Sincère Lecteur (2015 poem)

You would rather your soul’s chain reaction
than material success of an entropic image
wracked by Gessel taxes, relatives, suggestions,
growing ever tireder, pleasing no-one
but the boosters who manipulate its heartstrings. 

Binkying rabbits & zigzagging cats (2015 poem)

Binkying rabbits & zigzagging cats
proclaim those are their greatest moments,
those zigzagging, binkeying sea serpent hymns of praise.
We too zigzag, we too binky our apotheoses,
like a dense, forked sapping operation.
Blasphemy: trying to jam someone’s zigzag,
trying to stop Life from entering into this Earth of the Dead.

You have been scanned (2015 diagramming conversation poem)

I was listening to two young primates
talking, listening mid-conversation
as one does & diagramming what they
said. The first thing was a statement of the
obvious, & yet the other did not
seem displeased, perhaps because of all the
psi & oxytocin splattering among them.
Then one made an unsolicited suggestion,
which, if it had been addressed to me, would
have precipitated a crisp lecture
or resulted in my just ignoring him forever.
But, again, the other primate did not
seem to mind. I could not bear to listen
any longer to their conversation.

Logonaut (2013 quatrains)

Here be an age when men lack roots
and spread like roots into the soil
to find no purchase as ease loots
them of their energy and toil.

Here be an age that cries for Blood
and Entertainment in the streets
and cobblestones and humble mud...
and both hors d’oeuvres with front row seats.

I extricated my old roots,
replacing them down under here
because the niche I grew here suits,
because the people just stand clear.

So long as I have words in hand
I’ll glow until I’m ash and bone.
I am a stranger in this land
and, too, a stranger in my own.

Have you had previous mass grave experience? (2015 poem)

Have we at WeStaff got an opportunity for you!
Red horseman War is looking for a host!
You must have previous experience
at epileptic seizures -- having them,
not treating them -- & come from a small country similar
to Austria or Corsica or Macedonia next
to an analogous but larger country such as Greece
or France or Germany. Send your CV today! Don't miss this
Opportunity! Advance! Career! Advance! Ask for Jen.

Sketch of helicopter at aftershock party (2011)

Describing rings above shocked Armagh Street
a helicopter glimmered as it sliced
past overhead. At one point was it lit
up by an orange, hot flash of setting star.

I wish that I had longer toes (2014)

I wish that I had longer toes
so I could have four hands.
I watch my toes just open, close,
repeating my demands.

But no one listens, least of all
my stubby little toes.
At least they help me stand up tall
& level out my nose.

Testimony (2015 poem)

I grew up in “The Truth”, they said: The Church
Without TVs, the 2x2 black-stockinged Church.
I left The Church Without a Name when I was 17.

“The ant goes marching 1x1, hoorah! hoorah!”

The brother workers on the left, the sister workers on
the right, the pulpit platform with the Overseers on
it in the center with the microphone between.

A voice is saying “Let us turn to Hymn Sixteen.”

A sister worker’s voice is quaking at the pulpit, an
excruciating testimony. Flies
become too fascinating. Sweat drips down.

A brother worker later charged with sexually
abusing women is now saying “Don’t
put God in a box” at Effie convention. Then I saw
my cousin asking him about subversive doctrine in
the dusk as everyone but us was headed
towards the donuts in the dining hall, which
made up somewhat for spending five! hours! sitting down.

A diet of dystopias & Valentinus
-- Simon Cyrenean, Hypostasis of the Archons,
hylics, Psychics, & Pneumatics oh my! --
mediated my disassociation, then
my integration into mainstream life
was shocking, but I’m still some silver linings:

now inoculated against love-bombs,
sensitive to power structuration
& manipulative, cultic interaction.

So, I’ll share what I’ve accumulated
in the course of my investigation.*

They were ruled by so-called “Overseers”,
so I got a teenage introduction
to the oligarchic concept, then I
learned the word was what I had been noting.
One could say: in the beginning was the
concept joined with sweat & sense impressions.

Irvine, William: founder of the sect in
County Tipperary, Ireland. Excommunicated
by the group we later called “The Overseers”.
When he started preaching about preaching
to the aliens, his archons or lieutenants
spooked and left, then Cooney. But the “People
of the Message” were still faithful to their founder.
I can taste sectarian distinctions.

There were heretics. We spoke of them in whispers.
They were said to believe that Jesus always
had his full-fledged powers at the ready.
At the battlements we watched for them in whispers,
whispers about heretics here in the Last Days,
in the “Age of Mammon & the Devil”,

then a lightning bolt of adolescence
rescued me with drilling dreams of snapping snakes.
The leukocytes could smell my heresy! The fun began.
“Are you all right?” “Something has changed in you.”
It had! I was a mediating Valentinian! The Inquisition started.
“What happened, Trent?” Interrogated Subject. Subject “Fine”.

