Writing poems to be forgotten as fires consume the city hills and equestrian statues sink beneath the pooling water. Everything is fine. Men whose brains are on fire push us on toward destinations chosen over drinks at manic lunches. It is all woozy and thrilling if your soul is broken just enough. bewildered, we go on within The grand designs of great men too dull & afraid to live among love, kindness & imagination.
Each of us will fail
At dawn, at noon, at midnight
In the twilight world of our dreams
We scarcely escape the falling embers
From the sky
We run like antelope chased
By bullets
We hide in crystal caves
Adorned with glyphs written
To confuse or beguile
You'll run out of money
At the laundromat
You'll run out of cash
At the gas station
You’ll pawn your sofa
Your Neruda books
For mac n’ cheese
The glyphs, the glyphs
In the crystal cave
Return now
And read them
Among the strata of rubble, a faint, pulsing blue light. Digging to identify the source. A monitor is extracted. They shake it, wipe it with a rag. Repeating on the screen, an image of someone from Their Time, the time of the Loco Eagles. In a scene with a house and a lawn, some words can be heard. "Now." "Didn't you?" The person saying the words moves with poise, grace even. Her blue and white clothes: water and light. She leans out the doorway of a white bus. Beatific smile. The pair thinks, They were not all killers. "Flow." Did one of the others call her “Flow?” Movement, grace, hope among desolation: Flo. God (who is absent) is not against us, the pair thinks.
I
I am 55 years old, and since graduating from a Jesuit high school in 1985, untangling, understanding and, very often, undoing the Catholic theology into which I was submerged - quite literally - since my baptism as an infant, has been an ongoing project. While I gained some valuable perspectives from the thoughts of the Nazarene scholar of Jewish sacred texts, mystic, and cultish leader from 2000 years ago whom we refer to as "Jesus Christ," the psychological damage I suffered through my repeated exposure as a child to the lurid torture sequence of the "passion" and the nails-through-hands-and-feet-die-in-the-unceasing-Palestine-sun human crucifixion and - just as importantly - my exposure to the the stories I was told to contextualize JC's torture & murder by the Roman state was and is profound.
Saying "uncle" after thirty-five years of wage labor. The sky is a red sound you can't forget. Across the horizon, whales go crazy hearing nuclear subs perform their sonic tests. The 1960s were a possibility that was assassinated person-by-person. A woman in a polka dot dress runs through The Ambassador Hotel yelling, "We killed him! We killed Bobby Kennedy!" We were born into landscapes made by people indifferent to us. We're not meant to know of them. I'll never pick a flower or strum a guitar for Ronald Reagan, even though he projected himself across the sky of my youth like a mayonnaise packet splattering across acres of white bread. I'll never write a love poem to Oliver North, even though he was a knight sent to deliver a dead dream onto the cold front porch of my youth. I'll never drive a Winnebago onto George Bush's Jr's ranch, even though he lit up the planet like a century of torches tossed into a forest.
