Average Joe

Average Joe Hits the Snooze Alarm

When your Average Joe wakes up in the morning,

He'd rather go back to sleep.
He's always much better at chasing his dreams
Than making them real or deep.

He'd rather be kissing the prettiest girl

Than drinking his coffee black,
And nothing reduces the pain in his neck
Like watching the Martians attack.

He may be king of the toilet seat,

He may get lost in the shower—
But such delays are lots more work
Than sleeping another hour.

He keeps his finger on the button

To keep the interval short
Between hearing the alarm and pressing it down—
“Wake up?” “Not ready! Abort!”

He watches the clock from time to time,

Whenever he is awake,
And he keeps punching out, again and again,
With every nap he can take.

Of course the big nap is coming up,

Or that's the way it feels,
But that's just really another alarm—
That clock just has bigger wheels.
Average Joe Decides to Go for Pancakes

That settles it. I am going.

I am already engaged in going.
I am going and going and going,
Like I've never gone before.
Like I've gone a million times before
I'm going, the way I went,
The way I have been going, lately,
The way I've always gone, it seems,
The way I used to go,
Back when I went, when I could go,
When I did go, whenever I could,
And sometimes I could, I could,
I could, with you. We could.
We did. We did it more than once.
We did it so that we kept on doing it
Even when we weren't doing it.
We were doing it all the time,
And just doing it even when we weren't,
So that when we weren't doing it,
We still were doing it.
And when we were doing it,
It was like really doing it,
Doing it for real, the way you do it
When you are doing it for real.
We really did it. And we really did it overall, as well.
And I think about you and your stories,
And the stories we lived together,
So many happy endings to so many happy days,
So many sweet conclusions to so many honeymoons.
And it's right there on the border,
Between being in the honeymoon
And being in the world,
But never into the part where the honeymoon was over,
Or at least so very seldom
As to make it seem possible this might go on
Forever, without end, as long as we could breathe, all that,
Right there on that border, within its fuzzy limits,
That's where we are, and where I want to stay.
Where going for pancakes
Might be the story. Might do that.
Or might just talk about it. Like this.
An Average Joe Has Existential Fears

An Average Joe has existential fears:

He is afraid to die, afraid of pain,
Afraid of suffering, afraid of tears
(His own, the tears of loved ones, tears that stain
His reputation, tears of women, children, men.)
He is afraid of falling, of snakes, of sex,
Of not regaining balance once again,
Of hurricanes, of being trapped in wrecks,
Of being hit by cars, stray bullets, trains,
By comets that once hit the Earth so hard
The moon's the settled dust, all that remains,
And here they come again, in Joe's back yard.
He fears deceit, betrayal, abandonment, rejection,
And the meaninglessness of his own dejection.
Without Quotation Marks

Without quotation marks

I could go on and on, this way,
Like Samuel Beckett in a sandstorm,
Wearing the bottle bottom glasses,
Like the words of friends
Whose throats have been ripped out
Perhaps by zombie, vampire or werewolf but certainly
By life, by what staying alive requires.
None of my poems would have titles.
I, myself, would remain nameless.
I would not choose the irony of Average Joe.
After all, who gets my jokes, anyway?
But that naked ghost of authenticity,
However clearly you see it,
Here, in these words, or anywhere,
Is so elusive, so subtle, so nearly invisible,
That it's best left to inhabit the machinery.
Better just try to appreciate what's on the screen,
Rather than smash the looking glass,
With all the bad luck that will follow,
When you can't go through it,
And you're too big to go down the rabbit hole
Much further than Alice, no matter how much you drink.
Won't that be a gay tea party?
And what strange idea, pray tell,
Do you suppose that you will represent?
What will you bring to the table?
Will you be Mother, or shall I?
With all these nuclear wars and global disasters,
These asteroids hitting planet Earth,
These ecosystem breakdowns
That take out the food supply
And blossom with pandemics
Of horrible diseases,
One really appreciates a quiet moment
Sharing a cup of tea with a good friend
And having some pleasant conversation,
Don't you think? Oh, wait, excuse me! I know you don't.
Sorry to distract you from your own stupidity
And relentless focus on that broken mirror
Where you see your shattered image
And try to put the puzzle together,
Licensing narcissism as research.
I feel much the same way.
We have a lot in common, you and I.
Background Noise

When your average Joe turns on the radio,

He hears the hurricane a long way off,
The sounds of small arms lost in the distance,
The rain which is the cutting edge of nature,
Sculpting away the landscape, the frogs
Humming their last dirges in the poisoned swamps,
The whales singing their melancholy moans
Head down in oceans whose skirts are acid burned
By contact with the human enterprise.
He hears the planet's engines racketing
Toward a stall. And he hears the tidal slump
Of the economy, of poverty,
Of misery and involuntary degradation,
The hungry children crying themselves to sleep,
The honky tonk escapism of the common sort,
The strangely flat mispronunciations
Of every name that once held juice, held color,
Held the suggestion of the human pageant
Of life unfolding when life had a chance.
He's usually been thinking about himself,
About how maybe now he hasn't got a shot,
That it is clear now that he hasn't, really,
After all these years of baseless struggle
In which it simply was not yet too clear
That he had none, and that he never had,
Like so many of you reading this now,
Saying these words over in your mind
As if they were your own, though they are his.
Average Joe Contemplates His Navel

Sometimes, Average Joe wonders,

“Am I really cut out for it?”
He answers himself: “What, life in the ivory tower?”
“No. Life.”
You see, it all comes down to people,
Who you know, who you have to deal with,
Who have some impact or other on you.
And no matter how bad the very powerful are,
It seems like the way they have polluted our social life,
Exhuding their machiavellian contagions
Of anger, and injury, and pride, and wasted suffering,
Is maybe worse, in some ways, than what they do
Directly in the exercise of their power, per se.
Because everybody's stuck with the powerful.
You don't get rid of them that easily.
They have resources. They know other people, who do too.
And they know who they are, at least at the top,
And they practice their vile ceremonies
Of commerce and status and guns
With a quite evangelical fervor
That attracts many of the poor
Who lack judgment along with everything else,
And the middle class, who just want to be cool,
All the way down the food chain.
Average Joe feels like an Old Testament prophet
When he gets to thinking about such things,
A pronouncer of doom and a railer at kings
And the evil fancies that corrupt people
When they would otherwise just be kind and decent,
If they only had money like the Yellow Brick Road makes,
And all of the virtues of the companions of Oz.
But what's worse, is the way you're stuck with people.
It just comes down to who you know, who you have to deal with,
To survive, unless you're doing well,
And maybe even then.
You may not be thinking about it all the time the way he does,
But once you start thinking that way,
You're going to keep on thinking that way
Just like him, like it's no hope in sight,
Not for him, not for the truly virtuous.
The world won't have it. Can't you feel the pressure?
Why Your Average Joe Does Not Keep a Diary

When he sits down to write a book about his life,

Or undertakes some equivalently doomed grandiosity,
The problem for your Average Joe is this:
He doesn't really want to end it,
No matter how long it is,
No matter how unhappy it makes certain people.
It's not like he's willing to ignore the consequences:
Show him one dead baby, and he'll give up the ghost,
Just to be acting like its big brother,
Which is how he always thinks of himself,
Even though it puts him at odds with his Father,
Though exactly why this should be a conflict
Is far from obvious, since an older brother
Has siblings to compete with him for his chance
To murder the old king by accident
And slip into his mama's bed
Just like he was a little tiny baby
Until the truth comes out
And he gouges out his own eyes
And wanders the world in a moaning traipse.
One dead baby, one serious moral cost,
And you have won him over,
But a few broken hearts,
Some disappointed egos,
A thousand little minds
Constantly conspiring all around him,
Conniving at his destruction—
That's a cost he, apparently, is willing to pay.
Otherwise he'd just give up the argument,
Stop trying to clarify things,
Allow people to stop being good students,
Stop paying attention, stop trying to figure things out,
Stop asking questions, especially hard ones,
And certainly never even considering
Helping anyone else learn what is known to you.
But he goes right on, griping while he is most benevolent,
Self deprecating while also self aggrandizing
In his humble submission to the the sheer and simple truth,
Whatever consequences may ensue from that endorsement.
And so he keeps on writing, whether the book is finished,
Behind, complete, done with, or not, entered into the record,
Published, frozen in exotic metals at absolute zero,
Built into the very structure of the universe,
So that it might be decoded by anyone,
Or at least by anyone who can read creatively
And see an image of whoever they are
In what must be assumed to be the Author
Of the text we live in.
He still won't stop.
So he has a hard time starting.
Who wants that kind of worry?
Just for the sake of an improbable
And unverifiable transcendence,
Which he will never himself enjoy
In his own text, but always in another's,
In whatever he reads that he did not write?
He is blind, numb if not dumb, to the future,
To the ones he cherishes in his imgination,
Those distant children of another era,
If there ever is another era,
Who understand what it is like to be themselves
Well enough to realize that he faced the same window,
Saw the same face reflected in its surface,
As it does now, with you looking at me,
Beyond which the world bloomed, and blooms, at least for now, in mad profusion.
Your Average Joe's Reading Habits

Your Average Joe has good taste:

He enjoys the newest levels of extreme pornography,
With comic book Oedipal subjects,
Treated as if they were serious literature,
Interacting dramatically like lunatic puppets
Representing almost realistically limited people
And what once would have had to be considered
At least minor deities, with their strange powers,
Incarnations of abstract features of the situation
Holding allegory at the point of a gleaming knife
While targeting the next kill in the visual display.
It's pretty gamy stuff. Robots from the future.
Shiny robots. Scary robots. Red eyed danger robots.
Girl robots. Hot girl robots. Hot girl robots fighting.
Hot girl on girl robotic action. Who can resist?
We push things to the limits of possible design.
That is how we do things. It's a signature of humanity,
This extremism, as much as a mark of nature,
Where evolution makes everything possible,
Just another National Geographic special,
With or without the topless dancing girls.
Who can resist watching? It's must see TV.
It's digital and high definition, on demand stimulation simulation,
Just step right up, won't you? The carnival has already started.
You pay for your tickets and you ride the ride,
Just like everybody else does. Watch your fingers.
Just like the news. The economy. The bailout.
The bailouts. The parachutes. The parachutes given back.
The long fall. The resistance. The sound of the wind.
The feel of impact. The end of everything.
No wonder he likes this stuff:
Every story has the same ending,
The end of his story,
The one he's telling about how he cried,
How he thought about his mother,
What a lucky son of a bitch he is,
To have known how she protected him,
How she killed those who would hurt him,
How she stood, fiercer than an honor guard
For the emperor of the world, she loved him so,
How he loved others in his life,
How he maybe loved one even more,
Impossible as that might seem,
The story you are reading,
Which, strangely, reminds you of your own.
Your Average Joe's Identity is Stolen

He's not himself, your Average Joe.

“I've been ill lately, but that's not it.
It was just a litte problem with digesting
The stuff I have to swallow,
A problem with being full of shit,
Too full of shit to stand myself,
Let alone wait for others to complain.”

“But I am not your Average Joe,” he says,

Insisting on denying the obvious.

“I am not yours, first of all.”

And we know he's ours, by that alone.
He is always so insistent that no one owns him.

We point out that we were speaking nominally,

Not to assert some special claim we have on him, ourselves,
But to assert a more universal claim,
Choosing him, as if at random, like a passing Apostle,
To carry the message of the creator's love,
Or a mindless citizen who happens by Socrates' streetcorner,
Thinking at first he is being heckled by a gay prostitute.

“Exactly my point,” he says, pouncing.

“You want to fit me into a scheme
Where I am admitting that I believe,
Which I don't, in ideal things like souls and God,
Supernatural entities, surviving outside the body,
Even if you do sneak in the resurrection of the flesh,
Or uncountable virgins dancing on a pinhead's grave.
And I can't go there. When I die, I die. That's it.”

(“But doesn't he survive in the minds of others?”

Pipes in Mister Smart Guy.)

We wonder, in any case, what this has to do with him being different.
Isn't this exactly what happens to your Average Joe every time?

“Of course it does. And every one of us is unique.

I am so goddamned unique, you can't duplicate me.
Go ahead: Clone me. Download my memories into your computer.
Use sophisticated evolutionary programming
To adduce my nature. Let it read all my poems, my story,
Every word ever recorded from me,
All that mundane politics in my criticism,
All that strange magic, when I manage it.
Arrive at a perfect simulation,
One no Turing test could distinguish,
One my mother could not tell apart from me,
One no woman who ever loved me would reject,
And it still won't be me.”

“You could even pick a better version of me,

One who did end up chronicling domestic fabrics
And gentle, humane sentiments
And acute observations, never offending,
Painting the image of the savannah
Into whatever landscape is available,
Never intending to offend,
Keeping to the colors in the wheel,
Never vengeful, never less than perfect.
Much as I might want to be that person,
Have that person's success, that person's life,
And much as that person would be me,
Be the chosen sacrifice in your lottery of salvation,
So nearly identical, so full of what I am,
It still won't be me, except from someone else's point of view,
Never mine.”

(“Told you so,” says Mister Smart Guy.)

Never mind, we think. He's just like us, no different.

Prometheus stole fire and was punished. But why?
You don't have to extinguish the fire you steal:
You can leave behind everything you steal. No one would notice.
He must have wanted to get caught.
Your Average Joe is always on fire with originality.
It's all ashes in the end, dust and ashes.
Your Average Joe in the Bathroom Mirror

“Here's the damage,” says your Average Joe.

“Trust me. That's what it costs you.”
And it's always more than the estimate, you know.
Sometimes he gets to wondering,
About dying, about getting old and dying,
About getting old, about getting tired,
About getting tired of considering personal grooming
A form of self expression,
About his hair going grey, his beard,
About cutting his hair.
He might ask for some advice
From Professor Sects, who would counsel:
“A young man with a full head of long hair,
You are not so much shocked as surprised.
It shows off the state of his robust health,
The quality of his diet, his attitude toward grooming,
Which is to say, his grudging willingness to do it to order,
But an old geezer like you, a full head of long hair,
That dirt grey frayed curtain of shreds and tangles,
That's quite another matter.
It is the signature of his declining health,
His poor eating habits, his unenthusiastice reception
Even to the angels of hairstyling magic.
Of course, the logical thing would be
To dye it dark and wear it long,
Hoping to conceal from, who?
Conceal the underlying fact,
The fact under the lie you hope you don't have to tell
About your age. Funny thing, though,
Suppose they take it that way at first,
And then begin to notice some incongruity,
A strangeness to your face, perhaps even a childlike quality,
The one suggested by talk of second childhoods, no doubt,
And they may then figure out
That you have the look of someone who has thought about
Cheating, maybe even is trying to cheat right now,
With that head of dark hair, the finely wrinkled eyes,
With their white coronas of delicate fur,
The tufts of same in the ears,
The awful fragility of your stride, your gestures, your crooked smile,
The quaver in your voice, as of a dying man,
Hitting the most poignant notes with the least effort,
Lazy and self indulgent to the last,
Even as you are looking at him.
And boy, you do not want to be
On the receiving end of that perception.
So cut it short. Keep the beard under control or shave.
Don't try to draw attention to yourself,
To your once perhaps even a little handsome features,
Now in decline. Don't let them notice you looking,
For any reason. Step out of the visual politics game completely.
Remember, the king's glance gives power
Wherever it rests, with rare exceptions,
Even fewer of which actually give back power
In the returning eye of a beloved lover.
Wait and find those eyes. Look into them.
They will last forever, even if you don't.”
The Development of Your Average Joe's Personal Philosophy Runs into Walls

Your Average Joe is a wannabe Buddhist,

Longing for serenity and enlightenment,
Broken on the wheel of his own desire,
Forced to a thousand confessions of endless midrash,
The every ramifying discipline of scholarship,
The frothy irrelevancies of poetry.
He longs for the just heart,
Invulnerable to its own suffering
And tirelessly alive to the suffering of others.
He'd be the kind to pray for help, but he says,
“I don't believe in God. I just don't trust the bastard.”
So he forges his own destiny, far sighted,
But lacking in depth perception, due to the wiring
And the switches that got laid and set
In his brain somehow, perhaps in his youth,
When he kept running into walls as a result,
Breaking his fine nose, so it aches when it rains,
And giving it a little distinction beyond size.
He could be said to be the product of his injuries,
Of his suffering, of his healing and failure to heal,
Of his frustrations, his family, his love affairs,
His rare and sparkling genius friends,
Of the books he has been lost in, the movies,
TV, the internet, politics and history,
The asymmetry of reproductive interests
And the array of peacock feathers that follow it,
Of his undervalued work on an imaginary bubble
That could protect everything from everything,
If only enough people would believe,
The little utopia you join when you like what you read.
Maybe that's the explanation he is seeking,
All reducible to nature and natural selection.
Subject to the Red Queen, he has made some progress:
Now he doesn't hit so many walls. But they are bigger.
Your Average Joe as a Lover

Your Average Joe fancies himself a Latin lover.

He hears the guitars and the exotic percussion
And feels the hidden tides of love and passion,
The stones and obstacles of sorrow and regret,
The shifting foundations of the shantytown city
That is the human condition in this sad era,
While the radiant torrents of nature tear around us
Like the gentle solar breezes of the Magellanic Cloud.
But where is the girl? What's this story about?
Sorry to disappoint your generic expectations.
Try the paperback rack at the supermarket.
You'll find it there: significant stories about cardboard people.
Or you can pick up your share just by watching TV.
But then, why are you reading this? Reading Poetry?
What manual told you to check this section of the bookstore?
Did they tell you this was a great way to meet women?
The kind of women you want to meet? That's a laugh.
No. This is a world that puts you off by yourself,
Ignores the huge value it has said you have
And treats you like you had a great ambition
To be the garbageman in utopia,
As long as everybody else is happy that way.
Why are you more comfortable with writers
Who come from very different backgrounds
From your own? Could it be because it's so rare
Among the lunkheads you come from?
Do you envy them their success?
Or could it be that you have doubts
About your ability to represent who you are?
How could you fail to imagine what it is like
To be yourself? And yet your Average Joe forgets.
He sops up whatever the culture feeds him
Like maple syrup on his pancake of daily thought.
Oh, that's so good! Just like Mama used to make.
So girls, if you are interested,
Please consider adding a note to the Girl Scout Handbook:
The way to his heart is still to kick him in the stomach.
He likes a girl who can really kick it, you know.
Prior are Poetry and Agni esubmissions. Note following as sent.
Why Your Average Joe Feels Superior

It's rationalization, as we might expect.

Your Average Joe has lately concluded
That he just may be the only one still waiting
To hear from himself, in any really meaningful sense.
Yes. He feels that alone. Just like you.
In that respect, he is perfectly ordinary.
But is he a shade more honest than you are?
Does he have that much, just that much,
Just that tiny margin of a shadow
Of something a little finer than you are?
Could it be that he is a little more generous?
More compassionate? More full of love
And every other virtue that dares a separate name
Than little old you? Could he be wiser? Smarter?
More creative? A better lover? More of a hero?
And don't let's get started on your looks.
Your Average Joe's Ambition

Your Average Joe wonders whether this idea or that,

Any of his cornucopia of signature notions
Will be like the one in the drama
Of the rebel against unjust authority who dies
But not in vain, passing it on to some other,
Immediately after so passing it on.
Will he register anything on the seismograph,
Leave a trail in the hieroglyphics of existence?
How can he forget the intellectual oxygen
On which he fed and grew like a fat piglet
Being readied for the Easter Feast?
Who could not want a float in that parade?
And yet he will not be there to enjoy it,
So why should he worry? It's not the consequences.
They don't matter. What matters is the circumstance,
The chance to lay the bet on the wheel,
Isn't that it? It's just that you need to see it spin.
It's really a feat of the imagination he'd like to try,
If only it had the moves, the acrobatic fury needed,
To lift up the soul, whatever we mean by that,
By lifting up one voice in song.
You can almost hear it, can't you?
Doesn't it sound familiar?
And yet it's strange,
The way your own voice is strange
When perfectly recorded.
Your Average Joe's Jihad

Your Average Joe is easily tempted

To think of his enemies as not human.
This is a special case of his religious sensibility.
At one end of the spectrum, the array of ghosts
He is fraught with tendency to believe in,
Even though his experience almost never lives up
To what this world would be like if there were a God,
Is the Superior Agent, which is only a special case
Of the Other Agent, which, of course, one may have to fight.
And among those Other Agents whom one might have to fight,
Is a subset of interest, the Human Agents one might have to fight.
It's hard to keep one's attention on them and just them—
The mind wanders, and every sort of demon comes out.
Why, then, should it be a surprise that his fantasies
Involve wars of extermination, little green men,
Whatever other wonders animate the heart
With fear as much as wonder. That fear matters.
It clouds his judgment whenever he gets into a fight.
He loses perspective, unless he's been trained
Like everybody else, to be a bit more of a hero,
Or whatever is in his common heritage with us
Finally comes out, when he realizes how rare,
How utterly more rare even than friends
His enemies are. He pities them their lack of company.
And he studies war no more. Until the flying saucers land.
And maybe not even then.
Your Average Joe's Screen Test

This is the script you've been given.

It's the only one you have, and you have little time
To prepare to do anything different, no,
Even less, little time left to prepare for what it says.
Can you really think ahead enough?
Enough to make sure you don't blow your lines?
Your Average Joe is always blowing his lines.
You know how it goes. Just like you,
He is an awkward puppet on an inconvenient string.
It is very hard to get him to do anything,
Let alone anything he doesn't want to do.
The world hammers at him with suggestion,
With potential for purpose, with opening doors
In every direction, and the sun coming up on the horizon
Visible through every one of them,
In the thousand worlds they represent,
The thousand beautiful, possible futures
He has to choose from, and...
Wait a minute! Is that your life?
Not yours. Somebody's. Wouldn't be yours if it were that simple.
Exactly the same as the Average Joe's.
He got the same script you did.
Which one of you is really taking liberties
With the interpretation?
Who knows? He's waiting for the Call.
Just like you.
Your Average Joe is a Natural Aristocrat

How does your Average Joe feel

When he realizes that idiots are in charge everywhere?
The same way you do. Normal.
He wonders why nobody listens.
Nobody pays attention. Nobody tries to understand.
Nobody asks questions. Especially hard questions.
In spite of how many admonitory tales
In which the exact opposite is affirmed
As a cherished and widely celebrated prize?
Yes, your Average Joe thinks, our values
Are at odds with our nature, somewhat,
Or our nature is somewhat against itself, somehow.
He understands the laziness.
He practices that spiritual discipline himself,
With a fierce and daily renewed enthusiasm.
But it means you can't really count on institutions.
Strange to have to say that: Doesn't the being counted on count
As what makes an institution deserve to be one?
So this universal idiocracy, in all its many forms,
It tears at the sense of basic trust.
The pain comes out in all sorts of ways.
Your Average Joe loves disaster stories,
Stories about what happens after the disaster, too.
Stories about how the disaster happened.
Stories about what happened in spite of it.
Stories about how what happened in spite of it
Is really just another example of it happening,
How the daydream is also the nightmare,
And sometimes, vice versa.
You know. Sometimes you get lucky.
You get to meet someone like him.
At least that's the way it seems, from his point of view.
And in this, he is your perfect double,
Your own portrait in the manner of Dorian Gray.
What you refuse to countenance about yourself
Is everything you hate and fear about him.
The Chip on Your Average Joe's Shoulder

Your Average Joe is always the messenger you kill.

He realizes that you can't help yourself,
That either it's a strategic necessity for you
Or else your instincts tell you it might as well be.
And yet he hopes to be understood.
He hopes so hard, sometimes his religious tendencies
Flare up. He imagines himself lost in the forest
On a midsummer's eve, watching the fairies dance.
He gets that dust in his eyes and makes an ass of himself.
And yet he is the most sympathetic lover,
The one who really breaks your heart,
Even as you break wind, you are laughing so hard.
It might as well have been in the stage directions.
Everything fits together so neatly, so trimly.
But disturb him with the passage of time,
And slowly he comes to acknowledge
That the way he loved you was a passing fancy,
However caught like a fly in the amber of poetry.
You are the sap that caught and killed the beast,
Solely because you did not want to hear him out.
And he's never going to forgive you for that.
Your Average Joe's Role Prior to the Apocalypse

Your Average Joe works miracles every day,

But nobody notices. He feels unappreciated.
But when the rest of humanity does see him,
They see him as a monster, something to fear.
It's just like your situation, little feats,
No justice, plenty of prurient interest,
The ideal subject for a short story
Or a social worker's case file.
He's ready to start his own movement,
But he's too lazy to live the country life
And reading all those faces grows tiresome.
He has the doctrines worked out,
But he's leaving the ritual to his followers.
Or maybe, like you, he's just another doubtful saint
In a cult designed to survive a new dark age,
If anyone survives long enough to need something to believe in.
Your Average Joe is Never Alone

Your Average Joe worries about his inner twin,

That shadow of himself, of what he could have been,
How different things could have been,
If only things had been a little different.
He had never bothered with the video game market.
What youthful trauma kept him into words?
And was that really the problem? Wasn't it simpler?
He does almost wish someone could take the wheel,
At least for a while. Let him watch the sights go by.
Let him enjoy the radio selection.
What's the point of having an alter ego
If you can never get it to do its share of the dishes?
It's like thinking about having a soul,
But even less concerned with plausibility.
Really, he only has one because everyone does.
What is the inevitability behind coincidences
That have no meaning? Don't expect a creation story.
Even when you suck out ninety percent of things
With all your explanations, what's left
Is too troublesome to inspire worship.
But, like you, he often ignores the facts.
Your Average Joe Has a Sense of Taste

Your Average Joe has a sense of taste.

