Contents
1. Las Meninas in the Digital Echo
2. Lost in Nexus
3. Death in Transit
4. Indicting Eyes
5. Mr. Collingwood's Living-Room Reveries
6. Reflections at Night in the Urban Fog
7. Morning Blue
8. If the Ox Says It's O.K.
9. Children After Cicero
10. Verso and Recto
11. In the Dark Season
12. Black Swan in Snow
13. Owl in Darkest Blue
14. The Library of the Sandman
15. Raven in the White Unknown
16. Magpie in the Red Door
17. Maybe and Perhaps
18. The Conscious Tree
19. Two Sides of Innocence
20. The Option
21. Convalescence
22. Dream Desert Song
23. Thresholds of Peace
24. What the Wall Said
25. A Revenant of Russell Square
26. The Temporal Exodus
27. The Poet's Pardon
LAS MENINAS IN THE DIGITAL ECHO
Of the historical gaze lies the locked realm,
And the stares defy the age of Golden dream.
From visible to invisible and back to the visible,
The sovereignty of the center, of the image,
Is no more but an echo of the residing signifier.
A time has passed outside the frame, incurring
Analogue currents of presence and aura gained;
Inside, the repetitive folds of space and sight;
Either the equivalent or other the qua
Of borne glances exchanged and feints drawn.
From classical to modern to post to now,
An age, and court, bridged an end that ever begins
And never begot beyond the Infanta;
A hypernormal era gone, over and over, towards
The network, the digital episteme, the artist’s techne.
In the written code, the king dreams he is a king,
Though reflected by a gaze within the system’s binarism,
And held captive in perpetuity by a phantom joy
And delusive wrest that tricks the monarch into
Believing his own sovereignty over the artist.
LOST IN NEXUS
City, your polluted non-soul pisses acid rain,
precipitated by those who keep you erect,
and enclose themselves within you,
as you digest, daily, a morsel of their life-force,
and belch the industrial bile of what you're fed, subserviently,
to maintain your system of operation,
under the prime directive: to produce and consume,
buy and sell, discard and waste.
This is our self-constructed cage,
gilded with opportunity in the market place,
where dreams of luxury beat voraciously
in our pining hearts, because the signs say so!
And who's to question the ubiquitous adverts
insisting on one's attention to influence
a future intention?
Conditional response; subliminal control,
directing choice under the guise of freedom
and dictating the standards of pleasure,
which only hold a narrow margin in recessive minds,
deemed popular, acceptable, normal, and imperative
to capitalism - the modern religion.
Feeding rapaciously on the synthetic cornucopia
of mass produced "stuff", devoid of organic redemption;
the city's children, exploited cogs of the Great Wheel,
living a life, or so they believe, of individual decision,
under the proud banner of constitutional democracy,
continue, unaware, and mired in regulated ignorance.
The ruse, plied by the spectres of power,
that turns the world counter to the globe,
oinks its way to boundless profit, as the city gradually assimilates
the collective: not distinguishing pigs from sheep.
DEATH IN TRANSIT
Lifeless she loomed, though not clinically dead,
Staring with lassitude into the silent emptiness
Of her vimless world. You could feel time prematurely
Having its way with her careworn face, hanging
Submissively, oblivious to those occupying the same
Subway car, who, themselves, bled their own apathy.
Not even a trace of sadness could be detected
Within the moribund air choking yet another morning commute.
She, slouched catatonic, with desert eyes that
Could only weep salt, with gaunt, wrinkled hands
Just strong enough, it seemed, to applaud death,
Had blurred the point of her joyless destination.
It mattered little now, like her miasmal life.
Could nothing, but the cold metal box enclosing her,
Move the disabled soul of this sepulchral woman,
Like the boundless energy so teeming in her youth?
INDICTING EYES
Besides the societal conditioning of averting one's eyes
When passing a so-called stranger on the street,
I have increasingly sensed nowadays a more intense
Glare, however brief and subtle, deflected back from an
Innocent look that has apparently been perceived as:
an unwarranted invasion
when the eyes meet
like two particles colliding.
Will there come a time when fields-of-vision are policed?
