"Lament for the Chapbook-Makers"

1.
  The world of zines,
hobbyist prophets.
Not an underground
but an attic. We bank
on future collectibility,
though the paper blizzard
shows no sign of tapering off.

Declasse distress
& sleight of hand
meet on the xox'd pages
a Babel of aesthetics,
reflecting the war
only in its equal disorder.
But we're forced to do it.

Prestige beyond numbers
still, in the big leagues
of the publishers' minor markets.
More reviews than books are read.

Believers in the great Victorian novel public,
or in the Beat Thing,
teachers or would-be freelancers,
a lot of misfits
with no other axe to grind...
despised amateurs
with cosmic visions.

No center for this cult
than the discovery of the cult itself.
A poet with a vocation
is a menace to others.

History consoles,
especially the biographies
of latterly deified saints.
Much more than looking at each other,
much more than truth-telling.

O this balloon i keep almost letting go of!
Crutch of my life & its blighting.
Ethical enigmas give way to verbal
& i still don't, like Akhmatova,
find it helps one bit.

How beauty of the fleeting moment
produces this compulsion
is not a genre.
There are so few drugs that work.
The city, an addict.
Some with eyes on the red sky.

So i labor at this renegade accumulation
mindful of present dangers
like a figurehead carver
on a ship in a storm.
My version of tradition
not hawked in the thoroughfares
but whispered at midnight.
This is a public poem.

2.
  If the bridge i am building collapses
there may be reasons,
there may not.
If the bridge i am building begins
to look like a web full of caught bugs,
it may still be a bridge
but a bridge to a diff'rent place.

3.
  The watchers,
a tribe of aliens
with a tribe's beliefs.
But many fewer.

And other tribes the powerful.
That rankling, though a lesser
stigma than some. Invisibles.

This is the true love.
Sometimes it bursts through
the bounds of the rituals.
Lives can be transformed
if you're young enough.

Love in the margins
of our machine lives.
In spite of parasitic
infestation.
I'm amazed it's at all

but seldom grateful.

4.
  Masterpieces in obscure media
as a protest obscurer still,
he conceived the chief aim
of his leisure moments.

But the beauty of the project
soon palled,
so much work it takes!
(to say Damn the Competition);

might as well go on strike.

5.
  Too amateur a venue
for one so published,
this billboard i deface.
I resort to leatherbound editions.

Rumors of intimacy
rebound from the hard walls
void of bookshelves
or, indeed, posters.

And hist'ry, that debunked debunker,
comes to the rescue
in the wrong way for the wrong reasons.

02 13 92

'I believe that if the geometrician were to be conscious of this hopeless and desperate striving of the hyperbola to unite with its asymptotes, he would represent the hyperbola to us as a living being and a tragic one!'
--Unamuno

Everything after the Gulf War seems both empty & sinister.

"Animo qui aegrobat videmus corpore hunc signum dare;
tum doloribus confectum corpus animo obsistere." --Lucilius ('A sickness of mind, we see, makes its mark on flesh; racked with pains, that flesh then ravages the mind.' tr Janet Lembke in: Bronze and Iron (1973))