Through the cold, dead ages
with nebulas aswarm,
past long-agone stages
and the cosmic dust storm,
came a writhing terror
within the wombed vacuum
of a headless bearer,
an amniotic bloom,
its tentacles reaching,
thrusting out through the Void,
seeking, grasping, leaching
from passing asteroid—
not quite a parasite,
no more than beast, or Man–
feeding in endless night
on any thing it can.
I saw Schopenhauer on the shore
kneeling down in the frothy brine,
grunting and groaning at a chore
in the shallows along the shoreline.
I ventured closer and heard him gloat,
though his face was twisted and wroth
as he clutched a man by the throat—
a statue of Buddha in the froth.
Arthur sneered into the Buddha’s face
and proclaimed, “Mein Lehrer ist tot!”
He then walked away from that place
while the wood idol began to rot.
In such a car wreck as mine
you have no say-so, no line
to draw between what is now
and what will be, no know-how
or power will save you then,
nor have you say how or when;
nothing obeys your dire voice
and you truly have no choice,
but to accept what’s to come
in a state of peace, or numb,
or fearing it all, to fear
and to scream, though none will hear
whom may change what will be next,
what comes at the final text.
This is total acceptance,
this is mortality’s sense.
You cannot simply say “No”
when it is your time to go.
Born at hightide, buried to the chin
among countless others on the beach,
shouting, coughing, the froth surging in
to drown all within its lounging reach.
Openmouthed to sing my song aloud,
I receive a swig of salty surf,
sputtering words, too much like the crowd,
our voices a chorus without worth.
Where are those who dig free from the sand,
those who escape the insensate tide?
They rise from these deep holes and can stand
in sunlight, moving with a strong stride.
Still, the rest of us remain entombed
while waves wash over the thoughtless trend,
never heard, never seen, each one doomed
to scream into the surf without end.
Ah, but could I not dig myself out
by merit of my mouth and its bite,
by my teeth, by grit and bit and bout
to lessen the sand that holds me tight?
Or is that sand not of the hourglass
and, so, the holding hole that is Time?
Do those who are dug out truly pass
beyond, or are those lands but birdlime?
The attire of ideals ill-fit
in times of turmoil, times of want,
when hunger loosens a belt till it
slips to the ground, and we are gaunt,
nought but haggard skin, brittle bones,
starved from famines unbeholden
to kings sitting on their grand thrones
or prayer books long grown olden.
No, we waste thinner and clothing
slips off—robes, uniforms, and suits,
each badge, medal, and just-so thing
once honored by waxed marching boots
to give the semblance of order,
of hierarchy, place, power,
enforcing each make-believe border
between so-and-so in his tower.
The cufflinks slip off the narrowed wrist
like overlarge shackles from a beast
and the noblest scion cannot resist
the promise of the scantiest feast.
He springs, shedding old pretenses
like a Winter pelt cumbering
his hunt in Summer, his senses
overwhelmed after slumbering.
Even ladies doff their dresses,
their waists too small for bodices
as they prowl, twigs in their tresses,
wild-eyed like pagan goddesses,
seeking the next morsel to eat
to sate the pit between their ribs,
etiquette lost, thinking of meat
rather than wedding rings and cribs.
And children—children become ghouls
perching over impromptu graves,
soiled, feral, clutching bloody tools
while sheltering in charnel caves
to lick at cleaved skulls long bereft
of sustenance, the gray matter
drained, sucked to dry dust, nothing left,
though the children grow no fatter.
And so the ideals are piled high
like clothing for the End-Times pyre,
burning, smoke blackening the sky
as the starved and the cold aspire
to make a feast of their brethren—
naked, emaciated, stripped
by the hunger pangs and the ken
bestowed by the maw of the crypt.
The snail shell glows, amber at dusk,
a small helix on the hot road—
was it dropped here, this inert husk,
forgotten by a passing toad?
Silent, unmoving, a snail shell
spirals inward, outward, a gyre
tracing Nature’s secrets, the Braille
of tornadoes, whirlpools, desire.
The helix shows what we know
as the whorl spins without motion:
what is above, too, is below,
the vortex an innate notion.
It is a spiral galaxy,
a paradox of space and form,
of rise and fall, a fallacy
of the exception, and the norm.
Entropy nibbles at the shell
like a toad fond of gastropod,
but no amount of life can quell
the hunger of that endless god.
The heron in the cool morning mist
huddles beneath the oak by the lake,
like a monk with head bowed low betwixt
his gray wings while the sleepy woods wake.
