On earth as it is on Venus ...
The forge circumvents the altitude,
The cerebral poor long for their adjustment
Of the outer world
To brave the homeostasis like a tribe
In name only, or, really, a feeling
Of something beautiful, because it is true
Tho all that remains is the memory of laughter
And a small-still voice trying to form the words,
Which turn out to be as unimportant as
Tickets to already transcended dimensions,
An expiration point, that is, nothing real
Except for the ever-present attention
To what is no longer desired,
What desire once created, the red letter remnant
Of some flame that made its way through
The spiral-folding passageways of brain
On what you may say was a journey.
And if the thought was yours, if only
For a moment, the feeling that you own it lingers
Even after it no longer has a structure,
Whatever parts it had, fallen away
To re-imagine somewhere some other
Moment of desire, in construction site debris,
Some life spark pulsing the ethers
And the comforts of the visible
Never disturb what is not said.
We are raving mad, by our own definitions,
That fail to capture anything, every flaw we condense
Bears repeating in the breath and in the act
So we may see, in unraveling again, what we could
Almost piece together by ourselves,
Not by reaction, but prescience of discomfort,
What makes our temperatures rise,
And what we find cools us, the relief
That scarce exists without the pain bearing down
Without a break.
We trade another larder dream
For a dream uncompromised
By dreaming, the agreements it entails
To move things forward, not stay
In the paradise bluff, with its frozen honeybees
Watching the dust float, as if that's all
That is not there.
We wish to see what can't be seen
But mash that up with our privileged views
To show our seeing cannot see beyond the prison
Outside self, where the instinctual fails
But that is all there ever is to guide us,
To navigate the pauses from silence to silence
To share a memory of noise
That may be imagined, after all, that's the nature
Of dream, what one wants
But doesn't know, a reaching in the void
For what must be found there, whatever treasures
Show they leave no greater clue. The dust
It swirls away and gets on you
But only when you're bored of being the same,
The servant to the nothingness, the grand pollination
Where the ends are theoretical, means misunderstood,
The only thing worth motion is the reaching
For what is missing, and still is missed
On the other side, but you, you go there anyway,
Through the haze that comes to take the place
Of what you never knew existed when you reached.
The outlines of a voice, clairsentience, a feeling only
As thoughts fill your mind like tidepools fill with eddies.
Whose thoughts are these, you pry, but no one owns
What you possess, what you cannot try to hold,
You wear the role but it soon escapes
To other dinner theatres for other tragic soliloquists
To quip anecdotes of it ...
It was not you anyway
Though you found yourself in sympathy,
Which is the same as being the same as, evidently.
Curious these antediluvian ingots, for my babies
To glow in gold amber, so the throes of birth
Do not fall so precariously on the elders,
Who don't know, and, therefore, suffer
The flex flux indignities of flesh, the dream of innocence,
Denial of loss,
The passing land tide time lock dilemma
That unhooked the bitch dichotomy,
The Throckmorton method unheld,
The Dewey radical solution for the citizenry in refuge,
No small turning, this asp, this melon, and the jungle rhetoric
Of storm overtakes the village, encumbered
By a monstrance, for visage and complete replacement sheets
And ebony seats for the bonafide keeper
Hanging on to the furniture like grapes to an addiction,
The swell is swirling up nocturnal grab-knots of silence, tho
Gemcoats quail before adversity -- hull'oer floats of daisies
Registered at the wing where complacent lookouts gleam,
The tower that looked in on magic dust and crag weed
In its sweep of the seas, still unfamiliar, though we all
Want to die there, aye.
The ash of high chimney bequeaths black feathers
Of coal and tar and weathered strip pokered
In a local quasar where the sole McKechnies vie
For sober drinking rights, the rites of sin, of gin,
Of Sprites mincing wise amid the backdrop
With the flowers of condolence and almost love.
What we take in indulgence we fork over the stake
That the heart would have taken, an overwrought heart
Too bent out of shape to be breaking --
And all at once we are rhymed to the corpus
That knows all is part of the one, if a part is not
All of it except in the seeing that,
Due to our condition, we are absorbed to wave
Replacing energy with images
That can be believed in, no matter how cruel
Or untrue.
So we still linger at the gate, frozen in memory
Of what came before, what we never did remember,
The gate of mercy, where shame stays behind,
The gate to the invisible we don't believe in
Because we never have seen what we never created,
We needed to be prompted, sold
On its constant risings, along the New Jerusalem bridge
Cantilevered upward into deepest, densest fog,
The rainbow of our seeing embossing that
On the for-love-is-covered cloud, sound and fury's
Replay of theories, countervailing tendencies,
To yearn and remonstrate with the worst and best of them,
The Indian givers and holdup takers, bleeding a red queen dry
In the sunshine-starved environs of hubbub Wyoming
Where angles of mercy swerve among adjunct cars,
The kind that could be spinning out a pattern in a wheel
You've never seen, never even known to have existed
Except as one more obstacle blocking your way
To the alignment of world and eye you've been trying
All these decades to achieve, munificent sinner,
Shaping the play to your story
Because it's the only story.