A voyeuristic culture obsessed with other lives
Are conversely rendered paranoid in their own,
Playing the dual role with inevitable conflict
Evoking the Ouroboros of the mind with unwitting
Precision to swallow the self whole from within:
an inhuman shell
will be all to leave
these streets barren.
Has there come a time for our soul to bury itself?
MR. COLLINGWOOD'S LIVING-ROOM REVERIES
The blood on that magazine cover isn't real
But the disturbance outside whets the appetite.
I'm a man of numbers trapped in an unwanted alphabet.
The topographic plains of these tanned walls confide
An alien silence buried inside the husk of dried seeds.
A video Tower of Babel avails itself for a death of time,
And on the mount sits a sordid commissioner of sorts.
He is situated between an applauding rabble of libertines,
And a cause for trouble's sake to placate some illusive mandate:
Outside and obscured by the mist lies a serpentine meal of itself.
I'm no wonder among partial quarks and quantum scenes;
A wayward lance from a dusty history book pierced my shadow.
O! Godspeed the sounds of my faux Art Deco disc player:
The sole redeemer and counterpoint to my battles with the lamp
That seems to always goad my left elbow into anatomical mutiny.
In theory, my tea can ponder the hermeneutics of cyberspace.
There's a Persian polo game on eternal pause inside a frame:
"Bold rider, never, never canst thou score - yet, do not grieve,
For grand Persepolis has been restored into virtual evermore."
The tea leaves say all ye need to know of a beauty beyond truth.
I hear war drums muffled beneath the truncated tusk of courage;
And a bank statement whispers, "I own you", from across the room.
The furniture has conspired to expropriate my favorite memories.
I am disturbed by these fancies that have coiled inside of me:
A certain reality for an indefinitely lost, indefinitely filed thing.
REFLECTIONS AT NIGHT IN THE URBAN FOG
There is no sign of a Ferris rendering from here on the concrete,
No vista worth admiring from on high in the business zone as the
Fog catches the spotlight's projection just above a dull skyscraper.
Now decked-out as artless, mirrored columns, these giant verticals
Echo down the boulevard like hypnotic doppelgangers of commodious
Illusion; averting a cracked mind before this pavement's crystal bloom.
Below the weathered brim of this bygone fedora, I see, ghostly before
Me, a perfect stranger, perhaps another somnambulist of the city wander,
Imperceptibly, past a neo-Victorian streetlight long beyond the gaslight.
Like an animated version of "A Couple in the Street" by Angrand, or
The transitory figures of Seurat, I remain indiscernible to the other:
Apparitions lost outside of history in the chilled mist of an urban ruin.
Trees in captivity are studied like botanists by the mannequins in the
Window display; their steely, soulless gaze paying homage to the plant
World like frozen shadows dressed in fineries befitting the new nature.
Downtrodden denizens drip into a shabby diner like street drainage
Mumbling to themselves in Chandleresque haikus, the two o'clock
Blues: a case-worth of stories for any old typewriter 'n' pack 'o' smokes.
I holster no hardware and exhale a yellow fog, chewing a cheap memory's
Ramifications down these overexposed streets strewn with the typical
Detritus, and the promise of 1001 more images from night's program.
In the waning distance, above a static horizon of the avenue's vanishing
Point, I see a figure in soft focus like a sepia-toned secret harboring a
Clue to this dimensional crisis as time and space are once again rebooted.
MORNING BLUE
I could wish this morning blue
less somber than a funeral march,
and more serene than a lapsed catholic.
But I persist to chew its persistence,
openly without regret and gladly within its measure:
a placid declaration of mutual resignation,
neither sorry nor willing to chase each other away,
despite a feverish soul unable to accept its evanescence,
and a subjective perception unsure of its own reflection.
Twittering bones of unseen fear abound, folding inwardly
and swaddled in darkness, obtaining a purer sense
of isolation, locked inside a silent scream.
The days flee, imperceptibly, as time incurs the indifference
of a single, solitary universe, no bigger than an average man.
This is pale and true;
this realization in black,
yet, conversely, as white too, and no less false
under logical scrutiny somewhere in the grey.
This is pleasure as much as is pain.
