Gossamurmur (4 page)

they decided on this and other important grammatical matters

a kind of lower-case theft:

steal fire

steal salt

steal agenda of one who was struggling inside an organization of art

a words-only school finding new words for “containment”

A very first Decider of the First Rank of Regulation

was striving to ascend a ladder in a workplace like a corporation

a corporation where Deciders wrestle with “packages” and

“redundancy” and “assessment” and various means and methods of power “relaxment” created so that Deciders may decide

He was privy to a range of lightly inclined enhancement and free-association infusion practices which help Deciders decide

But the first Decider of the First Rank faltered in a conference call

enraged that he was not getting his way on a crucial decision

about “accessibility” about “partnering” about a once-in-a-lifetime “merger”

He broke down trembling at the end of a long mahogany conference table

“
Am I not a Decider
?” he whimpered into his soft manicured hands

The Tenth-Rank Decider decided to join in, weeping and trembling

a strange symbiosis among Deciders

they could feel one another’s frustration and pain

Not having the power to fully decide was a hell realm

They pushed through an agenda with cajolement and duplicity

with corporate advancement

with cynical advantage

closeted rage and hope of ownership and revenge

What is poetry to the robotic-drone dreamworld

rash of noise      hum      nonsense syllables

Talky entertainment boxes you can’t control by land or by sea,

in the air in sky that was unconditional once, and vast

A taxi pulls up and you get in, subjected to the squawk box inside,

deadening emblem of end-time in incipient dark age

This is fascism you mutter into your muffler

Take me to the next extreme

storm clouds gather on the horizon

“
What’s a poetry portal?
” the Third-Rank Decider asks, sweating into his uncertainty and possible loss of control

A window onto the whole world.
 . . .
listening back at you

The Deciders took Anne apart organ by organ, sinew by sinew. And they copied these parts into the husk of the new Anne with skill and dark intent. As they did this they would pause, mewling into their sinister Autopsy:

“
Little organ of Original Anne, what can you do for us now
?”

“
Little eyes of Original Anne, what will you accomplish now
?”

“
And you, sinews that bind operation of motion, where walk you now
?”

“
Tongue that composed many ballads and odes for your time, how will you sing?
”

They gloated in their desire to reveal the nothingness of all things, and to murder poetry.

They could not remove or mutate her consciousness, which stayed intact in the retreat and isolation of the Original Anne.

They made their copy, a mockery of the Original Anne, undoing the manna of Original Anne, who they cast into a virtual prison while they went about their plot of alienating humans from their linguistic natures. Language would become separated, torn from its vital dwelling place. Humans would be living out history and a life of unrelenting State without poetry. The Archive of the multiple voices was endangered, years in the making, to preserve breath and intellect, imagination’s other place, as
psychic inscription and to let humans of the future know some of us were not just killing one another.

“
You would never guess
,” they said, “
look at our creation, a perfect simulacrum
.” And they looked to a time of acquiescence where the populace would be silenced. Where the attention span of humans, ever-waning, would ride the waves of mediacrats, and hear tell endlessly, monotonously, the slow drip of the undulating fortunes of celebrity worlds and become even more accustomed and inured to the beat and thrum of war.

And more in lockdown. And more and more in lockdown.

There was a Decider of the Fifth Rank of the State of Rectilinear Space as it applies to a subject’s metabolism

Decider of how many gold stars on a bonnet

Or for one entering the room of major decision-making feeling diminished, there was a Decider sitting behind a massive desk of protocol and power

Facing windows of gray light in sad anemic offices over which more Deciders preside

Deciders of who leaves or stays, who gets laid off, who must be demoted

Who closes rank

It was not a happy world.

Original Anne mumbled in her prison/castellum:

Yes, you could lose your mind

And in captivity: pray if all else fails

And read all books while you still have privilege

in the library-prison world

Rimbaud you are source on the original list

Everyone abides you

Blake come soon and next and often

Dante Cavalcanti Sappho Hafiz Mallarmé all Saints of Poetry

And Saints also of any holy thing

Our Lady of the Pillar, in mind out of sleep tonight

St. Sephra Seraphim, be with me

Goddess of Scriptures and Scriptoriums hold fast

Simon Magus’s death giveth fire

Apostle Peter is watching, nary no scold

St. Francis of Assisi suspended above earth and watching

Christina the Astonishing help my troubled bifurcation

Rebbes, mullahs take heed

Archangela Girlani hold up the 3-brane world

Buddhas of compassion everywhere

Please release us from your spider’s cradle

Peaseblossom, Mustardseed O pray appear

Deciders: return to your neutralized stations in the shadow world

Your language stops revealing anything,

instead revealing the nothingness of all things

Can we dream our own melancholia for what is irretrievable?

