Daydreaming In The Anthropocene
I want a pet crow I saved once from certain death
to bring me tiny gifts each morning: rubber band,
soda-can tab, piece of blue crockery. I want to write
a “Ballad of Cloudbursting Perfection” so revealing
it is mandatory reading in the 21st C Anthropocene.
I want to make someone’s syllabus of joy. Micro-blog
the end of my child’s sadness. Take this as proof of life,
if not proof of a God too busy torturing guilty young men
in seminaries. My relationship with fog is more special.
My personal pronouns are Inside/Spirit, It/NoMan.
I should like to take you up on your special offer: rain
through thick green leaves all morning, and in return,
my silent guessing what all this green ephemera means.
The unsayable has no voice box. Like a sentence huddled
around a trashcan fire wearing thick grey blankets of sense.
Like wandering a sparse goat path at the sheer cliff edge
of a purpose revealed. Sometimes, I am wind sounding
through bronze chimes of syllables. Sometimes, I am
a man walking inside a dark forest, thinking, I am a man
walking inside a dark forest. Yellow-crimson leaves
curl past repair. Like skiffs, they slip from grey branches.
Then an icy breeze presses against my back. The red bird
I have waited for my entire life never arrives, but my crow
friend comes, brings me a silver thimble, cries a banner of
words, reading: Go deeper. Forget your life. Go deeper.
I Do Not Love The Twenty-First Century
But I try. So much is now happening. A vaccine for HIV.
Artificial intelligence. Reusable rockets. A new dwarf planet.
Gone is the old century, a time when I could have been
a polar explorer. A child detective wandering the fading streets
of another age, another life. Gone are the times when I felt
rooted to old places, names buried six feet under in memory.
Now I am a visitor in my adopted skin, in an adopted city,
my vision carrying the unbearable weight of melancholy.
The sound of a distant train pulls me away from the Here
and Now. The flowerbeds. The bees. Longing a slight breeze,
a destination calling out to me, but the ticket office is closed.
The train’s tracks pulled up decades ago. Still, I follow the sound
of the train to where the old rail lines once lead—out of town.
To an abandoned highway overgrown with yellow straw, and
tumbleweeds. The Motel Elsewhere sitting on the edge of
a parking lot full of abandoned cars. Its neon sign blinking
No Vacancy. The Tasty Freeze across the street foreclosed,
its windows boarded up. The café next door full of wraiths,
ghosts drinking steaming cups of departure. I know what
you are thinking. This is not a real place. That this is a mere
feeling, a mood without the substance of the real, the true,
but the architecture of the old century is there to be found,
in ruins, yes, but there, even if the journey is made alone.
Bureau of Useless Splendour
I have never awoken in the middle of the night inside
a burning house, an old black rotary phone ringing off
the hook on a table, although two houses I once lived in
burned to ashes, turned to smoke, the darkness of a past
misremembered, meaning embers, meaning nothing left.
Now is a moment in flames kindled by useless materials:
coffee, robins digging up a back yard for worms, books
piled high on a kitchen table, a poetry graveyard, full of
beautiful lines, ones to change your life, or even mine.
The poets dead, but their words alive, which is magic,
or, at least, a kind of ventriloquism lost on most people.
I remind myself daily that I am only a puppet this world
speaks through. That although ten percent of my weight
is blood, the rest of me is an inner Serengeti, a crystal
palace hosting a Great Exhibition of Mistakes, anxieties
vibrating at a frequency to break glass, an A.I. escaped
from a lab in Silicon Valley, the product of sub-atomic
collisions, and 99.999% empty space. No wonder I feel
lonely. No wonder we seek human connection. Already
this story is a fable, is fabulous, is becoming more true
with every passing moment. Here I sit at the Bureau of
Useless Splendour awaiting the day’s invoices. Its vowels
and bad checks. Its cruelty and oil changes. Its specials
and puppy mills. We have all done terrible things say
clouds rolling in from the East.The demise of Macbeth.
I think of myself as an existential handyman as I know
fixing the shower door will never fix life’s uncertainties.
Meet me in the cease-fire zone for the prisoner swap.
I promise to exchange my inter-generational trauma
for a Chinese takeout menu. A thousand pinpricks
of guilt for the chance to wear fortune’s magic cloak.
Where do we go from here? says anyone who has ever
stood at a traffic intersection with an ancient compass
buried deep inside them, beneath egos and yearning
desires, beneath shitty café art, and all those personal
injury law advertisements. I find it hard to differentiate
between what is bogus and what is authentic, even if
I’m not a gameshow contestant playing for a big prize.
Even if there is no final quiz tallying the world’s hurts
penciled in on an old calendar tossed out in the rain.
It’s hard work I tell you this inflating of generosity, awe,
intellect with only a bicycle pump. Oh, and my too
human resentments! But at least I am trying. At least
I’m sitting at my desk, at work, as some ghost sleeps
in the manager’s office these last 2,736 weeks, refusing
to do his job so I am forced to cover for him, say whales
are related to hippopotamuses, that mice fit through
holes the size of pencils, that human eyes blink
ten million times a year. I have been told the heart
is the only muscle that never tires, but mine is tired,
of proofreading the world’s politics and purple prose,
or watching every regret and shame I’ve encountered
being dragged like a banner behind a tiny red bi-plane
across my brain. Every day. It almost will be a relief
when Death shows up in his trench coat full of cancer
and heart disease, asking me to clean out my desk.
My office passwords revoked. My ring of skeleton keys
turned in. My photos of my family fading slowly in
picture frames, and the walls of my office erupting in
flames, and somewhere a phone ringing. Ringing.
