Reach into
this silence
we call brilliance,
the bomb;
Lao-Tzu’s cat stretches
on the couch and
a Grecian urn melts
to nothing in front
of the radiator.
This matters,
whether or not
we forget. It will
scratch its talons
through the ripples
of our minds and the
waves will surge forth
and break against
the walls leaving
stillness, an unmarked
car.
The hole within us opened up
and tore a continent in the
decadence of eternity. You
could plant fish there and
grow cornbread. You could
spill a cup of empty onto
the water and grow thorns.
This is the mutability
I’m speaking of. Rivers of
it. Like oil in Nigeria.
Dishwater running over
the edge of Niagra Falls.
I was there, and caught
the fork, while the neighbors
had me over for dinner.
Pangaea recoalesces
in the bathtub and
we learn to burn its
fumes in a primitive device
for heating octaves.
They are mellow
and yield strange
energy.
fragments tantalize
moss up the sheer wall,
wounding granite cleft a thousand
epicycles into Ptolemy’s eyestrain
at trying to figure out the
nuance of gophering
infobytes between
stars singing sugar tones
before the quasar shriek
of galaxyquake,
membranes fracture
my headspin and I
am now still on the surface
of the waters that
have lapped at my consciousness
since before I pushed out
from between Isis’ legs.
How much pain is there in the world?
Can you quantify it? Can you explain it?
What is there to be explained? Why does
one feel the need for an explanation?
Is it not like the crumbling of earth
at the edge of the precipice in the face
of a storm? The storm comes
lashing trees, washing out
roads, pushing boulders
off mountains,
changing the landscape
little by little.
Cataclysm by cataclysm.
Tempest in a teapot
becomes mysterium tremendum.
In the cave, a small voice whispers.
Finding a comfort level in craft is worrisome
because while the hourglass shattered spilling
sand grains everywhere and the wax melted
onto the paper in pleasing visual euphonies,
one wants to be called forth by storm, by flame,
by want, by God, and not to have it in the
back pocket or any pocket for that matter.
Because the art of requiem is not a portable
hole for just any poet to spit tobacco juice
in.
How much revelation can a woodchuck chuck,
the Earth being round, and Ezekiel splendid?
The cats at the gate mew easily,
spilling urns full of old ideas they
are tired of. As are we.
If Wallace Stevens had any clue about what
I’m seeing now he didn’t leave it for me but I
give him credit for superior philosophical insight
anyhow.
That we are not machines
I take to be axiomatic but
that I can continue to breathe
this toxic oxygen is without doubt impractical
- take for example the walrus, whose odes to the aurora
borealis consist of floppings about on the ice to
rend fish who wish to be left alone of course
as do we all but the walrus dives - or rather,
burrows, into the water to pursue them
elegantly, elephantine, and moving
mountains of water to do so.
This ungainly creature on the ice attains
divinity in its dive under the sea, for what
was misshappen and purposeless above becomes
pure precision, beauty, and evolution-driven
lethality on a par with, no superior to, any human
cobbled cruise missile.
I say this to say that I am not a machine.
Yes, I slip rather unacrobatically on the ice, and
am not fond of cracking said substance to split
into my dinner, or any atom.
But once I get into the water, watch me
become one with the spiral glyphs that
nourish and communicate, express and
extend me. Cybernesis is no addition to
what human being is - it Is the holon
of self. Cybernetics don’t add, baby,
they are. And the extensions of one
are tentacles of conventicles
of memes, dreams, schemes…
The year approached. The clustership returned, drawn to the remote epicycle by a conjunction of its system axis with the galactic center that occurred once every 117.894 triadic cycles. Not that the clustership visited every system in conjunction with the galactic central axis, far from it, but this one was special. It took many, many orbits of a mid-range system about the galactic core for the cluster to traverse the entire galactic disk, even at relativistic velocities. But the self-sustaining information ecosystem that governed the orbs had no expectation of travel at a different pace. It continued brooding, and breeding more of itself, and creating, morphing, transmuting, and shedding internal information cultures by the thousands…
He trusts that painterly gesture plights more deeply
than boredom or gastroinestinal distress. Woodsmoke
curls in his nostrils, a hint of industry; factory remnants
cling to the gap-toothed line of hills whose foundations
he played among as a boy.
Conjoining useless notions, seeming true but
actually a depth of jagged knowing that
makes one steadily stronger but sleepless;
the Azhar book collects fragments of piety
he never prayed but admires and resonates with-
a blue note wings between street lamps
and turns south in the deep pain glowering
at the riven world.
They tell him, “Chuck, you’re getting too old
for this nonsense.” But,” he says, “metaphysics
are all I have to fall back on. That and the back-taxes from
last years royalties.” “Um, dude, that’s a debit, not a credit.”
“Precisely, that’s my point. I’m epistemologically untenable,
to sprout regaling through my veins, limbs, and marrow,
and make of me a circus freak, but a merry one.”
“But your declining years, and expanding waistline…”
“You have to trust me on this. When I was a wee lad -
tooting in the pond with the ducks and the blondes -
I thought there was more to life than this. Now I realize, there
is only THIS…” Chucks opens his hands to reveal a mirrorlike
point of light that expands to include his, their, mine, and your
consciousness. In a flash it fans out the the extremeties of
the cosmos, and disappears, leaving Chuck holding a fig leaf,
standing in front of busts of Meriwether Lewis, and Ellen
Denegeres.
The mother lode split twice,
because the mountain
I was born on isn’t there
any more - the mining company
crumbled it down and
trucked it away. Ripped a desert
from rich soil, bird-song resounds
off the jumbled limestone.
I find the echo amusing.
But the empty just hurts.
Reinvention
Of the heart
Parts of me
Electrons spin
Madly
Boson orbits
Collocate
My eyes are
Useless in a
Realm of
Chronic night, must
Use feel and
Touch and smell;
I taste the ink and
Oil and dab the brush
Onto canvas I can’t
See, neither can
You, we must feel
Our way to paint, to
Burn, to breathe.