THREE POEMS from THE LONG NOW
Visit Ghost Proposal 10 for three sections from THE LONG NOW
[T I TA N O M A C H I A ] —THE LONG NOW, PART XIX—
A tree grew me; I was green and wood.
Parents run amok in the twittersphere.
Tectonic plates shift our relation
to the world to each other
no ballast to hold
to carve runes into.
Whose fault is it we fall
out of ourselves?
Here I am only a tick-
mark on a ballot, hung chad, long vowel
in an imagined electorate
falling further into otherness.
It was the clock not fallen back
that told the future prescient
the future deserved.
The fricative word, flesh-
pressed air into O and through.
It is not my voice who speaks
through the same portal as my voice.
What we say is systematized is entered into
the will to do to run to say:
nobody has the right to rule.
City swallows its children
storm drains dump into our screens
even stenciled curbs tell us
we are all just desiring-machines.
Can’t buy
demiurgic will without selling soul
first American rights
already sold.
+
I am most myself when with you
I am almost evergreen light
in every not-blue thing
in this new Middle-Age,
stuck between dark money’s bracket
and radio silence reality so impossible
to comprehend I can’t help
but comprehend it.
Robin says LOVE IS FORM
but we’ve lost the world
structure, lost the word
friend, lost the connection to cosmogony
but some say we, some can, some hope.
Who can swim this Charybdis
and make anything
like a modest middle-
class life?
O valley splay spill homes
from hills into grid night inaccessible
to us, an oppressive force
that ruins everyone’s party.
Even gods find fault
in the space between earth and earth
in the not-to-touch
two bodies split
by force
and fury
O valley museum
meridian car dealership corridor
the air fractures brown then clear-
ish: shorthand for
dollar store plastic baskets
in the widening gyre.
Every body is erased by itself
even love a simulacrum even home
is only the idea of home
the image of an ideal life
reversed.
+
I tell myself the truth of it.
I truth myself into it.
I try myself truthfully on.
I too want to truth over
the family schema on a paper tree
like a vintage map to the stars
exed out and corrected.
I want to work to win the heart
but lose
and think, why do we ascribe such power
to injured and healing things.
Why can’t we fake our way
into the collective unconscious wait
we totally can.
Parents too easily fooled
too pale to know the face
in the moon is an other
is a mirror’s reminder
of the previous day.
The toll it takes
stays on
in the chemistry
of the body
waking
into life like a day-burned room
blinded by fire from a dying star.
Truth isn’t any longer
a thing to seek or write toward
or make into a headline.
It doesn’t matter
matter in the instance
the great unknowing.
Fuck it. This is a poem for no one.
This poem for everyone’s after.
In the wreckage of every city
family, friendship, and fight
if some earthly forefather of mine
stormed your homes
tell me I’m not alone.
