JesseAbbot.com

Discipline seems more river than restraint at best;
containment in the way we massage and caress it.
To have and to hold a benediction or bane

like Dante’s terza rima, the gate to renewed life
within the sexy recesses of form.
I give you my senior running mate, the lady

Hindutva Śūnyatā, who may never be born,
mother India without all the motherutterers,
cross-pollenated joy of verse and tech

enjoined, yet minus all their own ghosts
(mirroring all of our own insisting on “Western Mind”)
convinced of so much existence & backstory.

I have a favor for any of you who might indulge me,
to browse the spectrum of avatāras beyond the local bar
of Book. Then subtract light which any take from you.

I seem to talk of candidacy, because I am not persuaded
by the current pen of prophets. Yet there is a stirring,
and such is the frontier between healing flood and hateful one.

A neighbor in letters reads a prepared statement:

“I have little to share today beyond my heart,
and if that is not enough, I ask for yours.”
Here enters a pause. Who is this guy
who thinks he can address me dispassionately
about something so dear? “I will answer that

in good time,” he said, “but first
I’ll mention why I don’t seek membership
in those writers groups whose general creed
is a cynical cream tea. The voice we entreat
requires no disaffection, though our scrutiny

is welcome. A new moment is available
amid the idolatry of nihilism as self-help diet,
and that moment requests the pleasure
of your alert attendance, with one caveat.
Leave the catalogue of Postmoderate passive-

progressive narcoacademic neoHomeric
stock epithets in your electronic woodshed.
If you insist on bringing these to my home,
I will remind you that I, too, am a recovering
Postmoderate passive-progressive narco-

academic neoHomeric stock epithet-
bearer, and show you to the gate.
To wit, we could go on like this for days.
And this is why I began today up front
with the effrontery of an offer of our hearts.”

Each of us is a community

on the way to some other place

and each of us has misconceptions

about towns we pass on the way

.

so I confess to knowing nothing about

Pulvers Corners, though Green Acres

came to mind for many years , all the while

adjacent to the certainty this was an absurd

.

conceit. If I never learn a thing about it,

it will join the sets and ranks of languages

unstudied, faiths unpracticed, ladies

unkissed. Pulvers marks my acres of ignorance.

How do you like demapples?
I reach inside myself for all my outgrown voices
and feel very much the ventriloquist:

the surrealist logician doing hiphop & disco,
carpet commercials from the local place in the 70s,
memories far removed from today’s more urbane

sacred and profane. It’s like how each of us sounds
when we play back the recording of our voice.
We detach, because it’s scary to hear ourselves.

Now the pasta sauce ad from the 80s
(I’m surprised now they did not call it “gravy”)
certifies the full sweep of ingredients of my being,

and the South Jersey accent hailing from
one of my father’s closest compadres
would seem to have imprinted mimetic me

as it emerges without study in my classes
and everyday dealings. Whitman was right
about the multitudes. Each of us. May we know them.

and she is beneath nothing
and everything at once.
The left side vows to suss

her out, but also not
to partner with her cause,
the ever-hotter posture.

Some suppose she’s the sister,
others the angel, even consort
of Harpocrates, whose baksheesh

from Cupid was that fair, thorned
flower, the value of which
secured that God’s signature

silence about all doings
and avenues of Venus.
Not surprisingly, alas,

Rosie’s not in the annals
even of myth, preferring indeed
the discretion of distrust.

The right hand knows
what the left is doing,
and goes to bed conversant

with its platonic mistress
in the lingua franca of strategy.
The left nostril continues to sniff

while outlawing the surrogate snuff
that Rosie peddles. How naïve,
she muses, that they fancy

they can be free of me, pure
and above the roving nomad
of sinner-strength spin, of all

that’s not in the majority
above board. What she knows
is that it is not so straightforward

as an ethicist’s bingo board of ends
and means. This is why the elephant
plagiarizes “I am cruel to be kind,”

and why philosophers
can seldom be king. The hour
of Kant is over in the New

State, and the reign of Aurelius
claims a new term, deep in the
gorge of those who may or may not read him.

Surrendering to something bigger than I can see
and building, Rilke-like to that being
(even if I can’t name this One through the haze)
do not seem acts too far from each other

particularly today with body and head awry.
More inclined to yield, but also not to distinguish
opposites so commonly, and the only obvious
obstacle is that building is tough

with corporeal setbacks. So I think of a brick
and the brick is me, and the One I seek
may not alarm if I favor just this single piece
today. Allow full color & weight in worship.

Ever try to race someone

to saying the first dumb thing?
.

That’s seldom why we came to this place,

but it’s always on the menu.

.

The road to self’s repaved

with webby tensions.

                                                       on a friendship recently soured

I have friends who don’t listen

when I hear them out more

than they can themselves

but less than is probably necessary,

.

and so they mistake my arrogance

for precisely what it is

instead of what it might be:

a path past grandiloquence,

.

a walk away from distance.

I need to get to that place

where I’m only misplacing people

in predictable cataracts of memory

.

and not in a permanent fact

they have forgotten me into

by virtue of our own intractable

refusal to regret and invite anew.

are like a kid in a candy store,

the entire span a fit one for sampling,

with no limit on taster and tasted

.

& others like a manservant on his first date

in years: all the senses reconfigured away

from mandate & spiff now only know the Beloved.

Here will be posted soon a redacted “Accident Summary Report” (with personal data expunged), the referent of which displaced the poem occurring amid morning (p.o.a.m.) yesterday. Thankfully, there were no injuries, and the other party was at fault.

I will also post a photo of some skywriting we saw from the road once we had switched cars and were back on the way to our destination.

I don’t claim these images are poems, but they’re what happened. The word “occurrence” is a riff from my indemnity days, since that’s the technical term under the policy for what this was. Kind of like “device” from the Sputnik era, but writ smaller.