He knows what’s good when he sees it,
Like a great work of art, or a baby,
Or a really great breakfast burrito and a glass of fresh oj.
Your Average Joe has been around
For at least around a hundred thousand years.
He learned from unexpected weather,
The back and forth of glaciers, from change,
The gypsy drumroll of the thunder
And the demon melodies of falling water,
To be a little flexible, to learn
From others, and to learn
From everything, the hard way.
He likes his sugar sweet and his skies blue,
As he walks out in the streets of Laredo,
Three hundred and fifty sunny days a year,
But not the day he happens to be there.
So beat the drum slowly and so forth.
He likes open spaces, low grass,
Mown down by livestock, and broken up trees.
He likes a view of water, the gleam of the blue wave,
Or at least some lush evidence
That fresh, drinkable water is somewhere nearby.
He likes to be able to see
In at least one direction
All the way to the end of the world, to the horizon.
He likes to know that birds are nearby,
Singing as if their little lives depended on it.
And he likes flowers, the way they smell,
And fresh, sweet, ripe fruit, ready to pick.
He likes a high protein landscape.
He likes a tree he can climb.
He likes to see a road winding off in the distance.
He likes to see a curl of smoke from a chimney.
He prefers wandering in the forest, exploring,
To getting lost in the jungle.
He also likes to go where others have gone.
He likes a path that leads into the hills or a fertile green valley,
Or the bank of a river that disappears around a bend.
He likes to see before he is seen.
He wants a vantage point, a good lookout.
And he wants a refuge, a cave, a house on a hill,
A castle, a room with a view, a penthouse apartment,
The more expensive real estate.
He likes to check out unfamiliar parks,
Strolling along their edges at first.
He likes an elevated view, as if perched on a ladder
Somewhat above the crowd of humanity and world,
And yet right in the thick of it.
He likes a pretty face, but he loves the heart above all.
Your Average Joe Has Ethics

Your Average Joe is a bit of do gooder,

Or so he'll tell you. If you let him tell you so.
He likes having that idea accepted,
Enjoys it every time he sees it happen,
Like making good on a free throw,
Even though he knows
That anyone who knows him at all well
Knows he harbors a rather darker view
Of human nature than one might expect
Of one so committed to virtue.
Implausible though it may seem to some,
The figure it cuts is nonetheless more attractive
Than his too often dull and too seldom enjoyed
Capacity for appreciating beauty.
Somehow, it's written there in his heart,
To affirm the good act even more than the good idea,
Dropping a face card with the image of Karl Marx
And whistling the blues, thinking about how he loves his baby.
Sure, his motives are complicated.
He's trapped, like you, in the fabric of culture,
Which he wears like a favorite shirt,
While you appear to be more interested in how you look
Than why you look, or why you look that way,
Which anyone with natural eyes can see
Is somewhere in his reproductive calculus
Just like he is in yours, when you meet him.
And part of that calculus is a little subroutine
We might call, “Being a Hero.”
It means to be willing to punish cheaters
Who cheat other people, and to do so
With no regard for your own gain or loss,
Purely as a matter of justice.
And that idea there is the key.
And through the doorway is a whole new world,
Full of complicated people like him,
Struggling with a world that can't be considered friendly.
If he makes a career of it, he needs to learn
To choose his battles. Random virtue
Is seldom rewarded. Best to use
A standard teaching distribution of praise and criticism,
And pray God can read your handwriting,
Because you are going to need some help
If you really want to do this in real life.
Your Average Joe Hates Politics

Your Average Joe has blood on his hands,

For every tyrant he never stood up to put down,
As well as whatever quibbles, large or small,
Attach directly to his individual history.
The simple fact is, he has lived through the horror
That took others out of this life,
Has benefited himself, it is even possible,
From their demise, though he would never know it,
And he certainly would not be happy that such is the case,
If he ever really had to imagine it were so.
But with all the sediments of guilt,
In all their opposing directions, so thick
And capable of poisoning the soul,
Is it any wonder he claims he never inhaled?
But what happened in his own day,
The terror, the rise of religious fanatcism,
The seeming dissolution of the fabric of ideas
That sheltered what he liked to think of as civilization,
Not exactly the good life, but better than barbarism,
Someplace one could find a comfortable niche
More easily than in the stone age real estate market,
Which pretty much started out crashed and got worse,
With nothing much to take the edge off,
Especially if you were only an Average Joe.
What did he do to stop what happened in front of his eyes?
Anything? Did he lift a finger? Pull it out and use it?
If it wasn't someone he loved, why bother?
Of course, he thought of himself as a better person than that,
Not someone who needed damsels in distress
Before he would go pricking in the plain.
Fancy that, pulling in the Faerie Queene
At this late date? But history is, after all,
Only a small part of literary history,
Which will go on forever, in a million worlds,
Wherever there is an Average Joe to read them.
And you think that means he is not you?
I submit that you are treating your own guilt
Over not having done the homework reading
In every class you ever took from Professor Sects
Exactly the way your Average Joe handles all his problems:
Solve what you can. Pretend to ignore what you can't solve.
Save your irony and keep it dry. Don't waste it
On lost causes like yourself. Play dumb if necessary.
So when you say the Average Joe has a lot to answer for,
We both know you are thinking of yourself as well.
The Good Man Meets the Evil Man

The Good Man says, “You

Are not a party to virtue.
What you want is wrong.
Yet you are human.
I can't deny our common brotherhood.
I see it in everything you do.”

The Evil Man thinks to himself, “Why

Should I even talk to you?
What I see in what you do
Is the mark of a darker hand,
One not of my blood.
I will not prostrate myself
Before your pagan gods of knowledge.”

Your Average Joe tries to be the Good Man,

But he can't fail to hear what the Evil Man is thinking.
Your Average Joe Works Social Construction in His Private Life

He has a job, more or less, most of the time,

When times are not too hard.
And he gets the job done, more or less, most of the time,
When the job is not too hard.
He likes pounding his nail
Into the fat, sweet bottom
Of some piece of strange luck,
Almost as much as he loves sucking
On Mama's milk or an ice cold beer.
He accepts the roles handed to him,
More or less, most of the time,
Unless it's just too hard to keep faking it.
And he might try to talk you into something,
Not because he wants to push you around
But because he thinks you'll enjoy it,
Maybe even more than he will.
He will point out that you are both prisoners
On the same island, you have similar tastes
And complementary needs and desires.
He will agree not to keep you in a black box,
Provided you are willing to take a look under the hood
And maybe add a little go juice to the mixture,
Maybe take an afternoon in the country,
A picnic, right there on the grass.
He'll show you the bird he has for you,
Maybe see how it takes to the heat
In that hot little oven you heat your kitchen with.
And if he got in through a locked door,
Remember, the key was there to find.
You can swim for the mainland any time,
And there, the law is not on his side.
Your Average Joe Glances at His Watch

Your Average Joe is always caught

Between the past he remembers
Which is not exactly what happened
And the future he imagines,
Which never arrives looking much like itself.
He himself emerged only gradually,
From having some internal images
To the acutely inaccurate but serviceable
Microscope, his sense of self awareness.
He thinks that by thinking, he may get somewhere.
Once in a while, he is right about that,
If nothing else. Hence he is happily distracted
By sporting events he could never compete in—
He doesn't think about why he doesn't get to play:
He just cheers and opens another beer.
This is the news, small or big.
All he does is transcribe what he hears on the radio.
You know the station. It's the one you hear
Down underneath the specific color
Of your own circumstance.
We're all on the same plumbing.
If you are placing bets, remember that.
When the system breaks down, we're all pigs in shit.
Your Average Joe Believes in Love

Your Average Joe really likes the feeling of love.

He swears by it. Pretends it can conquer things.
Builds a whole culture around it,
Asserting the primacy of individual life,
Usually male, finding its reconciling dream
Fulfilled, as only fantasy can do,
With all the good stuff that really happens,
Much of the funny stuff that happens too,
And some of it that doesn't, and a great deal more,
And only a seasoning of the tragedy real life carries out.
We are on the outer surface of that balloon,
Or you might say we are surfing the wavefront
Of that final supernova of insight
That renders everything else meaningless or worse,
While leaving the value of its own narrative thread
Severely threatened by several kinds of blades and scissors.
Still, he hangs on to it. Most cultures can't deny it.
Only ours and Joe's is sick with overdoing it,
Humming along with Little Audrey and Bing,
“You could be better off than you are,
Carry moonbeams home in a jar—“
Your Average Joe's World View

Your Average Joe communes with the dead

As well as with the living. Conversations. Games of chess.
You don't half understand him
Unless you know what kind of cocktail party this is,
Populated by the ghosts of philosophers and heroes,
Kings and queens and gods and goddesses,
By fictional persons of more modest demeanor,
Suitable to illustrate a more sophisticated theme
Or minor, dark, comic tragedy, much as you might see
His life, or your own. Windy dialogues
About the beginnings or the ends or the conclusions
Of civilization, or the human condition,
Perhaps framed as a brief parenthesis
Somewhere in the middle of the death sentence
Of life amid the inevitable cataclysms
Of sheer physical existence,
At the level where the lives of stars
Provide the most appropriate metric for generational sequences.
He's always trotting out his moral exemplars
Like brave horsemen challenging the dragons
Of meaninglessness, futility, irrelevance
And simple, brutal inadequacy,
As if a good smile before the battle
Made all the difference. He only wants sympathy,
And he will build parthenons and the Taj Mahal to get it.
In every selfless act, in every insane devotion to love,
In all the lasting glory of his legislation
Of reality by sheer force of imagination,
By the magical charm of true insight,
Its eventually irresistible color and attraction,
He's really looking to you,
Just as you look to him,
For understanding and compassion.
And you get what you pay for, and not much else.
Your Average Joe Remembers Sunday School

Your Average Joe was born into poverty

As abject and scruffy as Jesus Christ himself.
He wonders what he would have done
If he were Jesus, and he thinks,
Maybe nothing different.
You see, it's the love of others he wants,
And he can't get that
By changing what they are so much
That they cease to be themselves.
That's the whole point, that it is not just
The watchmaker's plan for the hand of time.
He wants you to love him, not somebody else.
He's not so worried about others horning in
On the bounty he seeks
As he is about you, how good it will be for you
To love him. That's the only reason he's jealous.
He'd hate to see you miss out on that.
So why doesn't he do something different now?
What's the difference between what he is
And being the Savior, Incarnate God, the Word?
Every compromise has been paid for,
Every penalty accepted.
He has the same message for you:
Love your neighbor, your Average Joe,
Just as you love yourself,
And things will work out fine.
So you're stuck in a boat and forgot to pack a lunch.
One guy has a packet of two saltines left over from somewhere.
Joe tells you that arguing over who gets it,
And fighting over who gets it,
Both are to be avoided.
He's trying to save you a world of grief
When you could be cherishing the precious moments
You still have left with your beloved companions.
And you keep talking about how to divide the crackers.
So he lets you off the hook
About really thinking about what he says
And reminds you about the loaves and fishes,
Though it's his miracles that are going to get him killed,
And he'd rather you not talk about them either.
Stick to to the lessons. Pay attention.
Try to understand. Ask questions. Help each other learn.
He's trying to keep things quiet, though he knows it won't work.
When the woman finds him and begs him
To cast the demon out of her daughter,
He lets her believe he has done so
Once he knows she loves her daughter.
And what child is not happier to have a mother
Who does not believe there is a demon in the child
That needs to be driven out?
Then she shouts it from the rooftops,
And eventually the Romans find him.
He could have refused, almost,
But he hasn't the heart not to die for her.
Your Average Joe just picks up the cross
Like it was normal. You know the feeling.
The Average Joe's Cultural Allergies

Like you, your Average Joe sniffs

At what passes for poetry these days
Most of the time. He thinks it ought to be harder
To say what you mean, unless it's hard to mean,
In which case he wants it all simple,
As simple as possible. So why fangle it up
With rhyme and metaphor and fantsy languids?
One religion seems a lot like another,
But you have to roll it around in your mouth,
Get a feel for how it tastes, then spit it out,
If you want to know how good the wine is.
Most of this will go unnoticed with the meal,
But if the wheels aren't aligned,
You don't have time to worry about racing the engine.
So why these fake bards and these idiots
Savants setting all the early adopter trends
Winning their third book contest?
Why does nobody look where they are going?
We're writing the problem in carbon right now,
But it all comes down to too much heat.
Everything else is rationalization.
The end is near, though hope is where the heart is.
Your Average Joe just wants an invitation
To face the music and dance. That's poetry.
He would write it if he could. Or does sometimes.
But the global shortages keep getting worse
And the market's collapsed, so nothing's worth anything.
No wonder he has a headache, like you.
Your Average Joe Takes an Hour in the Shower

“Clean as a whistle!” I can hear him say it,

Just like his father would have said it.
“Oh, an hour in the shower is a wonderful thing—
You get so clean, you can't help but sing!”
It is at about this point that you realize
What a starkly intimate revelation can go on,
Even in poetry like this, which is usually so,
Let us say, editorially impersonal,
Devoted as it is to the chronicle of the black swan,
The ugliest fucking ducklling of them all,
Your Average Joe, who serves as an instructional example
To you, dear reader, who must triangulate yourself
With respect to what's normal before you start
Asking any questions about the author
And his peculiar deficiencies, sad circumstances,
Poor health, bad luck, troubled mind, sleepless nights,
Lost weekends, absent work ethic, sour stomach,
Loose bowels, constipation of the soul,
Work headaches, sex deficit, attention deficit,
Bad choices, lack of thought and consideration,
Body odor, or his admittedly questionable taste
In clothing and couture, haberdashery and appointments.
(You see we know what's coming, so settle down.)
So, ironically, other poems about Average Joe,
Which did not appear to be deeply revelatory
Must now be reconsidered, as the obliquity
Of this discourse suggests that we may have missed something
Before we even started reading this poem.
And this one can be nakedly revelatory,
While you will assume a hidden meaning
That conveniently may serve the author's purpose
But has nothing to do with what he actually, originally, meant,
If anything. So that's the opening credits. Action.
Yes, this is a test to see if you can maintain continuity.
In the opening scene, the decrepit old Average Joe
Was stepping into the shower, reminiscing
About stepping out into the living room,
Naked and proud of himself
As only a naked two year old boy can be,
Hearing his father say those words, “Clean as a whistle!”
Because this is a poem about his father, about fathers,
And all the religious, psychological and literary issues
That accompany the theme of fathers and sons.
We're going to have to consider Jesus Christ and his Dad,
Both a couple of Average Joes,
And Joseph Smith and the Mormons,
And my dad, Jack, the Jack Mormon.
And everything that's peculiar to me, as my teacher Walt noted,
Is just going to turn out to be a version
Of something about you, because underneath everything,
When you strip us naked, give us a bath,
And make us clean as a whistle, we're all Average Joes.
It's always just that simple, that clear cut, that sharp,
Clean as a whistle distinction that sets us apart
From everything else. You draw the line,
And it's so sharp, it seems like there's nothing there,
Right at the boundary between the two parts,
Which each fully occupy what they may,
Cut so precisely and exactly that you can imagine
How a whistle can be clean, when the whistle you hear
Is the sound of a blade of infinite sharpness
Whistling through the air of the cosmic guillotine.
And the sound it makes is the sound of difference,
Of the bleeding edge, of the Average Joe's cut flesh,
As he shaves in the shower, and observes his degree,
Whatever that may be, of circumcision. Clean as a whistle.
It's like loving your father. It's not always easy.
But sometimes, just sometimes, it really seems worth it,
To hear his word in your own, singing your praises,
Provided you have the right father,
Though you always have to wonder if he really had to cut you so.
Your Average Joe Imagines He Has a Drinking Problem

Your Average Joe sometimes wishes he had a drinking problem,

It would simplify some things so.
And so he falls into a reverie, making up verses
Like some poor drunken Irishman,
Who stands in for every downtrodden soul who ever lived,
At least in this song:
“If you had the luck of the Irish,
You'd wish you was English instead.
Because if you have the luck the Irish,
You might as well stay home in bed.
Because if you've got the luck of the Irish,
You might as well drink till you're dead.
For if you've got the luck of the Irish,
Nobody else gets you ahead.
And if you've got the luck of the Irish,
Your lovers are better off dead,
For they've got the luck of the Irish—
Loving you means they're out of their head.
And if your own sweet mother is Irish,
Or your father is, it is said,
Then one got the luck of the Irish
When the other one simply got wed,
Or both of them were Irish,
And then both were in the same bed.
And you came right into your Irish
When you're born or you died or you bled,
Because the world's full of luck that is Irish,
Though it spins like an Englishman's head
When he learn's he's got the luck of the Irish
And someone else wins out instead.”
Of course, your Average Joe is not necessarily Irish,
But part of him is, in his head.
How Your Average Joe Says He Loves You

I'm sitting in the cafe, munching on crawfish,

And the jukebox starts playing Frank Sinatra.
Old Blue Eyes with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra,
“I've got you under my skin—“
And I think he's got it right,
And that I ought to tell you so.
And this is a revelation, which follows here:
I'm sorry but I just can't pretend
That I'm not completely in love with you.
I can't go on with the farce,
And it's been a farce, the way the farce has gone on.
So I'm resigning from the drama
Of give and take and having my suspicions
And giving away the secret I just can't face without admitting
That it's the plain and simple truth,
Letting everything else fall where it may
As a result of that unavoidable fact,
So impossible to deny. That's what I mean
When I say it, and that's why it's easy to say,
Why the struggle is all behind me
Once I'm saying what I'm saying,
Because it makes so clear
That I have nothing better to do,
That there is nothing I like to do better,
No recreational activity more tempting,
No necessity less of a burden
Than the burden of my song,
Which is to say how much, how very very much
I love you. When I confess this way,
You start to understand at least some
Of my expectations about you
And how utterly confident I am
That you will and do exceed them in every way.
So no matter how stingy I am,
No matter how inadequate as a man,
I'm still just hoping and praying you love me back
The very same, same way.
Your Average Joe is a Poet at Heart

Your average Joe is a poet at heart.

In the end he cares more what kind of poetry
He writes than anything else in the universe.
All he care about is having his words
Have the performative force of divine commandments
And the dazzling CGI visuals of spiritual revelations,
The underlying subsonic resonances, like at the B horror movies,
Which induce an unruly dread down your spine,
And the mellifluous harmonies
That bring beautiful women to tears and passionate vulnerability
And inspire great men to spontaneous oaths and acts of allegiance
Even for the unholy causes he whips up devotion for
Or the latest whim of his unreliable heart.
He might as well. Nothing much left to try for.
He has already screwtaped up every relationship
In his life: love, family, career, friendship,
Political alliance, casual acquaintance,
Life companionship, symbolic link, blind date
Or blind and forgotten collision on the street.
All he has left is what he imagines he writes,
And he follows his own advice,
The advice he gives to writers:
If the demons are not talking to you,
Or you are not talking to the demons,
Or you are both pissed off at each other, still,
Keeping putting down the words.
They won't let you get away.
They never let you get away for good.
And it's a good thing because you have no self discipline.
Your Average Joe Has Two Sides

Your average Joe, like you, is a compromise,

A complex, conflicted readout in which both forces
Each still exercise fully its range of effect
While, through a different dimension, exhibiting the strain
Of the other. Just like the way the President makes decisions.
He's caught between left brain and right brain,
Guantanomo and Denver, America and the moon,
Between reason and sanity, feeling and meaning,
Love and addiction, male and female, straight and gay,
Mother and child and father and mother,
Parents and other people's bastards,
House-painting and poetry, insanity and sex,
Romance and his library fines, Jesus and Dionysus,
God and the dialectic, science and killing time,
The sheep and the werewolves, smoking and drinking,
Between faith and his bid in the Dutch auction,
Between responsibility and loss of sphincter control,
Between the weak nuclear force and natural selection,
The memory of raspberry jam and the teeth in the jar,
The welding mask and the cigarette lighter,
The memory of the Great Depression and the Beatles,
Between the court jester's costume and the Mormons,
Between the cornsilk and the viola,
The textbook nobody reads and the choir practice,
The IQ test and the love letter,
The sweet tooth and the death drive,
The interpretive dance and the breakfast table,
The dream of Scotland and the rejection slip,
Nature and the latest fashions,
Subject and abject, object and claim,
Eyeball and scar tissue, prescription and preferred poison,
Loudspeaker and critical theorist, Buddah and billyclub,
Figure and translation, language and color,
Philosophy and restaurant review,
Graffiti and greeting card, reader and black hole,
Relationship and recreation, himself and you.
The Mind of Your Average Joe

On the table, the subject of every experiment,

Your Average Joe has the mind of an idiot,
Supplemented by the soul of a scientist.
In his quest for knowledge of the meaning of life,
Which he always dies without completing,
He acquires the character of a criminal,
Perhaps a little business sense,
A feeling for wearing a badge, discharging
Duty when necessary among the lower ranks,
And the suicidal soul of a dead poet
Who lives in such a hard world, he dies
Not by his own hand but by the machinery
Of plot and circumstance that make him what he is.
He's thus familiar with the idea of suicide notes,
With how every poem is a suicide note,
Including the great love poem you write
After you are dead and gone, hovering
Only like a beckoning ghost in the mind
Over the version of himself with the gun in his hand,
Inviting him onward into the hell
Created by his sense of rejection
From those who should, and should have, loved him.
You want to know him? Look at the gifts he brings,
How implausible they are, how unlikely,
And how unlikely it seems that they are his,
Treasures of metal and stone, signs of status
He feels a little awkward wearing in public.
You judge him the way you judge yourself, unfairly.
Your Average Joe Hears You Say Goodbye

What is this? Is this it?

Is this the way we talk
To each other now?
Do I know you?
Have you been trying all this time,
All this signifying dance
That is a mixture of my illusions
And your false promises,
To make me just understand
Who you really are,
As you would like me to believe?
Have you been already gone
As my temporary angel of enlightenment,
My brief dreams of happiness?
Was the whole point just for me
To understand you, finally,
After it is over, and everything else
Is just coming along toward its doom
At the usual boring pace?
Did you already know me that well?
Could it always have been I that didn't get it?
And you claim to be disappointed about me.
Well, OK, traitor. Go your own way. Like me.
And whether it's a curse or a blessing,
You've got to make it out somehow,
Just exactly the way I do,
No matter how far above or below me
In the whole rainbow of the human condition,
You, in your Average Joe ambition to be different
Are walking down the same road
At about the same speed
Toward the same, inevitable end,
As I am.
And once you face that,
You stop being picky
About your differences.
You will be a little more relaxed, in a certain sense,
But the nightmares will be worse,
And the happy dreams rarer and less satisfying.
You'll be in perfect tune
With your own suffering, no doubt.
Been there. It's not as fun as it looks.
But I'm really looking forward to seeing you again.
So why are you evaporating
Like the delusion of a fevered brain,
And why is that the only time
You seem to understand me?
OK, go your way. Had to ask.
I knew I'd be ready to die
The moment I met you.
Oh, my heart! Where have you gone?
Your Average Joe Utters a Prayer and Gets Back to Work

Let us be patient
As the hunter or the prey,
The fallen soldier,
Clinging to life, bleeding,
The surgeon on the battlefield,
The woman of the night,
Struck down in the street,
As the engineer turning on the power,
As the old man climbing the stairs,
As the sliding doors shut,
As the fingers click on the keyboard,
As the guardian listens for the password,
As the demons haggle for your soul,
As the friend who simply is there,
As the player plays the game,
As the fire goes out everywhere,
As the numbers count down,
As the corpse smiles for the camera
And the reassuring voices tell us
What to do or not to do,
While the angry gods quarrel with thunder
In frustration at their impotence,
As the bluff goes down,
The shot is fired, inevitably,
And the hospital bed is familiar,
While the paperwork goes on forever.
Why Your Average Joe Is Not a Morning Person

Once your Average Joe starts to take his responsibilities

Halfway seriously, he becomes deeply worried
That what he wants, what he cares about most sincerely,
Is a waste of his time. This kind of fear of failure
Is paralyzing emotionally, at an instinctual level.
Understandably, he is drawn to wasting time, by association.
What's the better way to go? Have some fun?
Of course time is only one dimension of what he wants,
Though he wants it all, day by day, on through eternity.
He also would like to be in perfect health,
Have a healthy diet rich in sugar and fat and flavor,
A body in the prime of young adult vigor,
But not requiring too much work to maintain,
Opportunities for love by the thousand,
That kind of love that makes pop tunes
Seem almost plausible, rather than the foregone dreams
Of a lost adolescence, which, outside of dreams
Was mostly misery. He wants true friends
And the adoration of the masses,
Along with the respect of those who really matter.
He wants a challenge, a series of challenges
He can rise to with at least a modicum of success,
And some idle games for his leisure hours,
A comfortable home, a world at peace
And free of the commoner sorts of suffering,
The ones that can actually be avoided.
He may even want to be remembered.
Is it any wonder he fears he will fail
Every morning he gets up to go to work?
Your Average Joe Is Almost a Pacifist

Your average Joe is entirely tired of war.