I should wish this morning blue forever,
whatever language of account dictates the day's numerous phases,
thus ending my course on one of those unspecified days,
usually unbidden and sudden,
and almost always never wished.
IF THE OX SAYS IT'S O.K.
I will cross the bridgeless gorge of the great divide
that separates thought from action...
I will fly to Singapore without the aid of a passport...
I will write the next "Ulysses" upon a fractal of immensity
where day cannot express the sun's rays...
All this and more to more this day, if the ox says it's o.k.
I may race the African cheetah or lasso the arboreal python in my remote jungle
for the heart of some fictional bliss...
I may, waylaid by the sabled gaze of tears assorted upon those undone days,
swim the fabled channel of chance...
I may, to stay, climb to flay an early morning's birch away, and nest beside some anchored
silence, holding with spite, a cellaphaned King James Bible...
All this and more to score this day, if the ox says it's o.k.
I can bleed through the rusted conduits of yesteryear's dreams...
I can dredge a December dawn for oysters sutured with
black pearls to kiss with impunity...
I can examine silhouette whales in the broken porcelain
of my secret vivarium...
All this and more to bore this day, if the ox says it's o.k.
I must confirm the stories, so whispered blue, behind the moon's brilliant subterfuge...
I must avert the kiss inside the candle's entrancing flame drawing
the pen of Aubrey to burn with nocturnal poise...
I must mend the spine, and restore, like glissandos from a harp,
what sun this techno-romantic rabble have left behind...
All this and more to mourn this day, if the ox says it's o.k.
CHILDREN AFTER CICERO
Like a Gregorian bug (not the Pope), history gathers moss
In the stagnant corners of contemporary minds,
Punctured in the back by a discarded apple
(With sharpened stem), rotting away, with a conquered worm,
All memory of ever desiring the sustenance of knowledge.
History now is re-imagined, renewed and
Remade daily from a revised script
Awaiting the sanitized approval
Of the here-and-now people:
Inheritors of a time all but lost;
And "good riddance" they collectively imply
In vain whispers.
Remembrance without possession or culpability
Is the order of the day, and keeps certain doctors away.
In selective waves turns the transmission
Of yesterday's minutes, filtered and edited,
Like a rasterfied, digital photo.
Can there be wisdom in savvy business smarts
While confusing it with "usable information",
As opposed to tradition's former Justified True Belief
In a knowledge understood not as mere alchemy?
The generational divide of fear has produced
Exotic children for a 21st century meme,
Voracious for games and play and profitable distraction.
Caught between the Sphinx and the Unicorn, can we both
Be forbidden in our knowledge and our ignorance?
What forgiveness indeed can even be considered
In a serpentine world beyond the sacred and the real?
By the sword 'n' words of a cyber warrior
Reflecting back CGI medicine for blue-suited patients,
An ever-present system's efficiency batters
Its way through the time barrier, leaping from
Age to age, and world to world, with absurd beauty
For its own sake, and a fiscal projection.
In the two millennia since
After Cicero, there appears no need of maturity.
VERSO AND RECTO
In the play of the trace, I have the peer of the realm,
And I translate the moods of my blood within it.
And only when this thought runs rampant
Into the shadow of its black wall
Does darkness have a wide wing-span.
Vanishing into the stark white border,
Enclosing the dream, I enter the absence
Of the ideal world dependent on presence.
The wherewithal of being, truth, center, origin,
Cannot hold its vaunted claim of stability,
Trapped in language and forever sliding to and fro,
There is no escape from the perpetual vacillation.
Words are not flesh, and metaphysics cannot reign
While rendered subordinate in undecidability.
The letter p cannot be without c or d or e,
Nor any other within the arbitrary alphabet.
And can the Pharmakon cure maintain a scapegoat?
An omegabet in reverse? Its twin poison denied avowal!
The either/or of meaning is premised on interweaving
Between what is there and not there; a fundamental relation
Constituted on the basis of the trace between those elements
Inherently structured to upset the balance, pertaining to
The privileged voice of the intentional expressive and
The disharbouring leaf of the falling indicative.
This is the presence of the spoken weighed against
The absence of the written, and tracing the divisions
Of both has inflicted this
Unhealed paper-cut of the mind.