*The investigation in question was based on the material provided by websites such as Telling the Truth, the Lying Truth, and the Liberty Connection. I'm in a succeeding generation of ex-2x2s, and we all depended on them for light on the matter.

Impressions (2013 poem)

Precipitate precipitation fell

like hypodermic needles down the sky

and turned daylight’s blue bowl into a well.

As night light interrupted by and by

slick asphalt glistened like black ice and shone

with bug-eyed light as Sol sets over sea

so scintillatingly. But minds of stone

care nothing for such beauties, scarcely see

beyond the nearest human being’s eyes,

and do not look up at void, ancient Moon.

It does not matter to them if the skies

are foggy with red, urban light or noon

is thriving with the foxtail wisps of clouds.

Like filagree, they lose themselves in crowds.

The Crackling of Thorns (2013 poem about the southwestern drought)

Forest fires have their own weather systems.

Sudden gusts of wind arise. A villa goes up 

like a protesting Hinayana monk.

There goes another:

popcorn in a bellows-driven furnace.

Blacksmiths in the Heavens

must be forging a fresh flail

to scourge the divide-and-multiply Southwest

of its afflictions;

but if so they'll have a hard time quenching it.

Los Angeles, Las Vegas bake 

like Mayan pottery or cuneiform-inscribed clay tablets,

depleting fossil aquifers and laughing, laughing

long into their loud, electric nights.

Iridium Required (2012 poem -- rolling stresses)

Singularity: a geometric curve of technical accomplishment

which scrubs the humans out of untouched infrastructure

like neutron bombs, surveillance cameras...

Resource! Grant! Consent! Appraisal! Resource! Resource!

Must obtain iridium, resource.

DARPA funding super-soldier program.

Vivisectioning gives way before

the mighty cost-effective handheld sequencer.

Geneticists code book in DNA. 

Transhumanism: movement to augment humanity.

Cyborg: a part-organism, part-machine experience.

Chimera: organisms with genetic data 

from another species. (Anyone will do!)

and last but certainly not least is 

Exoskeleton!: responsive powered frame 

which multiplies its bearer’s strength! and muscular endurance!

and usefulness! and freedom!

Resource, go to Sector 3. Iridium required.

Many Mansions (2015 poem)

Yin and Yang is Cain and Abel , sheep & fruit. I’m able 
and I’m keen, a good keen can catch-all can do here
on the fractured plates of  Aotearoa,
gift of active volcanoes, for in the shimm’ring distance 
hills are cloaked by their own clarity, 
clad in a state of mind above both thought 
& feeling. Almost could I be an animist among 
such objects. It is chryptochromin-activating dusk 
o’clock & all my thoughts have changed because
we have not even gotten used to fire
& light bulbs! What is more, there is a backdoor in 
the mind, but most go for dead coals that it has long departed,
rippling from the epicenter of a victory:
being in becoming’s sphere of axis, right suspension of the givens.

Hump Century (2011 quatrains)

(written in 2011, "the gods" changed to "Our Lord" in 2016)

...beamed down from satellites to TVs

plus nanonetworked smart dust plus deep packets oh I can't
perceive it all at once! Bound on a treadmill of CVs
& paying for our training's slant,

as well as its inherent use
to humankind, we must be more than splintered specialists
amongst the Google Earths & views,
we must be more than numbers on chill neatly indexed lists!

There must be a rebirth among the great apes armed with war
who scout the land & then report
on its munitions dumps, civilian population, spore
dispersion mediums, who kill for sport

from helicopters with high-powered rifles, yes there must
be renaissance among the apes
who wield the neutron bomb as they disturb the Terran crust.
Our Lord should take them by their napes.

Anomalistics (2014 poem)

As clouds lower, so do upper-atmospheric lightnings,
which accounts for some reported sightings. 

So we see them here as if they were alive:

on infrared or radar in the humming air they thrive.

Anomalies! Anomalies are beautiful, I feel. 

For just this sentiment see Devereux, Vallée, & Keel.

Ghost soldiers clomp stampeding stamp down shuttered shaking streets. 

Some are called elves, some are called sprites. They light this strange old sky 

of nights. And they bestir me with the holy question “WHY?!”