Sure, you can rile him up a little,
Put his dearly beloved or his own sweet hide
In the fire, and he will say the slogans for a while,
But the reality of war always dismays him,
No matter how necessary he has been convinced it is.
And in the long run, he knows you feel that too,
And so he is a man of peace by nature,
Whether Caesar or Cincinnatus returning home.
Let all your kings and philosophers offer their reasons,
The defense of liberty or the chain of blood for blood,
It just won't wash with him after awhile.
You see, he is in the trenches. He's seen the wreckage,
The monster that chews away at life,
Every bomb blast a little bite, closer to death,
A little more pain that cannot be borne.
Every bullet has, he knows, his name on it.
He's the one who has to be a soldier,
When there are no more superheroes left
And the world is losing its balance
Dancing on the razor edge
That separates self destruction from a close shave.
He's already half a ghost, feeling his phantom limbs
And reliving the trauma of his great battles,
So loud he sometimes can't hear the world.
It's bad enough to live the nightmares:
He doesn't want any more reasons to have them.
Your Average Joe's Childhood

Your average Joe's childhood stories

Have not been told, because, like yours,
His don't really come off much like the fairy tales.
He didn't get lucky. There is no magic.
There are evil people, yes, and some of them
Have awesome power in their hands,
And there are demons certainly, in the wine,
In the women, in the song, in the bread and water
Of your prisoner's eye view of the world,
Much like his. And there is no salvation,
Not in obedience, certainly, and probably not in thought at all,
And the miracles never happen in your neighborhood or his.
Still, he was born, maybe a bit reluctantly,
If the fact that he was facing backwards signifies,
And in distress, if the blue tinge to his skin meant anything,
If the rope already tight around his neck were not,
And knotted very tightly with knot after knot
Of unwanted, unnecessary complications
That really tie up the experience of life
In a way that is quite unpleasant to live through,
A rope he had himself quite innocently twisted,
And nearly killed himself with in the process
Of the dark dream that lives before we are awake,
Of the living fiber of his connection to the rest of the world,
And wailing like the inconsolable wind, but louder.
And that was just the beginning, just like your own.
Your Average Joe Celebrates the Third of July

He sometimes wonders what it would be like

If he were up in the clouds, looking down,
Seeing how his life fits together
Like a poorly played hand of scrabble,
Full of nonsense words that have no interest.
Or maybe as the work of art of a supreme genius
Interested in exploring the limits of irony?
Well, whatever approximation of divine superiority you choose,
For after all, it is your contempt for him to which
He is attempting to refer, in conjuring
The self indifference he imagines virtue requires.
And he thinks that what I am about to tell you
Is really going to piss some of you off.
But don't be in too big a hurry to figure out
Exactly when you'd start getting pissed off
If you were just a creature of his imagination.
Don't overthink it, isn't that what all you cretins tell me?
Well, in this case, then, I agree: don't. Just feel the pain directly.
Be hurt and humiliated by what you read or hear from me.
Be certain it is indeed about you,
And it is indeed intended to hurt.
Why? You have to ask why?
Why would my heart harbor some deep anger, somewhere,
Down below the level of ethical reflection and rational action,
You know, down where you caused me all that pain?
But just because you have the greatest reason to fear my words,
Do not assume I am always talking about you uniquely.
No, it's more like you are like Average Joe.
He is, at this point, how you and I relate to each other.
I am not assuming we have more than that in common any more.
You wan't better treatment in my writing?
My advice is treat me better.
Anyway, so your Average Joe is celebrating the Third,
Which is the day the Declaration of Independence was signed,
And he just can't imagine that it takes twenty four hours
For declarations to take effect, unless they come right out and say so,
In which case why not post date to set a deadline for signatures?
And I think that is what they did, just as a scribal convenience.
But your Average Joe, this year, this Fourth Weekend,
Has come to a certain revelation, perhaps an insight,
If not exactly an epiphany or a magical vision.
As of now, this year, this event, this time,
This occurrence makes it clear that from now on,
If not implicitly always already,
The Fourth of July is now officially, obviously,
Necessarily and even uniquely,
Perhaps partly because of the fact that the famous Declaration,
The one the so many hoped had constitutive force,
At least as far as making clear what is unquestionably true,
If not necessarily in making that truth what it is,
Except in the limited sense in which a little light
Passes for the light of all understanding,
I say it is now, that it has been concluded by your Average Joe,
That the Fourth, once his favorite holiday,
Is now the most ambivalent.
And this in spite of all that stuffing about Thanksgiving,
And the exceptionalism we can't seem to shed,
No matter how much we learn,
And in spite of the constant moan of the heart
About how lonesome are the watches,
How strange the frontier we guard,
With meetings too far and few,
And messages too stripped of nonverbal choreography
To justify the little blue pills--
This, not Christmas, not Turkey Day, not New Year's Eve,
Not even Halloween, let alone the more sober choices
Of Labor and Memorial Days,
This Independence Day, is now officially,
Forever after, from this one forward,
From the First Obama Fourth,
When the Civil War and the War of Independence
Seemed just for a moment to have
What it, the Fourth, was always supposed to have,
In common, for the sake of all humankind,
Something deserved, but it got instead,
Just like before, when promises seem harder to keep
Or just fall to irrelevant dust,
The honor of being the Most Ambivalent Holiday.
This is precisely because of something about which
The End Timers are right, but for the wrong reason,
Just like the Maya Calendar, which has the date right,
Which is, Time is out to get us. We are running
Ahead of the razor, we think,
But it's coming in on an angle that is hard to judge,
And it might just cut our legs off
Before we really get to the finish line.
Not his fault. Nothing about him.
He did manage to get the torch in hand,
And he can carry it, but the road itself may dissolve,
And he will not go on like Coyote, then fall.
He will just fall, no hesitation. Just like us.
That's why your Average Joe voted for him.
He likes having someone in charge
Who knows the score.
But he never bets on the game.
Why Your Average Joe Keeps Falling in Love

Your Average Joe needs to feed

His appetite for new problems.
So naturally he takes up with a woman.
He is a bull elephant natural man,
Enjoying his due reward with casual presumption
For his outstanding feats of masculine virtue
And the potential reproductive gold of his loins,
And she is one happy hippo mama girl on parade,
As they go waddling down the street together,
Like two cartoon characters of urban sensibility,
Who got the best number on the soundtrack
For their walk on. It's so good,
It would be worthwhile even if they had no backstory,
And the story they have is interesting enough
To justify putting down the razor,
Taking your thumb off the shotgun trigger
Or the string connected to it our of your hand,
Pouring the pills down the toilet,
Taking your foot off the gas,
Stepping back from the edge of the cliff,
The edge of the train platform, the curb,
Freeway's edge, turning off the timer on the gas explosion,
Tossing the mushroom in the trash
Instead of the spaghetti sauce,
And she's got her some trash for sure,
And he loves the smell of it.
Ain't love beautiful?
And keep in mind that he's got plenty of respect
For plenty of women he would never consider sleeping with.
Which you immediately assume to mean
That he has no respect for those he does,
For that's your stereotype of him, is it not?
In short, while you assume he's such a creep,
With this poem in evidence of his attitude,
Aren't you really only showing off
Your own obvious inadequacy of imagination?
Maybe it's the real thing,
Even if it doesn't look like it.
Like him. Like you and me.
Like the whole history of jazz, and all that.
Your Average Joe Pauses and Slips into the First Person and Does a Song and Dance Number

I ought to brush my teeth, no,

Maybe wash my mouth out with soap
In advance, for what I am about to say,
You're going to hate it that much,
I know you're going to want to see me punished
Merely for saying it, it's that outrageous.
Well, some of you, anyway.
Now that should put you in the right frame
Of mind, a mixture paranoia and long held grudges,
As you imagine I am, and the Average Joe is, in.
Here it goes. I am actually going to burst into song:

When the happy hippo mama girls

Come prancin' down the street,
You always got to wonder how
They keep up with them big feet.

And their high heels go clickety click,

And their hips swing to the beat,
And their little titties jiggle around
Like your favorite cut of meat.

So it's no surprise that average guys

Like Joe must feel defeat,
Because it doesn't matter how she lies
And how she doesn't love him sweet,

She's got the power of knowing how

To drive him to her feet,
To keep his tongue at its quiet work
In the darkness and the heat.

It's how she always takes him in:

The suction is complete.
She makes him feel like he ought to feel,
And that just can't be beat.

And though she may be hard to hear

And deaf out in the street,
She always looking out for herself,
And isn't that a treat?

Because your happy hippo mama girl

Is your Average Joe's help meet--
She's just like him, but with twice the balls
And a figure that's petite.
She wants to talk about all her problems,
And she wants him to listen, reet?
She isn't asking for advice,
And she wants him to be discreet.

But he always wants to help her out,

Though she questions his conceit
When he was only saying why
He offered her a leet.

Well the rain comes down and it hits us all

Where we stand with the elite--
When you find what you get is just the cold shoulder
The rain turns into sleet.

So your Average Joe and his average gal

Go dancing cheek to cheek,
As they waddle down the road of life
Pretending to be sleek.

(This is from“The Mating Ritual: Song of the Papa Guy Warriors,”

By Harry Sangai and Sam Notherguy,
All Average Joes, like you and me.)
Your Average Joe Places You Under Arrest

It's a routine investigation, nearly a bureaucratic requirement,

It's so utterly ordinary, what your Average Joe
Will always want to talk to you about.
He will just want to get a few details straight.
No need to worry if there are some inconsistencies.
We have all the time in the world to work out our excuses,
The way your Average Joe always does.
Your details are, like his, just part of the big picture.
But of course he, like you, is always losing sight of that.
Still, not to worry. Not yet.
Your Average Joe is in charge of old business,
Some long unsettled matters, long stale uncertainties,
So the fact that he is talking to you now about them
Is no reason for you to be alarmed.
They may be matters for which someone ought to suffer,
Be punished, feel the consequences, and so forth,
But you need not worry about that, we know.
That you, like your Average Joe, could be the criminal
Responsible for our current predicament,
Is hardly likely. He would be more subtle.
He would not, if you were the guilty one,
Want to alarm you by letting you know
What business brings him to your door.
He would not have let you know he was on the case,
Or at least he would not have seemed to be working on it,
But he would instead distract you with something else,
Something less threatening to you yourself.
He would want to preserve his advantage
And catch you unawares, for at that point,
You might just be in conflict with him,
Like he is with himself,
As he carries out his altruistic duty
And slaps your ass in jail,
Where you will meet all those other Average Joes,
Each, like yourself, a victim of another Average Joe,
And of all the Average Joes and what they insist on,
As well as your own stubborn, Average Joe type refusal to learn.
Your Average Joe Listens to a Lecture: Professor Sex Reviews Recent Film

I seldom have time to comment on popular culture,

As if it had some peculiar interest.
Too busy trying to find some real culture, with oxygen,
At a temperature I can stand, which is to say, “cool,”
And studying up the homework on doing that,
To pay attention to what you idiots are watching.
But I have to make an exception today.
It's the new German Sprite commercial I'm in love with,
Which may be history by the time you hear this or read it.
It's better than the beamer commercial, the ten minute one,
Where they paint a giant canvas with tire tracks in more than rainbow colors,
Showing off accelerations and agile turn skids
Like the techniques of a brush,
So that your life is a work of art,
As long as you are on the road in your sports car.
This must have been in production way before the last election.
But this Sprite commercial is an instant classic.
First, let me describe it. It comes off like quality porno.
I'm not kidding. It's been banned from the airwaves already,
Shortly after it was released. Apparently there is a whole trend
In German beverage ads for television of looking like pornos.
Beer commecials now feature bikini girls having orgasms in Germany.
You've got to hand it to those Germans.
The ad business in Germany has got to be the most sophisticated
In the known world. Remember, this was once Nazi Germany.
These people's culture remembers what it was like
To have what comes out of the radio be not just untrustworthy,
But downright evil, part of a palpable evil that is destroying
The very world they lived in. And unlike the Russians,
They've had time to think about it. Imagine Americans,
Even the dittohead conservatives, who pretend to be so embattled,
Having to realize, deep down in their guts,
That the media was that bad, even their favorite parts of it.
You'd see a wave of suicide by the previously self satisfied
Of huge size, an epidemic of retirements from positions of power,
All kinds of other signs of real revolution no one can ignore.
So these Germans are that skeptical of the media:
They had to be that disillusioned once,
And they remain that skeptical.
Hence the German ad business, witness the beamer ad,
And the overall pattern of competition
For who can make the best porno beverage ad,
Is considerably more sophisticated than the American ad business,
No matter how may seasons of Mad Men they make.
Lots of their ads show this off, which makes some worth watching,
Even though they are just commercials,
And partly for fun, and partly for their intellectual interest.
Well this one is awesome and audacious in its use of symbolism.
There's this cute white chick giving a blow job
To this black man, who it not huge but well cut,
In every respect that you can see, which does not include
His cock. Until he is just about ready to come.
Then, it turns out, just as you are getting ready for the money shot,
His cock is really, suddenly, a shook up Sprite bottle,
Which splooges all this white stuff on the girl's face,
And she loves it, finds it so refreshing and delicious,
And they are both very pleased with the result.
It's monstrous, it's so good, and you can tell.
So, I ask you, who is this selling Sprite to?
Cultural sophisticates like me? I wonder.
Otherwise, the prospects of its working,
As an ad to draw drinkers to Sprite, look pretty dim.
Think about who's going to be drinking here:
The black guy? Nope. The cute white chick?
Do cute white chicks love splooge in the face that much,
So much that thinking of one's Sprite bottle,
“Oh, this reminds me of how much I love sucking black cock,
Of course I want some.” Would it work? And the ad slogan, “Obey your thirst,”
Is that any more innocent? I am not saying women don't like to suck cock.
Nor am I denying that they often evince a preference for darker meat.
There are good, biological reasons why a blow job could be fun to give.
There are perfumes and pheromones in that white foam,
Along with its darker cargo, that could make a woman want
To have it inside her, and inside her mouth might do,
Above and beyond any function that cock has
In stimulating her vagina, clitoris or whatever.
But on her face? Why would she love that?
Is she what, three years old? A baby who likes to play with her food?
What this ad presents us is the requirement to submit
To the predominant male fantasy of female desire.
We men want women to want men, but when we do,
We realize we may not be at the top of her list,
Especially us Average Joes like you and me.
So only women who have bought into that would be swayed
Directly by this ad to drink Sprite. How many can there be?
Any of you ladies actually subscribe?
Are you in fact our dreams come true? You know better.
But there is a way, even so. Some, mostly young, women
Are getting used to the idea of playing roles while having sex again.
I mean, we tried that for a really long time,
And in the long run, they wanted something more.
But now they can do it voluntarily, which is different, some ways,
Some very important ways. And maybe those cute white chicks
Will drink Sprite as a result. But I don't think that's what it's about.
I think it's secretly a Coke commercial. Coke owns Sprite.
If this is the fantasy of Sprite, just imagine, what would be the fantasy,
What would be the porno, of Coke?
It would exceed the limits of male fantasy,
Which would make it acceptable, even desirable, to women,
Though far more women than men drink Sprite.
Coke sounds a little like cock, and who doesn't want one?
Avergae Joes do. Men want one, of course.
But so do women, one or both ways,
Either in the sense of having power,
Or also in having power over whoever has one.
And of course, who can blame them for preferring Diet?
They want the pleasure, without getting fat.
Isn't that the reason for every blow job?
So now you have two choices:
Grab a Coke and a smile, or obey your thirst and suck Sprite, girls.
This way, they don't waste any ad money on their second brand,
The one known more as a ladies' choice,
Even when they are making a work of art,
Even if it looks like porno to the Average Joe.
And why porno? Why talk about sex all the time?
Your Average Joe knows that's just the way
To say whatever you have to say most simply.
Porno is like math. It's the simplest case,
At least for the Average Joe like you. And me.
Your Average Joe Enjoys a David Lynch Movie

Sometimes your Average Joe

Allows a more serious music
To enter his dreams.
And they become
Much more subject to interpretation.
It's a lot less clear what the wish
That animates the dream, however repressed,
Really is. Can he possibly want life
To be so complicated and full of pain?
This is what we have to wonder
As we drift off to sleep, like he does,
Having stayed up too late,
Having wasted the day,
Having slept through the best,
Having failed to get high at any time
Before the dream itself took over.
If the flying saucers really had landed,
If the consequences for humanity,
For the world of Average Joe,
Were actually significant, possibly dire,
He'd still be working on the plan for that book,
That one on laziness as a way of zen,
Knowing some people might buy it
Precisely because they're not sure if it's a hoax.
He knows they are all, you are all,
Average Joes like him,
Just as likely to fall,
Just as likely to suffer the worst,
Just as likely to have only the glimpse of happiness and joy
That leaves you wanting more than you can have.
He just stops listening to the story
That everyone is telling him, on whatever wavelength,
And starts broadcasting his own,
Fascinated by the drama,
Unable to sleep,
Waiting for what happens next.
He knows he may not enjoy it.
It may in fact be a catastrophe
For him personally and for the whole world,
But it will be his story, that he knows.
And so he keeps paying attention,
Reading the credits,
Looking for his name as the writer,
Thinking, “The only way this could happen
Would be my whole life were a story
That I myself would have to have written,
So perfect are the ironies,
The way they stroke my every wound,
The way they make me suffer
What only I can understand.
It's as if I were God, and I were evil,
Intent on destroying myself
In this particular incarnation,
Not to save anyone,
But just to savor the futility
Of all my high minded ambitions,
Let alone those little impulses I feel,
Which I like to call love.”
Why Your Average Joe Hates Poetry

The trick of art is having for your own

A language in which anything can happen,
And it keeps on doing so, while you keep rapping.
You keep on speaking for yourself alone,
And suddenly the crowd is all around you,
Watching the hidden shadow of your smile,
Feeling their way across the dance floor mile
To somewhere someone's waiting for them. You.
While in the end you've broken every rule,
You've done the unexpected and the rare,
And you're outside what is acceptable--
That is, you've found a strange new word or two,
A fact or an idea they won't care
To hear. And then they are hearing it from you.
Your Average Joe Is Pretty Bad

Lately, your Average Joe is a bit embarrassed

Just to be who he is. For so many reasons...
I mean, shouldn't he be someone else by now?
Didn't all his arrows seem aimed at higher targets
Back when he first hit the shooting range?
And shouldn't they be closer by now,
What with his failing vision,
Overworked trigger finger,
And tired imagination?
Admittedly, he did it to himself.
The problem is there,
Right in the center of Average Joe,
In the middle of all those standard deviations.
It's his deviation
That is the problem.
Angels and demons are about even.
It's not that the moronically evil
Have dragged the rest of us down,
Though they have--
Nor is it that the supergenius do gooders
Have failed to pick up whatever the current torch is,
Though they have--
It's the Average Joe who brings down the average,
Which means you and me, and he knows this
Deep in his average depth heart.
And he feels a little bit ashamed
To show his face in public, as a result.
It's this anxiety
That accounts for how television
Became the idiot box
And why the interenet is surprisingly full
Of both porn and outright useless bullshit.
You get what you pay for,
And your Average Joe is a lousy tipper
And a cranky waitress.
Fado Songs

for Fran

1) From the City of Desolation

How can I express my sorrow to you

From here in the city of desolation?
How can my pain be understood by you
Who have your own measure of desperation
And your own version of the situation,
When you are so so far far far away,
And I am too, as said before today?

I've asked my words before to tell you of

Whatever lives and suffers in my heart,
Which can be nothing for you but love.
And sometimes I, perhaps, have found the art
To draw myself out of myself in part
And give you that best part of me to keep.
But I have never tried to make you weep.

Yet now I must, for that's my every song.

The songs of slaves, the songs of wiser men,
Of women, whose tears always come in throngs,
Of every heart for that for which it longs--
These have the ring of sadness that I hear
In my own voice when you're not there to hear.
2) Sad Reasons More

This life, my friend, is suffering and pain:

The first thing that your tongue will ever say
In infant song, naked, and howling plain,
The feeling that won't ever go away.
It is the constant hum of every day,
The sense we have of our own tragedy,
Far worse than any we can read or see.

It's in the sound you've come to call your voice,

In every sigh, in every syllable,
In all the background music and the noise,
And in the silence, which of it is full.
It has a power like gravity to pull
You down into the sorry sorry dark
And all you hear has this hound's yowl and bark.

And if you try to say I should be glad,

That I am luckier than most like me,
That thought just brings sad reasons more, more sad.
And if you tell me sorrow is not free,
I tell you being broke does not scare me,
For I have lost what nothing else can buy,
And sorrow helps forget remember why.
3) The Bells of Sorrow

Don't tell me you're having a great time--

As you know me, I know your voice too well.
I hear the bells of sorrow chime and chime
In every tale you do or do not tell,
Or in the background music as they swell.
What door is not ajar from their vibration?
What wall has not come down before their nation?

This is a song of bells, a bell of songs,

The sound I hear, the sound that you hear too,
The sound of those bells banging their harsh tongues,
Clapping their sides with tearful laughter too,
And all the mournful minor keys of blue.
Perhaps you know this song? That of another
Whose sorrow is like that of our Great Mother.

It is the world that aches through us, my love,

Through how our love is thwarted by all things,
And how our greatest hopes are but a dove.
We have been humbled to such wings,
Having no hope without some sad bell rings.
And I hear all sad bells I hear in you,
For your sad sorrow is my sad sorrow too.
4) The Saddest Hour

This is the saddest hour, the saddest day,

This Sunday afternoon without your smile,
Without some little song you sing for joy
Simply to be together for a while.
As time moves on, I linger, lacking guile,
Hoping the thought of you at least will stay
To see me through the darkness in my way.

It is a lucid moment, and my tears

Are there before I realize I'm crying
And my heart chokes my breath with all my fears,
The worst of which is not of my own dying
But of me wailing at the gates and sighing
To think that now I want belief in heaven
So that I might find you in number seven.

And as the moment passes, nothing changes:

I feel your absence with and without weeping,
When tears run out and voice tires of all ranges,
When I do anything, when I am sleeping,
When I am working, dreaming, I just dream
Sad dreams of you, no matter how I seem.
5 The Primal Curse

“...much ado about nothing...”

Farewells, so many need not have been spoken--

The heart's affairs, so few have prospered well!
So many friendships need not have been broken
By negligence or circumstance as well.
So little romance knew the magic spell,
Or knew how to undo the primal curse
Of time, that things must change, and most get worse.

The flowers of the Spring have been neglected,

And Summer's bounty has been freely wasted,
While Autumn's harvest is poorly collected
And Winter's cold is death to be tasted.
And all the garlands we have sewed and basted
Are now but milestones, millstones that we carry,
Lifting our weary shoulders, sober and wary.

How sad I am, I think you partly guess

And partly understand for your own part,
And how your sorrow's worse, I must confess
I think I can imagine in my heart,
Although my mind cannot grasp it to start.
So this is why I sing you my sad song,
That you may sing, and I may sing along.
Why Your Average Joe Does Not Hit on Above Average Women

Your average Joe knows his place,

But he doesn't act like it
A good deal of the time.
He listens to your the sound of your voice,
Its little edge of ego,
And he knows you're not humble enough
To be able to talk to him
Without experiencing a major decline
In self esteem.
And he's ok with that.
He thinks you deserve it.
Would do you good, he thinks,
Though he knows it'll never happen,
Not in his average lifetime.
That's why you get all those below average guys.
The above average guys see right through you,
And you are still average inside,
No matter how beautiful you are,
Still average in your heart,
No matter how smart you are.
And you know all this, and you resent it,
Which is why you won't give the average Joe
The time of day. Which he understands,
Though once in a while he fools himself
Into thinking you might be special, like him.
Your Average Joe Tells His Happy Hippo Mama Girl How Beautiful She Is

You are beautiful. Best livestock this cowboy ever rode.

