I. Apoplethecary
There were days when, fettered by the combustion engine, tick-tocking toked-up daze
Of an electric, lithophane, plugged in life,
Honed by a thousands hints when so small things became wrapped up in skin,
So begin to fester underground in the belly of the beast beset by newsfeeds
Of felled trees and ever more pepper days
Marked by the beast and the belching factories idolized in memorandum through hazy skies
Making forever into a melted thing of rice cracker thin lives
Vicarious existence wilting into virtual reality, local realty prostituting the land
To feed the mechanized hand that never stops asking for more
Moaning primal dirges near the convergence under the eye of the supermoon
In patched up hills where Eve buried the memory of eternity in the clouds above Orleans
Dragging autoparts through the fern forest for shelter in the blue dawn of revolutions not yet begun
But only dreamed of in the parallel worlds made in the uneven valleys of change
Higgs and oil rigs meeting in a future where all things fall apart only to be made anew
Dredged through dry riverbeds under the tousled head of the Amazon
Mud still clinging to hair – this the baptism that never slips away,
Seeing wheat fields waving underwater in the white water dancing of unshaven creatures
Fledged into saints of untainted faith screaming mercy into the void
Ever unyielding making unfeeling the marker of success
Tearing into sense deprivation or depravity in the impossibility of a full stop
Sharing resistance as a whisper or a dream
Almost imobile, relativist, morally ambiguous, value ambivalence wreaking havoc on meaning
I remembered
In flashing reverence the wraith days, those holy days of another time
Written in umbilical ties
Thrashing electric through pulsing veins
Outstretched in mingling with the dewdamp air
Spoken in sleep between the generations, hidden from nation, social resign, creed, from dessicating languages, from untruthful sages, mergers of mange ridden worlds, from the descending of the ages in ever more opulent rags, from violent Power and watching eyes, from wildlife tags and trackers, from bonafide saints and from all things that make divinity into commodity
Made glorious in disguise
Lived in the words that have since gone extinct, known only in body, embodied in the uncut forests, in springtime torrents, in noname glances, in infinite chances at a consciousness that does not eat itself alive.
My childishness knows the brevity that is empiricism, this cynicism so brashly lit behind the bluescreen
Oh bright resistance of a futile ideology, how you fall, how you shall maul reality in your dying throws
Oh how we shall sing your ceremonial goodbyes, oh joyous woes how they shall remember:
As if somber was a song so the beat is low and close, pantherlike in the blacklights
The band playing at the last strike of the night when the kids come out in crazed comfort
Dolled up eyes unprotected against the dioxide mills
To be seen, appreciated, pulled from the solitude of a once removed existence
To dance in the muchness of a woven world where no thread is not tied to all that ever
Could or would will itself to live.
The muchness
So unfair, oh silken places left bare and scraped and scattered and dismembered and remembered.
II. Echo
We are the heirs
To a tyrant’s lonely home, where pillaged and prideful remnants make dissident bedfellows
We are the heirs
To chopped parsley and minced meant-somethings left rancid on marble
We are the heirs
To too-hot country fairs, where in metalhot cars the soul screams energy
We are the heirs
To ecstasy of excess, to future dyings and reassembled technologies
We are the heirs
To hear me nows, to built up boroughs, to wild youth, to no man’s land, to one last stand
We are the heirs
Do you hear us? Do you care to know us – our lonely days in the shadow of once great waves
Left slithering on the shore, to be no more, dry on the count of four, knocking at death’s door. Do you care or are your wearied eyes too blind to love? Are your hippopotamus ears too shrunken to be enough – to form human from flesh – brother from broken thing – life from sloughed off skin and bread husks? Do you love us?
III. To a Vegetative Status
If you love us
There is no hierarchy in the lost corridors where the doors of perception swing languid in abandoned mines until the endless times.
If you love us
All these words will be disregarded, unturned, replanted in the garden where the wicked woman who never was wicked makes brother and sister, tying the cathedral saplings to one another.
