So much of this language is noise to me,
seeking attention, control over thoughts & bodies,
speaking from the center, for central concerns,
assessing the absent average, bringing childhoods
to an end abruptly in the school-yard one day,
where the scene returns, the defining moment,
our special people, our team, the most talented,
gifted, significant, losers, under-achievers,
those to be given menial tasks, excluded.
This language which generates destruction
by division, the somebodies over here,
the nobodies over there, the evil eye, the ones
without being nurtured to hope from the hopeless,
the ones they say should not be bothered with,
the noise, even this language which preens itself,
looks at itself for days in the mirror trying to make sure
it is presentable, convincing, detached, cool, objective,
subjective, informed, without self-interest,
that has the power of seeming correct for one person,
my work, my process, and an error for all others,
the multitudinous vacuums, the great unemployable mass,
the anonymous and the invisible whose lives pass
with the tick of a clock whose days pass into mid-nights
without an owl hoot on the dock.
This language which makes the well-known float
and the rest tread-water, that offers a faulty hand,
that never feeds the angry wolf & makes the wolf more angry,
this language that expresses the height of things
when the lowly lurk and wait and after waiting learn
they will wait between countries behind razor-wire,
that in the world of the important and praised
there is nothing for them in the order of capital,
who are offered the phrase tough luck, tough shit,
it's because you have a bad personality, bad habits,
bad family, low birth, no education, just get down lower,
lower yourself further, lower yourself, make way!
There's a place for us, somewhere a place for us
On an island maybe for broken souls, Little St James,
an island of misfit toys for the experiments of banks...
On this first day of spring your days are numbered.
What does it mean when one person's pain is one's own?
Turning pain into art passes the pain onward. Share with me:
my caste, my imprisonment, my childhood in an abusive family,
my humiliation, my "arcane story" that no one can understand?
I tell my friend it was this was and this way and my friend
says, ah, but you are you and you create this all with your mind.
This language of taxonomy hurts my brain.
Go name your disease. Go name your enemy and tell me
my own name decrees a kabbalistic reprise, a vendetta.
Ah, but you have always been a negative person, they say.
You were born a sad person, you were born angry.
Who among you believes someone is born to eternal delight
and others to endless night? Who is born to pain?
Who among you will skin alive the DeSade or the Masoch?
Who has been a slave by your side? In the days that come
a crown will be thrown of thorns, of spikes,
do they call it cactus virus,
do they call it cactus virus,
this wreath of spring made the wreath of death,
the crowned prince of crime virus, the orange virus,
orang-utang virus, the distancing virus, the judas-kiss
-- you will call it anything but the gypsy blade that very kindly
lends you the passport into the caravan of the rabbit-hole.
Last night was this morning in the global meltdown of the ice-age.
When you press your finger into the sea-anemone, it will spit water.
Geraniums, asters, dis-asters, the biochemical warfare of spores.
Animalculae, tiny viral animals, so much stronger than you.
They are as invisible as elves and monads and Blake's Zoas
and the demons of an average middle class life that merely wants
soft toilet paper, not that Eastern Bloc sand-paper.
So much of this language is noise to me: where they wish
the Christiansor Muslims who pray together an earlier death,
so much of what is human is all too human noise
to the planet we have polluted together
the Christiansor Muslims who pray together an earlier death,
so much of what is human is all too human noise
to the planet we have polluted together
spreading the genius species into the backwash of ages.
(March 31 version)
