Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Causes and Colors

February 2008

Sort of a psychological drama. You never notice just how complicated things are until you try to explain them to someone else. Also some free association.

One subtle knock
And a set of nesting dolls
Unfolds into an armored column
Ready to defend a phantom.

What do you get when you shatter
A crystal statue? A field of knives.
Which one is the murder weapon?
Which is the keystone?

Castles: really just an elaborate way
Of saying “Fuck off!” unless
Cannons: a simple way to deflate
Elaborate gestures.

A persona that becomes a way of dressing
As oneself, as armored, as capable
Of feints, ruses, Hannibal’s gambit:
Man as a maneuver, Man
As a column of elephants.

Man as alpine, snowy, ready to cascade
Without meaning into his neighbors;
Humanity as strung together
By insignificant wires.

The mind as cat’s cradle,
In non-euclidean space, dimensions
Crossing each other blindly
In the synapses.

The smallest nesting doll
Is by necessity more vast
Than countless galaxies.
By necessity,

There are ghosts inside everything,
With their own causes and colors,
Yellow and black.
Best not to stir up the hornet’s nest.

Introduction for the Apocalypse

December 2007

You know that bit at the beginning of Romeo & Juliet where they summarize everything that’s about to happen? Yeah, this needs to be the opening track of a fairly strange concept album or something. Or, let’s say why not, a rock opera.


This is a story about serendipity
and acid-base reactions
This is a story about human stupidity,
fundamental flaws and warring factions.

And Deadeye Dick standing out on the balcony
Radio dead on all bands
Trying to prove he can fix something
He hasn’t broken with his own two hands

And come on, own up, Sister Mercy:
You’ve been chasing your whiskey with whiskey and wine.
You say you can’t prove anything,
So quit trying to prove you make yourself blind.

This is a story about electromagnetic radiation
and problems with postage
This is a story about comic timing

And standing in half your apartment
While the other half sits on the ground
And waking up cold and shivering,
And wondering when winter came down

This is a story about modest achievements in literature
And government jobs
Both of which mostly are gone now
Burnt up for fuel or by murderous mobs

There were good things left before the fall
There’s still some good left after it
But Deadeye Dick’s got a makeshift spear
For the bad news dwelling in the rafters

So this is a story about the end of the world
And the things you might have to do afterward

Yr Lv Sngs

November 2007

You might say abbreviation is a theme here. These are all standalone poems as they were originally written, but I think they work as a sequence fairly well. They’re all under 30 words and 7 lines, though at the time I was pretty much just aiming for “short.”

-To Mercy (by many names)

  • Yr red gypsy jangle
    Yr radio signal
    Yr moonlit face
    Yr hair-flown breeze –

    Casual and senseless,
    Sensual and careless,
    As the rhythms of the sea.

  • Yr easy style
    Yr frantic grace
    Yr civilized smile
    Yr feral waist

    Yr face like home
    But out of place

  • Yr high country angles
    Yr frivolous fire
    Yr name in smoke
    Yr shape in wire:
    You know all echoes
    Are laced with desire.

  • Yr radical rose
    Yr seldom shows
    Yr crystal voice
    Above the snows
    Burnin’ up the walls of Troy

  • As far away as you are,
    As far away am I –
    Meet me in the western sky.

Snow Leopards

February 2008

I’ve been romanticizing armaments for a while. Part of me has constructed an ideal of love based on Spaghetti Westerns – not on the romances, but the standoffs.

My love is an elaborate ritual, stylized –
Not a love that I have had, but one
I inscribe, a love which circumscribes
All others.

My love is the love of two figures standing ten paces apart,
In a clearing, in a snowy wood. It is still snowing. There is nothing else for miles.
They are dressed for the weather. Their tracks, rapidly filling, lead in opposite directions.
The wind blows fiercely, from the far-off high country,
Towards a more distant ocean, and this is desire.
The whole world is desire. There is nothing
Before or after this moment.

Perhaps someday we will meet outside on a snowy evening,
Stop and recognize each other for the first time.

Then again, perhaps there is more.
Perhaps they step across the ley lines (We all carry ley lines).
Perhaps there is a transmutation, and they become snow leopards.
Or perhaps they cross, and they disappear, and the wind
Is still, and there is no sign that in some months the snow will melt.
Or perhaps they do not cross over, and the wind blows
That comes down out of the high country, that is named desire.

My love is the love of treacherous things, a love of loss
And of lost travelers. My love is an armistice, my love is two vipers
Intertwined. My love sings to me at the ramparts, and behind locked doors.