helplessly forward.
In the other poem, you wiggle your can crazily,
signifying America and William Carlos Williams,
making music in a gender desert.
Modernism's big adventure is still in print on matchbooks,
and corporate towers and education
in management distances.
It holds mirrors up to men in cars,
women in floodlit anorexia, with customers
paying for the pleasure of buying cheap.
Meaning a dog following masters, living after hours
in whatever local dog house.
A meaculpa inside each command.
Flash floods leaving the syntax damp, pliable,
but the dead resistant as sand.
For now, motion is permanent.
Automatic writing, floundered wills passed each moment."