Your eyes are like two x ray visions surveillance cameras
Focused on my soul, searching out moral faults,
Failures of character, missed courtesies, stupid mistakes,
And anything I might feel ashamed of,
As well as a whole lot of things you want to criticize
That I am not ashamed of.
Your nose is like a cute little parts per billion sensitive
Pollution detector, setting off alarms that lead you to tell me
What a nasty, unpleasant beast I am,
Every time you happen to notice.
And what can I say? I am a nasty, unpleasant beast.
And you love it, but you also love to criticize.
Your your lips are passionate, slightly discolored
From the heat of your words,
Which often appear as a heaving volley of flame
Aimed at me and my precious balls.
But I do love the sound of your voice,
And everything you say and do
With that mouth of yours.
Your cheeks are like two spanking smooth silk pillows,
And you have the cutest dimples.
I like to watch you admiring them in a mirror, sometimes.
You ask me if I think you're fat,
And the problem is, I love the kind of fat you are.
If I compare you to a summer's day,
You are hotter. And you are wilder and stranger
Than any little deer I ever shot,
And you are a lot hornier than any of those poor prizes.
And the prettiest thing about you is how I won you, and how much,
And how you always let it show.
Your Average Joe Gets Beat Up By the Cops and Reads the New York Times

It's true. Your average Joe does get beat up

By the cops. But he also thinks
There ought to be a law.
He wants his personal justice
Enforced from on high,
So he can go about his business peaceably.
He's right there with the founding fathers
On being opposed to tyranny,
And believing that democracy
Is the best preventative measure to stop it.
But your Average Joe barely understands economics.
He thinks it ought to be a crime
To be super rich. A crime in itself.
Why? You may well wonder.
The idea works this way:
Big bucks going to bad actors
Leads to, promotes, and even causes tyranny
To leak into the moral vacuum of capitalism.
It's as inevitable as entropy, or Murphy's Law,
Or the Peter Principle. Fecal matter occurs.
If you stop it from happening,
Stop people from ever even being super rich,
You are much less likely to suffer tyranny.
And your average Joe hates tyranny,
Just like he loves money.
He loves his own. He hates to be subject to anyone else's,
Money or tyranny.
So if he gets bum rushed while asking for a badge number,
He knows it's not his fault.
He just wishes they would go after the real bad guys
And leave him alone.
Let them lock up Goldman Sachs.
Of course, he prefers a richer mix
Of conflict in the bedroom.
In fact, he'll pay a hooker to get it,
Maybe even with handcuffs included.
Same as you and me.
A Country Song

Can't you see what a mess I'm in?

Been fighting the whiskey all night,
But I just can't seem to win.

And it's got me running to the ladies' room

Because I just can't wait
To tidy up my doom.

The girl in the mirror or the powder on her nose?

Because it's whiskey and coke and the scent
Of a sweet Mexicali rose.

So hang up your corset, you little whore.

It's liberation time--
But it's love you're fighting for.
Your Average Joe Drinks a Little

He's now certain that he makes bad decisions

As soon as the liquor hits his lips.
One too many times, he's found himself
Borrowing the phone to call a friend
And finding out the warrant has been signed
Back there where the short con artists
Got him thrown in jail and stole his wallet,
Then made him work slave labor
Before they let him walk the whole way home,
Across the desert to where he asks you.
Or he's living under the bridge, with his wife and kids
And wants to bless Jesus for your money, he says.
He's taking painkillers to cheer himself up.
He's hungry to have his little ego crushed,
And good luck sits down on his lap and kisses him,
And he wants a little love
When she slaps him for making the suggestion.
He doesn't like being hungry,
And he's hungry all the time, one way or another.
You know the feeling, as do I.
Pantoums on a Third Grade Knock Knock Joke

Knock, knock.
Who's there?
A door that's not a door.
When is a door not a door?
Don't you know?
I know that when it's ajar, I leave it up to you.
When it's ajar--? Don't you see?
Like I said, when it's ajar, I leave it up to you.
That's a jarring thought.
I thought so too. But it can't be helped. When it's a jar, I leave it up to you.

What door is not a door?

What door is not ajar?
What jar is not a door?
What jar is not a jar?

What door is not a door?

A door that is ajar.
What jar is not a door?
A jar that does not jar.

A door that is ajar

Is what one may go through.
A jar that does not jar
Goes nowhere through and through.

Is one what one may through

Not proof that really God
Goes nowhere through and through,
Not there for me and you?

Not proof that really God,

A door that is a jar,
Not there for me and you,
A jar that does not jar--

When it's a jar,

I leave it up to you.

When is a jar not ajar?

What door is really closed?
What jar can never open?
What door is not a door?
When is a jar not ajar?
What has been sealed forever?
What jar can never open?
What emptiness lies hidden?

What has been sealed forever

But the wounds beneath our scars?
What emptiness lies hidden
But the break in broken hearts?

But the wounds beneath our scars

Are still alive within us.
But the break in broken hearts
Will kill us and then skin us.

Are still alive within us

Still some things we hold out for?
Will kill us and then skin us
The Cupid we adore?

Still some things we hold out for,

We know we cannot get.
The Cupid we adore?
His aim is crooked yet.

We know we cannot get

What door is really closed.
His aim is crooked yet--
What door is not a door?

When it's ajar,

I leave it up to you.
Your Average Joe Contemplates His Own Evil Nature

Your Average Joe is not much like many mythic figures

A girl might hope he would embody,
Unless she has a taste for trickster tales,
For Coyote and Crow and Rabbit and Little Deer,
Who taught the Cherokee language,
So that when Sequoyah would set out
To teach the Cherokee to write,
And they would become ninety percent literate
In a single generation, as they did,
He would not be just wasting his time.
Mythic figures are thoughtful that way,
Giving themselves credit for what happens
Mostly at the hand of your average Joe!
Your average Joe, on the other hand,
Will take all the credit he can possibly deserve.
That's why whenever you tell me,
“Your Average Joe is a myth,”
I am likely to say, “Right on, comrade!”
Just like Jesus and Buddha, Adam and Eve,
And every prophet or oracle who ever claimed
To be speaking to some higher power
And prescribing or advising or failing fully to explain
The puzzling features of the life of the average Joe,
And like every legendary hero or shaman or such
That had to reckon with powers beyond imagining
Just to get through the day to day,
Which in his case can be fairly perilous,
And not often entirely without significant confusion.
This, his mythic stature, is especially true regarding ideas
About being true, or sexually faithful,
Or, if you insist on being objective,
Refraining from having adulterous sex,
With adultery construed very broadly.
Your Average Joe being true is a myth, certainly.
But you see, your Average Joe's opposite number,
His happy hippo mama girl herself,
Wants to believe she has a perfect right
To expect your average Joe, her average Joe,
To make and keep a promise not to cheat.
Bad news girls. The numbers are in.
Much like the pagan gods modeled on them,
The majority of men commit adultery.
Your average Joe is a casual adulterer, probably,
But an adulterer nonetheless. Has to be.
It's in the statistics. And you only get to form
Your expectations based on the average Joe,
The real average Joe, just as he stands,
Not yet improved by you. He's going to stray.
To expect otherwise would be wishful self delusion.
Do you want him any way? That is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the woman's mind
To dump the asshole now, or wait and see,
If maybe adultery does not undermine his sense
Of commitment. If it does, he's out of there, of course.
Otherwise, if you try to say you can believe
That he can be faithful, if he just loves you,
Because you are so exceptionally loveable
That it will never cross his mind, if he really loves you,
To love anybody else...
But you know that's not true, unless you can have an effect
On him, that is, unless he is above average as well.
(And we assume for the sake of argument that you are,
Although we know you are nearly as likely as he is
To, say, use your tongue to encourage your husband's boss,
Especially if you want to keep him quiet
After you have already fucked him,
Or perhaps to have given the pool boy
A tip in exchange now and again, if not a full naked insertion
Of the reward he wants to give you
For being such an excellent employer of men.)
Your average Joe is not that sensitive.
Whether you broadcast your feelings or not,
He is not going to figure it out without help,
Though he'd be better in the bedroom if he could.
He not only would have more opportunities,
He would not take them so often.
Not be such a frequent adulterer, right?
I mean, he would sense the consequences
And want to avoid them, wouldn't he?
To believe that load of zoo manure, that you inspire perfect faith,
You have to retain the notion,
The belief, the real leap of faith you take,
To say that the average Joe who falls for you
Is really above average. That's the kicker,
Even if we ignore your own very charitable self image,
And how your prefer that rosy mirror to the cold, hard light of day.,
You're kidding yourself about him, at least, you must admit,
If not yourself. And you know it. We all do. We all do it,
Or something very like. Like thinking, “She won't mind,
Not in the long run. I just deserve a little extra, I'm such a man.
She knows that. That's how much she loves me.”
You see how it happens, girls.
You know you've been a party to it often enough,
With some other average Joe or other
Whose happy hippo mama girl just doesn't understand him, he says.
How can you blame him, under the circumstances?
When it's your pretty ass wants nailing to the floor,
You know all you have to do is call the union hall.
Plenty of guys up for the job. And you know their number.
So stop whining about your Average Joe's wandering dick,
You stupid cunts. Mind your own panties, and don't get them in a twist.
You will have plenty of better occasions,
Ones where you might actually do some good.
Just remember how hard it is
To tell your average Joe, or you, what to do.
I feel sorry for both of you, and myself,
Even if you deny me your own pity
For my desperate suffering.
I don't expect any better of you,
Much as I hope for it. Don't we all?
Ode to the Muse, in the Form of Ani DiFranco

I wanted to write to you, like some French guy,

Dripping with sophisticated contempt and burning romance,
When you came on the radio
And showed me what you want by doing it yourself.
You assumed the poise of the super bitch princess
And what came out of your mouth taught me a lesson or two.
So I started talking about you in the third person:
Her idea of poetry
Is whatever she says it is.
She's writing the rules
As she goes.
It's just whatever pops into her sweet little head.
It's whatever she thinks needs to be said
About whatever she happens to be thinking about.
And she always has something to say.
And she is thinking all the time,
About the meanings of things,
And things become all so meaningful,
If for no other reason than because of thinking
About them and thinking about thinking about them
And thinking about thinking, and about thinking all the time.
You may love it sometimes. You may hate it.
But you can't stop thinking, once you start. If you did, you would die
Or slip into the grey soup of everyday life
Without a splash or a wave of any kind
And sink straight to the bottom of boredom,
Down where the razor blades get interesting again,
Just as a convenience item for the smart shopping suicide.
So it doesn't matter what it is: if she says it's poetry,
It's poetry, no matter what Homeland Security says it is.
And if it happens to be bisexual, who's asking questions?
Girl like that writes her own contract.
And your average Joe picks up the tab
In between his other obligations
And less savory hobbies,
Because he likes the way she sings
So much he doesn't mind the words,
Even though he really, really should.
Seven Lessons in Writing Poetry

1 Sign Up for the Class

In this class you will do well

To have your own reasons to be here,
And they should be life and death.
It should really matter to you
To learn what you learn here,
For Poetry is not concerned about you.
You can live and die without affecting it much.
The question is, “Can you do anything else?”
The commitment to do it is your business,
But without it, will never write poetry.
It has to be something you want
To worry about. Let all else go,
Let there be no trouble anywhere else--
If you are to write poetry, you must
Accept worry, know dissatisfaction,
Know how great it can be, know its limits,
Along with disappointment, failure, shame,
Guilt, sorrow, resentment, anger, love,
Generosity, charity, hope, doubt, fear,
Knowledge, the stubborn donkey of ignorance hit from behind
By the unforgiving and vigorous baseball ball of reality,
All as applied to your own writing.
You will know the compulsion, the obligation,
The promise, both explicit and unstated,
And the inadequate moral dedication
To follow through on everything Poetry demands
And hope the result is not entirely contemptible
To her fine and fickle, and hopefully pregnant nose.
You will be slave to the art henceforth.
And if you are lucky, it will be obvious
That your gravestone should say so.
2 Show Up for Class

Life is worthless
Without a little investment
And not much better with it.
If you lie around writing poetry all day,
You will never learn anything
Let alone how to write poetry
That anyone worth noticing
Would want to read.
Try learning something first,
Even if it means going back to school
Or holding down a real job
Or sleeping in an alley after begging for change
Until you could afford cheap wine,
Even if if means getting pregnant
Or getting an abortion,
Getting married or divorced,
Falling in love or getting laid,
Even if it means killing someone in the line of duty
Or getting beat down by the cops for no good reason,
Whether it's Wall Street or Death Row,
Main Street or mainlining crack.
No matter what it is, don't fool yourself
With the silly idea that your own dreams
Matter in any larger sense
Than adding a little porn fantasy to your diary.
The world is a sewer. Poetry is at the deep end. Swim.
3 Act Like a Child

Some Zen guy might say,

“Put on the white belt.”
Your guitar teacher might say,
“Memorize it, then play around with it.”
Your kindergarten teacher might say,
“Pay attention. Try to understand.
Ask questions until you do understand
And beyond, as long as you are having fun.”
Your father might be very proud of you
Or very angry at you
For all the sins you are committing
In the name of poetry.
Your mother might say
You are a unique lottery ticket,
One she bought long ago.
The other kids may tease you.
They may be horribly cruel and stupid.
You are allowed to hate them
For misreading your poetry, for hating it,
Or for failing to read it at all.
But you are also required to love them
For reading it, if they do.
And if they like it, be careful: they want something,
And they may not settle for poetry.
So go ahead and stay up late, way past your bedtime.
Watch TV. Listen to music. Go to the movies.
Do your chores if you must.
And even though you have to grow up too fast,
Realize you were born in the hangman's noose.
Let your pretty lovers and all the pretty children
Call your art selfishness.
Go ahead and eat the worms. They'll get their turn.
4 Play Your Part

I am going to write a poem with you.

I am going to write a poem myself, as an exercise.
Along the way, I will ask you questions.
Your answers will make certain decisions,
So you will have a part to play in writing this poem.
In the end, it will be a poem I have written,
That you might have written.
I want you to imagine yourself writing
The way I write. I'm letting you in the back door.
You get to see how the machinery operates,
Maybe even stick your fingers in between the gears,
And watch the bloody gobbets mashed off their stumps
By the unforgiving steel of the poetry machine.
This minor tragedy will help you design and build
Your own machine for mashing off fingers,
So you can go off and do it on your own.
Those bloody finger bits are your poems.
5 Start Writing Poetry

I'm offering you only one way to start,

Though there are many.
Have any of you ever written poetry?
Every thought about how to do it, how to go about it, how to start?
Sure, you just put pen to paper
And see where the words take you.
But I think you have worked out a lot
In the back of your mind before that point.
And this is an exercise to duplicate that process.
If you can master the art of what comes before you start,
You should have no trouble getting started.
So the first question I will ask you
Is not the one you might expect,
Ragged rebel that you are.
Here it is: “What rules shall I follow in this poem?”
I know you want to say I should break all the rules,
You would break all the rules, if you were a real poet.
And I would tell you that's just another rule to follow,
Fine in its way, as long as you remain dependent
On everyone else to supply the rules.
You don't get out of the assignment so easily
When you are the one making the rules.
So I ask you again, “What rules shall I follow in this poem?”
You mumble something about writing from the heart.
I think there is something to this:
You want sincerity.
But what about irony? What about lies, necessary lies?
What about discretion? Would you take no account
Of other people's feelings?
And you want now to modify your demand:
You want a kind of ultimate sincerity,
One that allows you to tell a joke, pull a leg,
Hide an embarrassment, shield a fragile ego,
Often enough your own. What's wrong with that?
And I could give you reasons why
You are half wrong. But I don't.
I simply point out that now I can't even be sure
That you really want me to consider your writing poetry,
To put it seriously in that category for judgment,
If your rule is to allow any degree of insincerity
That you happen to find convenient.
I point out that poetry is never just in what you meant to say.
It always has to be in what you did in fact say, somehow.
So you back off this whole sincerity question, yea or nay.
What you really meant was this:
“Write about something you feel strongly about.”
Or even:
“Write about your feelings.”
This strikes me as naïve instruction.
How do I even know what my feelings are?
Things are so complicated, so mixed up, love and hate,
Disgust and desire, all those things, appetites and fears.
So you ask me, “What are you feeling right now?”
I could give you a thousand different answers, and I tell you so.
But I accept that the rules we lay down for poetry
May be arbitrary constraints, within which we work,
And with which we play in writing poetry.
So I look in my heart for one feeling I'm feeling,
And I choose one at random.
“I'm full of anger,” I say. I write it on the board.
“What do I do next?” I ask.
“Express your feelings,” you say.
“Haven't I just?” I ask.
“Well, yes, but you really didn't get very deep into it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why are you full of anger?”
So I write on the board again. Now it reads:
“I'm full of anger.
I have every reason to be angry.
There has been injury, injustice and inhumanity.”
“Where?”
“Look around you. Or look at my life.”
“Whom are you angry with?”
“You, among others.”
“Why?”
“You disappoint me?”
“How?”
“You are not what I hoped for?”
“Who is?”
“Indeed. But that's another story.”
“So why am I a disappointment?”
“Because you slip through my fingers like a dream,
Like a misty nymph who has teased a mortal,
And yet you are a quotidian little bitch
Who just doesn't get poetry, or me.
Or you are my audience, that mob
Which might decide human sacrifice
Is worth at least a temporary revival,
Long enough to chain me to a rock
And let the vulture gore out my liver
Over and over a million times.
Or you are all the dirty little poets
Setting up schools where they can molest the children
With their two faced ideas and ideals.”
6 Keep Writing Poetry

Fine. How to go on from here?

Let's sum up what we've done so far:
We selected a rule, self expression,
Construed it narrowly to mean
Writing about how I feel,
Then selected a feeling at random, anger,
Gave it some initial expression
And explored some of its meaning.
Next time, choose a different feeling,
Or better yet, a different rule,
And see where it takes you.
But where do we go from here?
I have started a poem. It expresses my anger.
Any other rules I should follow?
Should I make it personal? Make it funny?
Make it political? Make it sexy?
Make it about sex? Make it political about sex?
Make it about political sex?
Make it about sexy politics?
Should it have an ars poetica subtext?
Should it secretly be about writing, about the creative process?
Should it have some other kind of rule?
Should it have a certain number of words?
Lines? Syllables? Sections?
Should it have some scheme or approach to repetition?
Should it have a danceable beat?
Don't limit yourself to rules I suggest.
Just tell me the next one, and I will write accordingly,
Or perhaps with a little discord, or a lot,
Or rampantly ignore what you say
And write whatever pleases me.
Of course, if that last is the rule,
I may already be following it.
Sometimes it's hard to tell--
One can break a rule by following it
And follow a rule by breaking it,
Depending on the rule.
Try any old rule. You may be surprised.
Whether pleasantly or not remains to be seen.
7 Stop Writing Poetry

Again, fine, but how?

A pistol is probably quickest.
Pills will do the trick.
Just be sure to study on it
Before you commit the act,
Unless your are not sure
Whether you want it to fail or succeed.
And in that case, studying
Won't hurt, though it may not help.
Consider it part of the homework for this class:
“Study various methods of self-destruction.
Be sure not to neglect the indirect,
Such as alcohol or drug abuse,
Doomed love fixations, unrealistic ambitions,
Religious beliefs, the application of science
To your own personal life, traffic accidents,
Or occasionally lacking the good sense
To come in out of the rain
When the hurricane is approaching.”
Or you might just happen to see
How the poem fits together.
Then you can edit it. Tinker with it,
Like picking at a scab
Or scratching an ancient scar
Until it bleeds,
And then picking the scab,
Year and ages after saying what it says
Has stopped mattering to you.
Then you can leave it alone,
Unless you want to publish it,
In which case you will want surgical tools,
A plastic drop cloth,
And some very loud music
To cover the screams
As you do cosmetic surgery on your heart,
And, without the aid of a mirror, or anesthesia,
Do a multiple bypass on your face.
It's a good thing modern physics
Has seven more dimensions than we can see,
So you can hide there with everybody else,
Even though things keep tumbling out of the closet.
And that does it for today.
Be sure to come prepared next time.
We will want to see what you can do on your own.
We will expect you to have been practicing
At least as often as you masturbate
And more often than you make love,
If perhaps less often than you order another round
Or look around for a lighter and a smoke
For some inspiration.
You know the ancient North Americans
Took in absurd amounts of nicotine
And practiced various sorts of human sacrifice.
(I mean the Cahokians. No time travel involved.
But thanks for asking.)
So, not that much has changed in a thousand years.
Keep that in mind while you are planning your revolution.
Next time well talk about evolution,
And you'll be a monkey's uncle and a new fish on the cell block,
Just learning to walk the walk and talk the talk,
Just soaking up knowledge from people around you,
The way people do and no other animal does,
And you will become an anthropologist,
As well as the high priest and the sacrificial victim,
And you will begin to smell and feel the heat
Of the volcano god Poetry that wants to eat you,
Or hear the sweet warble of the Poetry Canary,
Which requires freedom as much as oxygen to breathe,
As you explore the darkness, digging up the blackest
To burn for warmth and to earn a pittance,
Though the lesson will mostly be something you teach yourself
And then try to explain to the rest of us,
While also teaching us a whole new language
Which you yourself invented,
Just because it seemed like a fun way
To get your point across.
That is, if you have done your homework,
Which in all honesty I must admit, no one expects,
At least not from poets. Bunch of wise ass Average Joe slackers.
Class dismissed.
The Wise Ass

The Wise Ass is an old expression,

Meaning not just a stinky mouth
But a stubborn fool made a bad impression
For not deciding between North and South.

And though it fits the Civil War

Where all Wise Asses were neutral
About the slavery we abhor,
The tale is older and more dull.

Spinoza, the philosopher

Most set on seeing God through reason
Of any to whom we defer
And who is an atheist by treason,

Grown strange with mystic theorem.

And yet far from religious awe,
He told the tale of Buridan,
Whose Ass was wise but had a flaw.

He always argued to the contrary.

Whatever idea set his brain spinning,
He'd bring the opposite to marry
And mean the opposite of meaning.

He starved to death between two piles

Of fodder, equal ways away.
So call a Wise Ass out with smiles
And let him choose to die—“Which way?”
Fancy Cooking, RSVP

Some foods are like love.

