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Quest
I’m here to talk to you to today about happiness
and irritability. Spasm and reconciliation
and the like.
I invite you to be my guest in the future
where we walk along the shoe-
print of god, waves crashing around us.
You may stand in the corner of the sky
like a clock. You may drink the wine.
I respect you a cup.
Your diaphanous shell on these empty days
you must replace with garish wings
sown from corncobs and carrots and crawfish.
So we must go then, you and I, like stick figures in a flip book
to a farm by a freshwater lake
where the grass is pretty sharp.
Listen, your smart phone is purring in the ground.
Go ahead, quit your day job.
Your head is on the body of a dragonfly.
Buzz the chins of fishermen, zip
the makeshift sky; buzz the shoulders
of stupid children, zip their parents’ Washingtons.
Eventually you tire of wishful thinking and learn
to like yourself at least a little bit
like fake jewelry.
Stop brooding over the lava of some other world
and come here you big brute. Hold my hand
and feel our limitations.
Unkempt engine hair, philosophy off,
the ashes of inner peace--
another part of traveling is walking away,
still another is mowing the lawn.
Everything imagined is real.
I saw the Neanderthal. Now let me sleep.
To See the with the Far Removed and Sing
Jesus language with its dislocated utterances,
ontological axes, and pivotal, optimistic affirmations,
could there be a more decentralized approach
to the fundamental question of our hyphenated
awareness and established interpretations of
the unilateral variations of the self-extinguishing world
as if something created were nothing more than
something to be siphoned, storied, and destroyed,
such fluid borders, such blind proliferation of discourse
and subsequent geopolitical, economic, and cultural
continental drifts, tectonic shifts, such dominant
tight-knit relationships woven into the sociohistorical
dominion over the subaltern center left holding
the bags of rocks and water and sand, of promised
post-historical land, the sizable dynamics of ants
or bees in amassing their self-identified colonies,
but for our pierced descendants and noble exceptions,
savage mostly, the musician about to sing about
the garden, to unleash that airy or guttural voice
to its mud-splashing, leg-slinging, fur-flapping romp,
to uphold the self-determined roots and let them
dangle in their dirt, to seethe with the intimate
aspirations that break our bones or bring us to
the incremental openings of monumental discoveries,
the limited emergence of first imagined linkages
and realized recognitions, to banish the resulting
overblown, hegemonic claims, to embrace the wings
of the galvanizing and the heart of the far removed.
The Chains under the Water
My daughter runs into the room and points
to a spot on the floor and says,
“There’s a light there under the water.”
A dark circle of light echoes
as the fish gradually sink in their chains.
In my chest an absent wonder at
these silver-green gawkers like prehistoric mice.
Language is the fishing hole of being,
a mouse hole in the mountains.
My daughter runs into the room and points
to my feet on the floor and says,
“There’s a light there under the water.”
The chains under the water
where the good people go to be alone.
A grain of sand between the toes.
A light grain. A dark grain.
Wandering stars, immovable landscape,
jittery shadows under the glittery surface.
My daughter runs into the room and dives
into the darkness under my desk
and disappears in a chink of light.
I’m here to talk to you to today about happiness
and irritability. Spasm and reconciliation
and the like.
I invite you to be my guest in the future
where we walk along the shoe-
print of god, waves crashing around us.
You may stand in the corner of the sky
like a clock. You may drink the wine.
I respect you a cup.
Your diaphanous shell on these empty days
you must replace with garish wings
sown from corncobs and carrots and crawfish.
So we must go then, you and I, like stick figures in a flip book
to a farm by a freshwater lake
where the grass is pretty sharp.
Listen, your smart phone is purring in the ground.
Go ahead, quit your day job.
Your head is on the body of a dragonfly.
Buzz the chins of fishermen, zip
the makeshift sky; buzz the shoulders
of stupid children, zip their parents’ Washingtons.
Eventually you tire of wishful thinking and learn
to like yourself at least a little bit
like fake jewelry.
Stop brooding over the lava of some other world
and come here you big brute. Hold my hand
and feel our limitations.
Unkempt engine hair, philosophy off,
the ashes of inner peace--
another part of traveling is walking away,
still another is mowing the lawn.
Everything imagined is real.
I saw the Neanderthal. Now let me sleep.
To See the with the Far Removed and Sing
Jesus language with its dislocated utterances,
ontological axes, and pivotal, optimistic affirmations,
could there be a more decentralized approach
to the fundamental question of our hyphenated
awareness and established interpretations of
the unilateral variations of the self-extinguishing world
as if something created were nothing more than
something to be siphoned, storied, and destroyed,
such fluid borders, such blind proliferation of discourse
and subsequent geopolitical, economic, and cultural
continental drifts, tectonic shifts, such dominant
tight-knit relationships woven into the sociohistorical
dominion over the subaltern center left holding
the bags of rocks and water and sand, of promised
post-historical land, the sizable dynamics of ants
or bees in amassing their self-identified colonies,
but for our pierced descendants and noble exceptions,
savage mostly, the musician about to sing about
the garden, to unleash that airy or guttural voice
to its mud-splashing, leg-slinging, fur-flapping romp,
to uphold the self-determined roots and let them
dangle in their dirt, to seethe with the intimate
aspirations that break our bones or bring us to
the incremental openings of monumental discoveries,
the limited emergence of first imagined linkages
and realized recognitions, to banish the resulting
overblown, hegemonic claims, to embrace the wings
of the galvanizing and the heart of the far removed.
The Chains under the Water
My daughter runs into the room and points
to a spot on the floor and says,
“There’s a light there under the water.”
A dark circle of light echoes
as the fish gradually sink in their chains.
In my chest an absent wonder at
these silver-green gawkers like prehistoric mice.
Language is the fishing hole of being,
a mouse hole in the mountains.
My daughter runs into the room and points
to my feet on the floor and says,
“There’s a light there under the water.”
The chains under the water
where the good people go to be alone.
A grain of sand between the toes.
A light grain. A dark grain.
Wandering stars, immovable landscape,
jittery shadows under the glittery surface.
My daughter runs into the room and dives
into the darkness under my desk
and disappears in a chink of light.