Nature screams acknowledgment!

It’s the difference between trying to shake loose the truth,
or documenting the location.
Everything is.

Poetry behaves in accordance to all known natural laws. That’s good, that works, and that can help us. Where we get into trouble though is the vehicle of poetry is the mind.

Take a deep sigh and shake it off,
it turns out to be a simple decision,
one that the most people fall into almost naturally.

In the case of poetry the choice is between flagellation and breathing. This decision is usually informed by ideology, in your case flip a coin.

prod the thing (or, oh, it’s a mad beast)

What can we say of the goals and aims of nation-states? Of markets?

Constructs of the human world act just like any other animal. From what I can tell it’s all about stability and growth.

It might be easier if you think of religious institutions.

One day we were happy, the next day we had religion.

Suddenly you have a fractured global religion with localized sub-varieties in various ecological niches. We have the Pope and we have the Bitter Churchlady.

Demonic mouths starving for their next meal. Slobbering angry cries of angst and hunger scream under every footfall. Dizzying hunger stalks prey beneath every shadow.

Politics is just that. Nation states…economic paradigms…just that.

One day we were happy, the next day we had hierarchy.

When meditating it is important to keep your feet on the floor

Miniature sharks with rusty sheet metal teeth tear tendons from your toe joints, puffs of blood dissipate into the air as fragments of bone sink into the carpet.
You attempt to escape though an infinite field of sea urchins. Each defeated step crushing screams. Chunks of your flesh dangle rotting from acidic barbs. You struggle for your last breath as the men of war approach.

but that’s just illusion

the truth is your foot is broken. That throbbing is all the blood rushing out through the flap of meat you ripped apart on the metal leg. Remember you are meditating, in a pool of your own blood. That warm frigid filling is your foot bleeding you to death. But don’t let that bother you

the more important thing to pay attention to right now is how you didn’t notice when you were thrown into rot. A mountain of sickly sweet ketchup coagulates over the cast off carpet half buried in a greasy loam of plastic chips, metal filings, broken glass, and cat litter. This is the stench of territory. Tribes of feral skeletons glare at you from behind infinite overflowing dumpsters. As a treat the mothers bring their kittens to lap at the dripping blood from garbage bags. Here in a community dump in the middle of a trailer park in the unbreathable heat of the hottest summer in history and there are human vultures, a family, digging through the stench and the rot and the despair

but that’s just illusion

the more important thing to keep in mind is that a million years from now, when it is uncovered by some great upheaval, an ally will discover your decrypted broken and diseased toe, and will raise it as a monument to agony.

Poemcraft

This entry is part 2 of 12 in the series Undrafted, February 2015

A poem that isn’t willing to fight for its life is not worth pursuing.