Much of a Muchness

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!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.