Zumwalt Poems Online

Posts tagged ‘Poem’

Lecture on “They’ve Stripped the Forest for Babble”

We continue with a third transcribed lecture, this time on one of the most unforgettable and prescient poems of Zumwalt’s early works, “They Stripped the Forest for Babble.”


They’ve Stripped the Forest for Babble

Reams and reams
             The black-ink symbols innundate
             Flooding consciousness with printed words
                                          that possess
             Definitions but know no meaning
Tectonics, 
      Aardvarks, 
            political history of Byzantine hydraulics.
                        Dewey decimal has run rampant
                        Chasing, haunting, even lurking
                                  in the restroom
                        Parasitically clinging to the walls
 Stark and blatant waste or frivolous gaud
                        Venus dies --
                                   --                                          
                                   --    nonsensical nausea                       
                        The ice-age is returning

— Zumwalt (1974)

Zumwalt’s Prophecy and the Coming of the Ice

Greetings, once again, and welcome back. Today, we turn to a poem that, I must confess, is a personal favorite of mine in the Zumwalt canon. “Trilogy of the Oblique Carbide” and “Alizarian Grand Slam,” which we have previously discussed, are masterpieces of cosmic and personal collapse, respectively. But this poem, “They’ve Stripped the Forest for Babble,” written in 1974, is something else entirely. It is a work of startling, almost unnerving, prophecy.

Decades before the internet became a household utility, before the first tweet was sent, before our pockets began to buzz with the ceaseless torrent of the digital age, Zumwalt diagnosed the sickness of our time. He saw the coming flood of information and understood its terrible price. This poem is not merely a critique; it is a warning. It is a haunting examination of the fatal distinction between information and meaning, and the cold, sterile world that awaits when we can no longer tell the difference.

Let us explore this remarkable text by tracing its central argument: from the initial flood of meaningless data, through the tyranny of the systems that classify it, to the final, chilling apocalypse of meaning itself.

I. The Paper Flood and the Death of Meaning

The poem begins with a title that is a complete philosophical argument in itself: “They’ve Stripped the Forest for Babble.” The act is one of violent substitution. A living, complex, natural ecosystem — the forest — has been clear-cut. For what? To produce the raw material for “babble,” for meaningless noise. The sacred has been sacrificed for the profane.

This theme explodes in the opening stanza:

Reams and reams
The black-ink symbols innundate
Flooding consciousness with printed words
that possess
Definitions but know no meaning

This vision feels startlingly familiar to us here in August of 2025, as we scroll through a newsfeed that shows us a political crisis, an advertisement for socks, and a video of a cat, all in the span of three seconds. Zumwalt is channeling the very spirit of post-structuralist thought. Like thinkers such as Derrida, he sees a world where language has become an endless chain of signifiers pointing only to other signifiers, a sea of “definitions” that never arrive at a final, transcendent “meaning.”

II. The Tyranny of Classification

The problem, Zumwalt argues, is not just the information itself, but the systems we have built to contain it. He finds his central metaphor not in a computer, but in a library:

Dewey decimal has run rampant
Chasing, haunting, even lurking
in the restroom
Parasitically clinging to the walls

This is a terrifying personification. The Dewey Decimal System, that great Enlightenment project of classifying all human knowledge into a rational, accessible order, has mutated. It has escaped the confines of the library and become a monster. It is no longer a helpful guide but a “parasite” that “haunts” us even in our most private spaces.

Here, Zumwalt anticipates the work of philosophers like Michel Foucault, who argued that systems of knowledge are also systems of power and control. To classify is to define, and to define is to control. Zumwalt imagines this system of control breaking free of its cage. The promise of order has become a plague of anxiety. We are constantly being categorized, indexed, and filed by forces we cannot see. The dream of the perfectly organized library has become the nightmare of the perfectly surveilled life, a system so pervasive it clings to the bathroom walls.