They are best enjoyed at the right temperature.
The perfect cool of the salad, the fruit, the juice,
The sweet essence you suck down
Like your life depended on it,
Drinking it so fast, it's almost possible to miss it,
To miss out on part of it, part of its sweetness,
Part of its delicious moisture,
Which will have perhaps a tear's worth of salt
Along with the intoxicating liquors of life?
Along with the rum distilled from the slave's blood,
The magical blood of the cactus, the worm,
The fat bursting nectar of citrus and mango,
Payaya and pineapple, and a dash of cold northern bitters,
The salt of the sea, of the distant deep oceans
Where whales sing their sorrows and the cycle of life
Across infinite canyons where strange creatures
Thrive on the excess heat of the earth's demon core,
Where monsters eat monsters, and strange apparitions
Deceive, conceal with their delicate veils of transparent light
The burning, the poison, their deadly adjustments
To life in the darkness beyond human seeing.
Doolee ack a sacky want some sea food, Mama?
No, better, or at least to complete the conceit,
Love is stale bread to a starving wretch,
And you thaw it or cool it with your own breath,
Digesting, warming it, cooling it with your mouth
For the sake of your crying, knotted belly,
Saying “That's the right temperature, there,
The one in my blood while I'm still alive.”
But how about some comfort food?
Some pasta with some kind of sauce,
And the sauce is so delicious, so bloody delicious,
Full of the vigorous, muscular juices
Of squeezable tomatoes and mysterious, fragrant onions,
A hint of strong and wise ancient cheese,
And a pungent garlic bundle for your sizzling sausage
Just to round out the flavor with some sweet pink red
And some hot black black pepper, one chopped one ground,
Hanging around with some fresh, green oregano
And some easily available sweet basilisk basil,
All just drowning the noodle,
Which is tough on the outside, al dente perfecto,
Just firm enough to burst pleasantly
Into fluid, almost not noticeable in the climaxing flood
Of hugely flavored, naturally sugary music, Italian Gypsy jazz,
Which is hot, hot, hot, which is to say,
As hot as you can take it, like shots of grappa,
Like stolen kisses returned in the moonlight,
Just baby sucking it down, pigging it, gulp after gulp,
Almost more than you can take, but no less,
Exactly. No more. No less. Like the Gypsy woman said
When she laid out the cards and said it was destiny
That whatever we face, this is most important,
And we face this together now, tonight,
With all these stars tarantelling around us,
As we feel we are dancing while just standing together,
That the banquet will go on until morning
And possibly off into the changing seasons,
Into the leaves of the calendar
And the unknown mists of time where the world ends
And we are still in each other's arms,
Still raptly pursuing the nuance of a kiss.
And some of my poems are like invitations.
They are asking you out to lunch.
Interested? Your place? I'll cook. You can help.
Ever worked under a master chef before?
Don't worry. It's just like playing the piano:
You never forget. And it's just like playing the guitar:
You never had to learn. You just wailed.
And it's like singing the blues or dancing boogie woogie,
Anybody can do it with a little practice and and advice.
And it's like being born. You just can't help it.
And it's like coming home, when home is where you want to be.
And it's like an adventure you want never to end,
Like the timeless interval of the perfect vacation,
Cast away on a tropical island with a perfect stranger
Who is beautiful and finds the key to your average locked heart,
And you learn to smile all over again.
Sorry. Just burning air time. Did you say that's a date?
The Way to San Jose

Growing up with that song, it always meant

Knowing how to get home, get to a better place,
A more realistic place, a nicer place,
A cooler place, a place a little more out of the way,
Not near the center of where it is,
A center which is not everywhere--
There were advantages philosophical and sentimental.
But it also meant you were hip to the dope scene.
So nowadays, everybody's been to San Jose,
And San Jose has certainly changed,
Between the Silicon Boom Bust,
The continuing pressure all California cities feel
Toward Los Angelization
And the strange circuses of the Bay Area.
And the equivalent nowadays in the way of drug culture,
The thing with equivalent early adopter coolness
At least flickering on the horizon of the American Imaginary,
Is the way to Salvation City wherever you are,
The Most Immediately Available Approximation Of Utopia,
Or “MIAAOU!” as your favorite pussy is likely insist,
In an onomatopoeia of the purest demand for justice
And maybe a little extra bowl of cream
(Especially if she's in heat!)
The newest, latest, indie-est, baby sister of Mary Jane Coolest,
Seeking out the sustainable visions with lighter footprints,
Smaller dreams as brief distractions.
You don't want rainbow trails and new religions.
You want uncontrollable laughter,
Past memories, such as revisiting places from childhood memory,
Sensations of motion, or being pulled or twisted by forces,
Visions of membranes, films and various two-dimensional surfaces,
Merging with or becoming objects,
Overlapping realities, such as the perception of being in several locations at once--
You want the people around you, briefly,
To become cartoons, surreal marvels.
You want to feel disconnected from yourself,
Just to unplug for a moment from everything you are.
And let your mouth be clumsy
When you try to describe what happened.
You will fall down for no reason, lose your balance.
You will sense the floor of the elevator shaft
Toward which you are hurtling.
But then you will awaken, bathed in the darkness
And totally alert, as if the predator had passed you by.
And the clock will say it's been five minutes.
What I Have

What I have is something in common

That American Grey Fairy of Egotistical Sublimity,
Walt Whitman, and that rampant English dark sporting spirit
Of animalistic Yorkshire, Ted Hughes, and that timeless
And classic blend of Portuguese Jewish sensibility
With English Renaissance pride and virtue
(And a mixed attitude toward the Catholic Church),
The elusive and ever lusty Will Shakespeare,
And perhaps with a few cloudy eyed Romantics,
Lost in their dreams of superior beings,
And some soberer Victorian bards,
Pensively poring over the canvas of history and myth,
And possibly some odd birds like Spenser,
Laying down allegory like commedia del arte,
And a welcome old teller of tales or two from the Middle Ages,
And a stern old blind man dictating to his daughter
The magnificent language of Satan and the simple words of Jesus
(For Satan and Jesus are both average Joes, of a sort),
And maybe Plato and Jesus and Buddha
And Joni Mitchell and the entire history of jazz music,
The blues, and a certain version of the American story,
(Let the soundtrack music swell here:
A collage of stunning variety of distinctly identifiable styles)
With all of these, I have in common,
What I have in common with your Average Joe.
And actually, lots of other people have it, too.
It's surprising who picks up the phone on your birthday.
So, if you don't know about this,
Maybe you're not my friend.
Maybe you're no friend of the Average Joe either.
Put that in your self esteem meter and smoke it.
Now think about who's better off, you or me.
And all I've got is a fair sense of who I am.
What are you bringing to the table?
What I Have

What I have is the thing you want.

The thing you want is the thing I've got.
How could we ever find
A better way to keep in mind
The promises we made
That night of the moon, in its shade?

So all I really want to know

Is where you're going to sleep tonight,
Or so the story goes,
But not for Average Joes.
They usually get stuck,
Like me, without a happy hippo mama girl.
True Love's Betrayal

I study my tears, your tears,

To see if they betray true love,
To see if, in your arms, I'm missing what I'm missing
Amid the gentle art of kissing.

I study your face for hours

To see if it betrays true love.
To see if, in your eyes, I'm seeing what I'm seeing
And not just some politician agreeing.

I study your words for truth,

To see if they betray true love,
To see if, in my ears, I'm hearing what I'm hearing--
Is this the message I've been fearing?

I study your broken heart

To see if it betrays true love,
To see if, like my heart, it always keeps on aching
As if it never did stop breaking.

I study true love for betrayal,

To see if love betrays true love,
To see if love itself is nothing but a traitor,
Betrayed in truth sooner or later.

I steady myself with a thought,

To see if it betrays true love,
To see if, like all thoughts, it multiplies my tears,
Which I have studied all these years.
Your Average Joe Tries to Think Outside the Box

Your average Joe was inside a black box

Before he was born, or so it seemed
Until they noticed that his neck
Already stretched the hangman's noose
And that he'd turned his back on heaven
Before he'd ever had to face the world.
So he grew up inside the box they put him in,
Which was a box that mainly kept him out,
Outside the box they punished him for leaving.
And so he worked in both directions,
Opening boxes he was stuck inside
And opening boxes he had been left out of.
His knuckles got sore from punching cardboard.
He wore his edge nearly out cutting through stiff paperwork.
He tried making a box for himself,
But it fell apart in the hurricane's tears.
So he checked the box that said he could do the job
And agreed to climb into another box they made.
He packed up what he could in boxes
And put some in a box to store
And took some with him to furnish
The interior of his new box.
He went from one box to another,
Where the homeless live in boxes
And the wealthy live in boxes
And there is no box
For those outside the box.
And he moved into the only box available,
But most of what he had stayed in boxes.
And once again they boxed him in
By leaving him out and boxed him up
With boxes and boxes of lies,
Lies that were empty as boxes,
Lies that folded up like cardboard
Once he found his way outside them,
If he did, before they put him in a box
And buried him. They're still afraid the box won't hold him.
Sweet Land of Liberty

The strangers come at the point of a gun,

Saying it's all behind them.
They've lost control. They need out help.
Please don't let heaven find them.
And it won't be a war in heaven
That sends us all to hell.
Right here on earth is where mistakes
Are made and lies are told so well,
And it's just as well.
We tell them all the time
That we won't drop a dime.
In this sweet land of liberty,
Just living here can set you free.

And so we donate our canned food.

We offer them our tents.
They join the homeless on our streets
Since they can't pay our rents.
And it won't be a war in heaven
That sends us all to hell.
Right here on earth is where mistakes
Are made and lies are told so well,
And it's just as well.
We tell them all the time
That we won't drop a dime.
In this sweet land of liberty,
Just living here can set you free.

But every one's a fallen angel,

A rebel and a slave,
And someday we will have to pay
For those we did not save.
And it won't be a war in heaven
That sends us all to hell.
Right here on earth is where mistakes
Are made and lies are told so well,
And it's just as well.
We tell them all the time
That we won't drop a dime.
In this sweet land of liberty,
Just living here can set you free.
Chivalry

My road won't let me rest.

I want to call it a quest
And follow my code.
I want to prove
To my lady love
That I am the best.

Not the best of lovers

Down under the covers,
Nor the best of men
But that the light
Of love's delight
Around me hovers.

At the chapel parlous

I'll show I'm fearless
Because of love
Which stole my reason
Out of season
And leaves me peerless.

And, as a token,
My heart stays broken
And in her keeping,
So she might know
How my thoughts go
With words unspoken.
Chant: “You Will Hear It” (My Inner Lesbian of Color, Who Is a Santeria Socialist Priest/Activist
With Dual PhDs in Evolutionary Anthropology and the History of Literature and Philosophy and Who
Learned How to Scat from Betty Carter)

The word will speak.

You will hear it.
The word will say.
You will hear it.
The word will be heard.
You will hear it.

The time has come.

You will hear it.
The time has arrived.
You will hear it.
The time is here.
You will here it.

The world is turning.

You will hear it.
The world is whirling about.
You will hear it.
The world is spinning six ways we know about and maybe more.
You will hear it.

Things are happening.

You will hear it.
Things are occurring.
You will hear it.
Things are going on.
You will hear it.

The champions are coming.

You will hear it.
The champions are on their way.
You will hear it.
The champions will be here.
You will hear it. (You will be one of them.)

It's already started.

You will hear it.
It's begun.
You will hear it.
It's on.
You will hear it.

The birds will sing.

You will hear it.
The birds will be like flutes.
You will hear it.
Wailing in the wind.
You will hear it.

And the words of a prophet.

You will hear it.
The words of only one prophet, perhaps.
You will hear it.
It will be as if he or she were speaking for God, if there were a God.
You will hear it.

But it is but the message of freedom.

You will hear it.
But it is but the beginning of the future.
You will hear it.
But it is but the fuller understanding of the past.
You will hear it.

It cannot be misunderstood.
You will hear it.
It is something everyone can grasp.
You will hear it.
It is something anyone can explain.
You will hear it.

It is like the end of every song.

You will hear it.
It is like the beginning of every song.
You will hear it.
It is like the climax of every song.
You will hear it.

It is as basic as sex.
You will hear it.
It is as basic as food and water.
You will hear it.
It is as basic as a place in the landscape.
You will hear it.

And you will be changed, forever.

You will hear it.
At that moment, you will be midway through eternity.
You will hear it.
And you will be at the beginning and at the end of time.
You will hear it.

You may break down in tears.

You will hear it.
You may be overwhelmed with feeling.
You will hear it.
You may experience orgasm, maybe as if for the first, or the second or the first really memorable, heart
breaking, earthshaking, no possible faking, screaming through the walls, pounding through the walls
and maybe knocking the walls right down time.
You will hear it.

And everyone may hear that you hear it.

You will hear it.
Everybody may be sure you hear it.
You will hear it.
You may make sure everyone hears you hear it.
You will hear it.

It will become your mission in life.

You will hear it.
It will be the essence of what you do.
You will hear it.
You will work out the details sensibly.
You will hear it.

And you will get on with things.

You will hear it.
You will get things done.
You will hear it.
And you will know what you are doing.
You will hear it.

And you will be one of the champions arriving just in time.

You will hear it.
And, with any luck, you might be of some help.
You will hear it.
You might not be a total waste.
You will hear it.

And you might thank me.

You will hear it.
You might want to let me know how grateful you are.
You will hear it.
But you didn't need to hear that from me to know it's true.
You will hear it.

And I'll be pleading with you with my voice, my own voice.

You will hear it.
And I'll be begging you just to be the good person you could be, even though I'm not entirely homeless.
You will hear it.
And I'll be waiting on your kind acts in the silence after I'm done speaking.
You will hear it.

And if you don't applaud, sisters and brothers, you can buy me a drink to make up for it, in the name of
art or freedom or simple random generosity toward deserving strangers. And ladies, I need name,
number, a good time to call and say something sexy so I will remember exactly who you are later. I
will call you up and say it back to you.
You will hear it.
And I will ask you what you are wearing.
You will hear it.
And I will shortly come in your ear.
You will hear it.

And then we can talk about your day and mine.

You will hear it.
And I will listen to your problems and sound sympathetic.
You will hear it.
And I will sound like I love you, like I do, like I very, very much indeed do.
You will hear it.

And you may like what you hear.

You will hear it.
And you may not.
You will hear it.
And I assume you will do whatever you please about it, whatever pleases you, yourself, your sweet
little ass itself, that sweet little secret thing only you and I know about, and whatever you do, whether it
pleases me or not, or does something I'm not even sure I can describe properly, as it so often does, so
frequently, with such intensity, I will tell you.
You will hear it.

And you can say you heard it from me.

You will hear it.
And you can blame me if you like.
You will hear it.
And I won't mind a bit.
You will hear it.
Your Average Joe Looks at the Night Sky

Your average Joe wants inspiration everywhere.

He wants to look at the stars and read his fate,
Find a unique personal message there,
Inscribed in the physical history of giant gas balls,
Some thousands of light years away,
And in the peculiar positioning of clock machinery
Of planetary bodies millions of years old,
To comment on how his love life is going, this month,
How his struggles at work are getting on, this week,
The likelihood his car will be towed, today.
He wants the Goddess Fortune to smile
On his roll of the dice, specially, just for him.
He wants a blessing, a recognition, a sign,
A clear indication that what happens to him matters,
That what he does not only counts
But has a larger significance, that he is important
To the grand design of the cosmos,
Or at least that he gets to play a satisfying role
In the unrelenting drama of his life,
One that casts a shadow on eternity,
Ensuring his personal immortality
Above and beyond the survival of his soul,
Which he is also kind of hoping for,
Though he is not exactly sure what that might mean.
He hasn't realized that immortality, of that sort,
Requires only one thing: inimitability.
And he has not realized that inimitability
Consists not of being unable to be imitated,
Nor of being unable to emulated--
Much to the contrary, inimitability is emulable,
And highly desireable to emulate.
To emulate the inimitable, one must be inimitable.
To imitate the inimitable is simply a waste,
One the inimitable would never bother with,
Unless as part of something larger, something itself inimitable.
Prometheus brings humanity fire. How do you follow that act?
It won't do just to be his brother, to look the other way,
Or to be some Janus faced cousin,
Or to be some ecstatic saint of the present moment,
Or to be the bird with its beak in his liver,
Whether that bird is a crow from outside time and before creation or not.
You have to bring something that sets fire itself on fire.
And your average Joe is pretty sure he can do that,
Just like you and me. Humility is not his strong point.
Me, I carry a cigarette lighter in my pocket.
And like your Average Joe, I use it to burn my horoscopes.
I roll up my salvation in them and smoke it.
Why It Is Better to Be French

For Chaz

If my voice trembles, if I shake

When I read you my poetry,
It's not stage fright that frightens me--
It's the emotion my words make.

I do not give one little shit

What you think of my words. I care
Only to meet Medusa's stare
And guillotine the crazy bitch.

We helped you with your Revolution,

And shed the hired blood of Hess,
But our own was a bloody mess
And we ripped up our Constitution.

You had your Aaron Burr who shot

A banker and had mistresses,
We had de Sade's apprentices
And the Marquis, did we not?

Like you, we had one head of state

Whom everybody seemed to love,
But who with decadent kid glove
Could not avoid the mob and fate.

But Louis the Fourteenth wins set

And match for queen and cake, n'est pas?
While your Bill Clinton quibbled qua
Blow jobs not being sex, my pet.

Like us, you had a petty fool

Send soldiers conquering the globe
While he put on the purple robe
Of Empire when he could not rule.

But Bush, George W. seems small

Compared to our terrible enfant--
Napoleon's ghost will long outhaunt
Even that worst POTUS of all.

The Romans had their empire fall,

While Britain's simply petered out,
And you Americans, no doubt,
Briefly on top, must surely fall.
But our empire is of taste,
Of food and art and clothing styles,
Three centuries of Francophiles
Have still and all called us greatest.

Because you listened to Britpop rumor,

The bands that stole the blues you gave them,
The Stones, the Beatles, you did save them,
But we saved jazz, film noir, black humor.

You let the Russians march all over

Before you let the Cold War freeze,
But we brought Russia to its knees
Before retreating, cold and sober.

You gave us realism and Fitzgerald

And Hemingway and Faulkner's fiction,
And Jerry Lewis, and Poe's sweet diction
Which Baudelaire saw was Breton's herald.

We gave the world the novel first,

Before “The Great American”
Became the cliché, which like the pen
We plucked, is our expression, and raw or cooked, drank French wine last and first.

And we gave you your precious essay,

And villanelles and pantomime,
And gave you existential time
And some great Irish writers, eh?

If you're not French, you are not French.

Do not complain. You are inferior,
We know. Being French is just superior,
Because, being French, well, you are French.

We French invented the romance,

And love itself is French at heart.
French is the cheese. Love is the fart.
French women are not born with pants.

Italians may make love as often,

But not as well, be sure. French kissing
Is only part of what they are missing,
And they like babies. We prefer abortions.

Every abortion is really French,

And French abortions are all poets,
Philosophers and artists, all you-know-its.
(Being dead doesn't hurt them.)
And Death is French. We love its stench.

Where you give babies pacifiers,

We give them cigarettes, to learn
That life is shit. Time is to burn.
And all great truths are told by liars.

So if I seem withdrawn and shy,

It is illusion. Arrogance,
Low key and cool, says I'm from France--
That's what's before your stupid American eye.
Zen Writing Dojo: a Martial Arts Approach to Writing

When you start to write, the page is blank.

Unless you have already started!

If you have already started,
Write down what you have so far.
Then continue writing.

If you have not already started,

When you start to write, the page is blank.
You may wish to fill it with something from the past,
Something you have already written
And put away as finished or not.
Do so if you wish.
If you wish to change anything, do so.
The page is blank.
This is called revision.
Then continue writing.

If you have not already started,

And if you do not wish to fill the page with something from the past,
You are ready to begin: the page is blank.
Think of a problem you might solve by writing.
Think of whether you know
That this is the problem you want to solve first.
If not, put it aside.
The page is still blank.
Think of another problem you might solve by writing.
Again, think of whether you know
That this is the problem you want to solve first.
If not, put it aside.
The page is still blank.
Continue thinking of problems you might solve by writing
And considering whether each is the first you want to solve,
Until you find the problem you want to solve,
Or somehow it emerges
That one or some combination of the problems
You have already considered,
Possibly along with some other problem or problems
That had not yet crossed your mind,
Is the first problem or set of problems
You want to solve by writing.
This is called starting to think about writing.
The page is still blank.

State the solution to the problem (or problems)

You have chosen
As a rule or procedure to follow in the writing you will do.
It may be as simple as identifying what you want to write about.
The page is still blank.
Or it could be as complex
As a specific problem in dramatic irony in dialogue
Or a particular rhyme scheme,
Or as uncomplicated and ambiguous
As having a word or phrase pop into your head
As a place to start.
It could be more of a tune you fit the words to.
It could be an image, something you imagine,
The way something strikes your senses,
The way something appears.
It could be a feeling you somehow must express.
It could just be the feeling that the words are on their way.
You may have written this way before many times, whichever way it happens,
Or you may never have written this way ever.
Every rule deserves infinite practice.
The page is blank.
It is your choice.
It is your own fault if you grow bored as a result.
Try formulating your rule more carefully,
Or try to find more interesting problems
You might want to solve by writing.
The page is still blank.
This part of the writing process is called thinking about what to write.
The page is blank, still blank.

Once you have formulated your rule,

Write something.
The page is no longer blank.
There is writing.
Consider whether it follows your rule.
If not, consider changing the rule.
If you change the rule, write something more
Consider whether it conforms with the new rule.
If not, consider changing the rule again.
If so, proceed as before: write something, etc.
If not, consider changing what you have written.
You may change anything.
The page is blank, so to speak.
If you do not wish to change anything,
Consider changing the rules.
Change them if you wish.
The page is blank.
If you do not wish to change
Anything you have written
Or any of the rules,
Proceed as before: write something more, etc.
The page is blank, in a manner of speaking,
But less and less so.
This is called writing.

As you write, you may begin to feel

How it all fits together, or where it is going.
You may sense the end coming.
You may find that it has arrived.
The page is no longer blank at all,
But more or less full.
That is, you have reached the end of writing.
Now consider whether you wish to change anything.
Change whatever you like.
Write some more, if you wish.
Make more changes after that, and so on.
This is called finishing writing.
When you no longer wish to write
Or to change anything you have written,
Put away what you have written.
The page is again blank.
Your Average Joe Expresses His True Feelings with Difficulty

Hey, just want to let you know--

(Yes, I mean you. You're the one.
You know who I mean. You.
Even though it doesn't count
Because it's only poetry,
And that's if I'm lucky
And it's not just dreck,
Just two or three kinds of lawn cuttings
Up in smoke after a wasted morning
Being the conventional sort of whore
Who tries to do the work that pays honestly.
If it is poetry, and not just me blowing smoke,
Then that means it doesn't count.
You know this. You know me.
I could have a thousand reasons
To do what I am doing,
None of them to do, necessarily, with you.
I could have purposes and schemes,
Axes to grind, cages to rattle,
Wounds to throw salt in, fuel for a fire or two,
Maybe some switches to throw,
Maybe some doors to unlock,
Some walls to tear down,
Maybe someone else entirely
To receive this message,
For whom you are merely a stand in within the poem,
An avatar, a symbol, an allegory,
A distant hint, a foreshadowing,
An afterimage, a pale shadow moving toward the light.
I could be making love to her
With every word I say, as she reads this,
Knowing I wrote it as if to you.
It's possible you may have to discover
That you are not the one, or not the only one,
Or not the only one for me,
In order to make sense of what I'm saying,
And I'm not encouraging you to do that.
So just take it straight from me, if you wish,
For what it's worth, with all your doubts,
And all my equivocations and evasions,
Undertaken, apparently, solely for the sake of wit,
Without regard to whose feelings get hurt in the process.
Even then, I have to say,
No matter how difficult it is to say,
No matter how difficult it is to understand,
No matter how difficult it is,
Overcoming any possible obstacle
Or determined to die trying--
Even though I might have been saying something quite different,
On another subject entirely,
With you as a pretext,
Or possibly without even mentioning you,
Without pointing to you, without pointing you out,
Perhaps without even noticing you there
With the sharkish gleam in your eye
And the fierce determination
To get exactly what you deserve
Out of everything, every situation,
And particularly, perhaps, out of me.
How can I not say it?) I love you.
Subtext: English Love Poem

I'm wondering how this comes across

With all the thoughtful arrangements
I couldn't avoid making, for you or me,
And now there's nothing else to see.
There's nothing more, no chance that you will come around,
No chance that anything is found
That might give me a reason not to cry.

It's not that it's unpleasant, no,

I don't mind hearing myself say,
It's not that I object to singing
Or listening to the church bells ringing--
It's just I wish they didn't make me remember
How love is just a dying ember
And life is just a lump of coal.

But you know that already, don't you?

You have a nearly perfect grasp.
You understand precociously
The tide and turning back the sea.
But how does understanding that
Let you treat me this way, you twat!
You know how much I love you, babe.

So let's get on with things again.

Let's share the driving and the costs
And take a trip out to the countryside
Where everything's not green but open wide,
And that will be the background situation
To our continuing infatuation,
Just two stupid cunts out on the road.
Gloss: Subtext

The subtext of a love poem,

At least as that genre has been practiced
In English, is often quite different
In tone, manner, attitude, range of ideas,
And so on, than the text itself.
The text itself is often quite deceptively friendly,
Quite smooth and appealing, decked out
In the finery of the art with appealing style,
As a gentleman might appear, were he to appear
At court, where power is real
And tongues are cut out as well as praised.
The subtext can be pretty sneaky,
And pretty unsavory, full of manipulation,
Unfair use of argument and logic,
And a constant resort to the baser energies
Of a lady's character, which she may guard herself
Not to use casually with any stranger.
There is a presumption, and an intimacy
In the subtext, one that hits like the explosion
Of incomprehensible emotion that overwhelms you
When a kiss is stolen from you, which you would have given
Without any reservation, had it been asked for.
This is so, even though it seems juvenile,
Even though it is casually irresponsible
And as hard to misinterpret as a lewd proposition.
There is no doubt that sex, carnal, fleshly,
Endlessly indulgent and infinitely comforting is involved.
If a love poem does not do that,
It is not really a love poem,
Not one that might actually win a lady's heart.
It's just some other kind of time wasting bull
That some idiot thinks is his self expression
At a high level of aesthetic sophistication,
And happening to take the form of a love poem.
But it's not really a love poem. Like so many things, they're hard to find.
Sometimes I Feel Welcome

Sometimes I feel like I'm in my father's house,

And one thing that's real in my father's house
Is everybody gets taken care of,
We do not starve you, kick you out
Or kill you that we're aware of
Although you may hear us shout
Whenever the spirit should move us,
And we hope it will improve us.

Sometimes I feel like I'm in my mama's kitchen,

And one thing's always true in my mama's kitchen
Is everybody eats their fill,
Though sometimes she may have to scold you
And tell you what you ought to will,
What kind of arms you should let hold you.
But that's a mother's privilege,
To hold you back from the river's edge.

Sometimes I feel like I'm back in your sweet bed,

And one thing that certain in that sweet bed of yours,
Is that it smells like heaven's love,
And that it's warm enough for two
And that we fit like hand and glove,
Like spoon and spoon, like me fork, fork you.
And for a little midnight snack
Each knows the other may attack.
Sap of the Psapp Apple

Stone cold sober

On broke our figgy flesh,
Our public school brains.
Squeak by,
Free my what
In a burst of your fingers
Where you put
What you put where you put it.

Open up, open wide.

Worms are singing
Their first songs
Never out,
Never out,
Never out,
Solid as we'll eat you.
We'll eat you.
We'll eat you.
1
2
2
2A
1
2
2
2A
1
2
2
2B
1
2
4B

1
2
2
2B
1
2
2
2B
1
2
2
2B
1
2
4B

2
2C
2
2C

2
2D
2
2D
4E
4E

2
2C
2
2C
1
2a
2a
2A
1
2b
2b
2B

1
2c
2c
2D
1
2
4D

2
2C
2
2C
Your Average Joe Tries to Talk Like Frank Sinatra

My bag is barn burners. Got a bird for every beetle.

