Our lives pass like cherry blossoms, snapped from hurried branch to ripened fruit. We flit from first to fledged to finished, put out to ash one hundred years an instant. A truth we scarcely want to envision, yet death and quantum mechanics will have it.
In human want and vanity we make the cosmos roll into a ball and laugh, as if our hundred was even a flash to its endless procession of cold stars. It’s like to ants a rose would bloom eternal.
Do not ask the cosmos or pyramids of the atoms that went into their form, or the rose of the ants that flit across its back: for the pyramids would not even know of sciences written in scales of man.
The seasons changing keys set fruit to fall from mindful sagging branch to brutal dust below. The ants divert their sacred path to sweets divinely delivered on high, like man attributing meaning to change.
Is it just we who contemplate the ants, the Sagan starstuff, the music vast?
On workdays he’d get up, worn as the mattress’s springs, and put on his dad face. I’d sometimes see him through the cracks lit around the door frame, as if a shadow of himself was leaving with each creak of the morning stairs.
He descended that way for years, as did my mother with his parting kiss. As kids we were just bikes, video games, and splashing in the rain; as kids we were just bikes, go-carts, and the revving engines of boys, as kids we were just bikes, schoolwork, and the becoming of men, but even then I could see him fade off into the distance, a memory of what was his before the kids and the taking of coffee to wake.
The weekends were his, or so the company had said. There was always something that needed fixed, and this was truly his: the broken draws and banisters, petering cars held by just his thread, and the dead puller on the lawn mower giving reason for a series of expletives.
For him it was worth it all, for his kids were his reasons and the only thing that made sense, so he worked that job hard even when they took his pension.
Life should not be the descending of stairs or the omitting of yourself in bits, or the bit by bit collapse of it to life spent double-bent backwards for rent or the pursuit of raising kids, beat down to the most basic of its ends the circular logic of life lived for the time when you will get to live and take that mythical vacation’s joy and cease with all the fire within: a moment to get to know your lil’ boys.
How many years ago did the carpenter’s tools become useless to understand the world?
The hammer is as always a tool of trauma and force; the claw’s no better off it leaves a hole behind,
and does wielding with care make better the hammer?
We make metaphoric nails and hammer to build up our lives, but the carpenter now is lacking the tools and language of youth, grown old the world is gray and all the hammer’s truth does not buy an atom an escape from neutron splitting the nucleus in two.
A hammer has no words to nail to the fission of chain reacted unstoppable hatred of men who’d split the world to sink a boat.
If we turned it around, the hammer turned to the claw, what would it matter now? A hammer can only build or rebuild up the world from the rubble of nukes.
Like the old white haired professor, the square is out of touch with the world; things are no longer as simple as the intersection of two opposing and differing lines. The square cannot stand up to the truth, measured in double helix gymnastics performed sublime by the computer and sculpture divine: expanding time as seen through a new set of tools.
The old chalk line takes to the curves and fails to be of any use, when needing to mark straight the earth; in the deflection of small bits we loose to the ether the terms agreed upon with the making of tools.
No amount of measuring will fix the tool, and trying only delays the inevitable.
The Spoken Word Version of the Poem – A Carpenter’s Tools
Reading the newspaper: It said, new material blacker than black, and I laughed knowing we have always had that blacker than murder color just lurking under the covers and below the thin veil of Vantablack, the flesh at the whim of a man fully lost in the nanotube’s spiraling in helices from universe open to the moment of death.
The Spoken Word Version of the Poem – Blacker Than Black
Ever since the first grass blades gathered beneath the feet of wandering birch trees those little leafs have made us leap and flee; our hips an Eocene launch toward hazards,
exchanging the canopy for staggered bunny steps and slow arise to knees, back and the capture of huge feast with ease; no longer were we tied to the scaffolds
or made to feather through the leafy boughs; we instead learned to agree and to fight over pieces of the grass covered ground as the first beast to ever set its sight
on the cleaving of light where there should be none and the reason to see through the brightest of sun.
The Spoken Word Version of the Poem – Habitual Bipedalism and Episodal Humanism
There is an apocalypse in my chest, and there is a bluebird beating its wings.
They both want to get out; one sings and the other sleeps.
There is brimstone and there is symphony stretched out in the spaces between gray matter and the bluebird’s bars.
There is song and there are ribs, and if I cut a hole just big enough, perhaps she will escape before the fire of ten thousand dragons has chance to lunge to cloven feet and dash my musical friend against the rocky coast of my ribs,
But, still, I do not cut, I happen to like her in the cage. I have given her all the things that I could purchase: some seed, some drink, a perch from which to sing. I do not know If she sings to me or to keep the apocalypse at bay.
There is a bluebird holding back the waves, and there is an apocalypse of flames riding the synapse’s demand’s.
