Summers are no longer stretchable
the cars get in the way traffic
is to climate as the muse's reluc-
tance is to song
Nothing in the forest beckons birds
to muse on the flitness of
purpose wormholes to
stretchable summers -
Like my last post, this poem is again a tangential companion to another data post of mine, residing elsewhere.
It might not be the job of poems to say what can be said better using other forms of saymanship. But if poems float in an unconnected ether for very long, Wakan Tanka’s consternation notches up, and she speed dials Laozi asking him to summon up a new manuscript now that the gatekeepers have changed: something relevant to what Rita Laura Segato aptly calls the apocalyptic phase of capital. It’s up to Laozi then to cough up a new song which might, at first glance, not look like a song at all.
You hold the line responsible for its
waver, lunge and
Detach when did the morning weave
ever convince us
Otherwise? whose last word was it
that excused every
One from remembering? where does
reticence reside if
Not in the dream of hollows & concen-
tric irregularities?
Companion poem to this.
the stoke of a fiery pen is the un-
made word feel the thin space
around it grow into a river -
the felt of an afterthought is not the
noun it used to be before the
verbs rushed into the river -
i.
who will forgive
me for eating
your sweet red wheelbarrow?
ii.
show me your
handful of
fearful dust, must you?
iii.
will you bury your
blue guitar now
in a colored cemetery?
A lost gram of ink touches color touches
silk as it is learns to want - asks
the silkworm: where to find the
warmth of your longing that begets the
eking of song? - asks the parchment:
which word sat heavy and which light
and how to tell them apart if the two insist
on being same? will their difference
subsist if I ink them together as one?
as I hold the sun in my eyes, three
wishes pretend to sight i- the
largeness of heaven's folly ii- the
slow tremble of hunger's feet, and
iii- my eyes again, knowing the
the limits of knowing, the fragility
of trees & the hidden guile of
songs that pretend to know by
nighttime what transpired between
this stillness and that, unmasked -
grief is no stranger to story its
hooves are tried &
tread on the grip of
honest blood
remembered so of-
ten it forgets to dry -
you cannot send a promise from the top
of a mountain stream to its furthest
point downstream where it meets
the rascalled dream punctured by pin-
holes of lacerated poems read
those and surely the tread of
your wizardry will woe down with the
sewers of hazard turn now & stop
it's time to rein in mountainspeak -
once trust wavers, the hold of mountains
is water touch the droplets and
memory will hold no torch for you
to laugh your poems away to torch those
words, you need the hunger of
ancients and the foul breath that
lingers as sainthood comes crushing
down these poems are not to
be trusted, mountainspeak be damned -
still water rinses an ocean I can hear the
rush often, the din of the whistle often
as it stills itself in the rinse, in the rush - I
lose my sense of water when the wall
of hollow trembles I can hear the tremble
silence itself & the hollow rush often -
Gathering just-a-bit-o moss 