I.

evolving, thunder-struck

amino eventualities

and bio-potentialities

in the muck

re-group, protoplasmic and joyful

singing in the proverbial soup

of circumstances

and random cosmic chances

a song of differentiation

loose ends / ragged strands / loose lines

of poetry: DNA spiral dances

Precambrian time, period of time extending from about 4.6 billion years ago (the point at which Earth began to form) to the beginning of the Cambrian Period, 541 million years ago. Precambrian time encompasses the Archean and Proterozoic eons, which are formal geologic intervals

II.

the wriggling one-celled poet decides

to become complex

takes its time:

geologic / astral eons

twitching and failing

into the fabled tadpole of adaptation

to a godless universe, diverse

in its variegated futility

this idea has been summarized in the mouthful, ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’, which means the development of the individual embryo repeats its alleged evolutionary history. The first thing to say about this dictum, is that ‘law’ it is not!

III.

our fish, now fowl,

proclaims its Archaeopteryx manifesto

standing on Precambrian banks

demanding a return on its investment

in sedimentary overlays:

Ernst Haeckel !  shrieks the avian jokester

The Imaginary Monera: the eating habit and reproductive cycle of an alleged Moneron to which he gave the scientific name, Protomyxa aurantiaca 73 pages of his speculations more important than facts and evidence.

IV.

into the long long corridors

of time’s bad poetry

sleeping off the tadpole nightmare

sprouting flippers, legs, digits, wings

deciding to fly, smashing antediluvian cedars with trilobite tail

upright biped sporting body-hair

you shall prevail

descending from trees in African dreams

misanthropologically *****

gracile / robust (that’s us)

Hey turn that **** up ! yells Piltdown Man

from his evolutionary window

He believed that the only major difference between man and the ape was that men could speak and apes could not. He therefore postulated a missing link which he called Pithecanthropus alalus (speechless apeman) a woman with long lank hair suckling a child.

V.

falling for the lies

of the Lord of the Flies

Zinjanthropus asks quizzically

How much more of this

are you prepared to take ?

misbegotten centuries glimmer:

light years of bad poetry

captive eons of incoherent free verse

as we wait

for the Bronze Age Myths

to begin

Seeing the volcano from below
just another mountain
but this mountain
speaks of the earth disgorging
its molten guts
of lightning arcing
in ten zillion volt flashes
of God's terrifying grace
of geologic upheaval
that happened before anyone knew
anything about God
that happened before anyone knew anything

We were kids on a
long weekend
decrepit jeep pickup
camper shell over the bed
we stopped for an old Indian woman
and her son
hitchhiking
I remember the strange musky smell
of her
sitting by me
on the truck's bench seat
like food I'd never eaten
or a hand-me-down blanket
from the last century

We camped at Green Lake
and green it was
set out the next day
fully unprepared for our climb

But our young limbs
carried us to a precarious summit
the South Sister
nothing but sky all around
and dreams
distant peaks
the sleeping volcanoes
of the Cascade Range
stretching into the vastness
of north and south
Such peace

And here
now
I drown in
a deep web of tangled memories

Vistas I once surveyed
live and breathe in my mind
people I once knew
still whisper in my ear
though they are long dead

How do they live on?
Who tends these grass-grown graves?
Who speaks for these dead?

And where do these memories go
when we die?

inspired by a short story from the man from Snake River


<>


no alarm clocks heard expiring,
unrequired and unrequited,
we,
those, self-employed by the
nocturnal repetitive recounting
of sins of omission and worse,
those commissioned in
anger and haste, that breed only
more anger and lay further waste
from humans to 
humans,
awaken with an
irregular precision
and bad disorder,
demanding chances,
expiation, restitution, amendment,
but time erodes
possibilities for the
impossible,
foreign forgiveness

knock-you-down rushing currents
of water erodes Snake River boulders,
them oldsters just like the litany of our
malfeasances, indestructible in nature
geologic,
and in
human nature
illogic,
terms, such as time measurements,
irreverent and irredeemable,
for our sins
live far longer than
our owned memories,
in those harmed, who
cannot in the unlimited timeless quantity of
ever ever,
understand