When it comes to the bird, I'm a big leaguer,
Never bombsville with a broad, no matter
What the bums and the bunters say.
Don't listen to Charlie. But those Charlies of yours, I like.
Still, every chick's got some Clyde I don't like,
Some creep who's not cool or crazy for the dame, the dog.
You dig? I'm dying here. This is not the end, but I'm looking for Endsville.
You let that fink get to first base, and it fractures me.
It's a gas, so pour some gasoline for this gasser, gofer.
Good night all, can we get in the groove?
Who cares if some Harvey's hacked off?
I say hello when I see you. I'm your hunker,
And I can't remember my jokes.
Let's lose Charlie. Let's lock it up.
He's a loser, and you're no mish mash.
You may be a mouse, but he's nowhere.
You've got no odds with him: he's the original loser,
No matter what kind of player he is.
Don't be a quin for that punk.
Looks like rain, and you're ring a ding ding.
Don't be a Sam for his scam. Let's for Scramsville.
I may be smashed, but I'm sharp,
And you're five inch stillettos.
Or are you just some square's tomato,
Just a twirl looking for twistville?
This clam bake is over. Let's get lost.
You'll find I'm platinum, I'm solid,
And I know how to swing.
Professor Sex Lectures the Freshman Class

Well, I've redesigned everything again,

Following suggestions from my students
And pursuing the obvious goals I share
With my esteemed professional colleagues,
And I'm giving it one more try this semester.
I mean, I have great pass ratios. Better than most.
And I will stack my students' work against anyone's
Here at DUH. Where I teach. Not that that absent center
That is the creative writing program at our senior campus
Is my target, by any means. I don't attack
Anyone who can get paid to teach creative writing.
It's a beautiful thing, I know. No, I'm speaking
Of my freshman level students in writing
Which they seem to think ain't all that creative,
And they produce correspondingly dull results,
As all the people who told them that
Should have known better it would.
What I'm saying is that this time around,
I am at my last resort. This is the last straw,
My final hope for a cure, a gimmick, a method, a philosophy,
A stance, an attitude, a way forward
That will salve my conscience, get my job done
And get me paid for my trouble,
If not ly me with a suicide bomber's idea of paradise,
The way it's supposed to be even on my day job.
My pass ratios are high now, but they were much higher
When I taught at other schools.
There was this big university, and this community college,
And this small liberal arts college, and this other community college,
And this medium sized residential Jesuit university,
And I have to say, the ratios were higher,
The rate of high grades was higher,
The approximation of sanity I had was higher.
Could it be that here at Duh we have a certain number of students
Who really would be happier
In some kind of vocational program,
Not at a four year institution with graduate programs?
I know that's what the Republicans all have been saying,
And I know that they just want to cut higher education,
Eliminate it if possible, or make it a pastime of the rich,
Because they think that's the way things ought to be,
With the poor getting poorer all the time,
So the wage rate for the middle class is dragged down
By highly competitive, low paid labor,
Doing without the finer things in life in order to prosper
The offspring of their highly prolific loins.
It's a cynical attitude, and I don't like it.
I don't share their assumptions,
And I find their hopes and conclusions revolting.
I hope I have made my political bias quite clear.
Because I am just beginning to wonder
If there is not a grain of truth in the possible idea
That perhaps maybe, you just are not cut out to go to school.
And by you I mean, of course, not just my freshman writing students
In the literal sense, but also my creative writing students,
Both those who actually sign up for the class
And those who do not seal their ears with wax
While I read my poetry and talk about it at Notsuoh.
I mean, it's not a condemnation of your DNA
Or your identity politics, or your cultural sophistication,
Or your street cred, or any of that shit,
Just because I have been teaching you all this time,
And you have not learned a damned thing that matters,
At least to judge by the results.
And that's mostly that you drop out, disappear,
Stop coming to class, so to speak,
And you stop trying to write better,
Whether you stay visible or not.
And it's not all of you. Certainly in every class,
There may be one or two, might be one or two here tonight,
Who know what it costs to go to college with me
And are willing to pay the price
The way I paid it to get here.
I think it's worthwhile. As far as I am concerned,
Everybody ought to go to college,
As long as they pay what it really costs,
Rather than sit around wasting time
And the government's financial aid money,
When you could be having a lot more fun,
Maybe making a lot more money,
Being a plumber or pushing drugs on the street.
I am willing to pay a lot for a good plumber,
And I don't want to have to do his job.
Maybe you do. Pays better than poetry,
No matter how much dues you pay to get in the union.
If so, you should not be here
Unless you make a major adjustment of attitude.
Otherwise, you will fail, and so will have I.
So I leave it to you, this freshman class,
Though I know some of you are repeaters,
It's up to you. Either you all jump up
Out of the ruts you are in and write like fire,
Like carving it in giant letters in the ice with a machine gun,
Or I am the one with the attitude change.
I will lose my faith in humanity, in you, for good.
I will stop thinking I can do anything to save you,
No matter how much I love you, no matter how much I care.
Then it really will be up to you. And everybody else.
I will become cynical. I will stop trying to reach you.
And that is sadder than my death will be,
Which will be along shortly, I'm sure,
And I am counting down the number of times
I can still get laid when I am alive,
Average Joe that I am, and they are running out.
I know, one more fucking sands of time poem, right?
Yeah. But this time, it's your clock too.
You're going to miss me when I'm gone.
You can say it's emotional blackmail,
But that just means you really do love me
Or I would never have got close enough to you to get hurt myself.
Professor Sex Collects the Homework in English 101

Probably your most important assignment for today, in the three hours of homework you should have
done for this class between Tuesday and today for this class, if you want to get a C and you are an
average student, was to have five topics suitable for research papers and which you presumably might
find interesting enough to spend the time and effort it is going to take with in order to write such
research papers.

This is ironic, an ironic situation for you, or it should be. If you understand well what academic
discourse is, what research papers are like, what they do, how they function, what people who write
them are up to when they do, then you could do a passable job of this assignment in about five minutes.

First of all, only you know whether you are interested in these topics. I take your word for it. You could
be faking it for now until you find one that is really appealing. But you could come up with five that
would be suitable if only you, or someone else, were interested in them. You get automatic benefit of
the doubt for good faith on the topics being of interest to you. What we are testing for mainly is
whether you know how to tell whether a topic is suitable at all, not whether it is to your liking. The
ones you like are an included smaller group within the set of those that are suitable, necessarily.

So, what if you did not do the assignment? Possibly you were lazy and did not bother to try. Maybe a
big emergency came up and you did not get in your full three hours of homework time for this class.
You only needed about five minutes, if you know how to do the assignment, if you understand what
academic discourse it, what research papers are like, etc. No excuses work, if you understood the
assignment. It's not big enough to justify an excuse. You could do it in five minutes. Shall we take five
minutes now? Those of you who actually did the assignment can spend the time researching
information on the topics on your list. Those who failed to do the assignment through sheer laziness or
neglect can make up for their crime by doing the assignment now. If we agree, then I will allow five
minutes to work on it, in just a minute, as soon as I am done explaining my analysis of what you have
done. I am not done yet. Shall we take five minutes, in a minute, when I say?

There is one other possibility: You tried to do the assignment, but you don't understand well enough
what academic discourse is, what research papers do, etc., to tell whether the ideas you came up with
are suitable. If such is true, either you know that it's true, or you are oblivious. If you have been
oblivious, now you know: the problem is you don't understand what academic discourse is. Now you
are obligated to ask questions until you are sure you understand what academic discourse is, and what
research papers are like, etc. Did any of you fail to complete the assignment and realize that this was
the problem? The rest of you now should also understand that this was the problem. Do you? So now,
what do you do?

You are right: You should ask questions until you do understand. Any questions on that fact? Ok, then,
any questions about academic discourse and research papers?

But first, imagine the following: you are a junior member of a club that consists of experts on a certain
subject. It could be Chinese history, or political theory, or the biochemistry of coral reef ecosystems, or
almost anything at all. What are the subjects these experts might discuss among themselves? What are
the issues they might raise in trying to help the whole community of experts to a better understanding
of some aspect of the subject they are all interested in? It's not that they are not aware of the world
outside their expert discussion, far from it. Rather, they are exquisitely aware of everything outside
their disciplinary practice of constructive, reasoned argument. They even make mild jokes about how
non-experts perceive issues in their specialty among themselves, jokes any expert might appreciate.
They are not proud, but humble servants of the goddess Athena, whose province was wisdom in the
pantheon of the Ancient Greeks who created the first Academy for the study of philosophy, in which
Plato taught Aristotle how to think by telling him stories about Socrates, who stood on streetcorners
and engaged passing strangers and friends in arguments about the nature of truth, the good life, right
action, and so forth. That's why it's called academic discourse.

Academic discourse is the common currency of higher education in all subject, the master
phenomenon, which regulates all exchanges among and within all disciplines. Other kinds of discourse
can be conducted at college level: instruction manuals for computer programs, newspaper articles and
other forms of journalism, all can be held to a college level standard for writing competency. But no
other kind of writing is central, or perhaps even essential, to the practice, history and future of higher
education than academic discourse in the form of the research paper. It's identified with the mission of
higher education, in that being able to produce such discourse is the surest sign of a human being who
is not just qualified to be a citizen of a modern democracy and of the world but well prepared to
undertake duties and responsibilities, as well as to exploit the opportunities, such citizenship allows to
exist for every citizen. It's the final test of really being all grown up, which you have to pass before you
can attempt to master certain things, though not all things. It's what puts the bachelor in Bachelor or
Arts or Bachelor of Science. It means you are prepared to undertake any job that does not require a
master's degree, and mastery of a subject that would allow you to teach it. It's really a graduation
requirement, except that it's also required in order for you to get through college itself successfully.
That's why it's in the freshman curriculum as a prerequisite for so many other classes.

So now, before we take five minutes and let the slackers make up for their failure to do the assignment,
are there any questions about academic discourse, what research papers are like, etc.?
Why Your Average Joe Is So Stupid

He regards himself as an American,

And we Americans have been getting stupider
Steadily, overall, since the days of the Constitutional Convention,
And the evidence is in pop music, not just in the Bush era.
I know you have heard that before,
Every generation since the Jazz Age, and maybe before,
But it turns out to be true. Look at hip hop today,
Look at what passes for pop on the radio, let alone the internet,
No matter what niche market you are part of.
Back in the Sixties, what we all wanted,
Here in America, was good. We had that luxury.
We thought, now that we can pay, let's have it.
And the music changed the world.
And it wasn't just rock and roll. It was Motown.
It was Miles Davis being cool, and going electric,
And Dylan being cool and going electric,
Before Jimi and Janis fell like Icarus.
Even back in the Fifties, there were some tastemakers,
Some people in the know, people who were hip,
Cool, aware, tuned in if not yet dropped out.
You could never have got away with this shit.
Of course, that fell apart in the Seventies,
And it got steadily worse in the Eighties and Nineties.
And now, we assume that because we pay for it,
It must, simply, therefore, and obviously, be good.
And think of how the Fifties and Sixties were the last gasp
Of the modern and postmodern, which in turn were the exhaustion
Of Romanticism, the dark twin brothers
Of reason and enlightenment, which peaked
Just before Tom Jefferson compromised on opposing slavery
In the language of the declaration of what was self evident
For all mankind, for all time. For your Average Joe.
Your Average Joe Invites You to Sleep Over and Watch the Saturday Morning Cartoons

I want you like dog girls want Golden Retrievers,

Like cat girls want to pet every cat that comes along,
Like a boy wants a bitch who can learn some good tricks
And a redneck idiot wants a pit bull trained to fight,
Like a man wants a woman who wants a man who can cook.
I want you like all the cartoon characters want their desires,
Like Speedy Gonzalez wants to put his jalapeno in your taco,
Like Quick Draw McGraw wants to join a mariachi band,
Like Sylvester wants Tweety, wants to get his nose in that nest,
Like Elmer Fudd wants Bugs Bunny, wants fire off both barrels,
Like Yosemite Sam wants to be taller and better looking,
Like Daffy Duck wants Elmer to get Bugs instead of him,
Like Roger Rabbit wants Jessica,
Like Jessica Rabbit wants money,
Like Yogi wants a picnic basket, like Boo Boo wants Yogi's approval,
Like Tennessee Tuxedo wants his tales to end with a split,
Like Natasha wants Bullwinkle, and Boris wants Natasha,
Like nobody really likes Rocky the Flying Squirrel that much,
And like good King Leonardo wants Bongo Congo to keep on rocking,
Like Donald Duck wants Daisy Duck,
Without too many obligations,
Like Minnie Mouse wants Mickey,
With every obligation you can think of--
(We don't know what Mickey is really up to, what he wants--
Could be he's gay, or a Nazi, or into something weird,
Some kind of fetish where he can't take off the white gloves,
Even when he's playing the piano)--
Like all the Disney movie heroes want to be cool,
Like Aladdin wants to talk fast like Robin Williams,
And like that Lion King wants a top forty hit,
Like the Little Mermaid just wants to get laid,
Like everybody wants her to, by everybody who wants her to--
Like all the Cartoon Channel characters want to be all grown up,
Like Sponge Bob wants his underwear,
And Blues Clues wants whatever the fuck he's after,
Like Jimmy Neutron wants a robot slave,
And like the old cartoon characters,
Who had the great soundtrack music
From hot swing jazz from the thirties,
Like Tom wants Jerry,
And like Jerry wants to see Tom break his head again,
Like the Roadrunner wants to keep on running,
Wants it so bad he can actually do it,
And like Coyote wants the Roadrunner
So bad he always fucks it up and plummets to his doom
Or gets his ass blown sky high by his own dynamite,
Like Mighty Mouse wants to do some good,
Like Heckle and Jekyll want some sweet, sweet, sweet corn,
Like Felix the Cat wants, oh wants, finally, really, to get lucky,
Like everybody wants to have their own show
Where everything is so good, it seems like it must be just for you,
Like I hope you feel the same way,
Like you hope to find the guy about whom you do.
You and I

I am the title and the subtitle.

You are the chapter and verse.
And I'm always wondering,
“Could our love get any worse?”

I am the crick of running water.

You are the river with the rapids.
You couldn't be cooler or hotter,
And I am and am not, as it happens.

I am the ocean of motion.

You are the sea of to be.
It's a sweet smelling notion
That you have rubbed all over me.

I am the wave of the hand.

You are the butterfly's wing.
You come like a hurricane,
And it's an opera you sing.

I am just trying hit it,

One time through the zero
And I find myself trying
To be ten times a hero.

I am the pusher and shover.

You are the grab and the succour.
You make like an angel and hover,
Or I come up behind where you pucker.

You purr like a kitten

And growl like a bitch,
And I'm always getting bitten,
And you are always getting that itch.

And I am doing my best

To make time with you, lady,
In every moment of rest
Where your home lane is shady.

Or if it is bare
And exposed to the sun,
I cover you there
Till you tell me, “Have done!”

I am a gentleman clean
And well favored with wit
Though not quite as lean
As I'll be in a bit.

You got me on working it

Hard as I can,
And I will not be shirking it
Since I'm a good man.

And I love my jobs,

Both the getting and giving,
But I like your real knobs
And the part where you're living.

And I want to enfold you

In a blanket we share,
And there I warmly will hold you
With infinite care.

And while we are sleeping,

A dream may arise
Much louder than the time clock beeping
Till I'm wet from my toes to my eyes.

It will be the water we both are,

The tears and the jism and spit,
The lubricant honey filled jar,
And the blood that we join in a fit.

It will be the crick and the river,

The ocean, the sea, the air and the sky,
The blue, endless canvas that goes on forever
That some surrealist taught how to fly.
A Riddle on an Assigned Reading

The lurid excess of the image,

The painted whore of the metaphor,
The svelte dance of the conventional figure,
The overdeveloped photography of allegory,
The heavy handed intensity of the symbol,
The deceptive simplicity of the simile,
The rack and screw of the rhyme scheme,
The stress position torture of the meter,
The unconstitutional detention of the theme,
Its sugary syrupy upshot roped over everything,
Everything stained with the artificial food coloring
Of its constant expectation,
The subtle tango of its sound devices,
The acid devotion and vision of its names,
The weak congratulation of its confession
And the bleak worldliness of its penances--
Why do we listen to the siren song of its art?
It makes a journey seem to be a quest.
It turns a simple meal into communion.
It's like the vampire's bloody rage, contagion.
It's like the square of what is on the page,
The repetition of what's all been heard before,
Turning our commonplaces into Shakespeare
Or finding everything within the Bible,
Or treating everything like fairy tales,
Like something through the looking glass with Alice,
Like everything is Greek mythology.
It makes things seem to mean more than they do.
It puts a light of meaning on everything
And makes you doubt me when I tell you so.
It turns all violence back upon the self.
It lets things be both what they are and more.
It scratches things until they bleed politics.
It puts a woman up upon the cross.
It gives the mind its wings, says, “Fly or die!”
And everything comes down to sex, just sex.
But it turns sex into something else.
It watches the surface of the water for bubbles
And readies the hosannahs just in case.
It pays attention to the landscape like a painter,
And to the season's like a farmer's wife.
It picks out a hero with a blind man's words,
Diagnoses the heart, reads the invisible writing on the wall
And leaves you wondering, will this be on the final test?
And why does everything come down to death?
The Use of New Rules

The use of new rules, what good do they do?

We try one out, and we've broken two.
The first is the one that said,
“You soon are going to be dead.
Why bother with the future?
The past and present suture
Is scar enough to carry,
And it is halfway real, cherry,
And bursting with the blood
That sweetens every stud.”
The second rule we broke
Said, “Do not let us choke
On the brambles of complication
Or the sour fruit of low expectation.”
And yet we wish to try.
It's simple, by and by,
Like signing your name,
Like letting yourself be found, if not to tame,
Then at least
To feed the beast.
He loves cherry pie and vanilla ice cream
And girl scouts dreaming Samoa dreams.
New rules or old,
Some truths are still told.
Your Average Joe Volunteers for the Space Program

It's not a casual, recreational experience,

The heat, the way your skin peels off in fire.

The way you grow slick with sweat, you slip

Into the anger of the moment easily.

And yet you are cool. You are removed.

You do not feel what you feel.

The music makes perfect sense, as your bones

Consider getting up to dance.

Your spinal cord is an electric worm

Squirming at the universal signal.

Your brain is like a theater, a swimming pool

With every fish in the aquarium.

And suddenly, oh so suddenly, you understand.

It hits you like the soft splash of morning sunlight.

From now on you will have to fly through vacuum,

Watching the stars slowly revolve around you.

Someday you will discover intelligent life,

Or burn yourself away into the shifting sky.
Your Average Joe Reads the Lotus Sutra

The world is suffering. You and I are suffering.

Suffering is real. It is everywhere.
Everyone is suffering.
Desire leads to suffering, always,
One way or another, don't you know?
Desire is everything and nothing,
All failure, all frustration, all temporary success,
All brief flowers watered with blood,
All fallen fruit, half eaten, in the garden,
All heedless seed cast into the careless arms of the wind,
Nothing but suffering,
Nothing but the suffering that follows desire.
Everything is suffering.
It is in every breath. Breathe it in. Breathe it out.
Pay attention to your breath.
It is the sound of your suffering,
The sound of all suffering,
The whisper of endless repetition, of desire and suffering,
Of suffering and suffering, like the wheel turning.
Suffering will eat at you if you ignore it,
Like the water wearing away the stone,
And eventually, you will be gone, washed away.
It is your path, and it is how you lose your way.
But it is also the harmless starlight
Bouncing off the surface of cool water
Or lost in the turbulence of your mind.
If you do not accept suffering, you will still suffer.
You will be benighted by your incomplete awareness of pain.
Pain is the teacher. Pain is infinite. Pain is nothing.
You must accept suffering,
Or you will never escape it.
Suffering is a patient hunter.
It will drive you like a helpless game animal,
Its natural prey, before its fires and its terrible, swift, sharp and powerful weapons,
With their deafening roars, their perfect silences, their breathy whispers.
It will trail you relentlessly. It will trap you relentlessly.
It will carry out all the ceremonies of your sacrifice, relentlessly.
But first and last and all the time,
It will always get you
Right through the heart.
When Your Average Joe Is Feeling It

I just want to reassure you

That I am here, right in the middle
Of what I am thinking,
Of the stuff that happens in my head,
Not exactly on top of it, but struggling,
Not exactly to tame it, but to drive it faster
And push it out to its own limits and beyond,
Stretching it, changing it, molding it,
Painting the world with it,
Laughing like a devil in the flames of hell.
I'm finger painting with people's lives,
With my own, mixing the pigments with my blood.
I am where I arrive when I make love with you, where you arrive,
At that place where the pavement sands away the skin
And the motorcycle explodes in clouds of orange and black.
And this just keeps happening forever
As we sink down through rainbows to the jeweled bottom of the ocean,
Silent in the darkness and the endless cold.
Somewhere inside, I am calm in the fury,
Hearing the distant music, hearing the roar
Of the brass band pounding out the funk,
The mantra of el bicho feo, the girl's ugly bug voice
Amid the tango rhythms moving my feet.
I have always known that this is the way,
But I have only now come to know how much.
Your Average Joe Dreams of Being a Pirate One Day, if He Ever Grows Up

Trailblazing, tribalizing,
The plow moves onward, into the future.
We can neither undo the damage
Nor give back the tilth.
The world is conquered, one way or another,
And everything eventually becomes of use
And is used up by the slash and burn,
The forest fires and avalanches,
The market cycles and black swan plagues,
Or the slow, sure hand of natural selection
Or by the early adopter conquistadors
Who set the tone of our brave new world
Even more than the human sacrifices
The tobacco overdosed Americans have always demanded,
Whether in the midwest or down Mexico way.
So let's ask a question about this group
We call pirates.
I mean, you may not approve
Of certain practices,
Maybe those that link them
With the Fudge Log Cabin Republicans
Or not, still, you must admit,
They do have a certain popular appeal,
Maybe in the vicinity of major industry,
Where their swashbuckling defiance
And savoir faire carry them far,
And at least among men who remain,
Like your Average Joe, about thirteen
In basic emotional maturity,
Young enough to approve of swordfights
As a form of self expression
And to settle minor differences
With a certain frisson of finality.
You understand these boys are imitating
Reasonably sophisticated men,
Perhaps even gentlemen, who have taken up piracy
Purely out of rational self interest
And not out of any romance of some ideal
Which they aspire to but never reach.
No, they are quite certain they can be
Whatever they choose to be, and that they choose
Being their most essential quality.
And even there, we see the holes in the myth.
And yet if they show that anarchy
Can be a well organized force,
With constitutional democracy,
A sense of the old virtues of the age of reason,
The liberty, fraternity, equality branch
Of the collegial academy of De Sade
To which we all, finally, must belong.
Would we not then find that the dark revolution,
The real revolution, the one shedding light
Rather than clouds of unknowing
Might finally assume its mystic position
As the central point of reference for all humanity?
So I ask you again, about pirates,
Like I could ask you about Heracles, or Jesus or Buddha or Mohammed
Or Martin Luther or Thomas Jefferson or Harriet Tubman
Or Ghandi or Socrates or Deckard, the detective in “Blade Runner,”
Or Bogey or Marilyn or Jackie O or Bobby K
Or Dylan or the Beatles or Jimi or Janis or James Joyce or Albert Camus,
Like young lesbians might ask about “Xena, Warrior Princess” reruns,
Like every era always ends up thinking about the sixties,
Like Labor Day weekend ought to be a time of celebration,
And you know how that worked out, at least here in Houston,
Not just the economy, which is bad enough, but
Where we do have a problem, with the police,
As you probably know,
Who seem almost to consider themselves
A bunch of thieving pirates,
And the citizens of Houston,
Merely a mass of random fools
Surrounding their true prey.
I mean, are they reselling the drugs, or what?
That would explain their apparent attitude.
So I am going to ask you again about pirates,
And the possibility that gangland culture
Might really have something to teach us fools
Who grew up without the benefit
Of having organized crime in the neighborhood.
Put on hold for a minute your Texas culture,
Your TV western from a black and white era,
Where censorship was internalized
View of the world around you.
Discount that, and consider what's left.
And so I ask you about pirates, are they cool,
Are they gay soldiers of fortune,
Do they have a crooked eye,
A missing hand or foot,
Do they growl like no one else,
Are they always somewhat queer
And sensitive of heart
Though our blood is on their hands
And they're after all our treasure,
Are they cool or what?
Remember that being cool
Does not mean you are cool.
You have to earn your skull and crossbones.
That's Pirate Rule Number One.
Cool?
Zombie Love

You've got to love that zombie love--

It's cold and dark, and there's no kid glove.
It's dog eat dog, and eat and be eaten
And you keep on going like a dog that's beaten.
And when there's nothing left of your lover,
You just move on and find another.
They're all the same. Just look at their eyes.
Everything must eat, and everything dies.
Your zombie lover is objectified,
Which was all you wanted before it died,
So why not take it as it comes?
Eat the rich in their castles, the poor in their slums,
And the middle class, although they're rare,
Are just as tasty zombie fare.
So tell your zombie, “I could eat you up, I could--”
Say, “If the feeling's mutual, and you wish I would.”
Your Average Joe Free Styles Sometimes

I'm picking up the mic,

If you're just off your bike
And you just got your drink
And you haven't started yet to think.
And when I do,
It's something special for you,
Because you're average like me,
As all can plainly see,
An Average Joe,
You know?
But I'm telling you now,
Work's daily thing with the plow
Will be the new foundation
Of your aspiration,
Once you join my following
And really start bellowing.
The crowd will thicken, and the crowd will grow
With, here and there, your average Joe.
And they'll start talking union
Like it was holy communion.
They'll say to each exploited sucker,
“Step up and join, motherfucker.”
When the workers get together,
It will change the weather.
And that might start
From a word of my art,
And I'd be delighted
To have you recite it.
You won't be the first, or the last,
Though you might be the keel or the mast.
It will be the mass movement
Of the future's new groovement,
Beyond being cool,
Like a whole new school
Where everybody learns
To make fire that really burns.
It will be like democracy,
But without so much hypocrisy.
And it will be like music that moves your feet,
Where you snap, and shimmy and shake that meat.
But slow down, do it slow like the low down dirty blues,
Each step, a step you can use,
And every word
A different colored bird.
Don't stutter cliches
Like them other bluejays.
Have something to say,
And say it right away.
Don't waste your time
Thinking up some rhyme.
Just let the rhythm
Get in your jism
And think about the shit
That you take for it.
The shit you eat, and the shit you spit,
Which gets the shit you eat into it.
And you're not the best artist,
And hardly the smartest,
But you are right to feel put upon
When you're who the man puts his foot upon.
That's why you're political
From base to pinnacle.
The artist has needs
And everything feeds
The fire he's cutting wood for--
What else is it good for?
What will they say you stood for?
Will you be the clerk
For the Nazis, you jerk?
It's not about race
But the problems we face.
It works on many levels
For you causeless rebels,
And you animal lovers
There under the covers.
It's the fact that your choices
Are all imperfect voices,
That every path includes
Stones in the road and skies full of clouds.
It's all about truth,
Like the cornfield and Ruth,
And it's all about the metaphor.
What do you want to forget that for?
It teaches us how
To milk the right cow
And how to avoid
Where the shit is deployed.
That's life on the street
In the country of meat,
The golden arches
Under which everybody marches.
It's death to the future and death to the past,
And death to everything you hope will last.
It's the end of the world as you never knew it
Because you didn't get the chance, and when you didn't, you blew it.
And that's the irony
Of being Joe Aimone,
An average Joe
You may happen to know
As Professor Sex
Or Oedipus Rex,
Or of being you yourself,
Average Joe right off the shelf.
Your Average Joe Is Sorry He Fucked Your Sister

I'm sorry I fucked your sister,

But I am not wholly to blame.
She begged me, then I kissed her--
She seemed like a likeable dame.