And so it is said, and/or writ?
The differance is, and remains open.
IN THE DARK SEASON
Aluminum heart speckled with rust;
unheralded sorrow,
radiating from the central stem,
with an arrow-shaped reply
into the albino seas,
attaining stately proportions of time;
dark-green markings on a silver-grey
background.
Spined margins and undersides;
midribs of creeping senses:
my eucalyptus serenade;
a further attraction of your rough
surface.
Like a praying-mantis cloaked
in the exotic maranta,
I'm caught in your elegant glue,
the never found reasons behind.
BLACK SWAN IN SNOW
As if, it seems, in order to reverse the sky
With one dark star alone for a constellation
To mock its ancient matter of worn dispersion,
The Black Swan poses with virgin pride not to fly.
Encircled, and on, by the bitter frozen blank;
Not a single spark to stir up a husky spume
Before an eye to see a sole ebony plume
Would the bird condescend for the ruffled and rank.
Perhaps in the curved space of its long, slender neck,
With an ashen bill, it once strew a noted speck
That sang upon a white leaf to unveil a code.
However now, in the never of its reserve,
While in the shiver of the bright cold of the nerve
That preserves its secret sign, lies the flame and lode.
OWL IN DARKEST BLUE
Who but the Owl, given the rank magnitude
Of its private depths, can peer, free of reprisal,
Into the night's exquisite, remote apparel,
And stay firm in relation to its solitude?
Like the sullen Prince in a blue midnight motion,
The 'ply's fair sign comes with mote-infested Silence
Upon a breach in the hymeneal violence
Between two Orders; this bird-of-prey gives notion.
The night remains even in the wake of days born
It seems, not discerning the mourning from the morn.
(All the modern devices distract from their flaw.)
The doubleness of action in this hunting time
Gives the redoubtable yet unspecified line
To reverse the army of unalterable law.
THE LIBRARY OF THE SANDMAN
Enter lucid, by chance, and you may not emerge
From those shelves defended, the books never wrought.
The Dream motes ease on a volume missing from all
The earthen libraries contained by wearied flesh.
The true freedom of all the books is nowhere in
The touch of ennui and anomie bound in time,
But the keeper of the catalogue, with no sleep
Behind his specs, keeping the order of the shelves;
No bookworm in the Dreaming for a bird's-eye view,
But a book in an annex plucked when Lucien exits.
All begins there in the nothing of desire:
An object in the infinite white before words.
Full many a book is born there to be unread,
And bound its timber in a void of breathless air.
No waking can access the night's eternal hoard
Of the Magpie's text sent sleeping in sub rosa.
Did a Madame read One below a lava sky
For a mystic truth in a chrysalis unveiled?
The science and the nature still withhold the terms
To confirm one another in cosmic harmony,
Therefore nothing begins but a drifting off to...
A sleep disordered by leaves of wandering words
That echo downward, a delirium mounting.
So endless the dizzying mind searches the text,
So parched in a semi-oasis of the net.
There is a door, a door before and once for more,
For more to mirror a gift or more to reflect
No more but dust and ash and forget the airs fold.
To chisel in an instant upon some moon plate
A too subtle and pure meaning for the barren;
To balance upon that threshold the shadow's keep,
And dare to flirt awhile with the curator's heap!
Whether it be bound, or whether it be dreamed,
Concealing the written book of what one harbors
Cannot escape the one purview of the Sandman,
And of its word-form birthing will not be judged
From the fringe of the waking to the door of sleep.
The fate of destruction extends to the desktop
Of only those works prepared for publication,
Only those works in the market of the critiqued.
Evoked by the marked quintessence of nothingness,
However, the Prime Edition bears a silence
Too grievous in some to loom in the temporal.
In the mingling realm of thought and idea,
Of conception and purpose, the impossible
Summation of its history, and signs, divine
A mediator who between worlds preserves all
That is formless and unspeakable, sequestered.
In the despair of human solitude and pain,
The fear of belatedness continues to haunt
The vast, modern shelves that would fain leave it outside.
Significant feeling in the restrictive frame
May pass between the coarse words like a hermetic
Cry, and communicate under sound within sound.
