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.