Pursuit

What breaks this away,
sending dust and sparks
and whatever, rivets
cascading, falling,
I don't have some ideas.
We are scavengers
a remnant
living in an ever deeper
soiled temple complex,
names and local lore giving way to
geographically neutral designators
or at least that's how it felt,
the cranes and steel frames seeming so rare
and hardly missed.
Bones of Detroit, and all that,
but that's not our point
and we aren't looking back or
spiteful or whatever they
the eternal
say,
if you can manage a smile
even just to be polite.
Some revisions were needed,
is the company line,
they're drinking in the corner
to forget their vocabulary
and the very concept of
proper nouns,
from now on
improper.
Society and its functions,
et cetera,
the realm of
science and its betrothed,
mostly boil down to warmth.
That's water and fire,
if we revert to the
elemental
and we just did.
The questions
we just added later
to add some weight to
the answers,
asterisked in the original.
The pursuit
is a dowry you don't need to pay,
God willing,
but I wouldn't count on that.

Antioch

The things you left behind
were quite a mixed bag
of the sweet and cynical.
Ten thousand years of human civilization
and what are the chances we would run out of new ideas
in nineteen seventy two?
Ann Arbor sounds lovely,
but is it really?
I feel like I've lost
been deprived of
my capacity to even know
what I enjoy,
and in such an event,
I am glad to know you're here,
underground or wherever we've been
driven by our own
haunting
pasts or whatever
excuses
and the rain is clearing up
and I wish it would stay.

Tannenberg

It's the easy way.
To know something
and make something of it,
pretty heavy.
And lesser thinkers than we
pulled the airtime
necessary to call for their heads.
Waves bounding
and bouncing across
generations, vaguely,
connecting the tame rebellions
of our forefathers to the
graying bulletins and bullet-points
of the Sunday edition.
That's nothing new.
On mountaintops
surveying plantations and social experiments
they we they
look on the bright side:
geographically.
Alpine climates pass in pine-framed paintings,
coming of age, but who needs
an autumn there.
It's not ideal.
Three thousand
years
of medical advances
and most of what we
they do,
is let us heal ourselves.
But we cut the cancer out.
We should know
it's all misperceptions
and inflated childhood memories.
My mother explained Kent State to me
at an impressionable age,
and I still picture
the John Wayne battalions of
Monte Cassino and Normandy
coming down on Kisthardt Elementary,
the blood still on the blacktop
sending me into a dizzy spell;
I can't get past that,
and if anyone can
how can I move on?
Heritage,
is the name of the game,
and we are all born victims,
barring Providence,
there go
and corporate intrigue
and an overwhelming
and keeping it topical,
and sure, he's a fascist,
but by God,
the ratings,
by God.
and scheduling,
and ten-years down the road,
will we have anything to rebuild?
Is that optimism?
an emotion
we never learned in school,
despite your best efforts.

You are evasive.
And I avoid challenges.
Knowing that we have gotten this far
drives me from atheism
to believing in a cruel, distant God
at times,
with all due respect.
Self-awareness
will only get you so far:
even the broadest social circle
starts and ends at the same point.
And you don't do overlap,
I've learned.
And I am no community pillar,
not even a suburban catcher,
not all things to all people.
When we can't even trust in name-tags,
what have we for society?
A rhetorical, at best,
and yet we know who we are
(collectively)
bearing
down
on whatever we'll hit.
It's basic physics,
speed and distance and trajectory,
but we're running parallel
and all over.
And across the table
a symphony
and so on
all politics and foreshadowing.
Blink twice for yes.

A Sunday

Flickered and dimmed,
even the stars paled
in comparison,
the sun,
even.
The sun,
you hadn't even seen in months,
months of calculated and minor
abuses,
transgressions,
a winter wearing.
You know the ending,
why fill in the blanks?
And such reasoning,
you can't unring.
We wished we'd died innocent,
sometimes.
It's waiting,
only.
A beautiful accident,
anything.
It's getting too dark even to read,
trading the halogen
for perpetual candlelight.

Repentant

A sinking
reflection and reflecting
on our situation, ourselves
poured from
the heavens, galleons and lines,
soured on work
and un-impressed,
fell upon pillars of drowned sunbeams,
a bed of coursing phantoms
living and dead and allegorical
and skeletal hulks.
At this depth
there's a lot of weight pressing down.
Fire and water
and that nighttime fog giving an illusion of place
to this vast empty
spirit of the time
and unholy noises and crashes
is not much of an education.
And honor,
respected,
is sometimes a shorter voyage
and an easier way out,
but these decisions are
culturally-specific.
And we
polychromatic
but less so every day
in turqouise wood and steel
breathed deep of the ocean,
drinking it like Coca-Cola,
and found new worlds to,
drifting,
explore, but nothing
to find.

On counting the steps in the Barnegat Bay Lighthouse

I wake up most days already out of breath:
justification can take a lot out of you,
even as a residual effect, an aftershock,
a slow withdrawl.
Southern drawls
that stand out here like not much else does,
and a change in personality we are told about
but I've never been able to recognize,
drowned out by the wind,
when you think everyone just got so quiet.
And it's not quite the same
as a postcard, but still,
a view.
If you missed the windows,
well, some people prefer it that way.
Facing out bayside and knowing that all these places,
destinations and curiosities and anti-landmarks
will be passed on the drive home soon enough,
and not the ocean, with its empty promises
and mantras, and walking towards the parking lot
we can't even remember now
who is watching who.

Love Canal

And so it used to be
that one Roebling
took another
a thief.
What once the realm of kings
and conquerors was,
today: city -
planning.
Mother Brook
once no longer safe after dark
is no longer safe.
Koschey walks the waterside paths,
even now as the eighteen-wheelers
and business suits ply their trade,
speaking:
This town ain't even got a skyline,
why should I?
Graffiti-camouflaged,
his minions stand
unaware of the creeping menace,
a flanking vanguard of picket-signs,
and non-commissioned school teachers.
A lot can happen in the city
in a dead afternoon.
And the chemical colors,
bronze and crimson and gunmetal,
change with the speed
the acceleration,
because all of this
all of it
is just about getting somewhere
else
and when we reached the end,
we already knew where to go next
(but we'll never tell.)

The Prison System

Walking towards the horizon,
flat-planed,
or hat-tossing anachronistic celebrants
hanging from a red and silver street-car,
all captains of their respective football teams,
and head cheerleaders,
in the days before helmets, shoulder-pads, and
endorsements
bring us back to the modern age.
I dreamed I was dying and no one cared.
The blacktop skin of this ceremonial parade ground
bled gasoline and blood
(the real, ancient stuff)
and we circled.
We all breathed deep the same toxins
and yet only I had the stunted growth
to let me pass through the meerspiegel
even now
was the culmination of dark rituals
to keep our grass green
fences white
Christ.
I dreamed I was living and everyone cared.