Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: city life, God, cities, Portland, Hobbes, Art Deco, the 1920s, Merleau-Ponty, technology, inauthenticity, overcrowding, urbanization
The girls
of the 1920s were
little more than willow wisps;
all legs, arms, and torsos,
only a motion of limbs and
pale thin embodiment.
Bowlers,
and short hair,
flapper dresses,
boys at their sides,
neon, satin, sequins, and utopian
Art Deco lives.
They were all too young to realize the horrors
the technologies
they invested with messianic robes,
too old to hear their parents’ cries.
From farmsteads,
they came to the big from
the small, never understanding they only ever traded
one enclosure for another.
Anyone who has tried to live in a big city –
now or then –
knows what I mean.
My limbs move in ever-narrowing
circles,
squeezed in on all sides by an
amalgamated mass of
bodies.
This is my salvation and my
poison.
The city is my God.
His angels are a host of automobiles,
carrying the living dead
from neighborhood to neighborhood,
but anyone can see there’s no space
for anyone anymore: the cities
are filling up, the graveyards
are filling up,
Hell is filling up.
But I’m not different:
another pretender in a city of fakes,
you the flighty flapper
I followed here from parts unknown,
shuffling the same worn deck of cards and wishing for
that lucky hand to play, thinking of
the girls of the 1920s,
and the cities that will be
our graves.
Filed under: poems | Tags: architecture, cities, Dante, death, earthquakes, genealogy, God, mythos, Nazis, puppetry, puzzles, rebirth, ruins, storms, volcanoes, Voltaire, water
[another older poem, from about a year-and-a-half ago]
I dreamt of a time when the mottled pieces of our puzzled planet
stood in fault lines
when in fact they were nobles of perfect lineage
and with each movement
made ruins of our best intentions,
scrambling centuries’ worth of work
and making jagged jigsaws of them;
buckling the knees of freeway overpasses,
shaking loose steel bolts, and
creating works of art for us to ponder
in moments of riotous pause.
We did not design, in the past, but designified,
crossed lines,
and with every blow of the hammer
knocked the mystery from our lives
and lessened its greatness;
even Albert Speer knew this, the folly of his best laid plans,
and tried to imagine what his creations might look like
two thousand years on, as the beauteous ruins they would be -
He knew that sandcastles stand the test of time
when they give themselves fully to the surf.
All ingenuity in the performance is lost to us
if we pull away to find strings
and the hands of the master,
which wring themselves, even at rest.
We must use our own fingers
to touch the face of the world
and leave what we’ve created
to phusis,
that which arises and empties
and arises again.
Outside of ourselves,
in the hands of nature,
there are the things we can’t control
and the things we think we can,
and they push against each other like the prodigal and the avaricious,
and we stand within the eye of the storm
with all we have wrung from the earth
as some great throne beneath us
and are content to believe we retain some command of things,
while le meilleur des mondes possibles
rumbles around us,
seasons in transition, and colors, in the same cycle,
and us, quaking, in fear and trembling,
while the flow of Mauna Kea touches water, slows, and turns black,
and in vapors
whispers
that progress does not always mean going forward;
that it may mean turning our back on time and letting it sweep us to parts unknown,
and that it may mean a return, and it may send us into the ocean,
but as we give ourselves fully to the surf we know we will stand the test of time;
we know that death feeds life;
we know that at death an oath is sworn
to feed the living, and be reborn.
Filed under: poems | Tags: cities, city streets, evolution, forests, life, selfhood
We tend to step heavy
in the forest
and lightly in the streets;
in the cities we are but one
of millions
and the impact of our footsteps
and our presence
can be
and often is
quickly wiped away.
But in the forests we can make
the greatest impact
in life
though despite our footsteps ultimately the forests
shall endure until the seas boil
while humanity
and its cities
will not.
At some point we must all come to grips
with the fact that we
are nothing special.
We are little more than
the slightly mutated product
of a timeless pattern,
of a timeless mould,
to which our ancestors
have made
consistent and minute
adjustments.
Life
is not something which we can find
in the cities.
The vast majority of Earth’s creatures
live in the wilds,
in forests and
deserts
and near lakes and meadows
and rivers and plains
and streams;
And even what we term life –
and even when we call someone lively –
what is meant is little more than that
they act like animals.
Those whom we call lively are little more
than animals,
and life in the cities
will never be more
than the spectre of Life to be found
in the world.
Why do we run towards
this smallest part
of the Earth’s surface?