They are all here inside the knowing world of dark,
Where the slumber of one can peep behind their eyes,
With a fugitive dare, at works which are not, and
To improvise some estimation of a book
Before the stirring light begins the erasure.
In death these authors cannot be ruined by the
Dull privations of a living world too afraid
To write beyond the outlook that marks wonted roots.
The never composed are transposed invisible,
And converse among the material lot to
Echo the murmurs of a past that might have been.
Forever never now in preserved catalogues
Buried deep in the Dreaming of Lord Morpheus,
The alluring enigma of the lost volumes
Will resume as if to live out their destiny,
To house what truth or falsehood they cannot disclose.
Crossing over antithetical planes, the new
Tomes can be produced with great or easy effort,
But the complicity of the masterpieces
Await in stubborn contemplation for the night
To at last slip out of its folds the hidden ones!
RAVEN IN THE WHITE UNKNOWN
The scrupulous syntaxer of the dark plumage
By the woodside pines by the marble monument
Of one through many interred, offered in message,
Croaks in the full air of a midway's document.
Perched on the bold penumbra of indecision
Above a writing desk holding aloft pure space
Enfolded in the white canvas to fan precision,
The Raven holds within the text of unmarked face.
No sign so pure could the flyer dispense so long
From those Tuesdays of lore, like smoke-rings in a throng,
But death to those moments past has lingered to look.
Still within the stillness of a lone die's allure,
The daemon will not rue to roam the sky's azure,
Thrown in search, perchance at last, to find the Great Book.
MAGPIE IN THE RED DOOR
In the crisis since the Great Dissociation
Of the once wedded sensibility in time,
And of a time in Europe, like an equation,
Balanced on both sides, time now is a blameless crime.
With an eager wing and exclaimed tail-feather,
The Magpie of the dream takes its place in-between
The open door to pry the contents of whether
A text from the Broken Age can be pinched unseen.
This place has never taken place in the waking
Realm of dusty shelves for filling and forsaking,
But the binary bird sneaks awake in this sleep.
The sleep of the unwritten in forbidden red
May be correlated with the living and dead
To restore time jointly, to foster and to reap.
MAYBE AND PERHAPS
Maybe I need quiet.
Maybe a blunt silence.
Perhaps especially from within
as opposed to the usual without.
Fortuity would then perhaps invite
a reticent ether hiding behind air;
an aura filled with secrets,
latched inside a broken liaison,
culled from a foreign source,
distilled in a familiar fragrance.
Maybe and then maybe again.
Perhaps a knowing sigh that echoes from an old wind.
The quiet has my ear.
The ear sustains this silence.
Perhaps according to a sound
so imposed by a strange decimal.
It's the sort that alerts the owl
in a night's raw stillness
that freezes the hapless mouse,
save its wide, throbbing eyes.
A thought may then take flight,
expanding its plume-filled ideas over unexpected chance.
Maybe and then never again.
Perhaps a song that quavers aloud, atop a mountain deep.
THE CONSCIOUS TREE
In this dark, my answers remain elusive;
the question is a shadow.
The chill does not still beneath my heart,
and my rankled nerves squirm inside the cracking bark.
Indecipherable chatter echoes from afar, so far
across a lost intangible plain,
with the smell of dead time putrefying.
This is the cold moment of souls:
waiting, waiting, waiting,...wasting away.
Branches snap like a whip in the wind.
In this wood, my thought remains petrified,
and the root is always bleeding.
TWO SIDES OF INNOCENCE
As she brought forth the wind,
inhaling the grace that filled her lungs,
vistas would dance before her sky blue eyes;
these eyes that gleamed in wild delight, infused
with wonder as the sun, over the lush trees,
strew itself upon the rustling leaves.
While others, portioning memories onto a crooked plate,
in order to see them, vainly ask why this day should
match the days they did not capture in the past,
as they grope for endurance in the face of seeming
nothingness. Wretched and bitter, like a cold moon's
surrounding surface, it has worn them pale.
They can no longer see beyond the dying surface, grey
like ash - their inward skies empty of any
resurrecting birds. Hopes and dreams distilled in angst.
