Various poems, some unfinished, some not really poems

i.

Think not for an instant, child
I ever gave anything up

Two times at least
I told them I’d say yes
If they ever offered me
A seat among
humanity

Do you imagine I’d have said no
If they had ever
Ever pulled out a chair for me?

Now perhaps you think, friend
This lessens my message’s weight
My proddings have less the sting of truth
And more the tang
Of sour grapes

Not so
Child
Not so—If they hadn’t been so mean
There are many things
On this side
I’d have never seen

ii.

A certain kind of desperate pleasure
Comes to those who take the measure
Of capacities inner for facing defeat
At Adult Education’s judgment seat

iii.

AHXQRQXX these afternoon evacuations of the bowels
That choke out consonants and fart out vowels
And relieve with a roar the rage of the day
And cannot be prevented from having their say
I hear Luther associated the suppression of the church
With lavatory needs left too long in the lurch
Which makes these bellows of exiled constipation
Into a cry of holy, workless liberation

For all their barbarism, I like these nether shouts
They’re like poems
-- Or heresies –
They simply
will out

And the more they are gummed up, and restrained
The louder they’ll go rip-roaring, just the same

(I hope you’ll accept all that
With my apologies
As a learned riff
On Luther’s scatology)

iv.

A friend of mine once went to dinner
With Republican strategists – each one a sinner
Dedicated with a kind of admirable frankness
To dismantling good
And installing rankness
This one a diamond dealer
With blood on his hands
That one the brains; he
 “understands”
Each one of them had had his price
And long since been bought
See the next
 -- the newspaper writer
 -- among the lost
Whose capacity for thought
Couldn’t be slighter
So it didn’t much cost.
Regarding them one notes
A Christ-like inversion of morals
These tinsel Nietzsches, these bargain Sorels
If Christ came not for the well, but for the sick –
 Among these gents, he could have his pick.
I thought once the hatred I bore such men
Might be unfair -- but then…


v. 

All the things

I didn’t achieve…

Do not exist

So I won’t grieve

vi.

There’s so much time to fill up

In the course of a human life

You might as well be interested

In everything