notes on progress
What intent
will steal the word
in service of machine?
What essence, baptized by iron
fist, can never reach itself?
Only destruction, and its tools
once animated with vital force
by mechanized congregations
have ways of running out
of hand.
For consolation, only
conquest of accomplishment
in perpetual precarity, seeking
perpetual next.
An expanse beyond self.
What, then, have you won? Give me No One’s name. Having long since rejected the assumptions of the acolytes of progress, I am gone from the metaphor that makes the conquest of my seeming forms its mark.
––And with that, from your ordered pairs: Nature/ Mind; Nature/ History; Nature/Art. You claim victory in classification and find structure only in subjection, erasure, my silence. You assume I am quiet now, but the frequency of this song is beyond your hearing.
What was the point of your logic, except to keep me? I am not the end, but the reach. This body is no monarchy, and neither are these wants, invisible to the lens trained on contours. This tongue of a thousand tongues speaks sound without border or death.
I do not guard myself from breaking into endless unknowns, refusing life nothing that it passes through this unnamed constellation of shifting membranes, and not one contains a subject you can recognize. Come away from the shadow of your scepter and see.