She would not fathom such anguish, such feelings of loss;
this glowing child immune to darkness and despair,
with a smile that could penetrate stones.
THE OPTION
In the mirror, I face a foreign smile
and wait for my eyes to open the day.
This day is wan and grey.
I gather the sense to probe through
a minute beneath the moist soil,
under my worn soles, catching
the tattered laces (second pair).
My fingers enjoy the absorption of
tactile bliss. They haven't anything
better to do, anything constructive, practical;
only to feel is good enough for them, for me.
Time is neglected, pushed to the margins,
or the peripherals of consciousness, but
time remains refractory and vigilant.
The bugle charge of the autumn wind
blows an army of red leaves away,
across my path and onto, and over
a wide carless road; no other witnesses;
just me, in the early hour, under darkness,
under streetlights, under duress to remain
breathing, and to remain here...
CONVALESCENCE
Darkness peers behind a jaded tear,
unabashed at its willingness to evoke despair:
A meek and meagre hovel for a heart indeed,
to only beat in silence, aloof from optimism's flame.
The daily mirror reflects a venom of contempt,
where a new gash degenerates into an indefinite scar.
The transitory days rupture the soul - fade out.
...fade in...
This elevation has a butterfly wingspread,
beautiful and meticulous,
like a lover in a still-frame, locked and eternal.
There's a fond repulsion from storybook complacency.
Hug a horror from the past, letting it go at last,
biding its time in oblivion,
as far away from me as existentially possible.
A wayward child applies an ointment of innocence,
and vision is now widescreen,
and the senses bite, they gnaw
and tear:....Awakening!
DREAM DESERT SONG
This moon so luminous sits upon a dune,
And night is replete with constellations.
There is an Arabian song below the desert breeze,
Yet she is not far away.
Haunted by some whispered beauty
Above my silent and sleepy mind,
This night calls upon me from beneath
Where eyes can reflect within.
Desire, like home, I've fought so long
To crawl away for a second's respite
Only to advance once more eternal
With details beyond the ken.
This sand so abstract and timeless
Rolls under my thoughts with
Words that have never rubbed together:
I hear their new conversations.
In the arid folds a monad keeps vigil
Always within the hushed womb;
A comfort, like the smell of old books;
A time not time, before and after: the song.
And it sang of a mystery never solved,
And it called forth in a couplet deciphered:
"In the leisure of this tragic story
Lies a fissure of some magic glory".
There is something to this nothing.
THRESHOLDS OF PEACE
for Ashli Taylor
The trees drink my eyes.
On bended knees, searing songs
from a local robin bleed
in my drums,
pounding out mystified sighs
that echo deep inside the
hemispheres of my jaded brain.
Westward winds streamline my geometry,
probing the contours and cooling
the flesh standing upright
for the descending sun, cooing the
clouds to sleep; stars break
for the centre of the sky,
bursting with fervour, enveloping the
unfettered visions beheld by souls
thirsting for sensations as a
cosmos lays its universal kiss.
I give, and it gives, and we become
one majestic symbiosis:
An infinite expansion of energy, matter, spirit:
A melancholic joy eclipsing
any destructive inkling beside the fire.
WHAT THE WALL SAID
In appealing to the white wall before me,
I could only ask "why"?
Though knowing full-well, trusting the reliability
My query had no issue with its colour - I, acknowledging
white as such, in comparison to official hues and shades,
wished not to debate legitimacy on these visual grounds.
Contingent black - its binary opposite - brown, green,
orange, red, yellow or blue made no difference; well
I would surmise blue composed by the moody sort, if
my wry reference to popular psychological investigations
were valid and sound - sound, that is, to those who favour
uniformity in professional opinion.
Little difference, I suppose, prevailed, reluctantly.
No, I simply wanted to know why the wall existed at all;
expecting no answer, of course, directed to me from it!
And a jolting confirmation of madness was not my goal!
Religion sat me on its knee as a boy; I, naive and incognizant, was
told it was God's work, even the walls of the non-Christian.
Science held my shoulders as a youth; I, eager to learn and know, was
told it was atoms and molecules, excluding the walls of the mind.
