More poetry. I thought this one was lost…I always liked this. I love Radiohead.
Ice Age Coming
Somewhere alongside the freeway It is possible to hear birds outside your car window Thick, soot-covered birds Cackling in Ornette Coleman harmony As they perch on plastic buildings As they perch on the antennae Of the rooftops that make up the Rusted satellite cities where the Beautiful people don’t live. Antennae that reach up for gray skies With broken fingers Antennae that fold those broken fingers In some unthinkable prayer.
You can hear them over the petrochemical White noise shriek, The throbbing nasty murdering sound The murdering sound of what we have no right to do.
I am not human, I don’t know if you can tell By looking at me– I don’t know if one disease Can recognize another.
We are what is swept up from The concrete floors of concert arenas Ticket stubs, cigarette butts And broken bits of digital reproduction Strewn bits of experience and storage Coded in deoxyribonucleic spiral drains That flow down into the void You never know you’re going Until the second it happens– Isn’t that funny? When your stomach drops And you open your mouth to say something– And the full knowledge of how the world works Comes down on you like a shining Mack truck. Welcome to eternity, brother, Welcome to what happens next.
II
Your soul is the one thing You can’t compromise. Or so I was told, I never believed that Myself.
Futurity. When I was a child, they told me that The future was astral weeks And transcontinental travel And no more death. I would be laid down In silence, easy To be born again.
Standing, somewhere, outside of time The man I would become Was somewhere over the sea of Japan Watching red-sailed junks against the cornflower ocean and their white tails of foam On their way from Hokkaido to Brisbane or Adelaide Or my mother nation, great nation of cars and rec rooms and hip-hop. Standing on the observation deck Of a nullgrav transport, Watching nations hiply fragment And society groovily decay.
Now I’m no longer human I’m a smart card, I’m a credit card I’m an advertisement for an idealized version Of myself.
Graphic artist, Visionary, Creator, destroyer, Shiva with artfully ugly hair And a tangerine plastic chariot With a nineteen inch screen. And it’s all Microsoft lounge parties And kings and queens of the fucking universe Until night falls– Remember that, Until night falls.
III.
I am no longer human, I don’t know if you noticed; We are born without eyes these days.
My soul swam away Into the sea of warm memory, Which grows colder by the minute And forms pale veins of ice.
Humanity is memory And memory is desire And neither comes easily to us, these days.
Desire is codified and Memory is replaced with suspicion And nothing quite exists The way it once did.
Red sails of junks, Against blackest simulation ether, Floating on the pale chemical candle face Of the screen in front of me, blurred in my vision And the music of salty teardrops Falling into a searing liquid nitrogen pool.
Music for dancing children, Who were born without souls.
This is all that’s left Of the future
And
Somewhere, The hive glistens As something is born. Something pale and squealing Pushes its way out of the ice,
That moves like kudzu, So quick and so slow