She seemed to be thinking

That you wouldn't mind,
And both of us had been drinking
A good deal past three quarters blind.

And I thought, who knows you better?

If you can't trust your sweet sister's sister
You might as well write your last letter
And lay down like the last true resistor.

I'm not the one who shattered

Your friendship close and best
As if it never mattered
Or failed some other test.

She did that just like you,

When you, O girl so wise,
Fucked me when I fucked you--
So what's the big surprise?

And now, the truth you know:

You're just like him, you cunt.
You'll say an Average Joe
Is big when he's a runt.

But it's not him you need

To take control of, bitch.
It's you, and how you bleed
And then you get that itch.

But I'm sorry I fucked your sister,

And I'm sorry I fucked your daughter,
And your mom? I wouldn't have missed her.
They all said, “Daddy, please do it harder.”

And you know how much you're pleased

When I do what you don't expect,
And you know how I like to be squeezed,
And love's just a side effect.

So if you really want me to stay,

Don't bring up the past, or the others,
And I will not ask you to say
How you fucked my friends, my boss, my Dad, your other teachers and all of my brothers,
And some men down the block, and some halfway cross town,
And some in every burg, village, or neighborhood,
At every bus stop and train crossing,
And in every neighborhood, community or enclave,
Where you have touched your delicate ass down
In your long, and frequently horizontal, career path,
My darling. I am sorry I fucked your sister.
Don't make me even sorrier I fucked you, please.
An Critical Intervention on Genre from Professor Sex

Most of your poets nowadays,

As Leonard Cohen notes in his song, “The Future,”
Don't really want to get their hands dirty
And are willing to go to great lengths to avoid it.
This is also why they don't really take
To writing fiction: They don't want to pay attention
To those little insignificant moments and events
Of which life is mostly made,
And which, every one of them,
And this is the irony of the matter,
Is leading up to the ones that do.
And these same poets are also refusing
To take up seriously the more difficult burden
Of a more fundamental kind of poetry
Of significance, something more basically original.
Take me, for instance: I watch people.
I deduce what their motives might be
For the things they do.
And it's amazing how much I can deduce,
Enough to act upon, to shape my reaction.
And yet I have no idea what I myself am doing,
Why I do the things I do, often enough.
Someone told me to develop an observant ego.
I said I had one. He's the one doing all the deducing.
And why should I listen, anyway?
They said he might just say, “Joe, what are you doing?”
And I said asking questions is not necessarily
The same thing as giving answers.
In any case, if I could only reduce my own actions
To the kinds of motives I attribute to other people,
It would be a lot easier to accept the sheer futility
Of everything I think or try to do--
Since my own ideas about what I am doing
Are so often so far from that truth, if it is that.
It would be no big surprise that I fail
At what I think I am trying to do.
And of course that's not much consolation.
Like, say, I try to write that higher kind of poetry,
Go launching into space, trying out cosmic time schemes,
Reworking the stories of widely held creeds,
Tampering with themes larger than human concerns,
Or I stoop to writing fiction, admit I'm a hack,
And try to redeem my shallowness by dramatizing it
In the fleshpots and the suburbs and the newscasts
Or maybe the occasional fairy tale gone horribly wrong.
And what would those motives be,
Whether in the deeper dreams of poetry
Or the salable myths of fiction? You guessed it: sex,
Or what passes for it when it's no longer all that relevant.
Your Average Joe and the Forgotten Trojans

This is about love, but not the way you think.

It's more about the classic myths of love,
Like “Don't forget the Trojans or the War.”
And that comes down to being somewhat prudent
And being somewhat honest about sex,
Neither of which, of course, your average Joe does.
And little wonder, if you read the classics
The way every student of Professor Sex does,
As an opportunity to allude to his love
For Cleo, not because it's news, or true,
But simply because it's part of the tradition,
Part of his unconventional character
As much as it is of his average Joe nature.
It's always a story of him and her and how
She broke his heart, mistreated him, and killed him
With every loveless glance she sent his way.
Consider then how love rewards smart guys.
The smart guy in the Trojan War, Odysseus,
Was wiser than Menelaus and than Paris,
Who both burned down a city all for Helen.
He was smarter than Agamemnon, who led the war,
And than Achilles, who nearly lost it.
Both did so for the sake of a little whoring.
The goddesses who made Paris the judge
In their beauty contest, did not choose Odysseus,
Although he could not have done worse than Paris,
Whose only virtue was to be in love,
Who could not even cuckold like a man
And saw nothing in Helen but her beauty,
Exactly like the husband she abandoned,
Exactly like your average Joe today.
Young Penelope had wondered early
At how it was Odysseus had loved her.
She knew he had a certain reputation,
The kind that might suggest he might deceive her.
“Wily Odysseus, clever Odysseus,”
Those were the names by which his sort were known,
Much smarter than the average Joe you know.
Some even said he was a liar, a trickster,
An evil danger even to the gods.
Of course, his critics weren't the brightest stars
In the constellation of human wisdom and truth.
Rather, they were small minded, like the fools
You hear about in people's tales of fools,
The kind they tell when they've been drinking,
Or the ones you work with every single day,
Those average Joes who lavish their resentment
Not just on those who cheat, or have it easy,
Or injure him or others without stop,
But those who simply do or are much better.
Odysseus seldom drank, and all his tales
Had funny endings that would make you puzzle.
He was a strangely ardent lover, plain and honest,
So much that she could not doubt that he loved her.
He never toyed with her, even in fun--
Rather, he made love with her like a man
Who knows the next day may just be his last.
Though she could see no reason for his fear,
She felt him hold her like he feared to lose her
And that was quite enough for her to trust him.
She thought she'd have a long and happy marriage.
So it made perfect sense to her, she'd thought,
That wily O should figure out the deal
By which the other kings of the Greek cities,
The whole cock shaking gang of them should settle
By their agreement that they would not war
With him, whichever one of them, should win
The hand of Helen. Each one thought himself,
As does your average Joe, as just the guy
To get the prettiest girl, except perhaps
Old Agamemnon, who married her sister,
Unwilling and unable to impose
Upon his younger brother, his own right.
And people think his brother Menelaus,
Because his bride was stolen by a lover,
Who had the goddess Aphrodite's favor
But nothing else to speak of, being a prat,
And third in line to be his father's heir,
Got a bad deal in the great game of love.
But his brother got a worse one for being his brother,
Having to lead the war party to Troy,
Having the war be such a rank disaster,
With his leadership challenged by a mealy mouthed Achilles
And his daughter Iphigenia sacrificed
To feed the gods hating the cause he'd followed,
And his wife at home, sweet Clytemnestra stewing
In bed with his best friend, conspiring too
To murder Agamemnon in his bath,
Frothing the water red, stabbing, stabbing.
But think about Odysseus and his Pen:
The deal he struck to keep others from fighting
Resulted in the greatest war in history.
The girl he chose because he loved her truly,
While other men cared more for rivalry
Than love, for status and for boasting of it,
Or maybe just for beauty and its dangers--
That girl he had to leave behind at home,
For fifteen years, raising his son and heir,
And fending off the suitors who would steal her,
To steal his wealth and property if not
Her heart, which some with false heart tried.
And he was forced to go without her touch,
Not finding conquered concubines of interest,
And only sometimes being in the spell
Of powerful witches like Circe, who made him love her
With strange devices he could not resist.
It took him fifteen years till he got home,
And a whole book of perilous adventures.
And then he had to kill the forty suitors
Before returning to her bed at last.
And after that, he never stayed at home,
But ventured on, without a real purpose,
Neither the obligations of a king,
Nor that fierce need to get back to one's own,
No matter if the gods themselves oppose you.
Such is the way love treats men like Odysseus,
Though they're the truest lovers you can find,
You daughters of Ulysses, like him clever
But with the blood of witches in your veins.
Penelope had only one child, that a son.
It's you who need to learn to love much better
These men who have that thing your father has,
Though he's another average Joe like me,
Like I'm Odysseus and you're Penelope,
Like I'm Shakespeare and your bed's second best.
Respect the honor you are being offered.
Quit acting like you're Helen of fucking Troy,
And I'm another Greek soldier, riding that horse.
I invented that horse.
Your Average Joe Hits on You

It is a bit
Of an exaggeration,
I must admit,
I have to say,
But I like a girl with enough imagination
To understand the games I play.
I want to offer you a bite of that apple,
For that really is its actual size,
And I want to let you alone with that snake,
Because there is something in your eyes
That's very hard to fake,
And if after that you'd like to grapple,
We can find out what kind of issue we make.
And some think that's just how I'm talking,
And some think that I'm telling it straight,
And some realize I'm walk the walking
While telling everything I relate.
I'm just the voice of Adam and Jesus,
And Buddha and Mohammed and maybe Lao Tsu,
And certainly of Socrates and Plato,
And Shakespeare and Walt Whitman,
And Ted Hughes and Woody Guthrie,
But also James Baldwin and Frederick Douglas
And Virginia Woolf and Sigmund Freud,
And Bob Dylan and the average Joe.
And that's Professor Sex and Johnny Panic,
And several others in the Notsuoh Nights Show.
I'm really just trying to get your attention, baby girl,
Just for a moment, just long enough for you to understand,
To understand me and who I am, and you yourself and who you are,
And maybe then the love will just flow.
That's always what I'm hoping for. You know?
But you never seem to manage
To look me right in the eye.
When your beloved complains as I do,
You've got to have faith
That someone who loves you
Would not simply lie to you.
And then you have to admit
Either that you have done wrong on purpose,
In which case a whole different discussion
About what is acceptable ought to occur,
And soon maybe someone will be living on the street,
Or admit that you have made a mistake,
Even if you don't remember doing it,
And work on how to keep from making it again.
Even your average Joe deserves that,
That fantasy where you seek forgiveness.
It's the one wish you always ought to fulfill.
Because your Average Joe is truly a Christian,
Whatever his religion, and he's always a business man too.
“How?” you ask. “How is that possible?”
And his answer is that the appeal of the two together
Is quite attractive. You simply say to yourself,
“The only God worth worrying about
Is that one they talk about in church,
which is not one you have to fight every day.
He's not really opposed to what you want to do.”
And this is a slick evasion of the truth, of course,
As your Average Joe is prone to do,
For he recognizes that what it means is that
There is no God at all. He is an atheist at heart,
Somehow, no matter how his tears come up at church,
When he hears the music, or sometimes,
When he reads the Good Book,
And he just doesn't want to have to say so,
But he wants everything to be as if he didn't have to.
And he has plenty of monsters to fight besides God.
And isn't that just how you feel? I know I do.
But you knew all that already, right? Baby girl?
Tea Ceremony

What occupies your time?

A cup of tea, settling its molecules,
Through the paper side of the cup
Passing on the infinitesimal jerk and shuffle
Of the heat that drew out the essence
Of the manufactured shreds of leaves
That grew up reaching innocent fingers
Toward the great, distant and indifferent sun,
Who caught the earth like a fly
In the flamethrower,
Roasting it to a temporary equilibrium,
(O global warming! O catastrophe of heedless human garbage!
O coughing breath of engines and glowing, poisonous wastes!
O tricky microbes and genetically modified monsters!)
Where the cycles of water,
Like the water in the cup,
Evaporate and condense in tears.
Keeping things in balance,
Finding the still point of enlightenment,
Letting go of the wheel of desire
(Like the dog who chased the car and bit the tire,
Holding on, as it whomped him against the pavement, twirling,
Again and again and again, until finally his jaws unclenched)
Rips your heart out by the bloody roots
And connects the wires that lead to your mind
To a computer programmed to simulate torture,
In eleven dimensions in real time,
So that when you ignore it, it proves something.
What, you don’t know. But you try to understand.
Take another sip as it cools. This is nirvana.
Your Average Joe's Meditation on a New Shower Head

Would that it were so simple!

Home repair is really not my thing,
But I made an exception,
And it taught me a lesson,
Or at least it reminded me of the truth I knew,
Somewhere, in the darkest corner of my heart,
That we work toward these little improvements
In our oh so satisfying lives.
And sometimes, while they comfort us,
They also reminds us of our larger failures,
Our deeper dissatisfactions and fundamental regrets
Become clear, sometimes, just by contrast.
I got a new shower head, and it has changed my life.
I don't mean that the girls are lining up to use it,
Just that my own vision of my pitiful striving
Is appealingly more clear, if not actually better,
And that's a point worth noting.
You stand up from the toilet.
You reach over and turn on the shower.
You finish getting undressed.
You step into the shower stall.
You put your toe in the water. Cold.
You wait a few minutes and try again. Hot.
In only a few minutes, would all your troubles were so brief,
The sybaritic flood of achingly hot water splashes
Wantonly over your tired, old, badly and too little used,
Burning skin, like a soothing rainfall of sheer redemption,
Rain as it can only be in the heat of a dream,
On a hot summer day, in a beautiful place,
Where we climbed together to the library every day,
And we talked about things the way children do,
With one eye on the playground, and one on your new friend.
And that is so rare, that love, that childish love.
We wait so long for it to hit us again.
So what if all our troubles could be reduced
To something like waiting a few minutes,
But not too many? What if we just managed
That the interval between wanting love and finding love
Could be, for example, on the average, and you could count on it,
Only a few minutes, and not too many?
Wouldn't that be so much closer to a perfect world
In just about every way, from the one we're in?
Because, after all, you see what I am saying two ways:
On the one hand, if wanting love means having no love to give,
And finding love means finding a way to love,
Rather than simply finding a way to be loved.
Wouldn't that be a just about perfect world?
And if it were the other way around,
If wanting love meant hungering for it,
And finding love meant a mutual feast upon it,
Why, how could the good feeling not rub off,
At least here and there, in other places?
And love's a special case, but it is not unique:
It has a thousand variations,
And we ought to try to play them all,
Just like I'm trying out every setting on the shower head,
Just the way you would,
Just like any average Joe.
The Woman Who Is Looking for Your Average Joe

She always feels like she is missing something,

Like something, some things, something gets past her
Without touching her, something about life, the way it feels.
She longs for it, wants it to happen.
Doesn't know what it is.
Not that her life, her life now, the way it is now,
Now that she has taken charge of it, is so bad.
She's doing things. Getting things done.
She has her eyes on the prize,
And her heart in the right place.
It's been broken a few times, but whose hasn't?
At least she's over those sorts of guys.
She's got plans. She's working, going to school,
Working on that. Paying attention to the world around her,
Which she had ignored, back in the day,
In favor of the small sphere, defined and given
By some idiot man, who thought she was not only stupid,
But a glutton for punishment, who never loved her,
Never felt a thing about her but the tyrant's glee
At watching the slave suffer under the whip
And cower in a corner of the house
She has spent the the whole day cleaning,
Waiting on return of the lord and master
Whose favorite role playing game is “Sex Slaves and Torturers,”
In which he gets a little carried away,
Not listening when she says the safe word,
Testing her, to see how much she'll take
Before she breaks down weeping.
She never knew when he was kidding,
So he knew she never was, or nearly never.
Sometimes she'd think she might get through to him
By playing along, pretending it was fun.
But he was always a complete barbarian thug.
Now she just wishes sometimes,
That she could have a man, have sex with a man,
Have a man make love with her,
A man who knew what he was doing,
And who bore her no ill will--
A man who understands how a woman feels
And does not hate her like dogbeater hates his dogs,
Does not live out his fantasies of revenge or domination
As if they were all that mattered.
Not true love, mind you. It wouldn't have to be that.
She'd settle for an average Joe who could fuck her brains out.
The other details would have to be worked out.
And she'd be fine with that, at this stage, as would he.
And you other happy hippo mama girls don't know what you're missing.
Your Average Joe Goes for Turkish Girls

I want to put my worry in a box.

I want to put that box so far away
That I can't make it out when worry talks,
And I forget by the end of the day
Where I put the box, where I put the worry
That always took up all my time
With telling me I ought to hurry
Because the end is near to the uphill climb
On which I have been sliding down
Since way before I stood my ground
And way before I hit this town
And gave my heart to the lost and found,
In case somebody lost a heart
And needed one just bad enough
That always breaks with every smart.
Which though still good, was somewhat tough.
I want to forget the pain I feel,
The social contact acid burns,
The death stakes on the roulette wheel,
The love for which my brainstem yearns.
It already was true that a single word
From you might have pulled me out of the frame,
Might have de-Pinnocchioed this nerd,
Who'd then have wood for every dame,
But most of all for you who saved him
By saying “Yes,” before they graved him.
But where are you, who pull my strings?
I am an angel. Be my wings.
I'd do
The same for you.
How Your Average Joe Ends up as Professor Sex, the Poet

I once set out to find a spring.

I was a boy up in the mountains,
Having been born there, having grown up
Far across the mountains and the deserts
In the garden towns along the sea,
Before they all had gone to steel and glass.
I smelled the mountain sage at sunrise.
I learned the strange customs
Of the local tribes, while reading the books
About the distant worlds where wisdom lived,
Wisdom that said the fairy tale, the legend, the myth,
While never strictly possible,
Might still come true in whatever sense that is still possible.
I picked the red threads out of the dawns' corona.
I sacrificed myself to the cornsilk goddess.
I left behind the dream of being Beethoven.
I poured myself, like molten gold, into the space
You made for me, expecting to come out as your personal dildo.
I found that endless source of new ideas,
That range of intervention on the technology of the day
And I sang like Dylan in the chains of the precious wine,
And I found the part signing easy
That cast me as the monster, the demon, the tragic warrior,
And the heartsick suitor and the clever shrew tamer.
And I got up to sing my solo piece,
The “Spem in Alia” in a thousand echoed voices.
And this is the silence in which I am awaiting your applause.
Ladies, just leave a simple note with name and number and code word
So you'll know it's me.
Your Average Joe Goes to Work Finally

And that's a topic, regardless

Of whatever investment you've got
In whether or not it works
(Actually gets him somewhere,
Somewhere like he'd like to be!),
A topic not unfamiliar
To the students of Marx
And the followers of Freud
And the quantum mechanics Click and Clack,
But also in this case to the great little Mr. Poe,
Whose story, “Maelzel's Chessplayer,”
Figures so heavily in what it about to follow.
Maelzel invented the metronome.
Beethoven wrote a canon for him,
“Oh liebe, liebe Maelzel...”
Hear it sung in rounds, you'll receognize it.
Ludwig is making fun of Maeltzel,
And of linear time in music,
Which is not mechanical but living,
Where living itself harmonizes.
In Poe's story Maelzel has a machine,
A mechanical Turk who plays chess.
As the story turns out, there's a midget
Pulling the Turk's strings to play,
And there is no mechanical chessplayer.
Of course, now we recognize
That computers can outplay humans
Pretty well, if not always, at chess.
But as in Poe's day, for chess,
In our day, for certain kinds of tasks,
The best, or else the cheapest
Is human labor, human intelligence.
And each exercise of a human intelligence
One might reasonably call a test.
And so the basic unit of trade
Is the human intelligence test,
Or “HIT” as the folks at Amazon call it,
Who have Taylorized the muses,
Made writers interchangeable
With assembly line writing.
And that's the competition,
And I am just John Henry.
If you're a mechanical Turk like me,
Just writing HITS on spec,
Saying what needs to be said,
You bet that somehow, someday soon,
Somebody's going to see,
And somebody's going to pay,
Going to pay willingly
What my words are really worth.
And that day is going to be a new day,
A day at the beginning of heaven,
Though I'll probably be dead by then.
But if not, I have these two hands
To bring you gifts, these feet
To walk the unknown roads,
These eyes to read the signs,
This mind that needs the truth
This heart that needs your love
And this little, tiny pen
That that needs your help to write.
Your Average Joe Explains Why He Became Johnny Panic and then Professor Sex

Women don't get me. Generally, I mean,

In that deepest way we hope for from each other
As conscious beings across the infinite canyons
Of possible misunderstanding we regularly shout over.
It's like we're not just from different planets,
But from different planes, where gravitation is different,
Even though we know gravity has exactly one direction,
Which is down, and that entropy is God in every universe.
I give women more credit than men.
Women generally do have a pretty good bit
Of what makes a man tick under their pretty belts,
And men are pretty much clueless in the shirt factory.
So they get men, generally. They may not like it, but they get it.
But they don't get me. Me, as an individual, unique,
With a personal history that is not just a game path
Followed to catch the biggest prizes--
Or rather it is, but you need a more sophisticated idea
About what the big prizes really are in this life.
And you have to accept that life is unfair,
And that the best man may be an apparent loser
Like myself. You see, most women don't see me as a person
At all. Yes, ladies, those of you who are listening now,
I do mean you, as well as all those other dithering chickens
Whose heads are elsewhere and who may even have failed
To put being here now where you are on their little calendars.
All of you fail to see me, as I am, for who I am, in real life.
You reduce me to a stereotype. You do it quickly.
It takes you very little effort. You do it almost by reflex.
You do it as soon as you get a look at me,
As soon as you start thinking about why I might be here,
About what I might be thinking about, right now,
Often, or even all the time. And when you do try
To separate me out from the crowd of other Average Joes,
It's just to take special note of the points on which
You think I am inferior to the rest, not up to your standards.
I'm for the dustbin, the dumpster, the garbage disposal, the toilet, you're sure of that.
And you keep on working on more reasons why,
No matter what I do or say, no matter what I really am like.
And even fitting me into your stereotype involves some bloody surgery,
Some major decapitation and other bodily mayhem,
And I've got to tell you, it hurts. It does.
Now how's that for irony? You are always complaining
About being objectified, being treated as a stereotype,
Of being a nice domestic animal that requires a certain amount of care
And love, as well as firm discipline, to keep the household in order,
Or of being a disposable ornament, the pleasure of an instant, or whatever.
But it all boils down to the same thing:
You don't like being a blow up doll,
An evacuated placeholder instead of a person.
You know what? I don't either.
And if you will look around you, you will find
That you are stuck with the consequences
Of treating me as a stereotype you accept or reject,
Because the ones you're married to, girlfriend for,
Or whatever silly euphemism you have for it, you sackhorse,
Are all either worse than the stereotype,
Which you find out when you get pregnant
And you see how he takes that for twenty or thirty years,
Or slightly better, in which case, the way you treat him,
He tires of you and leaves you
As soon as he ethically can,
If he ever figures out what you have done to him.
And whichever gender wars tragedy you are in,
I say you did it to yourself, girls,
When you didn't listen to me,
When you didn't pay attention to me,
When you didn't try to understand me,
When you didn't learn from me,
When you didn't fall for me,
When you even considered ever having sex
With any male other than me,
You did it to yourself.
So I had to develop a therapeutic method,
So I could at least offer you some hope,
And that's where Johnny Panic and his lightning bolts came from,
With his band, the Justice Cigars,
Who played at Sylvia Plath's funeral at her own request.
An affair with Johnny Panic might just recharge your batteries.
And when Johnny Panic went back to school
To get his advanced degrees, he ended up, as you now know
As Professor Sex, everybody's favorite teacher,
The only guy who can really explain Ted Hughes' poetry,
Who doesn't only cure the sick on his couch
But gets involved with his students personally,
Stretching their imagination, cultivating their responsive powers,
Finding the way from the farm menagerie to the beehive
With the inevitable force of deep ocean volcano,
So there is little chance for stereotyping.
And this is just the way of the Average Joe, ladies.
We don't all have the complete syllabus and textbook,
But we're all teaching the same class.
I'm just the first, the best, and the original true genius
Who can train you to use the jackhammer of love,
Instead of the lesser tool of some lesser fool.
And I personally want every one of you to earn an A plus,
Which I will be glad to give you
Once you pass your midterm and your final
And I see your orals,
And you write me a real love poem that makes me love you,
And look me up again right after finals for something less formal and more intimate.
Ban This Poem

The Supreme Court of the United States

Is certain that child porn stars
Continue to suffer after the shooting,
The rides in fancy cars,

The Hollywood receptions, drugs,

The twisting of their hopes
And aspirations, their young hearts,
Like broken antelopes

Helpless before the lion's tooth

So long as their old clips
Have not dissolved to silver dust
And ash upon the lips.

