The shock of the eternal present,
      the glut of sensation, the assault of light,
      and the roaring deafening now all wither
to a desiccated ordinary,
      barren and rattling.
You know it as you know all things
      you no longer regard as miraculous:
      a shadow dyed into the flesh.

The rain, when it comes, is shunted
      into fallow fields, the fertile ones
      basted with the runoff,
      the stalks of weeds upraised.
This oracle clutches even to the cinders
      of all things burned.

they collected maps and atlases, weathered and worn,
laid them on their walls as tapestries,
assembled in small, wide-eyed groups to decipher and connect
drew to their chests compasses and electronics,
knelt at their shrines of computers and books,
became convinced of a harvest of history and rubies,
emeralds and wisdom in a land not their own.

they sold their possessions, their homes, their birthrights,
wrote their wills, swept together savings bonds, retirement plans,
trust funds to finance a journey to this place, this fresh frontier.

they cross-examined and cross-referenced their charts, their legends
with stars and satellites over ocean and into mountains
far from their homes, arrived at the site foretold by their plans,

and immediately set about to unearthing it in a storm of shovels and machinery,
only to uncover a vast, intricate emptiness,
a pattern of resonant tunnels and blankly majestic caverns, a nothing, a failure.

They quickly left, abandoning their lattice of equipment and cordons,
and returned to their own country, taking refuge with what remained
of their friends and relatives.

Of their trip, they stuck to the lie they had told themselves on the journey back,
which told nothing of the echoing caves, that they couldn’t follow their maps,
that lost and running out of food, they had been forced to abandon their search.

They vowed loudly to return, quietly pawned their guides and maps,
nursed their humiliation with bravado, let a disquiet seep into their palms,
the caves themselves roaring and thundering in their eyes.

Four red skin-streaks
as bright as cut fruit or silence,
Bolder than hot coal, more present than now.

I adore midnight
in untroubled solitude
in uproar and tremor
aftermaths dulled and forgotten.

All troubles come here to be magnified and shorn
an ever-hurtling pit stop
subtle and cryptic
like the silencing of a many-belled cacophony.

My history stops here to writhe and stumble, and eventually
is blunted to a damp hiss, and numbly tomorrows.

Today, someone over at invisiblecreature.com (a graphic design firm that specializes in album art) posted a link to the below video on twitter (@icreature), saying “Kinda sad that a YouTube clip could literally ruin a day.” I was expecting something like a video of a puppy being run over, or some kind of Current Event. Instead was this (You may need to go over to youtube to watch it, it’s not being kind to our layout):

You only need to watch about half of the video to get the idea, so if you become nauseous, feel free to stop. You can even stop after the first chorus, if you’d like. I retweeted the video, appending my own comment: “Scrap the human race and start over again.” The inimitable and astute music and culture-critic Joel Hartse remarked that watching the video, he couldn’t figure out what I found so objectionable about it. So I posted the following diatribe on twitter, which I have lightly edited and collated, and forms the body of this post:

“Let’s set aside the winking day-glo aging hipster pastel faux-punk of the video for a sec. (A lot to set aside, I know). But let’s. The backing track on the verses doesn’t even pretend to do anything but vaguely hint at a chord progression, leading to an anemic chorus that tries to substitute orchestra hits(!) for a hook, the autotune slathered on the singer’s voice like so much mayonnaise. Is there a song underneath somewhere? I can’t tell, but I can’t be bothered to even check. There’s no way of appreciating or even approaching this song. It’s a Clarke’s monolith of pop trash nihilism, impenetrable and inscrutable. Oh my god, it’s full of stars!”

placid laced
courier cliff
manage tail
cold concrete
wilt tile
erect wither
pontoon mountain

your hand is excluded from this sacred space as
you try to wave through me, try to feel the void;
where breath cannot go, there flesh too is banned.

what then can occupy this vacuum, can hold this shape?
it is not a vacuum, it is room and space for a spirit.
a spirit, a spirit; for time it holds the air at bay.

am i adam? what alabaster apple did i put in my mouth?
arlington holds three antagonists and i am their leader; no,
four antagonists, and Pride is their leader. all of us know me.

We are sitting on a cliff, shoes scraping the ledge, sun sneaking away.
There are two curdled clouds–tiny storms compacted, stifled by elastic air.
Iron bars pierce the water, generate symbols of eternity on its surface.
I develop a lump in my throat; to a body of water, anything is sharp.
And as we wonder whether good has died, whether we can be redeemed,
a fish parts the silence of the floor, stings me with the echo of a splash.

(given was:
cliff sun
storm elastic
generate iron
sharp develop
floor echo
vomit surreal
discard one pair)

But I still have no taste for an unseasoned remedy.
3 weeks ago, on a walk into the park,
I came across a bird long dead

stretched on the gridded concrete,
cleanly decaying, no trail of ants
or roil of maggots, purified by the cold.

I knelt there for awhile, I remembered
how my hand looks like how my father’s hand
used to look.

This is the bulbous fruit we are offered
to taste and see.

I will never understand the way
the ground is always thirsty, even as the rain
scrapes across it, carries it away.

Anyone can feel the philosophy
in the contours, in the smoothness
of a hammer’s grip, in its intentions.
Its appetites are no mystery.