Anacreon’s Place

Rectitude is your altitude; breaking dreams your
humanity-affirming raison d’être; students flock to you
for abuse and to hear your mighty words so
they may troupe to the coliseum that is
today’s meme-agora to be just like you,
someday handing out inscribed bronze
diplomas (like retiring Roman officers once got)
and basking in the flea-bitten radiance
of parasitic herd instinct.

To judge and not be judged, to speak
and to have one’s words engraved in
marble and set in halls of puissant
inutility; to act without meaningful
consequence because to you your
minions don’t matter, mulling the
rinds of rotted melon and declaiming
from the shrunken heart you still
possess whose small voice a few
yet hear, you are the biggest fish
in a small pond, and an angler is coming
with an angle of his own.

Fishing from the lap of boulders strewn about
a mist-telescoped valley, I am not catching
a damned thing and don’t mind because the point is
I am here and not there, and I cannot even hear the
737 whose contrails spread luminous crystalline flakes
impossibly high above the northern stretch of a ridge
bounded by Jurassic ferns and contemplated by the ego
of an escapee.

Above the darkness I am not called to sunder whims with sordid mummeries from the thews of wisdom. He said they’d been guacamole’d. Yeah, that was the way they would come through. Because they have come in to the unquiet dream that is the thing they have done. How can you self identify as Christian with that on your conscience? Running from who knows what only knowing that if you stop, the thoughts catch up and the tears run to flood. You can’t fake blood. Full stop.

The past has no picayune splendor; her consciousness of present
ditties and smashed hemispheres of mutual need notwithstanding.
A demi-moon of solvent mercury rests on hominid shoulders, which
we will not comprehend. We sailed far to regard democracy in action
on beaches of diamond gravel. Someone told us that if you dropped
a match on a petrol-soaked strand, diamonds would survive the flame,
but we see now that it was a lie. Diamonds are just compressed
coal after all, and they crumble as quickly as wrapping paper
in a bonfire, while our children asphyxiate on the smoke that rises
in twisted clouds, a soothing aroma to the gods of murder.

Waiting for the sun to rise in his head and at the matte-line of hills and horizon – now dappled with a hint of first rays and industrial smog – he is trying to derive order from the madness of the commonweal’s personalities – alternately raging ignorance and fantasizing nobility when his mechanical lovers sleep without snoring beside him, flickering rainbow lights on the walls and ceiling from between fluttering eyelids, cooing robot dreams.

“You think they are machines because you’re autistic,” one therapist told him, the one who tried to delicately wire him back into the mech-oversoul. “It’s just you can’t understand that affective level of being on its own terms because of the way your head is wired so you have to objectify it. Because it’s a kind of life you can’t identify with, and seems to operate on principles you don’t understand, you call it machinelike.”

“Well and good, and possibly true, but it’s my dreams that first told me I am looking at a biomechanical system and that it is designed to trap souls as effectively as the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix traps minds. And my heart tells me I’m not wrong. The beast has its tendrils in every human being – body and soul and all denominations thereof – using hemoglobin – perhaps, this is just a theory – as a kind of dynamo. And the sad thing is, the beast is not a single will. It’s not even a conspiracy. Because it has no real intelligence. It is a chaotic assemblage of loose entelechies driving toward a singularity Burroughs knows where.

But god-less remains in its heaven. The last rough beast that slouched toward Bethlehem to be born – in 1904 if accounts are accurate – still languishes in narcissistic self-formulation. I feel the need to escape. Into the sky perhaps? Or into the Mind? They are the same thing. “

His rodent-like mind-scurryings are beginning to annoy him. He is trying to lose weight, and has succeeded in quitting smoking tobacco. But the cigar has turned. What was sweet a few months ago lacks taste and luster. He thought that by quitting his job and beginning to live his dream, he would leave the rat race forever, only to discover over the months and after the honeymoon that the rat race still laps frantically inside him, and its imperatives are deafening even when he chooses not to listen.

He wonders if it has stained his bones as effectively as it has his synapses. He thinks, “This is why Hermes gave us comedy.” And watches Rodney Dangerfield.

At some point during the weekend one of the heads of the English department came to me and told me she wanted my help to bring some zing back into the curriculum, that she was tired of just rehashing cold coffee, and she felt the overall quality both of instruction and the students’ participation was decreasing. I agreed I would do what I could – noting that she was assuming that I would be going to school there to complete a new degree. I told her I would help in whatever way I could.

I woke up to find that the walls of my room were being taken down to provide space to watch a film. A huge number of people I knew – and many I didn’t – were ushered in. I had conversations with several old childhood friends, including Matt from college – who I was a little embarrassed to know still had my paper of confessions I had once sent him when torn by evangelical guilt – and Chris who asked if I ever heeded advice. I told him I usually forget to think about it.

