Tag: against progress

without conditions for return

after the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō

the last of a family
you lived on honey,
music, snails

crushed underfoot where
the livable world
was a corridor tightening

options closing
without announcement;
an old story of land
redrawn for what could be taken

in the name of progress—
clearings; in the wake
of a promised future,
bodies left behind

survivors, too,
until gone

forest birds arrive as call
before sight, whole
genealogies; ancestors
moving in the breath of leaves

some blows banish not only
the home, but all conditions
for return

now a recording,
still calling

tend

Time in Space

We need to talk
about time
& to talk with Time
eventually
instead of scheming
how to use it
to make the most
to have a good one
to have the best
to name its price
as with any commodity
any resource
as opposed to Source

to spend instead
recklessly &
listening for language
& other creatures
is to be folded inside
embraced by layered
fabrics of Time & their
attendant creatures
in
immersive intimacies
of waters, skies
where each breath
comes to carry the
next, yet uncaught.

touring the empire

at midnight

There were forests and wildlands at the outskirts of the empire––still, can you imagine?! All quaking earth and quail whistle, where roaring waters sounded ceaselessly. We were paid to visit them, as translators––not very much, as everyone believed that none of the forms of this land had anything informative to offer. What they had to say was so much more than the intelligence the emperors were after but there wasn’t a word for what it was, so we returned without much to say, accepting pennies for our silence. We said nothing, too, of the stifling emptiness they built of gilded halls of recycled data sets, sharpened to cut the earnest pilgrim at every edge. The naked emperors bled, too, but no one spoke of this––neither the blood nor their nakedness. The dogs followed at a distance, to lick it up. There was no room in the shelters in the shadows of the golden halls, so we took our numbers and got in line with the others while the shining halls stood empty, dripping blood with the wind and the dogs howling through them.

A Turning Point

Toward another now

At a critical time, the high priests of progress were called in to advise, and it was expected that their minds would point ever forward, that new horizons would be proclaimed sacred and new wine drunk before its time while the sacrifice was made offstage. They did and it was. Aftermaths appeared much later on the new horizon, and eventually the aftermath was now.

Into March

Against the cessation of stops.

To see the shining belly of a gaze, hungry,
we warm to it because it looks like relief
from another madness, a way to peel
the clocks to feel the membrane of each
hour’s sections cool against tongues,
nectaring the Eden we missed, minutes
running off our chins from the body
of Time, our subsistence rations
after nothing of that space or any place
could reach us singing any––more,
though she tried, calling with an offer.

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