Rampage
Von welcher mythischen Stadt begrüßt dasein?
i.
Mind
fortifies what it wishes to dismantle,
bogs itself in what it strives to transcend.
Its petals are pinned against yellow pages.
Mind
is scaling a graphic loop of rungs,
treading a bottomless conspiracy.
It has pressed the play button again.
Mind,
it crumbles in my fingers:
Encounter, react, systematize:
Je crée l'illusion; donc, je suis.
ii.
My neighbor’s blood is viscous with envy.
His lawn trumps my daffodil bed;
my dreams putrefy in his wheelbarrow;
my defeats fertilize his manic bougainvillea.
I sit with vulgar people.
I stand with vulgar people.1
I forgot we’d be passing through Basel. Stop for a bite?
I hear your daughter took a casino job in east Thebes.
Congratulations on the summer home off Lake Cocytus.
I’ll forward you that stock tip as soon as I get home.
It’s a sure thing, from Hector, my plastic surgeon friend,
the one who invested in Halliburton in the early days.
iii.
The suburb sprawls, its vinyl jaw unhinged,
raccoons, possums mangled on the highway.
Icecaps thaw, glaciers melt, polar bears drown
in the shelfless waters. Dumpsters in the Antarctic.
The maestros of petrol wave their batons,
sodomizing the great mother, siphoning her milk.
Mutant fungi in the crawlspace, stealth of bacteria.
The canyons weep, inauguration of murder.
True, poor Edomite, man is born unto trouble,2
but must we really give shelter to our betrayers?3
iv.
Dismissive snorts,
suspicious eyes, the clammy handshake.
Melancholy mannequins,
lipstick smiles carved into styrofoam faces.
Children in camouflage. The gloved hand
always scrawling in the black pad.
Silver cord of man, frayed and flapping in a sulfurous breeze.
President, Chairman, Emperor, Fuhrer,
still the locks on our kingdoms are made of greed and illusion.
Evening falls, fringed with barbed wire.4
Monks and dissidents vanish in the zyklon night.
v.
So many sleepwalkers leaping
into the mist of Brooklyn Bridge, Golden Gate,
so many limbs flailing in the waves.
Orpheus fumbles with his lyre.
Every night, gunshots—gangs
warring on the streets of Olympus.
Socrates on the east bank of the Volga:
Yediny, moguchy Sovetsky Soyuz!5
Atropos, drunk in the piazzas,
peddling cheap watches to the tourists.
Michael sweeps his bunker, irons his uniform.
Gabriel checks, rechecks his voicemail.
Weeks now, no word from headquarters.
vi.
Jerusalem. Gaza. Tibet. Sudan. Burma. Phalluses
of trade blazing beneath a satellite sky. Fumes
wafting from manholes. Tiananmen. Chernobyl.
Mama! I’ve forgotten how to sing!6
Tun Jihn Yu
Ah, Brunetto, io stesso faccio fatica a riconoscermi.
Ciacco, non piangere per la patria.
Tutto il mondo è diventato il Getsemani!
Forgive me for eating this bountiful meal.
Forgive me for sleeping beneath this roof.
Forgive me for making love to my wife.
Forgive me for everything I fail to see and do
and avenge. Forgive me for this insular life.
vii.
The indicator and indicated:
seppuku on the steps of the temple,
fading together in a pool of nonsense.
protean atomic strands shifting
a priori a posteriori fracturing & centripetal
The hypotenuse is a broken arm.
The compass is a roulette wheel.
abcdfgik2x2=6
incarnation absolute chromosomal & karmic
f(x) amidst entropy must in turn beget
The shortest distance
between two points is numbness.
viii.
Brain of man, hemorrhaging, bereft
of divinity, cries out, groping for its raft
of reason: then fuzz, descent, oblivion.
Heart of nature, trapped in a ruptured hull,
forsaken angel flagging in a sea of indifference,
foundered in the barbarian darkness.
Macro to micro, frantic clusters, molecules
huddling like shivering prisoners: ultimate
nucleation, chemistry reduced to a mob hug,
a final flood of stone: ubiquitous sepulchrum.
ix.
The end of time
is the beginning of time,
and time itself is timeless.
The dreamer is born.
And with the dreamer,
a dream that begins and ends.
The dream subsumes the dreamer,
and the dreamer the dream,
collapsing into timelessness.
Timelessness too is a dream.
The dream ends and thus the dreamer.
What remains is neither time nor timelessness.
What remains is neither dream nor dreamer.
What remains can neither begin nor end.
x.
Possibility
is spawned by impossibility, sentience born of insentience.
In an un-beginning, void:
Then something from un-something
emerges, life sired by lifelessness—accidental, immaculate,
effect devoid of cause itself becoming cause:
Space incarnate hoists its crusted lid,
blinks, recalls its own unutterable name: Adam wakes on cue,
stretches in the protean dawn. Eve waits in the wings.
The dream resumes.
xi.
Weeds sprout, coyotes
sniff the warming air;
roaches twitch their antennae.
A chemical sky clears;
the fugitive sun returns.
Judas’s coins are placed
over the eyes of the dead.
The rolling wagon is stopped.7
When the full moon arrives,
a breeze blows over the water.8
Jen Kuan Wei Chi
The nest is rebuilt.
The cattle are found.9
The plums ripen and fall.
Above us, marbles forever circling marbles,
flickers of light in the untraceable beyond.
xii.
Juliet cooks as I watch the game.
A five o’clock squall soaks the new flowerbed.
In the evening, we sit outside, counting fireflies,
planning conquests as things bloom and molder.
Next week Achilles, my old college pal, will visit.
Next spring I’ll pay off our mortgage.
Autumns come and go, each more exquisite than the last.
I wrinkle, my bones grow brittle, the shadow converges.
Afterwards, I hover for a moment, desires flurrying: