Fish are swimming at ease—
         this is the happiness of fish.
                  But the sage kings are dead

No way in or out—decades of discord
laid out in monasteries instead
of mystical tracts. The Ars Magna kept

   “Your glance disrupts my ease, faces
painted onto asymmetric Asmat shields
   imported from Iranian Jaya—

To distance oneself
   from the easel, the table, the example
      set by others long since dead

This is America. Jury duty
and the token fanfare of breaking
from our daily routines, men and women

“Ran afoul my nature to spend some time
in prison. To think
                                        on what I’d done:

learn to decipher the erotic hieroglyphs
of our age, prayers on squares of one-ply paper

just beyond the notch, slumbering
   like a rain-soaked paper on the porch—

No one to give voice to stone flakes swarmed with decadent
Coptic scripts still read in Arabic primers nor attempt
to understand extremities and implements as human shapes

Three times a day, I jacked off faithfully, yet
   nothing would enlarge my future, not