Endless

In summation:
1.Every second of every minute is the last.
2.The world is ending over and over, and it is.
3.All this finding and losing is just prayer.
4.The deadliest thing is beginning something.

The Pope announces he is praying for the children
with lemonade stands. He is praying for the loss of bees.
He is praying for the return of magic, yet he is unaware.

All energy is in flux. Everything is quietly blinking
The birds are falling like they need instruction and
I cannot stare that long. It is lost on me. Like my keys.

If the world is always meeting me and one of us dies,
then it is over. If the world is always speaking to me,
and it stops, then I have nothing more to say.

The clock has given us grief. It is the thing that notices
where we are going. And when something is gone it counts
with its eyes closed until we have hidden ourselves away.

The Aztecs invented the vacation as a practice for dying.
Something has died because something is starting.
Something has begun because something is gone.

Endlessly.

Myths are not in books

The tip of something need not be remotely like what is there below the surface. We will continue to go thru enormous change as to what we are like. But we seem not to notice the speed because we are in it. Or rather it has us. And we swim like fish in a new sea, always already the case, moment to moment. Until such time as we began to notice the weirdness. A lake will form in the middle of LA. No one came cap it. A small building in Japan cannot be stopped. Not ever. No one knows how. A river will change direction finding the path of least resistance. It contains us. And so it becomes so, very quickly. The mythic is no longer lofty. It is here in the swath of jumble left by an EF5 in Bama, the smooth takeaway of our stuff by the sudden near supersonic intrusion of seawater, the pulling back of the sheets in southern Spain to reveal the lost continent, the loss of Quaddafi's children to dread falling from the sky, launched upon blue waters. Behind a metal curtain an entire way of living vanishes overnight and we can't even remember it. Systems overtake systems until we are with the last one. The universe is folding things as it takes them from the dryer and then they are tossed. So it goes as we wear our clothes. In fashion.

The Outpost

A

There was wax all around us. We sweated
wax the way a horse laps trough water.
A deep flame. Earlier in the sun of shift
we had drunk rain from clear sky. Now we
doused the fire with long blue streams of piss.
And, there was the trick of who we are,
without a history, because we are ancestor.
Always.

B

We swing the hand-held devices in the air,
wood, bark, sap, old.
Above our heads we write a whirring song:
we were born in rotting logs, in windy praying
fields, at the bottom of looking glass lakes,
two skies above us.
Some hatched in a burst of light.
Others entered the world through stamens,
surrounded by bright yellow, magenta, milk.
And again, others cracked open the soft
domed smiles of woman. And peered out.

C

We slept beneath pussywillow, our heads
resting on the softly curled jaguarundi.
We had no way of tracking. We sat
at the center, only a sense of the
labyrinthine, that everything touched
everything else. Beyond the composition
of fence, of hut, house, room and window,
beyond the village of boundary, ownership,
the breakage, the loss, the very last thing,
were ones like us, living where a line grazes
the edge of the circle. We stand in clearings,
waiting for the shattered, the shortness of
breath, the skipping of hearts, the questioning.

D

I wear a black hat and I will take you back
to the beginning:
And there amidst the wax, the feathers,
the phosphorescence,
I will return from the shining world,
with an answer.