Birthday Pome

I was born into a chair
clutching a pencil,
the mouse cord my eventual
umbilical, super 8
our race memory

my spine, wriggling like the
Tacoma Narrows,
bore soft-sculpture
ambitions, radio-controlled
eyeballs, shuttering
cavernous digits,
carpal turnstiles

@31 I would be a spaceman
from 2001, or at least a monkey
from the dawn of man &
I would grok all that
psychedelic stuff, at last

so I thought. 10/26/88 I wrote:
"contrast is really satisfying."
& wouldn't it be?
politically? yet
an aphorism is no plan for living,
& thank God I divine my
kinesthetics like a dog
chasing its tail

extracted again, by Dart,
learning to creep
with the frogs, &

the single habit of
highly effective anatomies:
inhibition
(forget Stephen R. Darwin,

the lost packets,
forgive the dirt
from the terrarium)

allow your artware
to be free, so that
the backbone can lengthen
and broaden