Sean Pierson: Four Poems
PROLEGOMENON TO THE PERFECT SEASON
“Dans ses écrits, un sage Italien
Dit que le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.”
(In his writings, a wise Italian
says that the perfect is the enemy of the good.)
—Voltaire “La Bégueule”
Depends on which good. The lemon juicer certainly wasn’t stopped by the hand, no matter what Chaplin has to say about it, but where folding in half may be always-already integrated into the model you can still hurl a brick through the kitchen itself. So, scurrying in the floodlit afterglow of modern times, we might use everything, that everything everyone is already doing everything with anyway, to estrange the swarm of mercilessly recuperative trivia, discharged in this leaking now-time, called the “audible.”
Yeah—you get this history. The 1972-73 Miami Dolphins did not lose a game, becoming the only team in the so-called North American “Big Four” to complete a “perfect season,” in turn synthesising at last the Phileban contradiction between wisdom and pleasure in the swirly processes of the cocktailed good. The ladder falls, the bells of proleptic feedback clink for the end of seasons in toto. 11th century monks invented the clock alongside the index, and so labor and books were born, not necessarily in that order. Amass and wedge. Mechanized, the chiasmatic flesh of everyday life becomes modern to the tune of the clocker Camp’s Daily Dozen, grotesquing the style of the Lacedaemonion Politeia, patriotism a forte for all those concerned hustling over large balls from which many evils may arise which are, god forbid, broadcast despite the blackout. Against this univocal “habitat”—arch enclosure from theatre to pro shop—the poetic work should imply a “repertoire of others” to correspond with the irruptive prosody beneath the astroturf, Zonk calls “our greatest enemy.”
The epinicia thus bent the procession by strophe, antistrophe, epode to zero on the gains and annotate the flows of beef, hardened into allegory. Value stickummed to resuscitated monuments. Now deform that with that which comes from elsewhere, tear it or cut it, squash it or crumple it, then paste. We’ll ask for nothing and derange the feeling in time by which the painted airs block the zone according to a logic of free giving and receiving. Symmetrical velleity subbed out for insolvent prosthesis in the diorama, gleam of silver in a shoe bag.
A bowl for the atonal utterances of collected gossamer kitsch-glyphs in the palms. Use it. Through this impossible dream, the problem with perfectionism in poetry is the same as it is in football, as Lee Offman says:
We’re in the air, we’re on the ground
We’re always in control
And when you say Miami
You’re talking Super Bowl
BOB GRIESE
In bobs the opus: a now floated left-hand writes wrinkles like a
plum pit. Stone cold aplomb. Perfect season squash
every half-c into a day. Amygdalin stoked
is atelos and gym kid.
Oceanfront carpet perversion
those posters were NOT
meant to say plutocracy. Zips a 30-yard slant
in pass ingested, alive with the spectacle, blessed
by the moxie, as Grecian delicacy. On a wartime “om,” July Miami
cushions all zeroes laser on the lettering brawn
melts an arm in swarm of logic and more
of fate. The hand who makes parades
desire where formerly pride
snags alert. It’s in the airspace automating
demand on spasmodic choir, oxen with a head itself
built like a watch. A passing attack a permafrost lyre
like gold is griefe, whose records in the field of kingmanship contract
not unlike the opposite of ding-an-sich, tongues for it
into the thinknet ziggurat infinitely blinkered galoot
history’s tangerine kaput. Rolling out the scrawl
to self the thrill of pilfer
I’m good for it, Milton. Having been
in both boats, tell how long we have
been dead, Bob. Shoot, by crewcut avant the leg
to bind to broken brace what total bogus candidate debuts him so
writ catapitulate. Supernal oubliette nike. (To give up
by trebuchet) Hymn the difference
tween ten and fifty pct. Give and take
plucks the chord ‘gainst
catastrophic human oboes
give and take with the action. My lung might ooze
dairy as glory singer, but not only for you
flipper slingshot insolvent. Overcome as the weather, the huddle behind the
backs of lunar masses. Oh dégoût my goodness, this poet myopic
who deliver the goods. Freedom is…
…hijackers plummeting intwine
plushly net
hell a golfcourse. Run it in the “soft”
they play. Microbial slush: biscayne bottleneck
down sluiceway. Porpoise en garde pink summit millennial.
SAY gooood-bye poet! No matter what. Wait bub. Pick a junker. Pluck
a coupon from the clip. Then clinamen
kirk circuits weakened pleasure. Then visits winter white abattoir.
Phosphorous quarterback arrows errant overthrows the
arras secreting. Do don an overt gown.
GLAD FOR EARL ID
after Bill Braucher
Every red-blooded ammo
-nia brad wants to be a pro
footless quarto. When
nobody’s looking, even
grown memos have known to
fade back, before camphored
cocked, to throw a totem
down party line.
—Coagulum.
—Right into the old gargantuan
canapé.
In real life, there would be
80,000 falsehoods roaring into
earlaps and a horde of franc
-hises coming at yokel
in a snarling rustic.
—OOF. Crunch. Gristle.
Sunbathe the crackling heard
round foolhardy wormwood was
sounds of boardroom Greek legato
breaking in the orange boutonniere.
PAUL WARFIELD
here we’re caught
in a grace ladder
really a zipper
it’s been good to celebrate
a marginal vocabulary sung from
across the funiculum
we fall down on the radio
withstanding for it
vertical plasticated schemes
and I feel like the least
qualified guy there
especially in the massage center
production values slow
the earthiness
feast frontloads the year
with the gospel of finesse
mustn’t constant hum
the decadent threaten
suppurates under the a/c
thus the long lopside
in a history whose blood
runneth oranger
in manoeuvrable
solvent lounges so many
changes of address
in kilter with metal flows
flitting cross the scintillant
wastage against our
boisterousness
speed trial rain out
prurient wave of junk drifts
sunlit replicating play
we resist hostility
for a shot at irruption
in the life of the dome
you say as if
it’s a good thing
to find me there
becoming-dolphin.
Sean Pierson is a poet and teacher currently living in Ireland. The Perfect Season is forthcoming from Wild Honey Press.