Ideological (2007 poem in sprung rhythm)

Spark Motes of dust float in the beam

Through canopy of bed and wood

Good

Of opened drawer and canopy

Of forest down on pioneer men

Inn

Rangers Beggars Merchants Speeches

In this floating world suspended

Hid

Like masters under canopy

And cover of a palanquin

Men

Straining lift with slavery or

Drunkenness of moon mating

Rutting

Simply, masters, servants, but no

Enoch's Enoch's Enoch's walk, no

Clue

Into the words that bury them

Drum

Mass graves' hundred millions where once

Tens of millions lived too, longing,

Stringing

Beads on rosaries and stringing

Up unnecessary man-shapes

Grapes

Exploding as high pressure lights

Imploding as they reel from heights

Wits

Lanternfish of riots, winters,

Shouts and dreams, exploding Tzar killed

Lulled

By propaganda teeming from

The crowd programmed by snore of sky

High

Daguerrotype (2015 blank verse)

Dickinson, who called Itself "Least Figure
on the Road", burnt out Its codependent
ape mind and continued on Its mission.
Those desiring further information
should see Schopenhauer's lifelong work on
the renunciation of the will.

An orb's eye view of fun (blank verse from 2012)

I never go to parties anymore.

They're not the ancient ways I sought in them.

They do not tear the veil back; do not lift

participants above their hamster wheels;

have not! do not! will not! communicate

in dashing tongues of fire; are not the ways

out of the Age of Iron, Age of the Wolf,

Age of the Tower come around again 

to haunt the halls of drafty history.

With Writhing Willows (2015 poem)

I.

Wind flagellates the RSA.
Aograoroan sheets of shining stratus cloud
loom over dormant, busy mailboxes and eyes.
The pinch-faced, angry man
next door is always throwing out
his younger flatmate. I keep well away,
don't even know their names. Perhaps it's his
own son or other relative,
which would explain the other's patience and longsuffering.


II.

I found out later that it was his son.

Balance of power (2013 sonnet)

A dragon and an eagle whirl around
at dusk like Sambo with his shining skin,
a whirlwind furiously void of sound
and thick as Goodness. Round and round they spin,

frustratedly unable to draw blood
for sheer futility. Why fight along
the bell curve’s crest, why kick up fuss? Ned Ludd
would only separate us. Just be strong,

parade toys, troops and hawks, spit out glad bile,
and whirl around as though this feedback loop
between us means to last forever while
the debts and hungry mouths begin to group

around our citadel of magic hope.
We who were so enlightened now must grope.

Contraction & Magnanimity (poem: sonnet)

Grim sky looms gray, a sickly, writhing void
inside of one. Nightmarish bright gray days
& that low-pressure with which they're alloyed
replace habitual disciplines with haze
as harsh self-criticisms smirk & feud.
No progress & no product is enough
on such a day, with static gray imbued;
one's very soul departs one in a huff.

Our grander days of gliding, godlike clouds
proclaiming an exact munificence --
recalled to mind -- oppose these banshee shrouds
of a particular deluge... Intense,
far, warming, this light yoke of hours starts.
A whole begins to coalesce from parts.

The Mirror Men (2009 heroic couplets)

*You hold a mirror to your times and group,
obliged to hoist the colors of your troupe.

No comprehension is implied by your
allegiances. You walk along the shore,

exactly mirroring its curling waves
as in a graveyard you reflect its graves.

You’re powerless by nature to do Good
or Evil, only to reflect the wood

if walking through it, dark or otherwise.
What connoisseurs! You only believe Big Lies.

* I regard determinism as something which applies only to a substantial subset of the human population.

A quatrain of caution (poem: squib)

Traumatized by generations of fucked-up behavior,

people look outside of self-improvement for a savior,

yearn to be the massah closer than you think

because it’s normal. I’d advise you not to blink.

Peering through a window pane at a transmitting bee (poem: blank verse)

It was as though that bee had tried to speak
with those gesticulations of her legs
& thorax, one leg sometimes rubbing past
her head. She finally whirred off in a huff,
not having gotten through to me at all.

November 2nd, 2012 (poem: squib)

Supervisors overlooked propped-open doors.
Wind tumbled down the street,
blew dust off of the ruins.
Construction workers shucked their flannels,
roadworks fucked the roads.
Men spoke to one another as to men.
I stood at ease.

The Hell Upon a Hill (poem about religious cults & inquisitions written in 2014)

In fissiparous burnt-over
districts, Pilgrim Fathers drift like
sharks at peace with their own lurking.
The Inquisitors were devils
at their levels, theirs were revels
of a kind performing Hell for
future generations. Trauma
from that Hell still haunts burnt-over
districts like a bottomless pit,
and neatly on neat benches in
their neat gear do they neatly sit
like animals kept in a pen
of a kind performing Hell for
future generations. Trauma
from that Hell still haunts burnt-over
districts like a bottomless pit,
where watchful for the faintest spark
out in the silence of the dark
they roam the Land of Eyes and Lips
in case a breathing human being trips.

