Feckless Degeneracy with some Windmill Jousting – an epic in several belches –
Belch the First – by way of prolegomena
Of arms and the man I sing id est, of a man with arms and hands for that matter and nothing to do with them other than push gliding yellow felt across the faceless fees of contract physicians dealing the new deal daily to the deaf shipbuilders and jet mechanics and the incompetent OSHA oafs of Oshkosh and Oklahoma Sucking the blood of the body politic politely with a yellow felt pen Felt pen is all he’s felt lately so come, muse for someone should and tell of the student-cum-bureaucrat the man with arms and hands with nothing to do but pay bills and perhaps go blind
Belch the Second – in medias res (so what else is new?)
A brown caffeine haze like the stained inversion layer of womb-city L.A. swirled buzzing beneath his 4:30 AM skull like a Santa Ana locked in Aeolus’ cave bleary blurry burned home to Germantown where the rosy-cheeked firm-breasted wives of the power-corridor stalkers make their living doing T.V. ads for Cheer Wisk Breeze and disposable douches Brown and nondescript his mentality and the 2 unkempt letters on his unkempt bed from an unkempt friend a mad composer Beethoven of software UNIVAC of the mad pipes and unorthodox tunes and keeper of a faith in which all have lost faith but a miniscule few
Insanity issues from the violated envelopes rushing leaping prancing like a horde of lusting shoppers at Macy's white sale bringing back the shades, demons, ghosts, apparitions, & specters of times past when mastodons stalked the earth and loons reigned, then, and rationality belonged to serfs and the lords of bats sat wiggo and lecherous in a Coco’s booth sucking the bean and contemplating rape Jolly jester gestures jump from penciled pages and in a laughing gasp grabbed the felt pen pusher by corduroy lapels howling "Write! for the faith is dwindling like a soft candle-stump its fleeting flame flickering faintly from a shriveled wick.
Write! For I am playing pool and snooker with a drunken busboy Lothario the 2 of us Lear and his fool leering and fooling around with a round girl and her quoit-visaged female companion. Write! for the roundtable is broken with the tennis player salesman for Bridgeford talking Tupperware and household appliances as he flies to Dallas. With the great beard Sleaze of times past Falstaff with a joint now playing it cool in high finance at the bastion of upper-middle class white vacuity in Watts. With the genius leader of liberated wit doing a Ulysses gig in Asia beaming knowledge into little brown people and contrition, obscurity for the white man’s burden. Write! for it’s been so long, I find tacos erotic and Don Jose’s threw me out for fondling a quesadilla. Write! Right?”
“Right.” Thus murmured the pen-pusher toddling, tottering off to sleep to wake with the sun and, at the school the afternoon next he gripped his pen violently determined and thought Thank God Freud is dead.
Belch the Third — Arlington National Cemetery is my disco
So the student who feeds himself with a yellow felt pen and writes arcane monographs of the arabesque convolutions of the politics in Riyadh and Jiddah essayed assessed saying sayings not quite sane what he means is what he said Sotos speaks so to speak.
An auspicious year the best of the 20th Sophocles’ 3 Stooges Clotho & her Cronies gave the Greek grief early tried to hand him a couple of brooches to do a number on his bespectacled orbs but he’d seen that one before So they packed up their spinning wheel and headed for Ft. Lauderdale lawn chair lounging but not until his transmission got up and walked away from his Merc 18 miles west of Phoenix to the tune of half a thousand clams If it wasn’t for the pen pusher’s plastic money and smiling despair he’d be flipping burgers on Camelback Avenue Wearing a Marlboro Stetson snakeskin pasture pounders and calling home the T.V. and Gideon Bible at the El Rokay Lodge.
Jojo's has crept like mildew across a map and Visa-financed peasant lunches kept the moustache nourished all across the continent.
Back to the city of marble buildings and minds with few marbles where the town namesake “Father of His Country” has a phallic monument to mock the yellow felt-pen scrivener whose social life is on display next to the stuffed dodo at the Smithsonian and labeled “Extinct.”
Well, can’t complain one supposes, even though the only thing between the student bureaucrat and a morals rap is an iron will and saltpeter for breakfast.