your wry smile,
your why cries,
audibles you’ve
play called, go
unheard, unseen,
even and odd
Bach Orchestral Suites,
Beethoven Sonatas
more mock than soothe

trapped between industrial carpet
and flat unpainted Armstrong ceiling tiles,
you
in a hell of your own creation, forgot to include,
a Sabbath day extant, of rest for weary creators,
ever ever,

or planned in a world you’ve  designed,
so the best you
can do
is write
another and another
confession ever ever

watching and listening to
the alarm clock that neither
requires setting, for
it’s audible ticking is
alarm-ing curse
enough ever ever
that always never
rings

I want to see you sleeping after
tick-tocking like a wind-up clock all day,
falling like a taut of rope to the bottom of
a canyon to thud down into a pensive pile,
spreading your energy out as a silent spirit
across the dry river bed, the wind of you
whipping up sediments in the vast valleys beneath.

I want to bear witness to you catching my eye
from across the room cautiously,
covering the communion in cadmium lemonade tape,
tasty and afraid of being caught at the crime scene.
I'll throw you a line and you can come up gasping,
glorious and shining in the adolescent sun,
pulling in air where water should come.

I want to watch you write that paper you're working on.

I want to spot you screaming into oblivion,
washing over wonder with waxy fingers,
grabbing at the truth like five year olds ****** fireflies
out of a fleshy, dusk-dipped night
with mothers calling out "Come inside!" in loving, eager fright.

I want your eyes to glimmer something back at me,
meeting me in the cosmos to make the moon,
Mercury slinging stardust over his shoulder,
flirting with Venus and fighting her smolder,
meteorites crashing into each other,
creating solar systems in their wake.

I want to contemplate you on a flat plane,
feeling a frenzy of agitated hands
and fluctuating heart rate,
fault lines moving crazy,
crashing through geologic time
to make earthquakes feel human.

I want to stare at you saying things
that would color me crimson in broad daylight
as we breathe out heavy to the ancient incantations
of an early umber evening.

I want to see you
without a pocket mirror attached to my wrist,
cutting into my skin,
blood purple like lavender iced tea in the summer
and veins an undulating blue.

step one: you must realize that
villains are the protagonists of their own stories;
ergo, everything does revolve around you.
you really are not worthless.
why should you care
what the people trying to overthrow you think?

step two: use your anger to create.

step three: or use it to destroy.

step four: allow yourself to feel.
allow yourself to
hide.
you are not wrong for shining in the light or for shying from it.

step five: you must realize that
this too shall pass.
in one thousand years louisiana will be underwater
and new landmasses will rise from the sea like individual venuses.
geologic time will march on, inescapably slowly, on clocks you cannot read,
regardless of you.
we are still only in the holocene era.
the universe doesn't care how many times you try;
the universe doesn't care if you try; but
someone has to, and i believe it should be you.
on the word-a-day desk calendar of existence,
humans only arrived on earth on
the last minute of december thirty-first:
whatever pain you're feeling is temporary.

In from the mist of our material plain
Out far in the East lay a trail by the sea
Dotted with wells and the sounds of quails
Crusted jets of shined Earthen fits
Rubbed down from its shear as a mountain
Played out by the watery, rusted brass section

The Cliffs rise and fall on the water
And the Cliffs sit and wait on the water

Slowly lowing pours of passes,
Brooks and weathered ravines showing
Tracing inwards, out to pasture
Winds the coastline to these towers
Birds of Dover hover, soundless
Mixing air gusts line the pipers

Where Cliffs rise and fall on the water
And the Cliffs right down to the bottom

So may a beetle missing wing
Come eventually reach the sea
Gull by way or ever scaling
Geologic clock come sailing
Scoring drums the cheer of tides
Into when years are fossilized

As Cliffs rise and fall on the water
So Cliffs sit and be on the water

And all that stone bore out of time, styled
Dark and plinthed come moored day round
Ornate platters, restful gravel,
Granite or a painting gathers
Art and sky are matched as one, within
Centered over sunset blazing on

And the Cliffs rise and fall on the water
And the Cliffs soar beauty mined on the shores

Oh that I could tower the words
Or send them powering underground
To feel the warmth of deeper worlds
And find the geologic power
Of you.