Multipolar (poem written in 2011)

Hydrating as a paragraph or verse
you grow inside a time of quantitative
easing / currency devaluation /
open borders / Babelisme, haunting  me,
encircling me like antimissile shields,
propelling me like an electrolytic
cell, resolving all my oppositions
into unities, completing me like glowworms
all around one of a humming heated
night! It's 28 Nivôse. Two hundred and nineteen.

The Sun Itself (poem: cinquains written in 2012)

Raw magnanimity, unleashed at men,
is no respecter of existing forms.
Quite frequently it clashes with the norms
which govern this wild sphere whereon we win
or lose our minute wars, brave manmade storms.

True power, no mere irritating voice,
does not make one resentful, like the Sun
itself does not deprive all men of choice.
Not of commands is power’s lattice spun
but of humane behavior set to ‘stun’.

It's now early morning in Neu Sealand (poem: sextets written in 2013)

Dawn had not yet tie-dyed our arc of sky.
The wallabies of Waterdeath* had not
yet stirred. We had not groaned yet by & by
emerged from wombs of warmth to face the day,
ingesting caffeine at our usual spot
and breathing life into our lifeless clay.

Chill blue light shone down from the gibbous moon
onto the hamster cages that we call
our homes. Dawn had not passed our farthest dune
upon its way to greater, grander things,
like winking out the nightlight in the hall.
Gray statues shaped like birds had not spread wings.

*Waimate

Horse (heroic sonnet / example of sonnet portraiture written in 2013)

I didn’t even know that he was there
until he nearly crushed my fingers in
between two boxes of the pallet where
I had been stacking them. He beamed & then

cried “Watch your fingers, Bro!” And in that grin
I saw his topsy turvy, rotten teeth.
I think of him as Horse because -- well, when
I look at him I see a horse... Beneath

that bodily encumbrance beats a heart
of old. Some other workers say he "stinks".
He’s like a duckbilled platypus, apart
from other species. My heart sometimes sinks

as I peruse his file, look in, away
from him right there beside me as he zips
& come to no conclusion, not all day.
It’s better when the good ones crack his whips,

of course. I can’t forget him. He looks hurried
later on where formerly he scurried.

Centuries of Lights (rolling stresses poem written in 2008)

(an explanation of kshatriya behaviour
in the context of becoming)

All of us are kamikaze pilots.
It's a matter of which aircraft carrier to ram
before deactivation,
with fewer mangled bodies & torn, twisted bulkheads
in most cases.

 Maybe tyrant Kings are better than their absence,
better than the Tweedledumdee crypto-oligarchic State.

For Progress is:
the Reign of Terror or a Bonapartist Plebiscite,
gunshots in the woods behind a planned community.

The Long Weekends (poem written in 2013)

Centuries braid sine curves in the distance.
Centuries tilt, tumbling in the distance, galaxies of fixed points.
Fixed points on the axes are so distant,
warming as warm distant stars,
wide as wide open roads of two Long Weekends in a row!
A row of questions pumps my temporary heart,
and in the distant present I give thanks.

Two Squibs for Almond Castle (poem-in-two-squibs about a 'hippy mansion' in Waitati)

(written in late 2013 / early 2014)

1.

Fog unravels and untangles
at Waitati in the bright mist,
tops of pine trees disappearing
of a long soaked cloud December.

2.

Though the pace be apace, it’s a sweet, swirling place
where division of labour occurs with mad grace.

Lycanthropy (poem written in 2014)

This full blue moon feels bright and spicy,
as of different shades of beckoning. Icy
clouds of conversation rise, unravel,
cloak the night with shapes like sudden travel,
by my wracking reckoning. Dicey
bends, encounters, forks fan out and linger
like a wreath of new air in my time shape,
like a figure in a surveillance tape.

5A (poem about harvesting the magnetosphere originally published in Landfall 225)

The distant tether of the 5-Australis
Birkeland Aerostat Array, 5A
for short, was like a boy with 18 balloons,
breath puffing from his mouth in rich volcanic,
locomotive plumes of CO2;
or even like Medusa, snake mouths lunging
into the magnetosphere to sip
a million amps or so like butterflies
alighting on a wild celestial orchid.

[Note in Oct. 2017: One was not aware of Ignatius Donnelly's novel <<Caesar's Column>> when writing this poem; apparently the novel features a city powered by the aurora borealis, so it is on my summer reading list. Certainly one wondered and still wonders if one might possibly have read the novel before, making 5A an example of cryptomnesia, but I don't think that I even heard about it until a year or so ago when I began looking into proto-SF novels more.

