Everything you’ve ever wanted is [sitting] on the other side of fear 

—“George Addair” 

It still happens, read the news, a machete attack 
Just the other week, brazen broad daylight, 
Not an hour away from where I sit doing this 
Instead of tardy taxes or building up a following 
(In 1997, Albert Goldbarth said to me, Virgil 
Didn’t spend his time working on Virgil.com 
But please subscribe to my email newsletter) 
A man (naturally) arrested strolling from the scene 
Bloodied steel in hand still, a hacked off 
Head left behind beside the body (in films they fly 
Across the room, not so in true meatspaces) 
So cinematic actually it’s of little actual interest, 
Human or otherwise, you had to have dug a bit  
To surface the story and first been bored 
Naturally in subsequent days multiple massacres 
If stories can be said to break into a world 
So thoroughly ruptured the clichés are broken 
Horrors rained down on jews and students 
Don’t be afraid to be topical as time and the news 
Cycle quickly enough is typically good advice 
The terms for eternity so hardly set in concrete 
You know how every year there arrives that day 
When the leaves have worked loose enough 
And the wind gusts just enough to dislodge them 
To shower them down in a steady cascade  
So pretty, really, like Nature going aura farming 
Even if, from vantages high enough, on timescales 
Long enough, it’s cups and balls all the way 
Down kind of how there remain people who refuse 
To say google and insist on saying search 

You know it’s not the change it’s resistance to it 
That illuminates the truth: you have to make— 
OK let’s say induce—the people to care  
About your bike wreck or your book or your heart 
Principles of personal branding divinely 
Disclosed founded on the bedrock of routine  
But even the best of dogs habituated to its walk 
Will shit when it must without assumption  
If only you’d look (look!) you’ll see holocausts 
Everywhere and still there’s poetry 
Much of it, too, barbaric and senseless and bad 
Lost like Taco Bell in discontinuing the Enchirito 
For my purposes the symbolic exography  
Of flagrant perfection on a mass scale (I mean,  
Black olives, come on); the end comes in late 1993  
As NAFTA goes online and begins the end of 
Manufacturing and manhood in America 
Proof it’s possible to miss what we don’t long for 
Animal mythologies and maximum entropy  
The whole package of broken glass and the untold 
Role discretion plays in sadness