Zenarchery

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

Did I mention I used to write poetry?

Rain Coast

Prelude.

See where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament Bright curtains for a boy to slide down, Great masts to support the world where it has grown a little antique.

I.

The father is out of his mind, And has been thus since the cannons and the thunder, Since Herod returned and set up shop on the communion tray. He believes he has the viridian wings of a parrot And flaps his arms in thick brown sleeves And cries out a scarified song. Perhaps it is insanity; Perhaps it is only putting on a different pair of spectacles, To see the world anew.

Hurricanes come, hurricanes go But the wind always there; It blows bagpipe songs through the skulls of popes And stand-up comedians. The wind kisses your lips and makes them cold, Makes them gray and thick, Makes them part of the ground that the wind carves Like a butcher with the carcass of the bull. It blows on the walls of northern warehouses Where kids shake and move to music pumping Thick and bright as blood through a heart.

The father knows nothing of warehouses, Nothing of electro beats or stimulations. The father knows only that the Thick adobe walls of the mission Have transformed into the gilded sticks Of a birdcage And the rushes of the floor into Newspaper, announcing that the Great business has begun.

II.

There are no angels left in America anymore, Says the song on the college radio station As I pass the steps to the market And the lovely girl with the black glasses And the Prada suit. She smiles at me— I could ascertain a world of meaning in that slight Twitching of facial muscle, But why bother? The universe is a stretched thread made up Of quantum possibilities; I reminded her of her older brother, Or her co-worker, Or she has mistaken me for someone else. She comes from the kingdom of small towns Where everyone smiles at everyone else. She wants to wrap her legs around me And do exciting things to me with her mouth. She has an habitual involuntary muscle spasm That only looks like a smile. She is my unknown sister. All of these things are true, And none of them. The sweet sweat of the Pacific Ocean Mists against my skin and coat; Fetchingly, As I watch her pass along towards Pioneer Square.

III.

I died hung from a tree once. Maybe. I don’t know where, or when— Helena, Montana, after a lifetime of stealing horses Or Padua at the end of a heretic’s uprising Or Szechuan in the beginning of a peasant’s revolt; Or Midgard, before the world was made. I’ve tasted bitter coffee and bitter defeat, I’ve tasted your mouth and the barrel of a gun. I’ve touched Christ’s robe as he stumble through the streets of Los Angeles Or maybe it was Jerusalem—they look so much alike.

I’ve seen Fra Angelico lift the skirts of a courtesan As he painted the Virgin Mary; Seen the world described in projected light At twenty-four frames a second, Felt the wind blow through my hair and through my bones And the rippling feathers of a viridian-green parrot In the wet heat of the Third World. I’ve smelled coal-smoke and flamboyant trees And mangos and the faint perfume of a pretty girl With black glasses and a Prada suit Moving along a sidewalk on the rain coast of the Northwest, On her way to resignations and assignations That don’t have a single goddamned thing To do with me.

Found this in my Documents folder. I have no memory of writing this.

The sound of the horn and the drum Keeps us all awake into the night. They are praying to gods we do not understand. But there is solace in the heat and the sand And the breaking of bones that should have decayed Long ago. There is only the city, only the world; Everything else is something to be feared or shunned. Three angels with the heads of South American birds Came last night to drag poor Charlie away. What a Promised Land we’ve found.