Mann kind

“The diaries of opium-eaters record how, during the brief period of ecstasy, the drugged person’s dreams have a temporal scope of ten, thirty, sometimes sixty years or even surpass all limits of man’s ability to experience time-dreams, that is, with images thronging past so swiftly that, as one hashish-smoker puts it, the intoxicated user’s brain seems “to have had something removed, like the mainspring from a watch.”

-Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain)

Should I have sweat through those provocative dreams

Since time is running out

And shall I have watched, disturbed and overcome with infatuation,

Pleasure, intent on the scene, all its folded lines hung out,

The mosaic scene, the spackled tiles of moments to keep

Float over the surface of settled matters.

Transience penetrates us to move on and on.

This minuscule thought that writhes its way under

Eyelids-between us, selves. We are

Something small, private, intrusive, edgy and loose.

The Splinter severed from the smooth grain

Pierces its way deeper into our softness, 
past the seventh gate, writhing in quicksand

Only to break off the relationship,

Leaving a white fleshy hole with dead skin
light floods inside singing delicate motors

Before it can draw an arc, or a

furrow atop the brow with vapor and sweat
and feel the tickle from

blood running down wrists and pouring out nostrils.

Resilience needs rest and a sense, a little air and darkness,
solitude in a moment to hold on despite the vertiginous spin
We are in this together, that you remember 

That this horrific nightmare

Has occurred to me before, many times, before

I woke. 



Painting by Ivan Aivazovsky, 'Pushkin at Ai-Petri during sunrise' 1899 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

When in Still(ness)...

They also called it an Empire,

and it was empirical by nature, 

such vast open space.

Larger than life, holier than thou, cliché ridden and

doctrine infested-martyred and named Rome.

But what else could they do

but try to live most-ly

in the little time they lived,

in their little worlds they called homes

making cities, breeding atrocities, too close to comfort

any one or another.

Some chose other-wise;

the exile, the recluse, the slave

those submitting to suicide,

and Then death was revered, a danse macabre.  

Otherwise, it all seems similar-ly

tied to one another by Now and Then.

A full revolution must be given time

to come full circle. Whose to say we could see it move

around so little.

Anyway, it could happen again.

And it could be that we, lately,

have been simply spinning much faster

From the top

All looks still…

There-

The people were all in tumultuous states

of vertigo-

But none said a thing to one another.

Watch they way they talk-

It was all in circles;

Copernicus to Dante, Socrates and the wheel,

and assorted likewise misappropriated

little narratives.

Later on, we read about the fall of Rome,

too easily condemning this ignorance

of inertia, or how our standing under

the weight of air, held us down

to inevitable endings with variable speeds.

It is hard to hear the words Here

with all the rubble in between the teeth

and wind inside the ears,

or see how much time can change so little.

Here we are,hoping the All’s wishing well has an end

in good being, every thing-

although at times

it feels as though we were falling

a little faster

but we could not know

having never felt vertigo.  

Painting by Josephus Laurentius Dyckmans (1845) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

A good poem is vertigo

(A good poem is vertigo)

                -As if I know. No-

not by my own leaky pen,

though

                 there are a soaring few

alphabetical alchemists

that throw in

words that are known to explode next 

                                     to each other;

elsewhere

you find fissions and contraries may agree

lilting toward lyricality and

honing in on homonymic epidemics.

True, virtues are silent. 

You cannot walk these off.

And even then, some braver explorers 

                  pillage the nether regions-

savages and murky poetry readers

mineralized and ossified, fumbling and 

                  kneading to make meaning of it all

softer.

Those insatiable prose readers, of us

cannibal wordsmiths savorers 

of acids and sugar

                                 find balance

together.

Neutralized, sodium syllables 

grounded us, home again.

The top spun itself 
                   out and ungathered threads

that make any thing, 
                           more

True-

when the poem finds its own end.

                 


Painting by Elihu Vedder [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.