If you love us
There is a wishgranter, a salamander, a soul speaker, a cracking voice on the intercom, an old heater still soulful with morningcold children.
If you love us
There is still time. And it is not mine, no it is not mine.
If you love us
There is no matter that does not matter, no language that is incomplete, no culture that is cultified and codified and obstruse and ontologically obtuse.
If you love us
Magdalena will hibernate in drain pipes and pipe dreams and pied pipers in the black life mud, lifeblood still unwitnessed like Schrodinger’s cat, like bacterium, like May rain.
If you love us
There are no remnants left untombed, no lovers left dead too soon, no unbound books, no thoughts estranged from word estranged from the body burned.
If you love us,
It shall live.
IV. Bacterialism
And it remains
And it remains
Unstained and unclaimed, it remains
And these remains will be excavated in the unjudging room, taken from Pompeii’s tomb, from the revived womb of the matriarch whose heart still beats to spoken word – to Keats, to Waldman, to Ginsburg, to street music and birdsong, to tanoak and redwood made anew in metaphor, to soulful existence, to linguistic repentance, to shorebirds and the core of her sore wounds, taken too soon, to what you heard before you were born, to what you felt before you were shorn, to what the waif in the white room longed for, to what the sailor in the phospherences knew, to the great blue and purple and green, to the thing unseen, to the feminine night that moves balletically, introspectively, to the churning upset and the unfeigned love.
And it remains,
Soft spoken, unbroken, no tokenism, no mind-matter schism, no atheism able to explain it to the byway, rundown on the highway; no do-it-my-way, no sky blemish, no dam damned fishways to picket fence it in, to operate away the esophagus of song, to denigrate or philosophize or emigrate it away. No way.
V. Pantheistic Hope
I will be there
In Vancouver where the fairies fall, up in Vancouver where the elders have been betrayed,
Where flayed and knotched and dead they take their first and final joyride
Past big eyes in small cars, past long sighs and soul scars
To metastatize into soundboards so that even music, that last holy thing, has been catabolized.
I will be there
Dancing on the grey expanse before the gutted monolith, watching what has to be the last woman on Earth pack her bags at 10 PM and take out the trash and take her leave of a deceased and embalmed elken meadow, utterly and profoundly alone.
I will be there
With the bacteria graciously staying alive, with the altruism of the afflicted plant, with the egret’s evening egress, with the whale’s uheard cry, with the rhizobiome’s last breath, there in Tsaurai where the living onces are with us still.
I will be there
The last woman on Earth, stitched into canonical wisdom, living in dreams in the Pacific grasping for sharks and rays that long ago left us for the eternal tomb, drifting melancholy where 52 Hz has become universal.
I will be there,
Rebellious in my joy, joyous with you who dance magnetic, with you who do not shy from an ecosystemic reality, with you who can regognize personhood as it touches you in every life form you have ever encountered, with you who are hopeful, with you who are doubtful, who’s throats are full with crying and soot and laughter and resistance, with you who believe in miracles, with you who too wish to be there.
I will be there.
Say heretical, hysterical, oh but it’s only theoretical
And wonder why the thoughts you have all pull down, almost drowning, in despair
Gasp for air – grap a bag – breathe deep – pop pills and methane in your sleep – then again
Say mechanical, stand stick stock still, damn it all, make dust motes
on the windowsill where the widows have lain
Magnets to mark the continental shift, take familiar risks, break a leg, replace dog dead, days of lithium
Say warning:cliff upcoming, mind is numbing, wonder at the lack of wonder, wander in warehouses that
Never end, turn a bend, go on a bender, point guns at the Earth til you end Her, love your child and send her away, say May Day, say entropy, love your pent up energy, dissipate, uncreate, find guilt in your procreating sin, sing Sing Swan Song for the longitudinal stretching, say no more cavetching, say wretching is cleansing, say unblemished, say moulded, molten, moulting, loved and broken, much cherished thing I love you!