tonight’s playlist

[ let the thunders take me under and break my legs tonight. ]

3 compositions

An Inverted Haiku About Ernest Hemmingway

i never liked hemmingway.
what a boor! and string
some clauses together, man!

Atlantis

it is a mark of sophistication
among a good many humans
to posses an adeptness
at not smelling like a human at all.

the skill in practice: i hold an
aluminum canister of pressurized fragrance
which promises to sophisticate me
by making me smell like

“Atlantis”. (I am skeptical.)
I assume they mean the Atlantis of
mythological fame, the ancients
found it’s aroma delightful, one assumes

although it is possible that somewhere
in that yet undiscovered place where
the ideal intercepts our perception,
there exists a qualia of odor -

a thing pure, singular, intimately familiar,
and indescribable, like the sensation of seeing Blue -
which is every bit as Atlantis as blue is Blue,
and those clever devils managed to get it in a can.

An African Folktale, with commentary

once there was a beetle who was in love with the moon, and one day he thought his heart would break if he could not be near her, so he called to her. “my dear!” he said, “come down to me, and be my love, or i will surely die of loneliness!” now the moon is beautiful, but severe, and so has she kept herself pure and bright, though cold and proud. “i have had many suitors, beetle, but for none have i stooped even so low as to brush a cloud. no closer than this shall i come to the uncleanness of your earth until it is as clean and bright as my face in the full light of the sun.” this was the last that she spoke to him, but she did not understand him. the beetle’s love for her was far greater than that of all her other suitors. indeed, it was greater than their loves combined. so still to this day, perhaps when the rain has come and strewn the filth of men and beasts across the ground, the beetle toils, rolling the refuse into clumps and clearing the ground, although his labor is almost wholly to no effect. and at night he dreams of his love, the moon. and so we say here, in this country where i live, that a task which is hopeless is “the dream of the beetle for the moon.”

i have heard this story before, but sometimes the beetle is a man named Sisyphus, and he is a villain instead of a lover. and sometimes the beetle is the sun which rises tirelessly only to sink beyond the horizon each evening. and in another story, each of us is the beetle, but we are the proud ones, content with our toil, and doubting the existence of the moon. but perhaps my favorite, if you will allow me some license, is the story in which the moon is the lover who knows that the beetle can never make the earth clean, since the beetle is not itself clean, so she becomes a beetle herself and makes clean the earth and her love, thus redeeming both.

words

which old, dead greek said
that the soul arises from the blood of man?

if the thousands of vessels
running to and from the left side of this chest,
and tunneling through this human body,
which i obstinately call mine,
were opened to spill their burden upon
the ground,
it would be words
and not blood
that would mix with the dirt,
that would pool up at the edge of a root
and then spill over, and mix,
sticky and congealed,
with the dirt and the smell
in the ditch across the road.

the tongues of angels,
in the ditch by the road.

the pillows on this old couch
are stiff with the rigor mortis
of death-by-dust saturation,
a fate suffered by all the furniture
in this open-window-cooled apartment.
i sit reading old journals
hoping to find entries of profound
but forgotten
confession which say things like
“June 11, 2004, today
i managed to
turn desire
into
an art of un-
restrained pride.”
and then hear a cosmic
“ah ha” that knocks photographs off walls.
i am disappointed
only to the extent
that i find this precise confession elsewhere:
as the yet unvoiced summation of everything
i have ever written,
or thought,
or been.

but then i hear it.

(listen,
child:

there
Is
a Word
Which
traced
the face
of God
across
a nothing
even
emptier.)