The speaker’s judgment is absolute. This endless production and classification of information is either “Stark and blatant waste or frivolous gaud.” It is either useless trash or a cheap, glittering distraction. There is no middle ground for genuine value.

III. The Aesthetic Apocalypse and the New Ice Age

In the final, devastating sequence, Zumwalt shows us the ultimate cost of living in a world of pure data.

Venus dies —
—
— nonsensical nausea
The ice-age is returning

“Venus dies –“. It is a stark, shocking pronouncement. Venus, the Roman goddess of love, beauty, desire, and fertility, cannot survive in this new world. In a culture that prizes “definitions” over “meaning,” there is no room for the unquantifiable realities that Venus represents. Beauty is not data. Love cannot be indexed. This is the aesthetic apocalypse. It echoes the Frankfurt School’s warning that a world of pure, instrumental reason would inevitably crush the human spirit, art, and myth.

The speaker’s reaction is a direct callback to our earlier discussions of Existentialism: “– nonsensical nausea –“. It is the sickness that Sartre described, but it is not a nausea born from the silence of the universe. It is an informational nausea, a sickness born from the universe’s endless, meaningless chatter.

This leads to the poem’s final, terrifying prophecy: “– The ice-age is returning.” This is Zumwalt at his most prophetic and counter-intuitive. The common metaphor for the information age is one of heat, speed, and light. But Zumwalt sees the opposite. He argues that a flood of decontextualized information does not lead to enlightenment. It leads to a deep freeze of wisdom. It creates a culture that is a mile wide and an inch deep, a landscape of glittering, sterile, frozen facts. The overabundance of “babble” cools our passions, freezes our empathy, and halts the forward progress of genuine understanding. It is the entropy of the soul.

And what is so remarkable is how Zumwalt grounds this metaphorical winter in a physical reality. In 1974, the phrase “They’ve Stripped the Forest” was not just a metaphor; it was a headline, a literal description of rampant deforestation for paper production. Today, the metaphor has only sharpened and evolved. We no longer strip the forest for paper to print our babble; instead, we consume ever-increasing mountains of electrical power, often generated by burning the earth’s ancient forests of carbon, to run the server farms that house our digital babble and train our artificial intelligences. In this light, Zumwalt’s prophecy of a returning ice age becomes terrifyingly literal. It is not just a freezing of wisdom. The immense CO2 output from the very infrastructure of our Information Age threatens to disrupt the climate, potentially leading to a new era of environmental stasis and collapse. The babble, it turns out, is not weightless. It has a physical, world-altering cost.

This profound critique of waste — both the metaphorical waste of meaning and the literal waste of resources — is what makes the poem’s own form so devastatingly effective. The poem itself is minimalist, perfectly constructed, with not a single wasted word. This sharp, artistic economy stands in stark contrast to the uncontrolled, wasteful “inundation” of words it describes. The poem doesn’t just talk about the problem of babble; it performs the solution through its own concise, meaningful structure. It’s a masterclass in formal irony.

In conclusion, “They’ve Stripped the Forest for Babble” stands as one of Zumwalt’s most vital works. It argues that in our hunger for data, we have sacrificed meaning. We have traded the living forest for dead paper, and in doing so, have created a world where our systems of knowledge have become our parasites, where beauty cannot survive, and where the endless stream of information paradoxically plunges us into a new and terrible winter of the spirit.

Category:

Contemporary Poetry, Poetry, Poetry Lectures, Zumwalt Lecture

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Lecture on Alizarian Grand Slam

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.

Aaeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeiii!

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.

Category:

Modern Poetry, Philosophy, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Poetry Lectures, Zumwalt Lecture

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Changes of Note

It is with mixed feelings, and pretty intense regret, that I am aggressively scaling back on the publishing of Zumwalt poems on this site. As Zumwalt’s longtime co-editor, I cannot ignore the minimal traffic on this site and the numerous options available for me to submit some of Zumwalt’s previously unpublished poems to diverse and respected publications which will provide Zumwalt an audience of thousands or even tens of thousands of readers. I owe this to my friend Zumwalt.