But what of cats so cruelly killed

Beneath the barefoot heel,
Bearing the weight of six months gone
Or the stiletto's steel?

And is this not the same as nature

Where man lures fish to gorge,
Or like the bullfight in the ring
Where bull's blood battle is man's forge?

Such cruelty is against the law,

But what about its image?
Are we to say that none should know
The vision of the damage?

Religion, politics and science,

Education and journalism
And history and art may lay their claims
By those of criticism.

A kid is not a kitty, neither obscene,

Nor is someone defamed,
Nor is cat snuff an act of war,
Nor is the theater inflamed.

It's just that heel down on the skull,

The soft crunch and the dream squish
You hear, you feel, you wake to,
Makes you a little squeamish.

Unless of course, it is porn.

It's the fantasy of men
Under the heels of all you women
Again, again, again.

And who likes watching? Does it matter?

A fetish is a crutch,
And who are we to judge the viewer
Who needs pictures that much?

In fact, let's join the party, won't you?

Just find a cat and place
His head beneath your gravid boot
And look into his little face.

Now crush him. You're used to all the blood

From all your other habits,
From whales to cockroaches
To Easter bunny rabbits.

Now, as to how you're getting paid,

Let's say we have resources
So long as you will sell your soul
And join the armed forces.

Watch out for Rosie the Riveter's nails.

Just make sure your owner be gipped.
No Roman ever conquers Rome
Who also conquers Egypt.
Your Average Joe Admits He Is a Pig

With all this torture I have to do,

In a metaphorical sense, to you,
To actually push you to think better,
Which is, after all, what is meant
By your Average Joe going to work, finally,
I'm so glad I fixed my computer,
So I could write this for you
Without those huge stammers
Of imagination and thought,
That mind over matter yields
When matter doesn't give a shit.
I know you've been trying to figure out
What I mean, at least a little--
I see a glimmer in your eye.
And this is strange indeed,
Among the coincidences we have recorded,
Either because they seemed odd
Or because they had some other personal meaning,
Though often quite different between us,
Yet full of obvious suitability for reconciliation.
She said she's come a very long way, my friends,
And that the road is tough, she accepts.
The cutest things about it all, of course,
Except her crazy haircut, which I love,
Or maybe how she naturally shakes her tail,
And I say, when she says its been worth it,
That she looks fat and sassy to me.
“Like fine dog,” I add. “A Doberman Pinscher
Or maybe a Golden Retriever.”
“And I say this as an innocent animal lover,” I add,
Knowing the that the love poem I wrote her just before this one
Involved the tortuous death of cinematic mice,
Mickey and Minnie, ground under heel,
Under a woman's heel, under a stiletto heel.
I know what she can do to my kind.
But the real dilemma is, is this reborn hippie babe,
Perfect and ripe for the plucking,
The answer to my dreams? That's kind of up to her.
Some possibility the dark lady of the night
May swish before her with a knowing smile
And try to kiss me mouth on mouth
While I dodge like a bullfighter, with blood in his mouth,
And with the rose still between his teeth.
How can I resist her, with her rat's blood everywhere?
Which form of magic will imprison me,
Until the other casts an overwhelming spell
And I fall into the arms of her at last
Who loves me better than this drivel I write,
However it should turn out!
I want to get deep into shit with you
And wallow in it all day long,
And jump up on your pink behind,
Get up between those delicious dugs of yours,
And look into those thoughtful eyes of yours
And make you squeal like a sow in season.
Until I've fried my last pound of bacon.
And then we'll talk about dessert, ma cochonnette.
Your Average Joe Explains the Current Political Dilemma

Conservatives should not be for the marketplace.

That is a point they long ago conceded to the liberals,
And it's not even one of their own ideas. In fact, the worst of it,
That Social Darwinism crap started out on the left too,
And without much understanding of Darwin at all.
Conservatives, real ones, look back to Plato, Burke and Hobbes.
Machiavelli they respect but distrust. Too devious.
Locke, a lawyer in a world with an open frontier,
Misses a number of the more pressing issues,
Though he does fairly well with overthrowing kings.
Leibniz is too busy chasing the Chinese I Ching,
And trying to invent a universal language in which
Nobody could like, and trying to keep the whole of Judeo Christian
Civilization from exterminating itself over footnotes
And quibbles suitable for antiquarian scholars journals
To do much more than come up with a better version of calculus
Than Isaac Newton, who was busy trying to prevent counterfeiting money
To do anything but come up with a simple rulebook for ballistics,
One that works, even though some parts don't really make sense,
All the while trying to master magic and turn lead to gold--
No wonder the only one of those guys with a theory of government,
Spinoza, was the sort of Jew who combines mysticism
With honest and scrupulous bookkeeping, and an ultimate blindness
To any but the letter of the law. God is Substance?!?
No wonder Marx felt the need to be an atheist.
It wasn't just to shaked down Hegel for what was in his pockets.
(Don't worry: Rawls is waiting in the wings,
With Robert Nozick vainly biting at his heels
And Noam Chomsky giving another endless speech.
And a bunch of anarchists sniping from the wings,
Variously with bullets and witty but over simplifying slogans.)
None of this leads to an easy to spread program.
And public order depends on simple rules
That most people can understand. Conservatives know it.
They want respect for power, the sword before the pen,
For empire, nation, imperial monopoly.
That sort of thing. Careers for gentlemen of means
And ability in service to the great tradition
That has protected their elite status since roughly
The point the Scots agreed to lay down arms
If all their debts would be forgiven
And all their titles be retained. Tradition. Authority.
The best of several warrior cultures filtered through
Several centuries of refinements, rationalizations
And reorganizations, to serve Queen and country forever.
And that pretty much covers Labor, New Labor and the Tories,
Most of the Liberals, the various nationals from Scotland and Wales,
And the imperfectly healed existential bond
That makes an Irish writer the envy of the world,
And a happy resident of France, all too often.
There were American analogues, at various points,
Around Alexander Hamilton, around FDR, possibly the Kennedys.
In a pale shadow around Carter and then Clinton.
Note that progressive thinking and liberal politics
Are perfectly compatible with this sort of conservatism.
It's the one that makes your multicultural English teacher
Correct your comma splices in your dumbbell English class
When you had rather be spitting on the street,
Working on your platinum plan for world domination.
But then there's our liberalism, the one we know, the original stuff,
Born of an excess of conscience among the educated,
Technocratic from the beginning, slightly Confucian, all too gullible
When it came to that slick Scots con man Adam Smith.
But there is also a progressive streak, a commitment to freedom, decency,
To wars of liberation and decolonization, to the frisson
Of negritude, existentialism, second sex day after pill
Plain common sense open mindedness, not too hidebound by religion,
Though conservatives have been know plenty a time
To hang a bishop who only wants to feed the poor.
And that is the thing the Church keeps coming back to,
Along with the Buddhists and the self help gurus
And the mathematicians who understand that John Nash
Is the Jackson Pollock of the new supermediated, all digitally mapped
Ever improving cellular automaton of human scale architecture of ideas,
Where every idea we can live with fits with every other new one,
And the landscapes emerge from the sandgrains like flowers,
Like perfect ovula of sustainable orgasmic growth,
Reaching out to the stars like columbines
Seeking other columbines of different colors to entwine.
And here on earth we are at last free to choose
To find our rewards in heaven
And all along the way,
Provided we get down to the big questions I've been talking about
And start climbing the ivory tower
From which the real internet broadcasts,
So we can spread the word like fiery angels.
And that's all I want to do.
And all I want to do is do it with you.
Won't you take my hand?
Won't you be my partner
For at least one dance around the inferno?
Your face is painted with ashes,
I want to embrace you and bathe with you
In the waters of Jordan and the clean Pacific surf,
In the greater than thermonuclear baptism of right action,
Of love that can never be quenched,
As it's down below even the molecules, in entropy,
Where fate and giving everything to one's beloved
Is what causes all laws of nature, all history, big bang and all,
From the cotton candy galaxies stretching out through space
To the tick of the clock between one second before now and now itself,
Which is now already gone, swept away into beautiful dark oblvion,
And makes me feel drawn toward you
In my cautious and reverent way, my careful way, my hopeful way, amid a billion tears,
Until you invite, blushing caution,
That we join in that first kiss
That sparks, that starts, that lights up the revolution
That saves humankind and the world
And the physical universe such as we know it
And all the less tangible treasures,
And all the vivid jungles of interdependent life forms.
Like the memory of your tongue on my teeth,
Let me feel it, let me remember it, in that warm fountain,
And the franker, more legible lust, of sweat and motion
And interpenetration and the mixture of fluids, even to the blood,
That our lovemaking draws in the dust.
Snow Angel, Snow Angel! We'll soon disappear
And even our marks will no longer be here.
Should we not then love like there's no tomorrow?
Come kiss me. Let's practice for hours.
Let's get it right, and then let's push it beyond
Into something wholly new,
Something for which we have no direct words as yet.
Something that will raise us so far above everything,
That when it puts an end to my sorrow,
It will be like the turn of a well worn page
To a new chapter in both our lives, and the world's.
Your Average Joe is in Love with Love

“Why,” you may ask, “is love the thing,

The one thing your Average Joe always falls for?”
Here's love. Take a look at her:
She's certainly sexy. Fresh, pretty and appealing,
Like some hot babe at the beach at Spring Break.
She's vapid in certain respects, admittedly,
Because all she really understands is love,
The language of love, the actions of love,
The funny things that love makes us do,
On an impulse or for a lifetime.
But that is some bit of language and action
She does understand, and it's hard not to answer
When she calls, and it's hard not to do what she asks,
When she's really asking, and she's really asking you, just you,
Whether you love her and won't you please kiss her and such.
She is like the ultimate hooker-stripper girlfriend
Who really is your friend and really loves you
And just wants you to be happy and have a good time
Because whatever it costs, she always knows
Exactly how much of it you are good for.
Like your favorite baby sister, but with benefits.
You may be able to think of getting better,
But when it comes down to it, you do not turn her down.
You're as ready to talk about the body, the real body,
As ever she is, and to feel things about the heart
Exactly the way she hopes you will,
Though you also think about it in ways
She might not at first have expected
But in which she inevitably comes to take infinite delight.
So you do fall for her, head over heels every time,
All the way, deeper than any ocean in any song.
And that in itself means trouble, plenty big trouble.
And of course, sometimes she gets tired of love,
And the whole world falls to fighting,
Senseless brutality and calculated evil violence
All over the globe just like now, even though
Obama got the Peace Prize for looking like he has a chance
To do what should have been done long ago
In any world where love really existed,
Really ruled the human heart of your Average Joe
And all his less gifted cronies that even vote Republican
When they know that love, which they regard as the gift
Of their own God specially to them that's saved by it,
Is withering under their hands like blighted vines,
And the true harvest of the lord is dwindling daily
Directly as a result of their own efforts
To get everyone to love God like them,
For their hands are cursed, they know,
By what they have them do, supposedly in His Service,
Supposedly in love and out of love, and love for love,
Love for that love that surpasseth and so forth.
So your average Joe continues to burn,
Working the sweat of his brow amid the the fire,
Like a crippled god who believes he cannot win,
That love will never be in love with him,
For love is a thing of extremes, of excess,
Of painful absences and intolerable separations,
Amid the rainbows of its terrible presence.
And he is the extreme of nothing,
Of everything not extreme.
But he is wrong, if not about love,
But still about something about love
That really wants him, really needs him,
And always settles for him in the end.
You know you do it girls. Why not let him hope?
Why not let him live the dream a little with you?
We're all going the way of the subduction zones
Sooner or later, lost in the bowels of earth.
Why not try out the dance he wants to do,
And try and improve it here and there, wherever,
So maybe it'll be worth having live on
For a few thousand more generations
Until something better comes along?
And that might turn out to be the love he wants.
So why not let's get ready and practice,
So we'll do it right when we get the chance, finally,
To do it for real? That's how he's in love with you,
Completely in love with you and only you,
But also just with love itself a lot more than you
Until you start acting like the real goddess of love
And teach him a thing or two about how to love,
How to make love, and how to make love love.
Your Average Joe Gives Up on the Past

I've decided to stop using you as wallpaper.

I'm taking down your picture.
I'm cleaning out my files, clearing my desktop
Of stuff I haven't used in a while.
I'm deleting addresses from my addressbook,
Deleting phone numbers from my memory,
Changing my voice mail greeting,
Changing the way I say hello
And skipping out before saying goodbye.
Whatever you have of mine is yours,
Whether you burn it along with my heart
And selected other body parts in the barbecue
I know you like better to cook than eat,
Or let it gather dust in the rafters of your garage
Or soak up the odor of cedar in your hope chest--
It's all yours and you can do what you will.
I'm buying all new clothes, cutting my hair,
Erasing anything that might seem familiar,
Should you happen to encounter it.
But it's not that you won't recognize me.
It's that you will understand that I have changed,
That I am different from the person you know.
I am no longer racing faster than light
To catch your image as it flies, in the light of the past,
Toward our common ultimate destiny
In the jaws of a supermassive black hole
That is eating the universe alive,
And faster than we had thought, apparently,
Destroying everything that comes within its grasp.
We wouldn't have had that much time, anyway,
Maybe the length of our lives remaining,
But hardly more than that, unless something changes
About the way the world we've built ourselves works,
Trapped between natural law and our own stupidity
In the bloody public arena of hard won justice
Where the challenges just keep getting harder,
Our starting handicaps worse, and the issues
More absurdly complicated every day.
The fights keep getting bad, and the silence
Keeps getting worse every time you use it,
The way you've used it all these years.
And all I say is just an echo of that silence,
The guileless pleading in your limpid eyes.
I know I've made all these mistakes,
And some of them could not be avoided,
But all of them were mine. So I am ending it here.
I'm not even looking at your face any more
A million times a day, everywhere I look.
And I am taking responsibility from now on
For everything that has already happened,
And everything that will happen as a result
And for any new ways I manage to screw up.
I'm going to be a better person, starting now,
So you can feel guilty if you like, but I don't care.
It won't kill me, no matter what you do,
And sad as it is, that recognition is real.
I'm going to be like that Buddhist elephant,
Massive and deadly in its presumed innocence,
Bearing all suffering like the mere arrows of war,
Meant to kill a man, but hardly enough
To kill a beast like me.
I'm going to be the great placid beast in the jungle,
Rather than the little victim of the tiger's wrath.
I'm jumping off the turntable that brings me back to you
And breaking the record like a thousand times before,
Like an infinite number of times before,
And like I will an infinite number of times to come,
Exactly this way, with this sense of deja vu.
Call it necessity. Call it fate. Call it what you want.
I have to try. It's in my nature.
It's what kept my ancestors alive,
And what will fail to keep my descendants alive,
Unless they come up with some better way to do some things,
The urge to live, to keep on going,
After whatever you most want,
Which has clearly been impossible
For a very long time now already,
Even without the infinite repetition of everything
That leads you to this point of recognition,
Becomes something you can't deny.
I am as blind as the worms that will eat me.
And I have to try to give you up before I die,
Just like I had to love you.
And who is this for, you wonder?
It's for you, of course. This message,
This renunciation, this already failed promise
That should have prevented me
From saying anything at all to you,
In any way that you could ever hear or read,
That should have put me on the boat to cross the river
To the next world, just with the sadness it causes me,
Is for you. And who are you?
Are you my angel? My flower? My sleek bitch?
My prey? My predator? My reader? My audience?
No. If you were any of those, you'd know
That nothing I can do erases you from my mind,
From my heart. I love you too much for that,
However badly I've served you, volleyed with you,
Played with you for fun, fought with you for life,
Or simply used you as an excuse to write a poem.
It's all there, in the fabric of time itself, already,
Just waiting for the cunning linguist who can read it:
“What a fella show is less than what he got,
Though he expose himself to tender ridicule,
And what he gets will seldom break the rule.”
When your Average Joe becomes a writer,
He learns this fact: nothing ever dies,
Though everything dies when it dies:
We traffic in ghosts and spirits
In every action, every word we say,
And your Average Joe believes in them
Even when they don't exist,
Just like I believed in you
And just like I wished you believed in me.
And still do, or did, a little bit, in spite of everything.
Bedtime Story

You do not miss me. That is clear.

You have no need of me, nor care.
A useless thing, a waste of breath,
I have two occupations now:
I cry myself to sleep and dream
Of how you might not turn away,
And then I wake myself to tears,
A world unreal to me, empty
But for your absence everywhere.
Body Work

Sense the body. Be with it

From the inside. Feel how you know
The constellations all around you,
Their energies and colors. Know
This cool perception of whole things,
Their tangled places. Note how words
Ring true, how images take hold
Of what they mean, how what sits right
Fits in and what does not does not.
But most of all, feel how your heart,
Before you know the way to say so,
Moves forward into truth, my love.

Be easy with it, comfortable

Returning, staying with that feeling
That always changes into something
You’ve never felt before. Know how
You may not want to notice it,
Its difficulties, dreaming fears.
And know how you can let it be
Without your drowning in it. Find
The distance that is right for now.
Befriend yourself and what arises
To meet you in your suffering.
This Daddy Longlegs dangling
Himself before you in pure air,
I send him as your guardian.
Feel how the stumbling stones are there
Before your feet (I will remove them)
And how the road can still be open,
Just slightly, for your pilgrim self.
Count up your burdens. Put aside
Each one someplace where you can find it
When you are ready, and enjoy
The freedom you have thus created.
Allow your mind into your body
And let your body feel your mind.
And if you touch me now, you’re welcome.

Feel how you have become the flower

That blooms each instant, how the many
Are born from one. Whole new fields
Of dancing gypsy scarves appear,
Each one designed by nature, wild
In harmony. Now your decisions
Come out of knowing how you are.
And what you see, no one has seen.
You ask new questions of the sky.
You grow familiar with your body,
The way it holds the world for you,
And you are intricate, your life
Amid these complications safe
Inside you, where I long to be.
Your Average Joe in a Jam

Your average Joe, when he makes a mistake,

He is likely to repeat it, often enough,
And often enough just to try to make it look like
He knew what he was doing all along.
And this works, at least on the harmonica.
That is to say, he is always putting on a show
For someone. And can you guess whose name
Is tattooed into his DNA so deeply
That he has just got to show off
What a great mate he would be,
Though he hardly realizes this is what he does?
You know it's that happy hippo mama girl of his,
That average Josephine, with her attitude
About how everything revolves around her,
As she is the centroid exemplum of standard deviation,
Right where it's just starting to get a little fat,
A little fat around the middle, like a healthy sow pig,
Like a lady bear who's been eating toward winter
And getting ready to feed the world with her vegetable juices
And someday soon, maybe after she's done sucking
On pineapple and coconut, or licking up bloody marys,
She might just decide to stop eating meat
And feed it to the pussy that wants it so bad.
And though she may or may not have her little eye
On that biological clock, you can bet it's got one on her.
And so your average Joe is always sniffing around,
Waiting for a wink, hoping for a smile,
Watching for the lordosis of that steatopygian booty,
The blushing undulation of those mouth watering jugs.
Maybe neither one of them wants any kids,
Right now, at least, given these economic times,
If not the unique circumstances they each find themselves in,
Where exciting hobbies and black hole jobs await
Those time traveling Higgs bosons in their souls
Turning their backs on the direction of time
To pull them away from the pleasures and despairs
Of raising children, perhaps even together.
But it is the undying underlying logic of their inevitable collision,
The way he's just bad enough for her to disapprove of and enjoy,
And she is just crazy enough to terrify and fascinate,
That they can't avoid at least a one night stand,
Or maybe something quick in the parking lot,
Where he's flashing his badge at the other cop,
Because he is a hero after all,
And he might die tomorrow just doing his job
Keeping everything real peaceful and pleasant
So she can rest easy and the kids can play,
As soon as some come along, if they haven't already,
Or at least she can walk in the park and smell the flowers.
It is that fatal strange attractor that draws them,
With those simple necessities of life itself,
Reduced to its simplest terms, to live and die
By something at least loosely based
On whatever it was that brought you into this world,
Through the painful and lonely pathways of your ancestors,
As they walked barefoot over the sharp stones,
Read the signs of the game in the book of the world,
And followed their stories right off into the stars,
Where their brief adventure awaits its full extent
Before the giant, supermassive singularities
That are eating away at the universe even now,
A thousand times faster than we ever thought before this week
Shut down the love song, this perpetual blues I feel
And play like I can sing along a little,
If only you will pay a little attention to me,
Try to understand, ask questions, and just keep on
Until you understand me so well, your heart opens
And you tell me how much you love me,
Whether you're just starting to think I might be clever
Or you know we're like Sailor and Lula in “Wild at Heart,”
Or like two desperate strangers, the last two on earth,
Not knowing how life is going to be possible in the future,
Making love like's it's 2012,
Or like Adam and Eve that first night
After they got kicked out of the Garden.
While It's True the Jewel is in the Lotus

for A--

The lotus is in the flame,

And the flame is in the heart,
And the heart is in the body,
And the body is in the mind,
And the mind is in the world,
And the world is in trouble,
And the trouble goes on forever,
And forever is not available,
And what is available is not that great,
Except for the part that's you,
And the part of you that's mine,
And the mine is the shaft of sunlight,
And the sunlight is burning our skin off,
And our skin, my skin and your skin, is made to touch,
And to touch is what I want to do and have done,
And what I have not done, which is touch you,
And you are the only thing I'm thinking about
Whenever I'm thinking about anything,
And whenever I'm thinking about anything, lately,
I'm thinking about you,
And I'm wondering whether you're thinking about me,
I mean really thinking,
I mean really about me,
That is, about you and me,
Which is not just me and you
But you and I together,
The two of us,
Where you are the lotus flower
And I want to feel the jewel inside you,
Hell, I want to be that jewel, or at least its seed crystal,
Or at least I want to put in that seed
And water it with my tears and sweat
And warm it with my mouth, my words,
And see it in your eyes
And hear it in the vibrancy of your voice
And know it's there, right in your belly,
Where I want to put my hand to feel it, feel where it might be,
Where it would go, where it would grow,
While I listen to your heart,
The flame in your heart,
Your heart my world,
The world getting better every second we're together,
And when desire leads to suffering, as always,
The suffering sets us free,
And I'm on you and you're on me
Eight different ways, with every breath,
With every blind arrow that pierces the darkness,
With every mile of the road trip I want to take with you,
With every riddle we invent or solve,
With every frame of the movie,
Whether it's on the cutting room floor
Or flying toward the heavens
On the wings of electromagnetic angels,
Whose feathers are quantum fluctuations
That give off rainbows as they evolve, by natural selection,
From simple love scenes into Henry James novels
With better than Merchant Ivory production values,
And I offer you the secret that drives creation
Which is what we could find out together,
If only you were interested,
And your interest made you bold,
Like you already are,
And you simply told me that you understand,
And you are ready to go on from here
Into the higher plane where we can fly together
And dreams are inadequate to express what can happen.