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.