When I was a data architect, I was fortunate to have had several of my articles on Data Warehousing published in Data Management Review. I know the personal joy of seeing one’s own work published in a respected periodical. Zumwalt has been deprived of this opportunity since the unfortunate, but predictable, cessation of the GHLM newsletter, which had contracted with him for exclusive publication rights. He insists that publication of his work is not important and even scoffs at its future likelihood. I suspect this is not so on either count.

In order to keep this blog active, I will continue to publish anything Zumwalt sends me exclusively targeted for this blog — provided that I cannot persuade him to allow me to forward such material on to potential publishers. I will also continue to author posts like “Fifty Year Friday”, which showcases a combination of my flawed writing against reminiscences of some of the great music of fifty years ago. I wish I had time to write more — I gave up Century Sunday, Seventy Year Saturday and other features due to time constraints; I wish I could write better — I gave that up a long time ago — I write for the joy of writing and I am fine with one reader or ten, ten being about the maximum audience I have for any given post.

But as typical with my ruminations, I have veered off-track, at the expense at both my message and your patience.

My plan is this: Fill up some of the empty blog-time by engaging a well-respected, now-retired former literary critic (I will say no more out of respect to protect this individual’s identity, which is this person’s wish.) He has indicated he will record a short lecture for each previously published Zumwalt poem on zumpoems.com. I will use a software app I have to transcribe each lecture and post it here. Not sure when he will deliver the first lecture, but he is very knowledgeable on both poetry and all of the Zumwalt poems on this site and all the Zumwalt poems that have been previously published in the GHLM newsletter and the original GHLM (which, acronym, dear reader, simply stands for Good Humor Literary Magazine) — and, I believe, as I finish this long-winded, poorly written sentence, is something he can do easily off-the-cuff, with minimal time and preparation required. I have seen him lecture live on impromptu-requested topics, and it is quite something to have witnessed.

Until then, you continue as my distantly cherished and greatly appreciated friend, so please return so we can meet again.

Category:

Century Sunday, Contemporary Poetry, Fifty Year Friday, Modern Poetry, Music, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Zumwalt

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Washington’s Post

Washington’s Post

This government,
the offspring of our own choice,
uninfluenced and unawed,
the support of your tranquility at home,
your peace abroad,
of that very liberty
which you so highly prize,
(Experience in my own eyes)

you have in a common cause fought and triumphed together,
will not exercise more charity in deciding on the opinions,
and actions of one another.
One of the most baneful foes of republican government,
brought to the verge of dissolution due to diversity of Sentiments.

Lifted them to unjust dominion,
will, if there is not a change in the system,
be our downfall as a Nation.

With the real design to direct, control,
counteract, or awe,
to confine each member of the society
within the limits prescribed by the laws,

The powers of the Executive
of the United States are more definite,
and better understood,

to guard
the public good.

— George Washington (edited by zumwalt)

zumwalt’s notes:

Phrases from first and fourth stanzas are from Farewell Address (1796).
Phrases from second stanza are from Farewell Address and Letter to 1792 Alexander Hamilton.
Phrases from third stanza from a letter written in 1783.
Phrases from fifth stanza is from a letter written in 1794.
Sixth and final stanza is from the 1790 Address to Congress.

This poem was awarded third place (bronze) in a 2025 allpoetry.com contest: https://allpoetry.com/contest/2879139–Paid-members–Win–50:-Found-Poem

Category:

2025, Poems, Poetry, Politics, Zumwalt

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from one to zen

the moment has arrived
the moment is over

— Zumwalt (1998)

Category:

1998, F, Philosophy, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Zumwalt

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Unicosm

Unicosm

some like to read the railroad tracks
reflect on journeys past
some gaze at the sky
anticipate upcoming cloud formations

Some discuss running away
what chases them
what ensnares them in place

Each creates their own universes
Storing them up
Or discarding them in the dumpster with scattered package wrapping and useless electronics

— Zumwalt (2016)

Category:

2016, U

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untitled (Sept. 7, 2011)

thick trees engulf the hidden spell;
soft streams collide on risen ground;
so much, so fast, so far we go —
then leave the remnants of the trampled dust.