He blends with the shadows on the shoals,
as unmoving as dawn’s torpid air,
while sunlight burns on the distant knolls;
the hermit stands like a statue there.
What does he read in that quiet lake
that scholar of mist-spun solitude?
What does he read in the mirrored make
of water while in his pensive mood?
Stoic, soundless, solitary soul,
what is the bounty behind his eyes?
He does not blink as the white mists roll
like tumbling smoke into gilded skies.
Perhaps he sees the leaves of the oak
ablaze with the futile hues of Fall,
painted gently with a master’s stroke:
light on water, water holding all.
Or maybe he sees himself therein,
pondering his beak, his crest, his wing,
like a Buddhist monk mesmerized when
staring at his navel’s spiral ring.
A soothing gray silhouette, he waits,
an anchorite heron by the lake;
silent and still, in between those states
such as when we dream and when we wake.
Black spiders dwelling in the dark,
weaving webs from their spinnerets—
unheard, unhurried, unseen…hark!
The bedposts are their minarets.
Hourglass upon fat-fed bellies,
crimson warning and silken spools,
their prey melted unto jellies,
kneeling husks becometh all fools.
Creeping midnight venom-vigils,
black prayers and turban-wound prey—
the adhan signal, the sigils
of an ancient faith here to stay.
The imams rub their steepled claws
in devotions to their venom,
hunger and death the only laws
that govern the soul within them.
And their congregation trembles,
the hollowed, hallowed husks bent low
on rugs beneath bedspread symbols—
what dreaded truths the husks must know!
There is nothing more make-believe
than wealth,
nothing more in life which aggrieves
the self
than printed, pretend bills, values
that reign
in banks, stores, campaigns, minds, the news;
a chain
with which our god Mammon enslaves
the whole
of the world, from which no god saves
the soul,
a numbers game for which folks will
kill, die,
never understanding the bill,
the lie,
for which they pay the final debt:
a life
by market value summed and set,
a tithe
unspoken, below the fine print,
a cost
as bankrupting as any spent
or lost.
There is nothing more pretend than
Facebook,
Twitter, Tik-Tok, Tumblr, 8chan —
just look
at social media, how people
worship
beneath its digital steeple
to quip
at its altars—how it alters
a mind
until reality falters
behind,
thinking they vanquish the world’s wrongs
one post
at a time, singing their fight songs
to boast
while still working their dead-end jobs
between
rallying their share-and-glare mobs
to preen
in one-upsmanship as they strife
and flank
to earn more cred in Twitter life,
outrank
other keyboard warriors who
they fight,
though they should all be allies, too,
in plight.
While they fight over which of them’s
worse off,
the wealthy use them as victims
and scoff.
There is nothing more make-believe
than tribes,
that biased filter, sifting sieve,
imbibes
and expels what’s not classified
in sort,
panning for gold, dissatisfied
per force
with those not of proper karat,
weighing
for true alloy, for true merit,
laying
El Dorado with their paved souls,
conjoined
in purpose, riddled with pot-holes,
purloined
by compromise, never quite free
beyond
the gleam of golden purity,
their bond
a matter of gestalt conceit,
groupthink
run amok, no one so complete
when linked
in that Yellow Brick Road of Oz,
consigned
to a fiction of tribal laws
that bind.
A young Australian girl reclines,
her legs dangling from the dock,
tacklebox, fishing poles, lines;
blind to the saltwater croc.
Her Sunday dress is pure white
like flowers before the Fall,
her hair modest and braids tight;
no ribbons or bows at all.
The girl hums a hymnal song,
lines drifting—not a quiver
to hint that something is wrong
within the silent river.
She hums a song about love
and the paradise that waits
after death, in realms “above”
such as the old Bible states.
She remembers her preacher
and a sermon last season
that was premised to teach her
“Things happen for a reason.”
He said, “Egypt’s children died
as proof of God’s great power.
Pharaoh Ramses could not hide
his child from that fateful hour.”
When she asked him how she might
avoid incurring God’s wrath,
he said, “Keep yourself pure white,
and stay on the righteous path.”
The croc springs up from beneath
like a devil from below;
she struggles, but the sharp teeth
clutch tight and do not let go.
She screams out to her father,
her mother, Jesus, her god,
but the sound drowns in water,
crying, helpless as she pawed
at the beast’s face, its wide snout,
slowing as she drowned slowly,
as she bled and faded out,
the death-roll now more holy
than any psalm or prayer
she could say in her defense
within Nature’s cruel lair—
no rhyme or reason or sense.
Tangleroot And Tressknot 