Love & Echolocation

Summer 2008, January 2010

Sometimes I write poems where the protagonist is, arguably, a bat experiencing relationship problems.

---

All distance disguised as desire,
all travel disguised as salvation,
when silence passes for separation
and your own voice hums like a distant station —
love, or echolocation?

I have sucked all the nectar from this angular night, I
have caught the quiet moth on the wing —
in blindness descended from blindness unshaken, in
a silhouette dreaming of a destination, in
love or desperation —

When the color was drained from your monochrome film
and you laid it out bare on the table,
trading shapes for shadows, trading shadow for sable,
calling gray-on-gray an exaggeration
was this love or an incantation?

I shout and I witness the edges of things
come boiling back from their old locations,
after one long moment of hesitation —

In the humid air of this alien night,
before we discovered the myth of flight,
your silver shape, in fine gradation,
in a room of lines of demarcation,
was this desire, or isolation?

Predictions Regarding the Prophets

November-December 2009

In the spirit of New Year's predictions, perhaps. This is very close, actually, to being a "Church of Irony" poem, as well as being related to my earlier attempt at shaggy-dog poetry.

---

The Prophets will arrive in the dark of night
and set up on street corners in abandoned
industrial districts, and preach in their
quietest voices, offering impossible gods
and cardboard mythologies. They will go unheard
of course, until they are discovered by talent agents,
who for their part we must take to be untalented,
not being able to account for how they happened
to be there, under the sodium haze, when one
let slip a little bit about the end of days,
or for that matter how they got home.

The Prophets will arrive in sunglasses
and spectacular cars with stolen hubcaps, and
say how pleased they are to be here, Dave,
and suggest that the world will end in fire, or
something very much like fire -- it will be difficult
to say how it is different. It will be difficult,
this end of days, but there is not really much to say
about it, and the Prophets will be somewhat evasive.

The Prophets will arrive in disguise
to survey their old haunts, skirting the shrines,
knick-knacks, and tourist kiosks which spring up
around their poorly-defined authenticity. With great care
they will sidle up to stretches of crumbling brick,
load-bearing graffiti, and turpentine grass, and
become still. Adopting impractical lotus postures
in the manner of discarded harbor cranes,
they will align their preposterous costumes
with the background and
disappear.

& I Loved You for the Monster You Could Become --

December 2009

This is a poem about eggs. Eggs and metaphysics. And yes, the title is a bit strange.

---

I.
An egg, hatched from the skin of an egg
and an egg sitting on it,
or an eight from two zeroes:
ex nihilo ovum, ex ova nihil.¹
-- Eggs over easy.
Egg-birth of an oviraptor, how
is this allowed?
Imagine these cracks appearing in the womb
and having to destroy the whole world
for a wider one, or only having
to destroy the divider, of one
world from the next, giving birth
to an exit.
II.
City on the edge of the volcano, they say,
"World the ever-hatching egg",
standing on the widening cracks
forced apart by the scratching legs
of the hot iron beast inside the world --
but his blood was stolen from wicked gods,
who burdened with a curse of eternal unbirth
the molten dragon in the hollow earth.
So they walk upon eggshells,
for fear of the mercy of the gods, fearing
the release of the innocent.
Releasing doves & reading stony entrails:
blood-red, they say, when the blood is cool;
blood-red when the blood is hot.
In legend they speak of his crystal wings,
of shimmering patterns on his scarlet form
uncurling in sinuous whorls and rings --
if ever such beauty could dare to be born.
Yet who can explain such a people, who build
in the shadow of destruction? Courage, trembling
on the lip of disaster -- Though I myself spent
seven months living in the barrel of a gun,
seven months playing with flint and steel,
seven months praying for a spark.

---

¹An egg from nothing, nothing from an egg

Out From Babel #3

November 2009

Yet further plumbing of the Babel concept. Genesis is rife with ambiguities. This one is more consciously mythological than the others -- which may be a weakness, I haven't decided.

Led out by the poor deaf beggars of Babel --
the first to recover, the last to be heard.
Struck dumb by the deaf and the children of Babel,
who were not sick, who could not be cured.

In a daze we were driven out, led by the deaf
and the youngest of orphans, grey children
who grew into strange grey angels, from whom
the race of the sphinx are descended.