–Zumwalt (2011)

Category:

2010s, 2011, Poems, Zumwalt

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mental block

mental block

spiraling parapet spinning passages
sweeping the bleakness
clouds sail skimming the
gravy scum of lifetimes of labor.

I know
of what you go
and where you want
but pretense
the avenger of moonglow
cries out against all that is anguished

and taps on the counter
like the frozen ballerina
on the shoulders of your shoelace.

— Zumwalt (1980s)

Category:

1980s, M

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Hands Off, Bob Avakian!

Hands Off, Bob Avakian!

Shuffling
— In dark and dank
Howling
— A dialectic chant.

Genuflect to the rotund Mongol
Take, eat
This is my body
Of confusing, Confucian
Union by laws.
“Forgive me, Dad:
            I did a Tenzing Norgay
            On the north gate of the White House.”
“Ego te absolvo –
            You did it for the proles.”

— Zumwalt (1981)

Category:

1980s, 1981

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keptomania

keptomania

gather all that gathers up
To grab for good as gravy should be grabbed
To claim one’s stake for keeping sake
and reserve away from all

greed and gluttony strapped in gunnysack
gimply put away all the wayward weighs
wasted once and recycled past

kept pets,
kept toys,
kept keys to control access

slaves, maids,
husbands, wives,
siblings, offspring
access to premium cable

I seize the day and don’t let go
I am stuck in the ultra-glare of the sun
we are at a standoff
I must have it
but it hides soon enough
hurried away by the horizon

the thief
like the state
thinks nothing is ours

the state
like the thief
wants it all
until ours is nothing

I control the corner
when I step out of
the crosswalk lines
I watch how the cars
must veer away

should we go for it all
or issue stop losses
trailing furtively at the underbelly of bollinger bands?

grace and forgiveness
get in the way of my layaway plan
I put something down
and say it’s mine

keep it
keep up
keep going
keep alive
keep quiet

keep house
keep around
keep open
keep close
keep away

keep at it
keep up with
keep in touch
keep me in mind

keep busy
keep track
keep on truckin’
keep a tune

keep good counsel
keep your independence
keep your word
keep you from harm

keep regular hours
keep the right time
keep up appearances
keep appointments

keep the peace
keep the law
keep good company
keep the ball rolling
keep a secret
keep the correct time

keep them in sight
keep your cool
keep your powder dry
keep your hat on
keep your mouth shut
keep your hands off
keep an eye out
keep at arm’s length
keep your nose clean
keep a stiff upper lip
keep a close watch

keep the car running
keep the dogs out

keep the faith
keep the commandments
keep the sabbath

keep the straight and narrow
keep them on the edge of their seats
keep them against their will
keep the wolf from the door

keep down a good man
keep it in your pants
keep it together
keep the change

keep me company
keep me posted
keep me going
keep what we have

keep it away
keep it in good taste
keep it moving along

keep the prize
keep it all
keep what you can
keep what’s left
keep deluding yourself
that you only own what you have
and you only have what you own
keeping one thought all along
and keeping for keeps
(both liked and unliked,
marked up, marked down,
taken, unlocked,
cracked, hacked and uncaulked,
packages, kits, kilts, kippers, woks and yaks,
hooks, corks, kimonos, kimchee, caskets and casks,
books, backpacks, rakes, cakes, and wrinkled,
crinkled tickets for the clack-clack rackety tracks of oft-mocked,
poky,
flaky,
shaking,
creaking,
slinking,
sinking, red-inking,
budget-breaking Amtrak)
keepsakes for the sake of keeping

— Zumwalt (2011)

Category:

2011, k

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