Finding these answers, ultimately, inadequate, despite their
equally self-assuring hubris, I have come to realise now
that my grappling with this inexplicable question is firmly
rooted in the ontological: so I have my particular being, and
the wall has its: mine, animate; its, inanimate. But still being!
Until we both come, inevitably, to non-being. What then?
The wall said nothing.
A REVENANT OF RUSSELL SQUARE
The rose and its scent are suspended in cyber frost,
And the fire warms nothing off the flickering screen;
Time is post-historic and the past has become the present
With a fluctuating face and a twisted reflection.
The children are older now in the coital ways
Of the marketing and the selling of perfect images;
These images that demand attention and respect,
Far removed from passages of growth and maturity:
Youth keeps refusing the wisdom of tomorrow's wrinkle,
Even when youth has been displaced by a younger demographic.
There is no light of heart to be heard in the laughter between
The prepubescent and the "new-forty crowd" taking shots at midnight,
But there is laughter nonetheless in and around the garden,
And by the trees that are of no effect to them as they inhale,
Motionless, the emotions that are lost on an eternal moment.
The winter feels perennial,
Just as yesterday seemed certain in its sunny disposition,
But certainly cold before the bathers at the beach
And the customers in the express lane or aisle or pew.
The seasons are all preserved in the mainframe;
The clouds return the Sun's rays with dubious frequency,
As we harp on the loss of birds and bees flying between the knees.
Our own flight from the internal noise of ego has gone
Deeper below the threshold of conscience and out into the
Open air of shameless self-promotion and support;
There you can see and hear the froth of endless voices
Coagulate into a mass of membranes reduced to protozoic sense.
The dike is overflowing.
The slaughter is in the details,
Where the swans remain trapped in the ice, and are laughed at
Behind the blue-screen and the savage avatar.
The social rituals and redundancies are displayed with
The fragrance of an axe and the touch of an eel;
A taste that electrifies the palate of a cadaver,
Or the rapture of a seasoned critic.
But there is no joke to savor,
No now worth building on and setting roots to still.
All is not well in the turbine of the city's flow
As the alienated are remote from such alienation
In a fourfold fashion deluded into thinking they can think
Outside of themselves and for the betterment of humankind;
The same humankind scuttling for the postern door of virtuality,
Letting in and letting out all reality in an unreal way.
The mental defenses of the collective who buy
Are assured by the commercials and trend-setters;
Those authorities that are known and unknown
Who manoeuver celebrities like pieces on a chessboard
And calibrate the pop-charts like the weather.
The beginning and the end of this disjointed time
Has no end to claim and begins on a constant loop
For the poor benefit of a beleaguered minute
And the rich impairment of old time rebooted.
THE TEMPORAL EXODUS
“No one cares about reality anymore.” – Knight of Cups (dir. Terrence Malick)
Blood now courses through your iPhone.
“O.K. Boomer - don’t need to be told what technology
Has done to my generation,
To our psyche’s and sensibilities: I take meds for anxiety.”
We, and they, are jacked-in to the new non-tology,
The everywhereness of Capitalist Realism,
Where everything that is solid melts,
And is liquified, dissolved and fed into the new
matrix.
This is the world interior of the Hypermodern,
Of the new dividuals, the algorithmic seeds.
Memes have become the new confessions
Of the virtual booth where an apostasy, of sorts,
Took place without anyone noticing.
Vaporwave is the soundtrack of the young,
Who cannot remember losing a sense
Of how weird the real world was.
The semiotic chaos of words and language,
The excess of alternative identities and otherkin,
The “instinctive self-expression” of repetitive iconic,
Has conjured the midden heap of ideological rubble.
And all is left behind with accelerationist momentum,
With dark places to keep us enlightened,
With bright suns to blind all wisdom,
And to give thanks to one Singular end.
THE POET'S PARDON
Would there be an I to scold
Upon this earth as days are cold
Below the skies who know it not
Above the seas where I will rot
I should think this hate too old.
Men have come and gone to death
Without the peace blew from their breath
Withheld from love that could not save
Within their dark and barren cave
They had no joy to bequeath.
Once a life has spent its course
There is no time that you could force
Here unto a grief of sorrow
Where another chance could borrow
What was lost in the first source.
copyright 2019
