The ping
comes clear through the murky inter-babble;
The great division!
19 into 45.
I begin to knit
like a polluted saint;
threading fragments unforgotten
- worn balls hoarded
in the memory shed -
insults and lies
and the ghost-bones of icons
Into bits of love and pain
springing up, these possibilities
like mushrooming bollards
and emptying out
like sink-holes.
The dichotomies collide
in the cluttered void
Like dazed motes
Searching for companions
In the muttering din;
the carrying din wafting
through what feels like
the wake for God
cobbled together
At the very last minute,
By fiddlers and scribblers
on the wet deck of America.
The music begins to unwind,
We lean in our ears...
Too many frets, notes
in microtonal huddles
crunching into
The sucking, suckering hum
of the news cycle, breathed
like oily water
by grasping, groaning fish.
Choked on excess
Like Jimi the great,
The sound, unwound
like garroting wire
strung insidiously
across the path
that sneaks the edge
of a cul-de-sac
full of howl
and empty of dreams.
And yet, we continue:
News leaks like pus
from a trussed-up corpse
sucking in oxygen
breathing out pestilent vapors.
And yet, we continue.
The hole-poked bag
Leaks its unseen stuff;
the slow deflate
To sag and wrinkle;
The star falls from the spangled mobile
Landing with a rolling tinkle
On the cradling grave, conflating
Life with death and crease with crinkle.
Meanwhile, Lincoln is stone.
The stammered yawp
Dribbles from the Jaundiced Diminisher
With every bark and boil-burst,
Every foot-crunching
Twist of cigarette
On cathedral floor,
Every cheer from the undenounced,
every ball of hunger
rolling through the huddles masses
gathering their skeletons
like snow to a growing boulder.
Un-fictioned into farce
And shadow,
An eagle pulls in its wings,
and feeling nothing,
hurtling like a plucked and boiled turkey,
it gives its thanks
in passing hard
into the side of a bloodless mountain.
But most don't see it.
Heads down in distanced gathering
trying to fathom the significance
of point four two
recurring.