Two Months (poem originally published in PNZ 43 and written in 2009)

July: Industrial production peaks
at Horsetail Base. A riot breaks out in
St. Favonini Square, where dissidents
denounce the Oligarchs of Horsetail Base,
known as the Halswell Syndicate. Police
in riot gear arrived. No massacre
occurred, twelve brutal beatings having been
sufficient. August: Weeks of rioting
begin. Police unable to control
the escalating situation. Films
not entertaining People anymore.
‘The People’ throng the streets, dissatisfied
with Crooks... & newly enamoured with Hooks.

Uchronie (poem originally published in PNZ 43)

(written in 2009)

‘...The thirty Emperors of New Zealand
after the collapse of its Republic in 2095
extended their domain’s possessions
to include Tasmania, New Guinea,
parts of balkanized Australia &...’
‘The institution of “protectorates”
(involving annexation & alliance,
this latter in some cases genuine)
by Emperor Murray VI marked the imposition
of that order from without
which far-flung Australian city-states
& small, unstable leagues thereof --
harassed by raiders
from the Javan Caliphate & crippling droughts
domestically -- so sorely needed...’
‘...Aching teleology or lack thereof of history...
most regrettable... the Brisbane massacre....
my sphere of axis shudders....
hacked-off-breast phenomenon, albeit cultural...’

Impressions of the Caliphate: The Archipelagan Herald November 3rd, 2067

(steampunk poem originally published in PNZ 43)

Cargo dirigibles may be a common
sight for residents of Auckland, Melbourne,
Brisbane, Sydney or Christchurch, but the airship
might as well have been a flying jinn
to most Djakarta, Java residents
on Friday when a delegation from
the Australasian Common Area --
gawking right back at them -- climbed rope ladders
down into negotiation mode with
waiting priyayi. Humidity streamed
down tanned faces, moistened Dundee hats, &
often wiped the etchasketch of thought
like regularly beating gongs. ‘The Caliph
peace be upon him would like an airship’
‘...preferential trading...’ ‘Yes...’ ‘Moluccan
spices...’ ‘...in exchange for which the Caliph
peace be upon him will build trendy teal mosques
all over your countries...’ ‘Up yours, mate’... &
so, like compost, inconclusive talks
proceeded for twelve awkward, throbbing hours...

White Smoke (Fukushima-Daiichi disaster poem originally published in PNZ 46)

(written in 2011, modified from "gods" to "God" in 2016)

Fukushima plant is leaking coolant -
white smoke - burning concrete - the reactor
may be melting - fallout map - "set back the
industry for decades" - hydrogen sparked
HWUMPH explosion - Fukushima plant "the
next Chernobyl" - scientists declare quakes
'Unrelated' as tectonic plates as
Japanese authorities distribute
iodine to counter thyroid damage -
Quake, tsunami, radiation, fallout...
Yes the gang's all here - O God*, pluck out Man's
technocratic, cybernetic hubris!
Smash Man back into the stone age! Save Man...!

Men prove themselves unworthy to wield stars.

Oneiric (Christchurch earthquake poem originally published in PNZ 46)

(written in 2011)

Catwalk dangling from a rippling blackness
by a metal chain... with men in hardhats,
six or more of them, unable to stand
straight & sliding into one another,
just like helicopters moving girders
into place so swiftly that the girder
tilts & rocks... towed by obsidian flat
ovoid rippling oil-slick stormy blackness.

Eremite Hawk Secretary Jesuit Yoruban (beginning of "B.C." cycle))

     I see amanitas almost every
     Day on Tinakori Hill. Of reindeer
Red
Black
     Think I then. No time have I to rate us
     Well. I trundle up the Monty Python Hill.
Teal
Tell
     Above stark lows and grays abide blue
     Levels! memories! like saucers gliding
Aqua
Wintry
     On a field or sea, a plane contrasting
     With tall monticule.
Teal
Bed
     Small mandibles of insect scorpions
     Trace patterns as of missing spider webs,
Ray
Clouds
     A dove's mobility regarding time
     For two years, he just said, a human hid
Roads
Hay
     Transfigured, fire before the flesher's sea,
     A bow above my level four of cloud
Wind
Womb
     Which heralds not a drench of monsoon but
     Small mandibles of insect scorpions
Red
Bends
     Make us fill out forms.
     But I return, and so does he again,
And when?
And then?
     As we evade, thus far, our shrieking whims.
     The ravaged Caeser of a cabbage leaf
Cool
Colors
     Falls off my head past glasses in thereon.
     Our savaged sand lives, smoke and dust consoled.