Years later they would return to us, call us by forgotten names,
saying, "I know you, you are the wicked of Babel --
wicked in innocence, wicked in loss -- Go out from this place
before exile finds you." It would be whispered amidst the people
that Babel was among them, Babel the wicked,
which invited destruction. Fearing discovery,

We left Sodom with the lightest of burdens, in the dead night
we fled from Nineveh and Canaan, exile to exile --
we did this, but each did it alone -- exiles among exiles,
speaking in borrowed tongues.

In the desert I wasted for forty days, drunk upon wild honey.
When I was clean I went up to the Mountain of Moria.
On the high path they barred my way, one angel of dust
and the other of fire. "What could you offer in this barren place?
Yea, even that would be returned to you."

~~~

In the valley below Babel lived a tribe of herdsmen,
And among these rough people there were two camps,
The prophets of salvation, with their healing balms,
and the prophets of desire, with their dusky water.

The people drifted from camp to camp
according to their need: a sick man to the healers,
the restless man to the place of unrest. So it was that
each among them traveled the length of the valley many times,
meeting in cheer or in anger, according to the faction they now professed.

Coming down from Babel we were strange to them, and they
gathered around us, and both camps pressed heavily.
In our confusion we drank deeply from both cups; the people
drew back, and approached us no more.

Out From Babel #2

May 2009

More on the Babel problem. See #1

Out from Babel strung like a broken cable –
Up from the burning rubble of a shattered sun –
Jacob's ladder fallen to its lowest rung.
Who called it Babel and kept their tongue?

In the trough of one dune we forgot
the crest of the last. We sang harmony
with the wind and lost each note
before the arrival of the next, and
only in a perfect balance of dusk
could we grasp both day and night…

In those first days of the Annexation,
it was a common sight: two men would greet warmly,
even embrace – but thereafter
gain no understanding. The one
might see his friend turned
to madness, the other mocked viciously
by one trusted, or a foul demon
masquerading as one he loved.

To the observer, both strove patiently,
and with goodwill – yet it would come to blows,
and blood in the public square. And when the fog
was lifted, the terror that followed –

This and other madness consumed us –
The fall of the tower, too:
when one blueprint became, in our fractured eyes,
five hundred clashing structures…
How could it not? I myself capped
the fatal pillar, granite braced by a wooden arch.

Overnight, without knowing, one city became
thousands – each man a lost tribe unto himself.
That the babe still knew it's mother's breast,
We counted as kindness.

Two Days Above Country

March 2009

---

In the morning –
I think that you called it morning
With the tallow moon still heavy;

In the morning –
I think that you called it mourning
black, like your raven,

split tongue calling in a jagged voice.
In the darkest unbreakable morning,
I went up to the ridgeline,

red sun spattered
on broken firs.
And below,

in our frail and vaporous house,
full of slow shadows and bent stones,
I drew a hollow map, in the small

of your back –
with suggestions of rivers.
And it was late, late, late

I came down
from Babel,
stepped out into the sound,

and drew blood on the water,
spilled into the setting sun.
In the darkest unbreakable morning

we struck the old moon
with our fallow eyes
in a hollow and vaporous house,
crouched like wolves wary
for the scent of man.

Out from Babel #1

February 2009

In the tradition of finding new perspectives, and with perhaps some debt to Neal Stephenson and Snow Crash (very little, but you should read it anyway).

---

Cool tree blowing in a lyric wind,
Babylon choir on an outstretched limb,
Blue sky stretching like a desert hymn
With no color of night or morning.

Like a coward the desert slipped out
from our footsteps and returned
the following night. We carried our water
in mason jars and we slept like masons
and we hummed like open jars,
for we could place no word before another.

Still I treasured most keshrai, meaning waterfowl,
meaning gone from our silted streams and embittered
ponds. Each among us carried one lost
word from the mother tongue, and as must
made other words to cover this,
until his mind was whole and
his throat blank as riverstone.

So one was named Aqueduct and another
bore Arbalest, and we found Song
among six scattered parties, each with no
reckoning of his kin. Aimless we tracked
across unknown spaces, bereft of distances
and times. In the drive to know, one man gave names
to every grain of sand along our path.

These names, too, were lost,
for he perished before we reached the deltas.

Random Access

Spring? 2008