The presenter asked me to confirm something he was saying was funny, and “take it from him, he went to seminary.” I believe my comments were drowned out in the overall noise level. I saw Angie – a hottie from High School whom I haven’t seen in twenty years – and Vita, another High School beauty with noticeably graying hair, who mentioned that she had just been kicked out of the computer center for being vocal about something that offended her. She continued to be rather insubordinate.

The nadir of the morning – evening – whichever it was, was a woman who had had some kind of brain surgery that left her brain still exposed. She was trying to participate as if there was nothing unusual about the situation – people were walking out on the meeting in droves and I eventually followed, I need to find a bathroom anyway. To my dismay, it seemed the woman was following me, although I don’t think I had anything to do with it. It was merely the natural direction of travel in the building…

I went to find a bathroom. I was in the kitchen – a huge steam-punk looking space with gears and trolleys, looking more like an industrial facility than a kitchen – when flashing lights went off and we were order to leave the building because of some mechanical trouble that was potentially dangerous. In fact, it was raining at a hurricane level. We kept having to go from level to level to keep ahead of floodwaters. What didn’t so much impact me at the time was that the waters never exactly stayed at the same level, they always subsided – what we were running from was always the wave front of a new surge.

Eventually, we got very close to the summit of the complex and I was saying Hail Marys under my breath, wondering if this was what it felt like to die. I thought briefly about casualty lists back home and that I was likely to be on one. I vaguely wondered what people’s reaction would be. The storm increased in intensity, and skylights started to shatter.

The war continues. The emergency has been upgraded to insurgency along the east coast, parts of the mid-west, Colorado and Wyoming. It seems that everyone from the Hellfolk to the SAS is getting in on it.

 I was one of those detailed to defend the Hovel, an indefensible monstrosity of beautiful carpentry and abominable masonry, located deep in the Blue Ridge, that appears to have been selected for preservation for reasons known only to the arcane community. We knew we were on a death mission, because the Silverfish were our first attackers.  We managed to beat them back - at times with fisticuffs and entrenching tools - and they pulled away. There was much shouting and backslapping, but I knew it was a feint. I took a fire-team to the other end of the hovel, dodging sniper beams covering the windows, and when I got to the other side, and joined with my dug-in comrades, I saw the silverfish were heading this way now.

Still, we got reinforcements - ships, mecha, magical troops. I engaged in single combat with one of the silvers - no mean feat - as the battle raged elsewhere, and had the pleasure of auditing their thoughtwaves - they wanted to send more troops to take me down because I had “pinged” - shown up on their numenal radar so to speak. Then that fight was over.

Before I know it I am out leading a patrol to reconnoitre into the foothills. We run into an RAF crawler recon unit. They are delighted to see a “Yank” combat team still alive. They say things weren’t looking so good down south along the coast when they made the Leap. I reflect that they rarely have for at least two centuries.

The bestial eye-corner creeps
turning blinding night orbs on soft
paws whose claws dig trenches
in the loam that fill up with the wet
breath of fleeing gloom.

We sit on the rocks for a new frame of reference,
easing tired muscles -I pulled something inside my hip
it feels like - and the ragged line where
land meets open air spindles in our
churning temples as if to say
“do not fold or mutilate.”

The monster that stalked from Augustine’s pages
watches us hungrily from the ebon spaces between
elms, but does not attack. It does not need to.
We are its bidding, to fence straight back into
the metropoli, shredding silken delicate minds.

We are not conscious
of any of this.

The briefing continues as the gentleman from the New York Times
expresses bafflement that a third stringer from Stuarts Draft,
Virginia who couldn’t hack it loading trucks, answering phone calls,
or spinning spandex is trying to write poetry for princes, essays
for theologians, and jams for sax players.

Not for princes, the poet corrects.
For princesses.

The circle stretches closed with
a quick buckle, and a shimmy,
of the conveyor.

waiting for the freedom bird
28 days and a wakeup
sweep and clear in the offing
his heart would break
but its gone, melted
out all over his fatigues
in a dream last night and
if he let himself think about it
he would realize his soul
is quite gone, the massacre
of the villagers at the edge
of the dike will be talked about
by historians for the next
forty years plus.

He is empty and weeping,
shooting holes in an oil
drum in a mad minute
of desire as green gothic
birds thump beyond the
tangled horizons of jungle
that are the entire universe,
his world, blood and sweat
streaking his skin and clothes
his love and his hate, as he loves
and hates himself.

to the center of oneself
with thoughts words and music
of ones who have been dead
for centuries

artifacts dug out of
Eresh, had to dodge
bullets to get in and
out.

What I saw there,
scarred my mind.
What I became
will scar yours.