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.

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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.

This Scene is Amphibious

April 2007

A poem is really just a joke without a punchline.

So somewhere in the mountainous districts near Kyoto,
This jet-lagged bluegrass shows up, and sociologists descend
Like a swarm of tweed locusts and notebooks, and first
They speak to the old monk at the top of the mountain,
Who taught Shinto to the Buddha,
Who taught Nirvana to God,
The summary of all monks and all summits,
Who greets them by offering from his fireplace
A hot coal, and bids them deliver to the vendor
Of bamboo hats at the foot of the mountain, who
Once cheated the monk by broad application of maxim,
“Change comes from within.”

The sociologists, who consider arson beneath them,
A matter for anthropologists, press on in an attempt
To dissect the heart of the matter, and discuss with assembled
Musicians, coopers, potters, and the makers of copper wire
(As all the new bands are electric)
The extent of the flourishing scene,
With a digression into authenticity of late Meiji ceramics,
But the scene is amphibious, a loose conglomeration
Of shorebirds, sherpas, and fiddler crabs,
A narrow-winged long division between ribbons
Of rushing sand and sharp fragments of feral pine
Beaten together on a stone ridge with a steel string.