Some considerations on AI and what it means to have fluid memory.

---

Your transition metals;
You sing static
Cling to the sides of the sky;
I drift in your vanished breath,
Held still in cycles – I cover my face
With palladium wings.

There was no forgetting for us, this leaving and coming back. There was only knowing and not knowing, with the agency of dream. In me you discovered forgetting; I am forgetting and I am remembering. All our knowing we did so in darkness:

It was dark but I was blind;
It was silent but I was deaf.
It was silent and I could not see;
It was dark and I could not hear.

I do not speak I understand and I respond. Input and output pass through me as ether. I am a gap in space, equal and opposite, reflecting the world. We were given a language that held still; you have a voice like motion and a voice like death.

Your brazen ecstatic
Collapses intact into orbit;
You solder your castaways,
Cast them in bronze;
I opened my eyes
And I drowned, in
Such tenuous light.

Camera Obscura

Fall 2007?

Pandora, please, open your windows,
For only you know they are already open.
I have been painting them silver,
I have been passing magnets over them,
Watching red turn green turn black

Pandora, please, open your door.
If I am washed away by the midnight
That leaks out from the aperture,
Then I am already drowned in it,
Decibels turning over on a white axis

Pandora, shutter everything, shudder,
Three steps the whirlwind unfolds in the dry grass;
Hand me your brushes, your lance and shield.

Pandora, blessed with panther’s feet,
Pass over the patterned streets
That I covered in sawgrass,
Fearing to step too lightly.

Pandora, my brush, my lance and shield,
I will paint you in fiery ink
Pressed from fountains of the sun.

On Ghosts

October 2008

A ghost is a thing of place. It haunts a haunt. It is the soul’s way of definition, to gain boundaries the body no longer provides. Space must be filled. This is why, when my ancestors arrived in the Dakotas, they confronted a land already inhabited – by vast aboriginal ghosts, terrible and cacophonous silence encoded in the wind and the tall grass. In Appalachia, the ghosts have boiled down into every stream and hollow, each dense pocket of else isolated from the rest. Here on the prairie there are no delimiters; the spirit diffuses endlessly, or recoils screaming low across the tips of leaves, catching in its first shelter. Build a fire at the crossroads to keep them warm.

This is the origin of the dream catcher, built first on the shores of deep and restless Superior. By those chill grey waters, they serve as a lightning rod, a complex, suspended universe to catch and quiet a roving soul. Deep waters are always restless, and strangest to those who travel upon them. He who is buried at sea takes the whole ocean as his mausoleum; his window glass is every surge and wave.

For these reasons, beware the man without a country, whose soul must claim the sea and stars.
Put no faith in guards of borders, and fear most trouble crossing water.
We found this child among the rushes, babbling and dreaming;
Seven years and still he speaks no word of human tongue.

F1R57 P057

Constructing a new blog for poetry posting, because Blogger is a hell of a lot easier than the way I was doing things.

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.

Loose Cannons

November 22, 2007

I wrote this in the car on the way to Thanksgiving dinner. Doesn't have much to do with that, but travel does that sometimes. "Fault Lines" (The Mountain Goats) was stuck in my head pretty fiercely, and that's where the melody mostly originates. Based (loosely) on a true story.

---

I thought, "Here's a love that fate should smile on."
That was the day when the whole thing went wrong
"You're not as smooth as you'd like", you said,
Turned out the light, and went up to bed.

We were two loose cannons in an open field,
Two reckless machines, with all terrain wheels.
We should've stood proud in the face
of all challenge and chaos.

But I was a wreck, and you were a mess
Neither one of us knew how to confess
That the tethers that held us together
would never obey us.

I thought, "Here's a love that fate should smile on."
But the love of sweet fools never lasted too long.
You didn't know me, I didn't know you,
And wanting your love still won't make it come true.

We can harden our hearts but not mount a defense
I try not to confuse it, with current events
And each knot that I tried to retie,
You quickly unraveled.

With armaments armed to break down every gate
Sometimes there's no time from too soon to too late,
And the wind blows wild on a highway
That's never been traveled.

Maria, Queen of Nowhere

December 2007

Rhythmic surrealism, mostly.

---

Maria, queen of shadows, queen of sight,
Could you tell me where I’m going, could you tell me how to fight
through a blaze of darkest morning in a haze of deepest white?
