--- S T A N D A R D   S C H A E F E R

Awestruck along a wall of mown grass 
industry and diligence enter arbitrage
something of something is never apprehended 
ambiguity especially amorality installs the animal in a few faint lines 
over the entrance to scrutiny, poverty, respect
the ants dance an ambitious anodyne to the actuaries of empire
allegories leaves the antelope to its own devices, don’t yours? 



A bat during a lecture on the birth of the galaxy
like another beagle of a century through a screen door
but always presented as a peptide chain
that beats at night to avoid its creditors
asks if a beast has any unconscious behavior
symbols of motherhood, formerly of feeding and flight
stir the tinniest, percussive music through phrases of light.



But how could the beagle’s analysis make so much more sense
than chewing the cud or dining on camel’s meat 
why are the clumsy so much closer to pulchritude 
clearly both are capricious if not vacuous 
especially considering the camel’s habit of getting shot up in the Ottomans 
or occupied by an algebra of clones and calamitous nuance 
when all that was needed was a little constraint. 



As the deer pants after the water’s brook, so go those who call the shots
though rarely they take them further than dear lord, don’t those dark eyes require discipline 
to message or does the medium undertake its own divine derring-do
does it scramble through the bug mesh and dive for the divan
or does it content itself with a sandwich on the sidewalk where the deer most certainly are not, 
either way it seems a little distracted 
so probably no protection from the department of defense.



E is for error so not quite exalted, often associated with the eels along the highway 
oozing toward the exemptions, 
heels to Egypt, Ethiopia, even the East Coast
seem too exuberant in embracing the mangy eagle
with its eye on the zephyr of height, width possible enumeration, 
easily conflated with intelligence but even error leads to exoneration, 
odd elongations, emanations from the poultice--the disequilibrium between equity with justice. 



A fish drawn on the door of a house was once invitation to mass
the greeks drew fish on the tombs of those who were strictly fisherman
few have found the lesson in the two or embraced the faithless beauty of fatigue
a far too a furious many have forgotten the fabulous accounts of mobility, 
in which the the falconer does exactly as he is told--a function of fright, fire ants or figurations 
the fissile materials was not a figment, certainly not a false memory, 
for memory is only a phase of sadness with a fickle theory, and a tendency toward fanatics.



Enough with the goat-songs and their alleged depth, enough with locusts, goddam 
the gravamen of these comic grievances is that guns make great soup, that the letter G
is most grating when gallantly silent.  So bring on the gophers with their gratuitous groundwork
tonight we shave the beard off Georgia before she flies her goat to the Galapagos, 
with no more need for your generalities of feeling, your obsequious greed for tragedy and 
devastation.  But if you want go Greek, don’t grouse.  I suggest you grock the genius of their 
garrulous guffaws, and gank the obligations to the enforcers of the game.



Huge is the heron who rules over frogs who eats them 
he is like history or hopelessness however less rude, less exhaustive
hierarchies never hail or concern me so much as the hippo
or the herons falling into my bed and don’t flap.  They move through glue 
like the mind of the honest, hallowed be the haphazard the audience of hydrogen
anchoring its handiwork to no headroom, no engine, no hood  where
no hereafter could possibly hide.



Indigenous to impotence and imperialism, or anywhere else all eyes are beady 
like an ibis who turns up in a poem illegally, the Indian or innocence are never welcome,
except as insistence, but when mine fails I become impolite, almost as if the ineffable 
were a plausible idea--an ibis or an Indian is, after all, plausible--even more so when left 
incomplete--though it comes to represent  idle, hazy, indelible illumination--
that why the I is rarely recommended in "art" though required in "imbecile"
the impossible, the imminent-- never leave it in the ignition, if the idea is never to compete.            