Lots of late nocturnal revelry with Eve’s daughters watching omelets feed a Charybdis appetite, or catching two-dollar talkies at the Circle. Taystee Diner, bean brew, juke box jokes as Hall & Oates, Simon & Garfunkel and Queen eat my quarters Coupla babes a lanky blonde, a petite brunette (I’m a blonde sorta, maybe). [If you’re a blonde I’m Grover Cleveland] But the pen-pusher knows, through the cruel anvil of experience, never argue with a woman Their logic makes minds' Minotaur maze looks like I-10 between Quartzite and Phoenix so peace dictates saying he’s been out late with 2 buxom blondes (and call the pen-pusher Grover Cleveland). Fun ladies and dynamite looks socko boffo knockouts but as for romance my social life is in formaldehyde at D.C. morgue waiting for someone to identify it.
Belch the Fourth — Ambition rides the Metro, but still can’t get a seat.
Thrice has the world spun encompassing ol’ Sol in completed circuits since the Golden Greek marched east like Alexander to conquer Persia-on-the-Potomac Thrice. Most of those who entered grad school with the golden Greek (before he cultivated the yellow felt pen to streak the beige bilious bills at Fran Perkins' Annex (on 14th & NY, NW) Most of those who dared demonic dementia to cut academia’s umbilical with a sheepskin rectangle have and got spewed into limbo
Alexander pushes the yellow felt pen and checks the views on the Strait of Hormuz holding court Doing okay if you are a tortoise All done excepting 100 pages of shoveling so let’s look for birth in May ’82 unless alma mater aborts Meantime there’s always yellow felt pens and green enough money
It all adds up to the bottom line which is the theory of relativity flattened in the templates of grad school to wit master programs stretch like taffy over time the faster you work and time goes gossamer tenuous and ephemeral and e...t...e...r...n...i...t...y is the... last... gasp... of... pondering... postgraduate... programs while your transcript grins and yawns at once
Belch the Fifth — if life gives you meatballs, make albóndigas
Beckoning from beyond the lips of an unborn year are the evergreen plastic vegetables that live only in refrigerators on display at Sears & Montgomery Ward Come come We are the vegetables of legitimacy of actuality and your folks’ approval eat and could we interest you in life insurance?
Rustling from behind in those dim glow worm grottos at the base of your mind are the petrified relics Memories of a golden age long tarnished return return return unused portion of your life for a *full refund* Slapping your back with ghostly hands guffaws Why be a frog when you make one helluva tadpole?
Polystyrene peas aren’t going to make it Julia Child or no Yet you can’t keep the cranium small while the cerebrum expands unless you want to grow lobes out your ears
The abyss between the plastic veggies and petrified pasts is the only place to call home and keep your honor
The bricks and mortar of this balancing house are words the hardshells of deranged thoughts that maintain continuity with the solid past and laugh like a strait-jacket model making time at Camarillo State: the faceless featureless chaos of the unraveling future.
Belch the Last — by way of epilogue
The song is done, Muse, evaporated like Borden’s milk and the balance in my checking account the yellow felt pen pusher pushes on staining audiologist indices and the lives he has touched like a Mexican dinner The time-space continuum has swallowed the Golden Greek yellow felt pen and all and he inches along the cosmic alimentary canal
But soft like that Mexican dinner cheap and satisfying he may return with an acrid burp to remind the party of what once was.
I once loved this world–my world–which danced with emdashes– the best kind– at end of lines– seemed so clean– went directly to the heart –or at start of lines or–in-between
now, it is the mark of the beast, and I accept the notice to cease and desist: doing my best to return to, and better learn, the effective incorporation of proper punctuation.
–zumwalt (October 2025)
And then Zumwalt made a slight revision to align with this news story: It’s been discussed online for some time how ChatGPT’s excessive use of em dashes are more like a bug than a feature. Finally, Sam Altman and team have come to the rescue. As discussed in this November 14th news story, Sam Altman posted on X, a few minutes before midnight on November 13th: “Small-but-happy win: If you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it’s supposed to do!”
I once loved this world–my world–which danced with em dashes– the best kind– at end of lines– seemed so clean– went directly to the heart –or at start of lines or—in-between.
Now, it is the mark of the beast, and I accept Sam’s notice to cease and desist: doing my best to implement on request the effective incorporation of proper punctuation.
creases and wrinkles pouts and interpretations a phone number from Port Said left in a pocket
Oh, how the gin fizzingly stirs swirls of melodies unfurl as veils drip like honeyed falling stars
Ah, how the cover stays low so the currency flows like foot traffic at the dusty bazaar
“I’ll show you Egypt” has been her most memorable reply but I doubt her intentions and so plan another solo excursion hoping that once I return that crumpled, rumpled look will be comfortably cool at work
I never liked them anyways And THEY ALWAYS came with a safety cap for something that’s not now very safe
The bottle always asserted its authority just two wait this long if you really want more
Treated me like a child even though it said “extra strength”
I am not pregnant that’s hard for a man particularly in their sixties but what’s not good for a goose is maybe even worse for a gander.
