Not a Pretty Poem

Don’t hold your breath or expect sighs: this is not a
pretty poem, neither  thoughtful nor profound.

Crows call and quarrel with each other re  sun coming
up over the Santa Monica  Boulevard.   I imagine this
sitting in North Carolina hearing the morning choir
across the Swannanoa.

Down by the dig, buzzards sit in a  dead  tree stretching
wings like Nazi’s guarding the Cherokee burial ground.

Anything can stand for the whole and holy if you don’t
watch out and have to be precious..

Rip Smash & Ruin my folks dubbed me when I was small
and everything I handled went to pieces: King My Dust
touch. No rancor in this nickname. Had the need to take
things a  part. “It broke,” I’d tell my old man.” IT?” he’d
say:  I learned irony little and the habit of putting the burden
of things falling apart on the thing-in-itself.

Even now when I sit on a rock I satanically accuse the rock
of being hard when it’s obvious hardness is an emerging
quality rising-up out of the relationship between my butt
and the rock.

I’m as responsible for the hardness as rock is—but I
practice my life long habit: reducing a triadic relationship
to a binary and blaming the other.

Scapegoating. An easy and conventional epistemological
convenience. The same with the cat: my itchy eyes and
aCHOO! That bastard Sneeze-maker!

Breaking things still strikes my fancy even into old age—
more interesting than leaving them alone and as they are.
What  makes them tick? How can one know what one knows
without push and shove, twist and tinker? Macular
conceptions?  Immaculate?