Just us june-bugs, jay-birds, just as jack-rabbits certainly no scowling jackals 
could ever be justified given the tactics of our jaunty, jack-booted creator
so why mimic the old man’s jargon, then again why judge our gin-soaked precinct
or take a jackhammer to our own jar?  There never was any justice in the jukebox
or in this jerkwater animal pen, so why expect it from our jobs or jumps in logic 
why get jaundiced about the shape we’re in--we were never Jerusalem 
and we won’t be again, but I go back and do you too, right? Or is that you just jogging? 



Thinking and tinkering kisses your book shut, then bunkhouse after bunkhouse
follow the blinking hand past the campfires through the knotgrass
until knowledge is a Kodiak between your knapsack and courage
then its Krebs's cycle or an appeal to the Koran (some people read for it, others are singing)
the timid join the kookaburra kvetching about the cyclone--the worst kill for it 
and think they’re cooking--the best drink it and start to sparkle, others simply duck--
very few are kind about it. Even the Kodiak is keeping his head down.



Like the lynx, love leaves a precious stone in its urine.  Lambs eat them 
in a bath of lion-sauce to cure  jaundice, epilepsy and mental illness--
only too often it usually causes them.
Certainly it provides scant comfort to the harp strings
carved as they are from cat’s gut, and still little less is more important 
than lassitude on the lips
little more so difficult to climb than my leader.  Poetry, he says, is 
about little else but loss. 



"Merely blind but not born yesterday" says the mole on why he won’t go metric
or meander the fourteen hills between here and the Middle East.
It’s a metaphysics of melodrama, this squabble about the mission of the UN.
It makes no more sense than how man became the measure of too much.
Certainly, it’s not even worth mulling over, much less mewling 
how each morning you got to get behind that mule or how as if standing on the tail of a mouse, 
these mountains meticulously swagger. 



The newt is the enemy of numbness, north or south, always with an eye on remuneration. 
It used to be associated with novels that made the nose dirty,
now the interest is on the invoice, never mind accounts received
or that no verb of light is holed up in a stone.  But if you need roots, the recommendation 
is rancor, even vindictiveness because nothing is left of near extinction, except 
its pronouns, a few dead names on a no longer scandalous page--the void 
and its nightingales not withstanding:  no, there is simply not a nickel’s worth of difference.



Opinions are omens of obituaries to come, and order, the owl muses, only attracts them
who then but Odysseus could coordinate our travel plans given the otherworldly nature 
of our dependence on the optimism inherent in offensiveness. How can this orphanage orbit 
what’s left of the ocean, who but the owl knows the empty boundaries of the stars’ halo,
who knows how low the echo oppugns us, who has seen the asteroids oozing through it
where is the officer on duty or more importantly who has not taken the oath--
who but the oyster can swallow such old, obstreperous scores.



Pleasure does not please me, says the phoenix.  
Wherever it is permitted, the parents are born dead.   
Purportedly, a few have been resurrected by their offspring.
Thus the parakeets pander to politics and politics returns the favor, although at a reduced pace.
A purl, then gradually the whole pig is served. 
Thus impulsiveness is rendered preamble to provocation, or as the parakeets put it, 
"Poetry is impossible.  Why plead its case?"



Because we are not qualified even to quail before such questions
because the quacks running this bestiary can’t keep quiet
because quips are not literature, no matter how quotable
because in and of itself, quackery quaffs very few longings
because democracy is no cure for the quotidian
because of Iraq and Qatar and Kuwait
because who dare coo "Quiet, please!"



Reason is a thief who hums a robin song
with a raven’s thirst for craven lust
rarely has room to speed
raised on raw varnish with a taste for riddles.
Lately it seems brazen about its low regard for catharsis.
Reason, the raccoon believes, likes its reading light.
Reason, it seems, rarely has the time of day.



"Sounds means so much to me, so say what you mean," said the swallow reaching for the long 
spoon .  "I like things that go down smooth like spiders," said the stork.  And "I like things 
verified by observation,"-- this from the sphinx who works occasionally in customer service.
But what is splendor if not surface tension and who believed skin has ever been anything but 
pages, just as a halo is only a lack of spears.  Ecstasy requires loss of balance, just as jokes told 
backwards reach us like silence-- in stages, and with stingrays until snobbery is just philosophy 
by other means.



