To balance our gait upon our knuckles
To grunt and snort monosyllabic responses to charismatic charlatans' fear mongered exhortations
To lasciviously lap clean crimson palms stained by innocent pools coagulating in occupied lands
To ignore our fervent dreams' rotting entrails while corporate willed solutions enforce through military commands
To suffer unredeemed agony's heartbeat longingly mourn
To rise above the clammy carcass pile now representing civilization
Yes even the time to ask forgiveness for desecrating this immaculate planet
Elapsed twenty minutes ago
Did you not hear the alarm
The echo screams even now in plaintive wails issued from the raspy throats belonging to starving children
In the final crystallized newly-etched fossilized tears from species rendered extinct with every additional breath you breathe
In engines' incessant whirring, painting the sky with a murky brown wash
While darting through streets and choking highways
In frightened eyes' furtive glances askance over hunched shoulders
For an unrelenting amorphous evil which only exists within ourselves
As we created all good and evil from our own fantasies and phantasms
Will you choose a dullard's cowardice not knowing when to discard
Life's training wheels or how to stop maniacally grinning
At Narcissus' lying shadow winking back from beyond the mirror
Where monumental edifices erect glorification to humanity's imagined supreme majesty
And mastery over a habitat which gave birth to us
Sustains us
And which will outlast us by eons
We cannot create a workable master plan
For subdividing the entire planet
No make-up brand
No matter how much collagen you use
No plastic surgery procedure
No architectural style
No designer label on our apparel
Can mask the decadent Hyde lurking within the Jekyll
Masking our desires and tainting all efforts to dominate splendor
We cannot make natural laws subservient
To economic models designed for wealth's centralization
The quality of mercy has been constrained
It drops down like acid rain
Waterboarding Western Civilization
Which writer calls the sky clear blue
It's brown by smog and hazed with gloom
Who sees the stars on moonless nights
When sight diffuses in city lights
Which wilderness helps wild to teem
In factory poisoned dying streams
The ocean's extinction we make
When plankton and reef's lives we take
Veiling screens reveal when parting
That all are one and one is all
Not bits of
Not imbued with
Just different branches
One solitary tree
Only one instant exists
Now's fleeting illusion
So fertile with options
Begging "Redeem
Life in this now
The only now"
As each new now passes to not-new now
Just more of the same now requiring
Not-yet now to slip
Through regretful fingers
He is I as I am you
We are they as she is free
Life's a maze though interlaced yews
Someone's the sky so anyone's the sea
The dog bear and hunter too
Eternally shine constellationally
Not life death nor sad adieu
Obscures cozmic Unity.
This is an edited version of a poem which was originally published by Eleventh Transmission on March 3, 2008 in their Vol II Issue 3. A link to the archived publication has been placed on the right column (8 poems on Eleventh Transmission).
4 comments:
reads like a mystic's work...
wud that be called preaching at some level... and whose voice is that?
Hey Tanuj! The speaker is the "single fleeting illusion" of life, the future looking at us as historians, humanity's conscience, Mother Earth, the planetary mind.
Yeah, this is preachy, I know. It's blatantly getting my view out there. It's a political, social consciousness poem. Sometimes I think that unless one tells people exactly what one thinks, one is apt to find much later, that one's point of view has been changed. This one isn't easily changed, is it?
Have you read Wild Swans by Jung Chan? A wonderful political history and personal Chinese story from the novelist's grandmother to herself as a young adult going through the turbulence of change.
Also England, even though it resisted for as long as it could, was on the brink of defeat. It was luck what stopped it from being occupied by the Germans. Hitler suddenly eyed Russia and changed tactics.
Hi there Monique. I take seriously your remarks regarding the possibility of England having been invaded by Germany. (Am I correct in assuming this comment is in reference to my essay on why occupations can no longer work?) I agree. My point would be, though, that the British would have emulated the French. The British would not have submitted to Hitler's occupation without a struggle. They would have built an underground network of resistance like the French. The British colonies in the Empire, like French colonies, would have resisted the Nazis and Japan. The U.S. would have done what it did, ship arms and supplies to the British, though in a more clandestine manner. However, it would have drawn America into WWII earlier. But, I'd like to think that the British would have held out a resistance just like all the other examples and that history would only be marginally different.
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