Then I should see and know your goodly earth
That concrete, brief and money serving prose
So slyly veils, betrays so sickly from me
Every day.

I want you in the coldly marbled glory of
A soaring place of awe for dreams -
A monument valley where the trivial has no place.
I want you in the moment of a glance -
A quiet corner of a room
Where plots for good
May hatch.


I want you in the tears and smiles
And curious nothings
Of all the many miles
To come.

We’re tying our shoes-- as we think about the day's gifts
          Holding strings-- curling ribbons with latent sweat
"I’'ve heard they’ll pull us through-- we tie around each box
          eyelets, through tunnels and catacombs."-- a shimmering luster abetting
beyond the sky.

Today we mourn those drained sausage-limbs at noon-time
     --(Sallow-cheeked mistresses and fortunes abounding
        for those who have time for such things.)

With tears
     --hiding the feelings of those who have none

                  slapping the ground.
We see
           every unfurling light
combine with blots of pity
                                                 to fortify prairie grass.

And I remember an old gravel highway that separates my family and church from geologic
build-up which the wind is slowly chewing.

I can't be with them-- like the western, sandy steppes of Nebraska,
     I can't hold water, and their loving nourishment sinks through me.
     My arms won't be like ribbons, in an embrace of the
dead’s remitting tendrils.
     As I lay outstretched on the Sand Hills, shielding my belly from the desert sun;
     boring water trapped in caverns under neatly wound sweat-bows and boxes
I, one day, too, cry emaciated tears.

     Surely, we are tethered firmly to the spool, dangling with
tensity on the tines of breath, shimmering, aloft-- but also, don’t forget:

We are fastened by a knot above our leather casing
     holding the body in-piece and being manipulated at once.
     We decorate the boxes, in which we are to lie
with wet, green ribbon, pulled through rocky soil by course, chapped hands.

I read that The Colorado River
is pinned down like a snake
used to be that
(before the one-armed-man was king)[1]

the feet of the river
would pick up and move
across the Sonoran dessert
they’d trample laundry lines

and capitalist enterprise
now the snake is still
breathes still it is captive
under 15 concrete collars

the next time it sheds its skin
is geologic time. beyond generational
in geological time the flooding
of the Glen Canyon is a frame

skip, but a ski boat’s wake is forever.
a vast inland sea, even
castles in the sky need moats.
impenetrable as the air

the whole shebang un-erodes,
it becomes nothing
squeezed between ghosts
and immaculate parking lots

9/20/18
9:26 am

The people I meet in dreams don't remember who I am. I knew you back then, I say. You know me. But I think about the ways I am different from then, how fear made me shift in ways I can't describe.

There isn't enough time to tell the stories of my becoming,
as I am still becoming.

Winter is my season. No stranger is the cold, dry air to my nostrils. The wind whips my face, lashes for every breath taken for granted.

Ice awakens ancestral knowledge,
not of human origin but geologic time.

When did we become vessels for truth? For the words on my lips crawl from a well of pain, fragments bubble to the surface.

Pieces to a puzzle only I can solve.

I wonder, does the core of our planet feel the way we do? Does she writhe in pain the way we do? Is she lonely, like me? Does she feel alive when the sun beats across her face, and does she dance across space to feel alive, like I do?

Earth wept when we plotted her demise, victim to the narrative of a civilized society. Human progress is nothing but power and glory.

How have I been so complicit in your suffering, I ask.
The Earth remains silent.