In the velvet tooth of a ticking kitten almost too embarrassed to survive, truth is a tarantula softly 
speaking--how it buried its treasure in the tiger’s river, behind the silent T in "sentimentality"
or in the wet sparks off stolen grain--always one more flight down, three bolts into an old tire.
A can of condensed milk teeters on a friend’s book. "Tigers do not burn bright," Bob wrote
followed by the paraphrase of a boot that can’t help but tell us--nothing is as swift as once it was, 
but you gotta get active if you’re planning a feat.   No, a feast, Bob would have said adding "I 
don’t like terrorists." He would have wanted us to wear cat pants, but never very fast.



Understanding is unbecoming and should rarely be unleashed--unless by a unicorn 
and under agreement.  The powdered horn, it goes unsaid, is something of an aphrodisiac--
dappled on peasants they light up the bridge--and sing the world of the unhappy 
is an unhappy world, built on eat mes and brick walls.  It’s better to undo the sunlight up your 
body in a small room, lie down, steaming, light dappled side of then wake up. 
Though through it all and under every circumstance, it is of the utmost importance 
to remain utterly unapproachable.



Vultures or voyeurs it is never the voyage--it is only verbs looking for something to do.
Victims recite their last volitions, one vagrant remark feasts on the virtues of others
Until the voice is full of vivacious viruses. 
It is they that keep us warm.  It is not the votaries, nor the saddle varnish. 
Certainly it is not the vanishing herds.  And though it is a privilege to have had them, 
To have known the vibrations of such birds and the power in a vacuum tube,
It would have been even more of a pleasure to have the veto instead.



A lone wolf is a lonely wolf, but upward the wand forward with the whiskey or not. 
It is a lonely world but when it is quiet and the water is a mirror, method is reflected.
A lot is riding on the writing with or without any dark vowels
or any more white lines when the wolf is buying his newspaper already unwrapped, 
but knows it is unwise to ever unwind.
And so he takes his time in waiting, since what good is a wolf without warm blood, 
san time or sans world, what is there about which to woof?



Xiphosura are too esoteric to be so exultant, especially since what’s left is most extinct
and even they are not exonerated but driven more exotic by the excisions and dissection, 
by the ox-like excavations.  It doesn’t get any more foxy or extraneous than anthropomorphizing 
the over-examined. Perhaps what is extant is only the proportions and relations, what’s left after 
the examples and animals after the hexes mark their spot 
after xenophobes of the barest life are finally exasperated--
What is left rolls over on its back, a horseshoe crab with nothing to exclaim. 



But lean as a yak, the yolks continue their yodeling
the young seem oblivious to the yellows of their pages
concerned chiefly with yardage, they overlook the yeasts
yawping to cover whatever the yesmen don’t eat
mere yo-yos like me go off over yonder
where our yearnings yield less damage, 
where no whys siphon off ours yahooed days. 



So what if snobbery is just philosophy by other means? said the zebu
bet you were hoping for the zebra, the subspecies of zilch, but 
given its high profile as the end of history and its zealotry for ambiguity 
how easily you can be forgiven but he’s not here, he zoomed off 
to bore people with his fuzzy accomplishments
this is a zoo of dividing by one, so, no, I am not the Zeitgeist
or an exalted zygote of your salvation.  I am a zebu.  I don’t zing and I don’t horse things
am even a little boring, with the one hump in the sizzling heat
maybe you’ll sit there waiting for your appointments
maybe you’ll have some zucchini while the days and nights will fizzle out 
maybe you’ll be a zombie when we’re finished, something preciously unspecific
like Zion or Zaire or Zoroaster and maybe we were always nowhere
but at least we zeroed in on the zip code of indistinction
how many but zillions can say as much?