I live with pain constantly Bad neighbors Bad news and so — pretty bad headaches…
I can easily explore better options no warnings on dosages I well know what works well and even if I have a brutal headache the next morning and mess up the car driving At least I had me some fun.
Discrimination lies with concentration Machinations, machinations equilibrium staggers— Smell the breath of industry—intoxicated fumes Has the ignition point been reached? Atomize before the vestigial globules are digested and Odovacar pulverizes the wall
Orange! Hellish pastels screaming unknown genius and hint at hidden chortles While nicotine nimbi scud and stain And we suck slyly, slyly sweetened caffeine and wait for it to reach crit mass in our body-plexus-pit How’d we find this sticky Formica stop anyway? We iron out our cerebral wrinkles Observe the threading warp and woof And still can’t discern how we got in Or where they hid the exit So all you know is that it’s always open– Isn’t this the graveyard shift?– And the cross-eyed waitress will bring a misspelled, miscalculated mistaken check when dinner’s over whining whining wining and dining Somebody waste that skinny kid if he won’t stop bellowing Disagreeable distaste in distinct decibels Disgusting! The food may slither down your maw like greasy lint But can’t we at least eat in peace? A garish cosmos of flickering neon and cretin Muzak It seems as if everything was drawn from the maniac cook’s Primordial soup The proper proprietor leans in languishing linger leisure Across the register Smiling slightly as he strokes his beard, unconcerned Christ! Is this morbid midnight meal a subtle jest Or is he just plain stupid?
Quadroset
i. dawn
the hillstrings lace the pale garden
shadows are lifted
teasing the ground
beak your piece says the mother bird
for worms are precious food
a tranquil birth
and yet no clue
of the chaos yet to come.
ii. rush hour
screeching skidding
piercing ears
no art could match this pace
crying howling
curses threats
bodies pushed around
smoking burning
greedily fuming
factories wait in ambush
oh no can't stop must be off
my time is much too dear
look around this ghastly ground
motion is the coming price
the virus that will spread throughout
gain begets a further need for gain
and soon nothing will gain to stand.
iii. salad bar
radishes
cucumbers tomatoes
garbanzos bacon
vinegar and oil onions roquefort
croutons almonds greenbeans
more and more and more and more
oh yes I have to try the lettuce
iv. the evening
the culminations of aggravations
the see-saw city glare
mixing masses of migraine messes
must this mottle meet the mind
old sayings still limp around
and appetizers drop on the ground
the news is needed if it's not misreaded
everything remains and continues
like an out of control hoover vacuum cleaner
sucking everything up
count the days forget old ways it's all a daze
and deeply dives the disordered ditch digger.
-- zumwalt (1973)
Soft gentle beauty leaning against the window Fostering a belief that loneliness is loveliness what is good must start with pain A perfect state of perfect mind.
Cool pleasant sand Lies in a land unknown play and fun is wasted time and idle are the satisfied. A self-constructed sterilized cell for working days And nights towards a goal that cannot be achieved. the rain and sun are both the same. Is this a way of life?
This is the second of our transcribed lectures. This one is based on the following poem:
Alizarian Grand Slam
Manifest crescendos
Homeopathically kneepanning Santa Fe plethora
Safely soaking with the mangoes. Are there
Any removable transversals
Balancing on the Pawnee Indian?
Aaeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeiii!
Saliva adorns my peanut butter.
-- Zumwalt (1973)
A Journey Through the Failed Sanctuaries of “Alizarian Grand Slam”
Good afternoon! It’s afternoon for me — if not for you, then “good morning,” “good evening,” “good insomnia,” whatever you feel is appropriate.
In our previous lecture, the first of a series of lectures on the poetic works of Zumwalt, we explored the vast, nihilistic landscape of “Trilogy of the Oblique Carbide,” a poem that confronts the failure of justice, fate, and the physical laws of the universe. Today, we turn to its companion piece, the second of Zumwalt’s defining early publications, “Alizarian Grand Slam.”
If “Trilogy” was an outward scream at a silent cosmos, this poem is an inward one, charting the collapse of the aesthetic, intellectual, and sensory self. It is a poem about the violent collision between beauty, thought, and the sheer fact of being a body in the world. Its concerns are more intimate but no less devastating. It is a profound and obscure commentary on the subjugation of desire and the thwarting of our deepest need for connection.
