Dystopian
In the future we say I remember when…
though our brains are built to forget.
In the future we choose the artificial reality
that suits us best.
Trees will say a final blessing
before we cut ourselves down
and we crusade against a brand-new
common enemy and not realize it’s us.
In the future our children seek love and find
convenience packaged perfect for their avatars,
the great reef is rife with blight,
unceremoniously browned and stagnant
and we export our intelligence
but leave our bodies on the beach with the whales.
In the future we eat so much
that grandkids are fat and famished,
we rate our daily experience
so someone else can graph it
and kids don’t write because
it takes too long.
In the future poetry is an ancient study
of lost languages,
every story competes for an audience
in a mythology of progress
and we are present to narrow narratives
from unknown sources and call it knowledge.
In the future we are colonial tribes
to an imperial cosmos.
A Spell for Safety of Girls
A crone in your small pocket
your own projected self
language of past and future formed
before the lines of your hands.
Scent of discernment
taste of truths
the feel of your own liquid body
its firm imprint as you walk then run
in your own strong shoes and quick feet.
Words soft to the ear formed from earth
baked in experience, shared and baked again
foresight for the age as you reflect it
wise, skilful, dimensional
the trust of skill owned by ancestors in
your pre-recorded fields of vision.
Ascent of butterflies, fragile and fierce
the crone’s veins like aspects of your refuge
the river, trees, and wind
all that travels with them in their flow and footings
that you can stand, sit, fly in that freedom
and map it to your volcanic core.
Pilgrimage
Tonight, the bent smear of cover eludes them --
its luminous dusk bowing to a mass of rain.
Falling are their prayers, pelting the stone
and bramble path under climbing feet.
They are a valley of umbrellaed petitioners
rising like fungi, capped in black.
Umbrellas mark them, cast like sins,
no more than foul food to vultures that circle
ahead of the news. But there is one,
the one who will be first for she is now last.
The final. Her view clearer from the rear post,
through the rain and dread.
She begins a song, feels it become the future,
sends it ahead of the sunrise.
Bells and Angels
We immerse ourselves in the sound bath
lay on mats in the cold theatre,
so close we are almost sharing blankets.
We want bells and chimes to soak through us,
wring out the old. We want
to steep in the undertone cello carriage,
meet whatever awaits us behind closed eyes.
300 people, almost sleeping, summoners to
angels as the mallet glissades, chingchingching
That Zuzu, I think, “Everytime a bell rings, an angel gets his wings”.
I think we’ve exceeded any quota.
Our stilled bodies in chiming saturation
let angels find their freedom.
Outside,
beeping hustle, smell of gyro and samosas
grease the air as we emerge, quieted.
At home, we light a candle, turn on twinkle lights.
A soft reverberation hangs in the head like old memory.
There are recent losses, we imagine them lifted
clouding the sun,
streaking the cirrus-winged sky.
The Last Boat
I remember the fluming melt
a green phosphorescence
caking smell of sulphur
permeating brick and mortar plans --
a singed headache
and
begging for fresh breath.
By then most had fled
the single-toned city,
silent to its future, an almost remnant
shrouded in gas and rising tides
seen from the last bridge --
our boat to ride the next waves
away from its black suns
and chartreuse-swirled memorial skies.
They said it was a no-land
a mere invisible city where its ends
met like a vortex.
They say it sank making its waters
as dark as forest moss at night,
an emerald hue seen
only by satellite.
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