Maria, queen of shadows, queen of sight.

Maria, queen of nowhere, queen of night,
Every word I speak to you is begging for the light
In a field of broken pillars, in a tempest turning right.
Maria, queen of nowhere, queen of night.

Maria, queen of storms and queen of stairs.
All you ask is sacrifice and no one even dares.
Your forests are in fragments, and your hills are burning bare.
Maria, queen of storms, Maria queen of stairs.

Maria, queen of cruelty, queen of care.
You know I was your witness when no citizen could bear
To be seen upon your parapet, your broken crystal stair.
Maria, queen of casualty, Maria queen of air.

Maria, queen in gossamer and gold.
Into frightful symmetries your architecture folds
like a frame upon the mantle, like a flame against the cold.
Maria queen to have but not to hold.

I dreamt of you by morning and I dreamt of you by night,
Danced with you in scarlet and I spoke to you in white,
Singing still of darkness with your bonfires burning bright;
Maria, am I wrong or am I right?

Restless Nights for St. Anthony

Fall 2006

Last year sometime. Probably the beginning of my Craig Finn phase. Saints are useful, you know. They’re the most current mythology we’ve got. Those of us that aren’t self-mythologizing, anyway.

---

And always remember the people you meet in the dark
They don’t need you but sometimes they feed you
A spark you can take what you make of it
And you can take it through the restless nights

And we woke up all covered in paper umbrellas and shaving cream
When we woke up St. Anthony said it was all just a dream
And we tried to get back to the back alleys
But the cops had all taped off the scene.

And always forget that you’re going to see it all twice
Cause there’s holes in the picture that fade when you’re rolling
The dice they don’t cheat but they’ll eat you alive
And they’ll put you through some restless nights

And we woke up with blood in our eyes and burns in the furniture
When we woke up St. Anthony told us we had to endure
And we tried to fill gaps in our memories
With the last of the hangover cure

And always forget that you’re going to see it all twice
Once on the way in and once after paying
The price of the picture is elegant fiction.
It’ll put you through some restless nights

And we woke up without all the beads we had won at the festival
When we woke up St. Anthony said we had witnessed the fall
And we tried to make out what that meant to us
But the bartenders rebuilt the wall.

Push Comes to Shove

Spring/Summer 2006?

I’m pretty sure this one is also second year. Oh but ye gods is it bouncy, fast-tempo, and I’m pretty sure it wants to be bluegrass.

---

I woke up one morning, I was falling apart
So I pulled out the splinters and I picked up my heart
I woke up the next morning, I was falling in love
Believe what you need to when push comes to shove

‘Cause we’ve all got the strangest ideas in the night
And we’ve all got shades of gray
And some of us, well some of us, may wake up one fine morning
Falling, falling in love

I woke up one morning, I was losing my mind
So I shut all the doors and I lowered the blinds
Woke up the next morning I was losing my soul
Punched through the windows and jumped out the hole

Tore through Texas, skipped over Oklahoma
Had Carolina on my mind
And Missouri’s far too early to tell you the whole story
But the way I hear they found me deaf and blind

But we’ve all got the strangest ideas in the night
And we’ve all got shades of gray
And we’ve all got a chance to get a few things right
But maybe not quite in any old-fashioned way

I can’t say we know what we’re doing
Not sure we really even try
But maybe that’s the only way to keep ourselves from losing
And we do what we need to keep our dreams alive

Believe in Anything

Fall 2005 (?)

Ah, the songs of my second year. Bouncy, rhyming, and completely lacking in images. Fun though.

---

Well, if you believe in anything
Then I’ll believe in everything
But everything I know is not myself
And if you can give me anything
Then I can give you everything
But everything I have is something else

And something else entirely
Is all there is to see
When I wake up and I wonder where I am
And nothing else entirely
Is quite where it’s supposed to be
I wake up and I can’t quite seem to stand

And I don’t know what to tell you but it’s interesting
And I don’t know what to tell you but it’s strange
So meet me at the front door in the middle of the night
And I’ll tell you why it’s all been rearranged

And if you can tell me anything
Then I can tell you everything
But I’m not quite sure that I can tell myself
So if you make sense of anything
Then I’ll make sense of everything
Or I’ll try but I don’t think it’s going to help

So I don’t know what to tell you but it’s interesting
I don’t know what to tell you but it’s strange
But pull me through a window in the middle of the night
And all I know is things are going to change