Entropy Vs. Eudaimonia
As children we were fed safety glass,
geometric fractions, viscous with blood
and saliva, and we were doused
in gasoline. We were born to breathe
CH4, CO2, N2O and our shadows would
be cast through swarms of heat. We
would watch even the mirages evaporate
because we know impact intimately, and
our skies are miasmal shades of brown, and
our seas are gravid with endocrine disruptors.
We’ve had our skeletal structures engraved on
bumpers and windshields of foreign autos
at various velocities. We were
saturated in corn syrup and were given
C15H16O2 to play with in petroleum cradles.
We were born to a dying planet,
hurtling through an entropic universe
at suicide speeds.
Descent
(Geologic Plagiarism in Three Acts)
Act 1: The Empire
Made of flames and
drowning
in each other.
The only gravity we couldn’t defy
was our own.
We were scrawling
horizontal movements
across vertical lives.
Fondling with
lungs of liquid mercury, and
smiling with
hearts of melted snow.
Mostly, we were just
lips on lips
in lightless stairwells.
And mostly, I said no.
It had rained,
earlier. And,
on my back,
I watched
those drops on glass
condense
and slide into
each other. Unlike us.
His agonizing, unwarranted thrusts,
that was the meaning of fear.
But I watched raindrops
on glass play the pauses
of their movement
with such poetry.
The coitus of their polarity,
there was gravity there,
that biting cold
that misplaced fog.
Yet their regretless lecherousness was ephemeral.
Thus fell the empire.
Act 2: Quantum suicide
June was distillation.
Blood on stone
and spring in leaves.
The supposition of inanition
and rising. Triumph so grand
it left ghosts in the gorge
and birth
simultaneously superimposed
on the rim of the red wall.
I am the haunt of the hills,
thrice dead, but countless times
alive.
Act 3: Summit
I fade now
into the bowels of the prehistoric,
to fearless, dusty, silent places,
there is no loneliness here.
With parched lips, drag my aching
bodies again to the light.
Then up.
To places of bare black rock
and cheek-biting, digit-numbing
cold.
Until sunrise to be surrounded
by the unforgiving integrity of
the midnight mountain universe.
To the top of the world,
on brittle bones
till the sun melt my wings
that I may find reason
to breathe.
Narcissus Necrosis
Recalculate your colors,
those of stolen roses.
They are
yellow petals on hospital linoleum.
They are
frigid stanzas in your obituary.
They are
lost among adjourned wishes.
They are
pulling down the stars.
The Desolation
English will watch while
the promised places dry and
drown in blood.
English will let their rivers run cold,
and will call the lands that birthed civilizations
barren, infertile, desolate, impotent.
English will let cultures fall
and when the cultivators are dead
we will call their lands deserts.