Emerging
from the middle of a donut-shaped dream, I rolled out of yesterday
like there was
no tomorrow, leaving
only now, its dinky gravity enough, apparently, to pull me out of the
family tree,
family of
man, American consumer army family, leaving me no parachute but
the poetry map
I'd stitched together
confidently, happy, careless of those unstoried pages flying
into the future,
written or read,
who knew, but now the genres, modes, tones, the careers are ripping open,
I've gained weight,
apparently, body lurking
in the weeds all the while, its endless voiceovers more familiar by now
than
memory,
but for outside news? nothing but echoes, read by soothing Furies
looking straight out,
we the media,
all other pronouns confiscated, late breaking faces making
eye
contact
out of the mask of uniform intelligence, brisk concern, it's
in the contract,
mouths fully employed,
nimble with the universal accent, undisturbed by accidental carnage crawling
beneath
datelines
and places, giving way to epic plots and fashion-bodies spinning
the confected minutes
to a timeless
friendliness, "here be epics, here be epiphanies, here be state of the art
oceanic
marginalities,
last month the Gross Poetic Product showed a modest increase,
continuing the trend
from the dawn
of history," and there's no way to turn this off, the mute
button's
broken,
like all the others, so much for the thought that the remote was
autonomous, mine, that
I could write,
and it would do the rest, this must be the work of History,
Blatant Beast,
Today's Date,
this morning's neural releases, which who wants mentioned,
the tiny dreams,
the plans, ever-huger,
are those the powers? endangered, to say the least, by their own
tenses,
ours,
what I write, wrote, you read, will read, with just an is or two separating
made from making,
breaking up from
broken open, hardly enough, but that's what there is to work with,
sirens blasting,
ignore them
at the risk of enchantment, and what's the opposite of that? and where else
would it
put us?
and before the question mark touches down echo has answered,
Yes I
know, knowledge
echoes from the tapes, "This planet seems inhabitable, in fact, conditions
are perfect for
pastoral or industrial
park, I'll get a reading on the temperature," and we're back, in the loop,
that trick
palm pilots
learn in their cradles, to make the world present in all directions,
asking only for
our spontaneous ignorance,
giftwrapped, gold ribbons, bows of burning desire, personally monogrammed,
cut,
it's
a wrap, the irony will never be fresher, the studied refusals of cliche more
stolidly searching, those
frames, these happy
coincidental hours, with in and out on the same page, vale and dale rolling
their contours
in unison,
forests dancing onto boxcars, each autonomous trunk trundled
toward utopia,
Pleistocene raptures
still burning behind the scenery, below the pages, under the pissed rivers,
smothered
heat
making our expressions compromised ambassadors of an enlarged continuum,
nowhere to rest
for the weary,
or the bored, or the teary, or the usurpers next door, behind the mirror,
there
are
no final surfaces, on earth, in dreams, no smooth pages on which to fix
the just sentences,
writing on water
turns out to be a play on words, a pun that only works because inside
a language
everything sounds
the same, the Federal Building says Federal Building
on the outside
and the cement
is fine with it, apparently, so why, legibility wonders,
does
sense
have to be such a pill? how many tons of therapy will it take, even to get
to square one,
to be able
to feel even one of those organized, sharp corners, amid the growing suspicion
that the problem
is one of
basic structure, that the mind's endless infoliations are only crude links
lashing the sea
to its name
without prior consent, or even notice, a kind of invasion you might say,
even though intelligibility
knows it's for
the best, articulation and pleasure will follow, they already do, don't they,
frisking around the
heels of power,
but there's a certain unease, an itch that anxious stares from even the best dogs
can't
scratch,
being emperor in no matter how many brains, no way can enough
satisfaction fit inside
a single body,
even if it swallows every scrap of information on the horizon, novelty
all day
and mood
music all though the night, plus the fantasy powers, but when they
give you
the keys
to Philadelphia and the people who live here, you'll find, on the same
chain, the keys
to Baghdad and
the bodies in the bunkers of the Federal Buildings there, and if these keys open
any book, any
line of credit,
what it says is there is no more sleep, no more awakening, Surrealism
is was
the last
gasp of that logic, its snorts issuing in apnean revolt, volcanic fragments
the curators shelve,
aroused but careful,
in ever sharper catalogs, signals for the bidding to go a little
crazy,
rediscover
its beliefs, relive foundational erotic breakthroughs, but the gavel
hardly makes
a dent,
the niches are too deep, only the fuzziest light sifts down, the openings
close early
in there,
not much to do but focus on the fleas jumping off the evening soliloquy
as Captain Kirk,
highest ranking ambassador
to the ego, pronounces judgment, "cooling, cool, cold, a life
is wax,
a singular
stylus would be good, but there's only so long to press
into the material,
whether you know
a language as yours or you don't," it's quite a distortion of course,
but
you're
not? the fractious infinites fit into people the best they can,
or
else
they don't, flooding the world with things, either way
it's now,
the moon's
full, as is the earth, its places dissolving into undesired
triangulations, each named
nowhere to avoid
confusion, to give all parties a fair shot at sedation, where everywhere
remains officially
in reach,
in the past or the future, bend those equals signs to get out from under
the vacuum.