And we gathered darkness by the basketful – Poems of bewilderment by Pina Piccolo

October Dream of Gathering

 

And we gathered darkness by the basketful

Plucking the twisted fruit from fatigued branches

 

We were caught with our snouts rooting for tubers

As destruction besieged the canopy

 

When the elements, at long last, turned against us

We couldn’t use words as shields

 

Nor could our tools expand

Our neural net fast enough.

 

All we could do was stare

the bear in the eye

 

hoping for a truce

a trace of mercy.

 

October 15, 2020

 

 

The sound of 2020

 

It’s like hearing a ghost language

Not an echo

Nor a buzz

But an absence

A failed cadence

That flickers

Unexpectedly

To remind you that not all

Can be dissected

Or expressed

In a tamed

Form of being

Dressing its knowability

For the grand ball

 

It’s like the frozen

Silence

Of a park

That witnesses

The arrival

Of an army

of bulldozers

and chainsaws:

 

all the birds have leapt

and flown away

and the worms

burrowing underground

suspect that something is

seriously awry

 

It’s a brazen

Tone of bracing

Absence of sound

The language of dread

The communication

Of  the broken link

Of the vessel that has

Shattered into shards

 

30 October 2020

 

 

 

Dreamwashing #1

 

Pelting a nightmare of mink

That stole

The hubris of kings

And starlets

Starring a species

Wrapped in blindness

A hunger that devours
And devours, and develops
And destroys
And raises to cull
And soon shall be called
To extinction by its own devices

And strike and strike and strike

Said the blond performer

Of nightmare dreamwashings

As the suspended world

Hung in the balance

Clueless and misguided

Slouching toward caatstrophe

Devoid of the courage

Of the fleeing mink

 

7 November 2020

 

 

 

In Praise Of Those Who Refuse To Suspend Disbelief

 

Not that they ever asked us

whether we agreed

to suspend our disbelief

they assumed we had done it

for so long

it had become our second skin

 

Not that they ever asked us

whether

we might have second thoughts

about us and our offspring

and the seven generations

staying in that scaly chrysalis

wrapped in our spit

and theirs

our wings never breaking free

condemned to the cramped-ness

of a still birth

 

 

 

Days Of Smoldering And Incantations

 

Days of smoldering and incantations:

at the junction feet fail to lift

as you listen to the birds

crying out their tweet

and lizards lay glued

to steaming rocks

 

Days of thunder at a distance

and sunspots beckoning

a glowing motion

to continental drift

as the stuffed and the starving sit

waiting for the drone to strike

and deliver

fear into the soul.

 

 

 

The Transit of Times

In these transition times
– fog hovering
and cold wintry air
ripping through your flesh-
stand straight like a weather vane
then slouch
not on the way to Bethlehem
but like a rumpled scarecrow
seeking vision through the dim light

What’s flocking together
is not birds of a feather
but albatross and sparrow
peacock, and egret
flying in the shadow
craning their necks
against maverick winds
festering in the hollow
of their bones

A shift of pressure
exhaling from the mouth
of redundant times
unleashed from the fractals
of the Age
leaking from cargo cults
into a planet on edge.