The journey begins with the title, “Alizarian Grand Slam.” This is the thesis of the poem’s tragedy. Alizarin Crimson is a deep, historic red pigment, a color of passion, royalty, and religious vestments, but it is also famously fugitive, prone to fading over time. A Grand Slam, conversely, is a moment of total, decisive victory. The title, therefore, presents the central thwarted desire of the poem: the desperate wish for a perfect, beautiful, and lasting union — be it in art, love, or spiritual understanding — that is, by its very nature, doomed to decay. This is made more potent by the history of the pigment itself. Traditional Alizarin was derived organically from the madder plant root, but in the 19th century, it became one of the first natural dyes to be artificially synthesized. This mirrors the poem’s central theme: a quest for something authentic and natural in a world that increasingly offers only a synthetic, mass-produced substitute. It is the desire for a permanent victory painted in a fading color.
This desire builds with an almost feverish intensity in the opening line, “Manifest crescendos.” We feel the subject’s yearning for transcendence becoming overwhelmingly obvious, a rising wave of need. This is the great hope, the upward swing of the quest. But where does the subject first seek this grand slam? The poem suggests they turn to the world of art and culture. For centuries, our society has held that art is one of the most reliable paths to experiencing the sublime — that feeling of profound awe and transcendence in the face of greatness. It’s a recognized path, and the speaker begins their journey here.
The journey immediately sours with the dense, cynical line: “Homeopathically kneepanning Santa Fe plethora.” Here, the promised path to the sublime reveals itself as the first failed sanctuary. Keeping in mind the poem was written in 1973, this is a sharp, historically specific critique. By the early 70s, Santa Fe’s reputation as an art colony had boomed into a massive tourist enterprise. The “plethora” the poem describes is the overabundance of commercialized galleries, the marketing of a romanticized “Southwestern” aesthetic, and, most pointedly, the explosion in mass-produced Native American jewelry that diluted genuine craftsmanship into trinkets for visitors. The speaker, seeking authentic, sublime art, instead finds a glut of commodified culture. The response is not a grand critique but a violent, crippling gesture (“kneepanning”) delivered in a dose so small (“homeopathically”) as to be laughably impotent against the sheer volume of the marketplace. The desire for a transcendent experience through art is thwarted by the very system that promises it.
Having found the world of aesthetic and social order to be a corrupt wasteland, the speaker makes a logical move: a retreat into the personal, the sensual, the relational. This is the second sanctuary: “Safely soaking with the mangoes.” The tone shifts dramatically to one of luxurious peace. The mango is a fruit often associated with love, sensuality, and exotic sweetness — a world away from the violent critique of Santa Fe. This line represents the hope of a romantic or platonic relationship as a safe harbor. It is a desire for a purely phenomenological connection, a moment of shared, unmediated, sensory bliss, “safely” removed from the judgments of the outside world. Here, with a partner, or perhaps just within a state of pure bodily pleasure, the “Alizarian Grand Slam” seems possible again. This is the desire for a relationship to be a perfect, self-contained world.
But this sanctuary, too, is violently corrupted from within by the intrusion of a twisted intellectual desire. The reverie is shattered by a cold, academic question: “Are there / Any removable transversals / Balancing on the Pawnee Indian?” This question is the poem’s cruel turning point. The abstract language of geometry (“removable transversals”) is brutally imposed upon a human subject, the “Pawnee Indian,” who is reduced to a static, objectified prop. This is a profound commentary on subjugation. Within the context of a relationship, this is the moment one partner stops “soaking with” the other and begins to analyze, categorize, and objectify them. It is the twisted desire to control and define the other rather than to connect with them. This is a brutally literal depiction of a specific trope in American culture: the “Vanishing Indian.” This was a widespread concept that treated Indigenous peoples not as living, evolving cultures, but as static, tragic relics of a bygone era — essentially, as museum pieces. Zumwalt’s line makes this metaphorical objectification horrifyingly literal. The partner ceases to be a person and becomes a problem, a theorem to be solved. This can also be read as a critique of dogmatic religion, which often imposes its own rigid, abstract laws (“transversals”) onto the fluid, living reality of human experience, subjugating believers into props for its logical system. The sanctuary of the relationship is thus destroyed by the same impulse for control and objectification that defines the failed social order.
With the failure of both the external world of art and the internal sanctuary of the relationship, the subject is left with no escape. The result is a complete psychic breakdown, expressed in the only way possible: a primal scream.
