Category: people watching

nevermore

in neverland: a retrospective

Nevermore near Never-Never Land had waited, abiding, until Time was done. Before she was Nevermore she was Space and she was here, tasting like soil & salt, iron & leaf, fruit & flesh.

No, she insisted, she did not need another distant photo of herself framed with an airy sentiment in glass. But Time and his countrymen either did not hear or did not care. She shrugged, sighed.

Before she was called Nevermore by the keepers of the Neverlands, she had been an endless, renewing enough: of water, bird, breath, wave, weed, gale, flame, and rain––wanting only to be tended, absorbed, heard, caught, ridden, warmed into, and met with open hands.

The Neverlanders thought instead to take and stake her, carving their names, instead projecting upon her the warped and boundless entropies of their endlessly whirring heads, as if to spin away from gravity herself where she palmed the souls of them at their feet.

Sigh again, winds, for those who can imagine no space greater than the ones between their ever-stopped ears, that neglect who is before them ever, in favor of Somedays and One Days and Next Times, claiming to Finally See.

––Until Nevermore, at the end of their Time, stopped hoping they would ever get around to the real work of tending, preoccupied as they were with their confidence and confidences.

She would retreat beneath the soils of herself again, fold her wet through running sands, run her rivers underground. Time went up and out––away, away––storming plans for monuments to legacies.

Sigh again, no longer asking for a hand to come for the tending, that wave now whisper, stay, to meet at last the rock of those waiting shores, and carve another layer smoother ––in.

dear might be

in close proximity, unhearing

i imagine sometimes
you as your almost-believable avatar who
one day opens an imagined door
or ears to hear, to let them, to all you do
not––
inside or out in these eons between us
and your almost-never, the moment
of this blaring nevermind, i train her
back to soundproof cellars
of some other time
promising to visit.

patterns

within given systems

Sometimes it makes more sense to rebuff balance. Now, for example, I prefer to stay inside the unfolding, never-arriving spiral flight around an ever-renewing lost and found where it is brimming with tactile tongues in four dimensions.

But with no room for such admissions in standard parlance, one carries on. Nodding when the next one repeats the inevitable and expected line. Yes, balance. One of many agreements in a given day: pay no attention to the elephant, the peeking tusks, the tongues.

notes from a reading

in the shade near the back of a crowded room

Why does the performance poet so often sound like the caricature of a self-proclaimed poet? I suppose this is something that happens in the act of proclaiming so much and at such volume in that outfit. This one calls himself by a word that is three adjectives stitched together, each of which might have been lifted from the stickers of a 1980s grade school Trapper Keeper ™. It isn’t @zippydippycool, but you get the idea. I do not like noticing these things with such profound embarrassment. Doing so only reminds me that whatever it is that one is supposed to be very excited about, I am not. And that my heart, which may sometimes retract in shock to a mean and stingy artifact of itsownself, is usually on the verge of brimming way beyond expected confines, so I spend most remembered moments of this one life trying to pass as one whose heart and everything else is not so often leaking. Meeting mostly failure, with many humorous exceptions that never fail to surprise me, as when someone remarks (as someone often does) on my apparent calm. Which may explain the aversion here, as perhaps only the complement to a fondness for the dull-seeming ones with no names who do not wear any outfits but go on in a deliberate way, careful not to show themselves too much and scare everybody off, unseen and unproclaiming, especially when it comes to knowledge of what it is that is going on––here, and here, and also––do you hear that thing in the background, which is nowhere? I feel it coming closer all the time.

waste

an everyday tragedy

i watched the small gods of the would-be hero’s mirror world tie him down to be devoured. he took it for a feast in his honor.

terrified of being, he chained himself to the mountain he confused for his own image and became the vulture to eat his own flesh every night. he never thought to imagine a fire there for the taking. he had to see himself its maker. he had to steal.

he thought he was the sun and the rain, the harvest and the shade, but we knew him as the storm, and its wreck. when asked why, he said only “I….” and blew wind.

knowing was outside him, looking on, but knocked too soon. as often happens when a would be hearer lives in the maze of his mirror-world, the answer came too late.

carrier pigeon

re: undelivered message

What I came here for was a thing for the moment. Ancient and entirely present.

Ready? You called, with so much enthusiasm, I thought you understood.

You know? I called back, amazed. Now retrace the original sin.

I do know! you shouted, and Now is the time! I took your slogans for sincerity. That was a long time ago. Now you repeat yourself. Sure, there’s a wolf somewhere, but when?

You don’t know time. We joke that you are it, given the terms of your world. In which you are all but your saving and still the sun. No other imaginable constant, and so not ready when the real one comes.

I am not sure to what extent the joke is mutual, but laughter is a means of survival in transit. Destination? Return to sender, we suppose. I have nowhere else I was planning to go. But here––

Okay, if you want, I say. Be louder. Wear more feathers. I don’t know what you think you are doing with any of that but they say it works somewhere.

Many love it––you constantly remind me, and anyone listening, of this truth. Your sacred red herring.

Go ahead. Offer it up again and again. Confess without words, how you love how they love it, even as they hold the alternative like a knife to your throat.

I don’t want to lead you into a frightening place, you smile. And wink, for the camera, again. Recasting illness as forbidden fruit, infestation as the alluring dragon guarding your treasures, your gilded selves.

What does an old bird say to something like this? With a sigh I assure you, I am not afraid. But for you.

You can lead a horse to water but there’s nothing to do for the one who keeps sending the cart far ahead of himself and away from her banks, to collect.

Okay then, friend. Carry on. It is easy to misread a moment. There is enough here to distract you from presence, and in a moment, I go, to carry back with me an awareness that most of yourselves will never know.

chaos and waste

in the fields

Know the killers by their words. They use too many, and invert them. They speak a language of chaos to stir confusion. Once frothed to full foment, they descend from their towers to feed and grow fat on the blood of lambs. By morning, they have disappeared to clean themselves and then reappear above the carnage, lamenting. This mess, this mess, they say. For shame, they say, and lob another theory into the crowd, the usual balloons of enhanced security and maximum efficiency. These float on the raised hands of the assembled, who cheer.  The speakers smile, digesting last night’s feast. Tonight, repeat.

Meanwhile, a haggard band of constant shepherds gather under cover of remaining trees, to tremble before the lives remaining, and abide.

binding energies

future objects

When the prison or its shadow becomes constant and the fugitive no longer wants to scream, sing against its fortress in scandalous melody, of exorbitant creation––not of lasting order, but as embodiment of the cycle of renewal and destruction sacred to all life. Sing to the way form freed from origin may open the way to the ecstatic space of sublime sense, out of mind and loosed from all perspective, the psychic distance between eye and image finally collapsed, in favor of the wider lens, no longer a singular consciousness, but psyche herself; no longer worldview, but vision. Bring back the missing, the not-theres, invisible. To animate the assembly back to birth. 

Exit mobile version
%%footer%%