I Could Say Nothing

I could say nothing. Or I could exert my imagination
to say the way it never is, nothing but exceptions
working to rule, functional disparities between chaos
and clarified thought, the dream grammars
of magicians on the nightwatch asleep on the job.
It’s a polymorphous perverse multiverse
that will take any neo-gestural suggestion
as seriously as a potter shapes the emptiness
of the urn he’s making for himself on the wheel
of birth and death, his hands caked in starmud
that comes with its own kiln baked into the mix.

I could say nothing about the lack of an inexplicable reason
for why it is the way it is and return to my ignorance
by default like a solar prominence lashing out
into the dark as if it were scourging the softness
in the eyes of the upper atmosphere almost in tears
for the way it rants at a planet determined to see for itself.
I could busy myself, soul-searching for words
the silver-tongued Russian olives might risk
whispering into the ears of the willows still in their gowns.

I could mine the crude ore of the asteroids and turn
the motherlode into subtler refinements of the mind,
as the soothsayers of greed have foretold
like an oracular app on their stealth cellphones.
I wouldn’t be alone in this, with all
these affable spy satellites and drones for familiars
keeping watch on what I write about the breadlines
outside the surrealistic circuses that distract us
with the infinite variety of living like people
with no choice but to be consoled by the private rights
of wild animals shocked into performing
for a ringmaster with a whip and a footstool
to keep the savagery of our rage from getting out of hand.
Or something disgustingly cute to take us off the ball
we’re losing our balance on, keeping in mind
inside every sentimentalist is a nasty brute.

Trying to seed a sea change with bullets in an exchange
of gunfire is the forget the immaculate conception
this sea of precarious awareness first had of us
when it breathed light into the waters of life
like moonset into the barrier reefs of the sponges
and corals that engendered us to live outside the law
as if we were honest with ourselves. First impressions
shall be the last, and the last shall be the worst of them all.
If people don’t concentrate enough to lose their focus
in someone they love anymore, the rest is fate, and we
just dissipate back into the void like a passing thought
or the one way tickets of Monarch butterflies on the way home
like illegal aliens estranged by the toxicity of our pestilential
presidential run-offs as we research how to musically embrace
extra-terrestrials in a bond of cowering friendship to feel
we’re not alone in the world, except together with each other,
where it isn’t familiarity that breeds contempt,
but the encylopedic holy books of our hatred we keep
preaching to the choir like voice coaches and spinny healers
laundering the bedsheets in a cult hospital of blood-stained angels
racially profiling the stranger at the gate
as if his shadow fell any darker on the earth than ours
in the doorway of a house on fire torched by a burning cross.

Dry ice for tears, people don’t cry for each other anymore,
they evaporate spiritually, they sublimate, they sigh
for a better world than this worst of an infinite number
of better alternatives as they arm their innocence
like a children’s crusade on the way to another holy war.
Is it feasible any image we were created in the name of
to love one another is as rabidly addled as the memes
we follow like Ibn Attar’s pilgrimage of birds
to look into any god’s eyes and see ourselves
in a parliament of corrupt politicians padding their travel-fares
as they do their bodies, egos and hairdos at public expense?

When hasn’t the death hex of the military industrial complex
not been a blessing in disguise to the corporate undertakers
who wash the corpses for burial like sins off their hands.
Offices of great state enshrining human rights on the Vietnam Wall.
Dividing, we rule. Together, like the old woman
who unwound her spinal cord into a million weak threads
as if she were sorting out the bloodlines of xylem and phloem
in the heartwood of the tree of humankind, we open
a school of assassins to preemptively protect the golden rule
with concealed weapons against the genocidal madmen
who secretly feel, by killing children indiscriminately,
they’re pschoBabylonically on the road to becoming one of us.