The Deciders think the troubadours were a problem

Erasure, a suicide pact

Magic doubles deceive you

The stuff of your sex and the projection of mind…

This is normal and sinuous

They are taking you apart in the time/space machine

Reading one upon another in fulmination of other lives

Don’t go crazy, Original Anne

Let’s go excavate some poetry

on papyrus      in cuneiform      magnetic tape

solid-state memory
save on the cloud

faced by an electronic pentameter

“
claw out some poetry eyes?
”

save on a cloud

switching code in the runnels

circling a moat devised as a first-front defense aporia keep moving, keep dancing

mountain shifts

ice crystals form on her duplicated mouth

a forked path on forehead

more streaks on screen bank

which way to caress a broken brow

familiar as your deadly Belle Dame sans Merci

reels of orality

chalk, obligatory calcium

in marrow of women who wrote in ancient diaries

bemoan their Heian imprisonment

shape of crying like a mourner

you could establish in humility this pose

“shape of a mourner”

who are we kidding?

when Deciders cheer inside

break sound they said

manipulate pitch

vocal cords

phonation’s

a discourse

for the impostors

what is language?

“
We use it, don’t we?

in our copious memos, in our ‘releases,’ in our

power documents

in our homilies to the world

cliché quotations on

life

suffering

the passage of time

on Patriotism

on the need for downsizing

on ‘tighten your seat belts’

on finding the childlike naive spirit of servitude within the workplace

don’t look now while you are looking away we will replace you

with our own poetry, our mission statements of despair
”

This is a template application for the Deciders

images of rows of normative coffee mugs

as if we are having a pleasant chat over

a freshly brewed cup of virtual coffee

Hardest problem in science

   is the origin of language

      “
we bend science
,” they say

  prelinguistic system among primates

our early human capacity for song

level of public trust

to sing your song

bend or break it

in ritual/speech evolution

100,000 years ago to

Homo ergaster,
the first human to vocalize

“
can we find her and bend her over?
”

“
vocal grooming, could be low-cost
”

    “
is she vocalizing? is that all she does?
”

language not separate adaptation but an internal aspect of

something much wider

human symbolic culture

without it you die

low-level marketing and publicity Decider has the bright idea of how to encapsulate his vision of “poetry making”

“
Aha,
” he thinks, “
a lone rocking chair at the edge of an ocean, then you can make what you will of this desolate nihilism: will she submit?
”

phonemes produced on the outsides of our body

shed skins to be nameless

decided the pipeline that will change the cartography of living things

deciding the Grand Canyon

hundreds of water bodies threatened

endangered habitat of whooping cranes

pallid sturgeons

decide the future of American burying beetles

decide assault weaponry, blood on hands

decided the model of air, water

of earth

of fire

in

empire

offer a truced tribunal, tear down the wall or they shake within your cacophony the end of wilderness

memo: we need a commission for the scrutiny tribunal

Deciders of all accounts

took the stratus off a poet-face (stratus = layer)

kept her in a cage

cumulus more of heap like severance pay

cirrus = mere curl of a hair resembles coil of sound

double bind

decided our debt to one another

was it not
humanitas
&
caritas
?

none of that, they said

those who created a system of amnesia

other gateways, escape hatch

cascade of timeless motion

hiding behind an ambivalent waterfall

a waterfall just falls

faceted elemental tableau

it doesn’t notice your paranoia

cloned sisterhoods in the dark castellum

where is our feminism?

your job disturbing the edges?

crying like a mourner

wish she’d disappear that other…

nimbus

halo around your words

words like combs, twigs

prowl the low and complicated grasses

as a brick turns to dust

nimbus is relational

nimbus is the older sister

more experienced

hidden

can’t shake her

and shadow government

off

radar

sequence by sequence selling off the genome

Let me explain
, the Poet said

no vagaries I hate that you would think that

not knowing but echoing mentor’s extant scheme

neither pounce nor sweat nor becoming intentional

the “that” in not knowing her agenda but make the writing clear

would speak of the innovation of poetry

anxious in the wings

as if knowing might spark intimacy

to bring release from knowable things

of this world

impermanence of the altostratus and such

faint beads of sweat staining gossamer robes

altruistic, asymmetrical

altiplano did ascend together?

did we climb the jeweled stair?

or here

did tryst?

as in

transfer and truce

her part in my drama translated,

she was an impostor of the worst order

all landscapes not inviolable

all terrain not off the map

she beat me to the antechamber, and

may I speak of urgency?

spider thread spun