I Believe I Have Acceded with Docility to Aesthetic Laws

• Is Michael Nesmith one of the greatest underrated musicians of our time? That's a Michael Nesmith song above, btw.
• When I was eight years old and my brother Elric and I played The Monkees with my cousins Jennifer and Wayne-Matthew, I was always Dolenz, Jennifer always Jones, Elric always Tork, Wayne-Matthew always Nesmith. Or visa versa on Elric Nesmith Wayne-Matthew Tork. Dolenz and Jones, via television, were the stars, Jennifer and me the oldest.
• When professors oppose unions.
• How academia resembles a drug gang.
• I've made a conscious if unsuccessful effort to drop the running haranguing gags re: power wins the whatever the fuck contest, but, re: power wins the whatever the fuck contest. The mulitple actors on multiple stages infrequently change, the plot never. Still, as I predicted - as did others - the NSA leaks strengthen power, doesn't diminish power, he types into his self-incrimination google machine.
• Home of the Whopper.
• Man, conqueror of Nature, dead at 408.
• The last thing you'll see if you're eaten to death by a penguin.
• This week in water.
• Wheaton skyline!
• VW tells DCU to fuck off. Pint bet the next shirt says Indonesia, either the country or the airline. Though Thorir might wait until he rebrands United and changes the kits to red to add the Indonesia.
• Waggish's books of the year.
• Sheepish.
• Rethinking E.E. Cummings.
• Yes, this is a Michael Nesmith song:

HEIR APPARENT

Lyn Hejinian

Thing now tone, aquatic tilt is real, stick and money thieve, turn the future,
          scratch gas, cricket

Listen

Little spider darting out from a hiding place behind a rolodex and racing to
          a cranny between piles of papers: something we saw, wanting it to
          come back, or wanting it to go, like a king when royalty is outmoded

Glenn Gould is still humming along like a Volkswagen on an autobahn

One day a mournful young man spat on a traffic cop’s shoe, but the man’s
          name was Ferdinando and the cop’s name was Matilda, and they
          lived together happily ever after

Actually, I am not addressing myself here to metaphysicians, nor to spirits,
          nor to pedants, because none of these know how to see the
          particular beauty of a rain-soaked field

I believe I have acceded with docility to aesthetic laws—so says Odilon
          Redon, but to what in the world around us might those laws
          pertain?

All good children envy mint, so tune your instruments accordingly, because
          mint is as obstinate as a god

A celebration takes place and in surprise my error is corrected

Parsimonious ethnicity, cowardly mind, constraining gender, uninherited
          class, deracinated citizenship

You are so tired and I am so timing and he is so tidy and then there are
          those others, all so tithed and tipped-off and titanic

Help, I’m clinging to the side of a cliff, gripping a crumpling outcropping of
          rock, a train is rumbling through the valley below, a passenger
          looks up

Then two tiny birds darted (jetted? bulleted? sped!) from one tree to
          another and I could see a band or spot of yellow on each, but they
          were too little and too fast for me and who cares about
          identification?

I am very busy, I have a lot of energy, I’ve got a lot of projects underway,
          I’ve a number of plans, I’m very active, I’m industrious, productive

*****

Cat in the redwood, chasing pie

Now in a sequence is a consequence, right?

Fred laughs, Ferdie scowls, Finnian drums, but whatever it is that Clarissa
          Shirley Jemma Moore does is whatever only she knows and maybe
          she doesn’t

You have only to slide some sprigs of thyme after the shallot and lemon
          into the cavity

In the tale the dachshund wears boots and the little girl, its companion, has
          a purse that replenishes itself with money whenever she buys
          kibble, cookies, or fruit

War warrant plate daring too doesn’t didn’t sum it

An autobiography offers a gloss to a life, but it’s a translator’s gloss, full of
          misunderstandings

She dared to ask and get canny and deride servility and temper glass and
          scatter candies, and that was a mighty horsewoman indeed, and she
          rode with chocolate spurs

I wouldn’t say particles exactly, I couldn’t capture particles of any single
          lifetime, because there is no single lifetime nor solid anchor nor
          sweaty pathos that doesn’t end up at the bottom of some sea

Slowly she swiftly turns and all that was said is to be long considered

The present cannot decipher

Make it language then, with no pictures

The ponderous sun hangs as rose and cream white fruits must if student
          loans doom college graduates to poverty

A love scout, that’s the term, is he or she who sometimes finds mourners,
          sometimes celebrants, sometimes children, sometimes no one at all

*****

Suppose ungainly twigs, somewhat

Lished itivity tent ample crates

You disappear into a duration, the where and while of which is called
          Heedlessness, Indifference, Absence, Mischief

Yesterday, let’s go out; tomorrow, we were kept indoors, now let’s eat
          grapes

Suppose the poet speaks and the language doesn’t answer

The passion has its turf but, whoops!—I thought it was better managed
          than that!

Nobody moves in the photograph, nor will they ever move

Rally roll and then the little girl went up the tree

Into an L-shaped alley the young son strolls harboring a month’s provisions
          in his velvet portmanteau

The radiator knocks, the jump rope knots

Digestion proceeds as we sleep, and it is for this reason that we fart upon
          waking

It had been raining for three days in that interstitial environment, home to
          local fauns, where men come out of oaks dark, smart, and with a
          hint of criminality

Speculate for me

One a tree, softly, two a right eye, tenderly, three a threshold, kindly, four
          a mallard, fortuitously

*****

Isn’t worry wooden?

Appearances burn to perfection, the same old frolic, permanent atoms
          becoming astronauts and then unbecoming them again

There was never and will be never and once she was like a gazelle
          commanding a field

Violent is the violin, deep is the speed with which the Great Wall of China
          wanders, serene is the soot far up the chimney venting the smoke
          from the “Longlife Log”

The sun keeps its secret, the daily news is sunk in light

This is a melody played on a cock harmonica, lyrics lost in a story buried
          under a bellicose rock

Could she and why?

What butter!

The barefoot musician fiddles on the ice with greater weight over the years
          and the juggler’s jugs get lighter

It’s not from an aphorism that you’d want our memories to rise—you’d
          resist, persist, preside

Life is full of indubitable data, indelicate stuff

Though drawn to the claims of the sky, I duck my vertigo and devour a
          huge sandwich, my commitment to gravity, which holds my shadow
          to the ground

We are subject to the ultimate disorientation, a cloud of invisible power

The sun is surefire

*****

She stilled cream-colored stones an eternity ago and one bird flying there
          too

This is a pictograph of sediment not sentiment, of unbound layers of mud
          not the sold ore of South African gold

It is said that seven sleepers slumbered for two centuries and then woke up

The dead have mixed

Writers dowse in books, and being one I find that the first two words on
          page 203 of the book are Wilfred Owen’s (bent double) and the first
          two on page 307 are Auden’s (amid rustle)—magic!

What might a demographer dare?

Behold the scooters and riders and divers, scooting and riding and diving up

The young woman on tiptoe said and we didn’t doubt

What’s desirable then isn’t writable—there are more walls than trees there

Clerk, haven’t you a pen with pigs in it?

Okay, I’m leaning back, as if that would help me remember from pungency
          and acerbic comments relegating Natasha Rostov to the makeshift
          stages of a sitcom, but I fall—off that stage!

Butter jumps

Curmudgeon

The autobiographical isn’t renewable—so who is she?