This is the sound of absolute severance. It is the shriek of a consciousness that has been promised transcendence twice and has had it violently torn away both times. It is a definitive retreat from language, which has proven to be a tool of both impotent critique and violent objectification. The crescendo that was once “manifest” has now reached its agonizing, wordless peak and shattered.
Following this explosion, the poem collapses into its devastating final line: “Saliva adorns my peanut butter.” After the quest for a grand slam in art, after the search for safety in mango-like sensuality, after the intellectual violence and the resulting scream, this is the final state of being. It is a moment of profound self-contamination. The desire for connection with an “other” has been so thoroughly thwarted that the subject is left entirely alone, in a closed loop with their own body. “Adorns” is a word of supreme, tragic irony. The subject’s own biological substance — saliva — defiles their sustenance. This is the ultimate image of a subjugated desire. This personal collapse is given a final, sociological twist by the choice of food. Peanut butter is not a natural object like a mango; it is an icon of industrial food production — a processed, homogenized, mass-produced staple. The speaker’s grand quest for a unique, sublime experience ends in a lonely encounter with a symbol of uniformity. It suggests that in a commodified world, the only thing left is a commodified self, consuming a commodified product. The grand, transcendent yearning for an “Alizarian Grand Slam” is reduced to the slightly disgusting, masturbatory reality of the self “adorning” its own consumption.
In “Alizarian Grand Slam,” Zumwalt presents a coherent and deeply pessimistic narrative. It is the story of a soul seeking meaning, first in the broad social order of culture, and then in the intimate order of a relationship. It finds the first to be a commercialized sham and the second to be a site of objectification and control. Both sanctuaries fail, leading to an explosive negation of language and a final, pathetic reduction to the isolated, biological self. The poem is a masterful, integrated commentary on the failure of modern life to provide a space for our desires to be met with anything but decay and disgust.
A Comparative Note: The Telescope and the Microscope
It is a fascinating and crucial point to compare the stylistic differences between “Trilogy of the Oblique Carbide” and “Alizarian Grand Slam.” Doing so reveals the incredible precision of Zumwalt’s artistic voice. The two poems, published as a pair, function like two different lenses used to examine the same essential crisis of meaning.
“Trilogy of the Oblique Carbide” is the telescope. Its critique is vast, historical, and cosmic. To argue that the very concepts of Justice and Fate are collapsing, Zumwalt must draw on the grand arc of Western civilization. The poem summons:
Mythological Allusions: “Moira” invokes the entire classical tradition of the Fates.
Historical Mysteries: “Judge Crater” taps into a moment of unsolved, public failure.
Philosophical Figures: The shadow of figures like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer looms large.
Even its contemporary references, like “Alpha Beta,” serve to ground these epic concepts in the mundane, showing how the grand decay has seeped into every corner of life. The language is necessarily broad, pulling from philosophy, history, and theology to make its case that the entire external framework of meaning, built over millennia, has rotted from within.
“Alizarian Grand Slam,” by contrast, is the microscope. It is fixated exclusively on the present moment — the “now” of 1973 — because its subject is not the history of ideas, but the immediate, lived experience of a single consciousness trying to survive in the wreckage. The poem is a dissection of the modern self, and therefore its references are intensely contemporary:
Art-World Satire: “Santa Fe plethora” is a direct jab at a specific, booming 1970s cultural marketplace.
Pop-Psychology Jargon: The cold language of “removable transversals” evokes the detached, analytical fads of the era.
Simple, Bodily Realities: “Mangoes” and “peanut butter” are immediate, sensory objects, not historical symbols.
The simplicity of the language in “Alizarian Grand Slam” is deceptive. While “Trilogy” uses complex allusions to deconstruct complex systems, “Alizarian Grand Slam” uses simple, contemporary language to show how those same systemic failures manifest within a single person’s quest for connection. The absence of historical reference is the point: the modern subject is cut off from history, trapped in a present-day hall of mirrors where every attempted escape — art, relationships, intellect — proves to be another trap.
Despite this stark difference in style, the artistic voice is perfectly consistent. Both poems exhibit the same core traits: a deeply cynical view of established systems, a violent juxtaposition of the sublime and the banal, and a final, devastating reduction of all grand pursuits to a pathetic biological endpoint (“URRRP!” vs. saliva). The shift in tone and reference is not an inconsistency, but a brilliant artistic choice. Zumwalt uses the telescopic style to show us the universe is broken, and the microscopic style to show us how that brokenness feels, moment by moment, inside our own skin.