The Spoken Word Version of the Poem – The Bluebird and the Apocalypse
This magnificent rose, many a millennium old, with a magnetic north and wholesome moral code, with morbid blackness weighed against a heart red high-minded multifoliated celestial form so tormented, yet, tranquil it is as noble mention among men: the fervent song of the people, the mortal Blues of Motown sound, the almighty seed of immortal lot, and the seat of human immaterial parts.
Not in leaflets or amid the marching of nuclear niore to be found, nor in the movements of poetic beats, nor the in junkies hesitation marks, nor in the medic’s hands or bag of livelier arts is it found.
Institutes and journals have looked and settled on the truth, that it is not a matter of the mark missed by surgeon’s scalpel or the teacher’s defining of youth, but rather that the idea is obtuse.
Our myths morn it’s downfall and necrosis in the most sad and uncertain of terms; like heaven or the mortality of curtains we speak with meaning but motion to something mired in the old circular logic of metaphor, but as symbol the soul’s a meteoric rock materializing firm from above.
The Spoken Word version of the Poem – O’ Do Not Speak of the Soul
“We are the hollow men… We are the stuffed men…“ — T.S. Eliot
We are the cynical ones with gluttonous mouths of ridicule, whispering alone in darkened rooms— our keyboards avoiding praise— our heads all crammed with ads.
We are the cynical ones, the lonely together, the lonely when apart distrusting human interest, trusting only in interest made.
We are the cynical ones with ridged behavior— wooden imitations of nurses faining bedside manner as empty pockets and coffers to the sick, weary, and dying without beds.
Life without reason, work without passion, anesthetized meaning, talent without action;
Those who still have their wits, who’ve not been taken by the camera lens, weep for children with plastic parents, but only as a cynical whim of ridicule: Oh, poor them.
Facts we dare not face in this plastic place, with words that will not arrive— with hands that do not reach.
There is no sympathy here— no sign from hand or lip to feel: no smile from a park bench, no blanket for the storm, no voice of kindness saying, softly, come in out of the cold— no cup of cocoa, no warmth.
We will be no closer in this plastic place, but still we primp and put on makeup and dance in our made-up prison as life is used up with adornments like Iphones and Fit Bits, to wash in lime the mind as navigator’s eye blinded to peripheral images.
Out of this, amid the peripheral vision an image of a bedraggled man, to whom we offer no more than a fading glance— not smile, nor blanket, nor kindness’s cocoa.
We live in floating castles and wear our dark glasses in this pseudo kingdom, this plastic paradise of poor, this sad celebration of silicon, and here these false images are praised, worshiped, and receive the coronation of a king under the watchful eye of a pyramid.
It’s like this. in the plastic kingdom, orating from IPhones, rejoicing ourselves as captains with hands that cannot steer— and our penance paid to empty pews.
Life is not here, there is no joy here in these hills of made-up stars, in this broken picture, this artificial mask of actuality.
London Bridge is falling down— the children get up and dance in rings around the roses with their pockets full; London Bridge is falling down— the people build it back up again, and the children ring—a-round and all fall down.
They are now the cynical ones—
Between the meaning and the solemn facts— between the actions and the hands, the kingdom falls—For this is the glory forever
Between the dying and already dead— between the indifference and lacking response, the kingdom falls—This suffering is very long
Between the repulsion and unspecified stiffs— between the impotent and the absence— between the impediment and the inflating, the kingdom falls—For this is the glory forever
For you are— death, life— for you is death.
This is the life the world lives. this is the life the world lives. this is the life the world lives— without a life but that of death.
Liberty’s wields her sword in most imperceptible ways, bearing you had her rewards entitled to you from the praise, rejoiced when tyranny escaped then forgotten till bitter days, yet unseen, would come to reshape our lives in new and terrible chains.
I have gone out into the snow, braving the winter’s fiery cold, and searched for rabbit high and low when frosty mitts refused to hold.
Crouched here by the flickering fire, with sustenance somehow in hand and hope renewed as flesh desire, I begin again to clutch at strands of life’s little leaded moments, in the weight of our laughs and cries and in the wait for small rodents to give a vestige to my life.
If I were to go back behind, not to the quaint little cabin, but backwards, opposite of time would I then still begin again the great forgetting I have found as fire, rabbit, and freedom: the simple things like self newfound, or would it all go to tedium, screaming cars, and booming days filled up to the ears with the wait?
Do not let your spirit be leveled flat, your laughter should rise with the coming sun, laugh, cry, and dance in the embers of life.
Let old men bedraggle their minds with stats, because your world is young and just begun. Do not let your spirit be leveled flat.
Old men in their disheveled rages will chat, the best of them will say, the world’s undone: laugh, cry, and dance in the embers of life.
The worst will stand as pillars so fat from flagellating their littlest pun. Do not let your spirit be leveled flat.
Whoever is born, dies, and lives by that, roar against the bald heads of men so dumb; laugh, cry, and dance in the embers of life,
and you, my friend, might just not fall as flat as these old grey men who look up to none. Do not let your spirit be leveled flat; laugh, cry, and dance in the embers of life.
