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.
HIGH VOLTAGE
Give me liberty or give me library books,
book cards stamped full of yesterdays!
Am I a teacher or a court stenographer
recording life’s paradoxes? It depends.
Have you learned anything from this fly
quietly dying, trapped in a spiderweb?
Or from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland?
Pencil in your answers then stand by for
further instructions. If you could see fit
to transfer me out of solitary, I promise
to stop trying to escape whatever this is.
It’s dystopian family night, every night,
and I am buying! I wish things lasted,
but the menu constantly changes. I’m
afraid of meaning, so I rub my feet
on the carpet, sending little sparks
from my fingertip to your arm. That
shock, that tingle of recognition, is
the one thing I am trying to preserve.
Not leitmotifs, or chalk numerals on
a blackboard, but a stream of charged
particles passed between two people,
okay? Ready, set, zap! Our bodies
two light bulbs transferring energy,
illuminating a colossus in the dark.
OLYMPUS MONS
In the movies, satellites in outer space sweep across
the exosphere of our planet, blink red, make sounds
like a truck backing up, a lie told by sound editors
since sound carries by vibrating air molecules, and
no air floats in space, so I guess this is my way of
breaking it to you I canceled my pioneering flight
to Mars. I would much rather scream into the void
on Earth, than a vacuum of empty ether in space,
and where would I put my beach glass collection?
Too many things I would miss. The flowering of
crabapple trees in Spring. The scent of rain, and
a green city park. Little things. Toothpaste spat
into a sink. Paying too much for a Maccciato.
The squish of sand and ocean foaming between
toes. Ordinary men and women, too. Not ones
with degrees in astrophysics who gladly squeeze
breakfast from a tube. Real people with real fears
who carry their anxieties like Sisyphus up the hill
then trudge down, only to do it again tomorrow.
Accidents, illness, pain, malfeasance, misfortune.
People with a fear of darkness, without actually
floating around a spaceship in it. People tethered
to the smallest, most ordinary of daily miracles:
a hummingbird’s whirring, a sunset lighting up
clouds the colour of cotton candy, the laughter
of two small children bouncing in a trampoline
in a neighbour’s yard. What might I say if I found
myself walking the red dust canyons, dry lake beds,
extinct volcanoes of Mars? If I found myself alone
on the summit of Olympus Mons, sixteen miles
above the planet, I would say Home. I miss home.
IT’S ALL GOING TO BREAK
Today, I am steering myself into fresh agonies. The rain
falling heavily appears to be boiling the surface of things.
Despite the pummelling, when the rain stops, the grass
releases an aromatic scent that, if it were a foreign word,
would mean love. Would mean forgiveness. I’m terrible
at future-casting. I slept on Google and Apple shares.
I invested in what no ear has heard, no eye has seen.
I walk around couples taking pictures of each other on
sidewalks. Age is “shrinkflation.” The visible world
grows ever smaller, despite it taking three connections,
across a day, to reach Koh Samui, Thailand by plane.
Memory is a Homecoming Weekend where trees still
line the cobblestone path and the campus quad is eerily
deserted, except for the one cannon sitting prominently
in the centre, where some random joker has painted it
with the words, this is not real. In sum: do I cry or sing?
Even if the years were unkind, they all retreat in the end.
By then, I will be a pile of carbon ash carefully scraped into
the world’s most expensive marble jar. The news says
climate change, the Right and the Left, brick and mortar
retail stores, everything is going to break. Well, speaking
as the frequently broken, nothing is beyond repair.
I’m giving up skepticism’s time-share. I’m renegotiating
the terms of my lease. I want a clause that says I deserve
my share of happiness, my little plot of dreams, a summer
sans brush-fires, a 50/50 draw in good luck. I need
a first aid kit of laughing gas. A bushel of smiles.
Something to poison my anxieties with joy.
REQUIEM FOR THE AMERICAN MEME
Cultural ideas spread like dandelions, forget-me-nots,
in the green lawns of corporate America. I’d stare at clouds
rather than memes, but the inside joke of nihilism,
of civilization collapsing, is more funny than a cloud’s inside joke
of rain. It will be another ten years of forest fires, famines,
before we hear the punchline of eco-terrorism overtake nightly
news no one watches. Memes say, watch the dancing baby!
Every one of our houses is on fire.The caption: this is fine.
Now substitute a dog drinking coffee for Noam Chomsky.
Substitute Jason Momoa sneaking up on every damn one of us
for a carriage ride with Death. The American Dream,
once an orgiastic green light, is now a rape kit in the car trunk
of a serial killer. My thoughts cannot be toyed down
to a picture of Kermit the Frog drinking tea,
to Leonardo DiCaprio raising a glass of champagne.
Maybe the best meme is what light is whispering
to the cherry blossoms making them so horny for bees,
or how every Instagram selfie tasers the word me over and over,
until it smiles. Here is a photo of an otter swimming
with its baby on its lap. Here is condescending
Willy Wonka. Add funny captions. I would add my own,
but I’m too busy turning myself into smoke, into
a cultural panic attack, into magnolia blooms torn asunder
like beautiful metaphors for living and dying.
Change my mind.