Poetic Pyromania to prepare for NaPoWriMo 2017

Haunted by data, hounded by blog-bots, assailed by algorithms, poets have been reduced to human resources, fractionated, monetized and commodified like petrochemical residues of the antediluvian world. In keeping with that metaphor imposed upon us by ourselves, we await a mere spark to begin consuming our own fuel, flaming voraciously into poetic combustion. Through this incendiary process, we liberate the very energy that an unpoetic world seeks to label, quantify and merchandize. Flame, however, cannot be commodified—only intensified, suppressed, or extinguished. Elemental fire may be started by lightning, produced by physical friction, electro-chemical reaction, or started from a pre-existing blaze. Poetry is similar; whether sent from God as a bolt of epiphany, a spontaneous combustion, or as a transposed flame inspired by anterior works, April is our month for playing with metaphysical fire. It is thus that we, as elemental (or just mental ) poets, refuse, at all levels (lyrical, cultural, mercantile, geologic, celestial and infernal, etc.) to be co-opted, commodified, and/or in any way politically corrected.

We poetic oilmen and women are the active nihilists of a nihilistic era. We locate promising sites, then we draw up, from below the poetic bedrock, raw inspiration. NaPoWriMo allows us to drill deep into the sedimentary layers of poetry and tap into the deposits of lyrical fuel trapped within. Some gets pumped up, some comes gushing spontaneously to the surface in a crude form. It can then be refined to varying degrees of flammability and into differing types of fuel; think diesel versus jet fuel… one will take you further faster, but both are indeed fuel.

As oilmen and women, we pump our precious resource up in raw form from subterranean seas—the remains of lyric flora and fauna of a previous age buried under the silt of an inundation of data-driven global dullness. Through sheer creative will we set these deposits ablaze, to produce, out of the incoherent night that surrounds us, poetic illumination. In the light of our own flame, we cerebrate the utter uselessness of our artistic product—by continuing to create it, refine it, and then burn it up in a transcendent pyre of irrelevance. Thus, we wage uncompromising war against the powers and principalities of technoid global dominion. Our useless words, unread and unwanted, undermine the process of attempted global conquest by the unpoetic Enemy.

How long is history made
20,000 years or three hundred?
The dedham cracked, releasing as it calved the chip on its shoulder
A glacial erratic
A plutonic catastrophe
Or a geologic pilgrim
Which we call Plymouth Rock.
When we landed on the chip,
It broke once, twice, and its demolition continues as tourists whittle down the stone to its smallest of meanings
A sedimentary token of mistaken intention.
I wonder how long we shall be here.
I think the truth is found in the dwindling stone.

mop handle doldrums
staring through space
into universe
drooling goon doodling cartoon
caricatures of lost loves
silt accumulates
at the corners of his fleshy mouth
soft movements of incoherent mumblings
give rise to spit lines stretching
and contracting
green bodied fly occasionally drawing ire
if not attention
the world seems out of focus though the grime coated glass
passersby unaware of the squalor of a man possessed
frantic scribbling by a chewed up #2
held in scarred and stained paws
webbed by genetics
battered by an uncaring world
unflinching girl
frozen grimace
geologic

moldy socks stuck to the grime covered floor
hold my attention momentarily
lost in thought, scrambled
I wander from room to room
looking for misplaced memories
pictures of you in the sun –
retaliation against the bloodbath
leaves the young admonished
sent before the tribunal
judged by skin tone
and pronunciation of hard vowels sounds –
enraged caged beasts cease peace
fleeced pieces of feces resist change
instead hardening and shedding color
petrified putridity permeates the ponderosa
floating on a sea of geologic waste
the sandy shoreline smiles at the scene –
endgame fascists brooding over equality talk
sit Indian style, calling it “criss-cross”
so as not to offened
wait for the moment in which they are able to **** indiscriminate
those deemed less or inferior
pancake batter dried to the edge of fine china
dog hair gracing Chanel handbags
**** in frocks frolic in the farm fresh
air
for pennies –
***** jokes dot the comic strip
leaving children confused and aroused
immorality gains traction
with its studded tires and studly physique
sturdy in its placement
stable in the den –
awash with idealism
indigents scrap infected scabs
looking under for answers
finding only diseased blood –