I wonder what it is I hear rattling
around inside your skull,
is it a chew toy, a pair of dice?
what hidden
meanings lurk behind that idiot
grin, beaming
feedback you got from the satellite dish
you mistook for a corpus callosum . . .
ren&stimpy on every channel.
I have little time
for the incoherent jibes of madmen who hide,
alcoholic, behind a false cloak
of inapproachable genius.
what a joke—
do you think I really give a shit?
Blubbering as you chaff tender
the deteriorated wrist
of some long dead thing, you in your infinite
self-congratulation, have the gall
to still call Art.
"wake up, wake up . . .
oh, please . . . don't you leave me!"
It's fucking sad, but you know
I see more true-to-form “Art”
in the patient crayola scribblings
of kindergarteners
and in the masturbatory habits
of rhesus monkeys
than in the masterpieces you
so eloquently "produce."
but let's not forget your abstentious Muse!
She was alive once, you know,
but then you killed her, drained every ounce
of vitality from her limbs, sucked the juice
right out of her,
and for what?
you couldn't even spell chrysanthemum
with a cut&paste,
you're a fucking waste of space
on a blank white page—
I.
I have wandered sand dune seas
Drawn mountains from ancient rites of lava and glacier,
Stood among the dead spirits
Conjured under coyote moons, until I longed
To howl at my brothers,
And bark the meaning of my life
Fixed with sparks in the ovum, the evanescent
Iris fused to womb-mind
Mama’s little messiah
Come to smash the forbidden gates of fire
Crush the eggshell throats of priests
And lay waste their sacred temples—
But I did not hate them, their god
Of steeplejack towers, ghostly in gray morning mist,
Wounded Man transfixed above the altar, his
Wings pinned to cork, wooden rictus
Agape in mute scream,
An angel standing in the sun,
A crystal tree
Flared white
Against the corkscrew kinesis
Of silicon skies—
I was born to a world
Of skyscrapers
Ribbed in sepia mirrors,
Shedding prisms of shattered light, slanted
In the looking
Glass of Mammon,
While the swords of Man gleamed naked
In the garden
And the seven silver trumpets, blowing
Sweet defiance,
Proclaimed Chaos the new Lord of Mathematics,
And sat his ocular skull, grinning
Gold atop the anthracitic throne
And bowed
In reverence to the express
Hieroglyphics
Of his sixth most intricate projection—
The Wise said I was an infant of vision, but
Doomed to claw on fours up a mountain of human
Flesh,
They predicted that one day
I would call down fire from the sky, scattering
Bodies
Like sparks on a roaring wind . . .
Blow them into a rim of fabulous stars, now . . . resolved
And winking in the void,
Transform
A pointillistic swirl of molecules, a dislocated hum
Grown fat on white noise, into a buzzing swarm
Of hornets, but their
Stingers dripped purple poison, and jabbed me
Until I shed
Tsunamis from the pits of my eyes,
And cried out in terror from the depths
Of my psychokinesthetic prison,
Snow blind, lost
Amid that searing . . . white
Annihilation—
II.
And so I escaped,
And Pariah, I am named
Like the cast-off skin of a synthetic snake
Bound to an age, when
All the scales measured the shifting sands
Of my life
One molecule at a time . . .
Relegated to an arctic clime, where the snow swirls
In flakes of chalk,
And crashes my temple like a cold-drunk wasp . . .
I am companion unfit
For these armies of naked white birches
That stand stock-still, a ring of ghosts to mock
The dying wind,
And move only to shiver, to rake stark
Black claws
Against the bare
Pink belly of dawn—
Now,
The arctic wolves are my brothers
Their tribe and mine are of kith and kind
Living out on the fringes, in the vanishing tundra
Unaware of the concepts of space and time,
In the wilderness
Surpliced in a guise Nature intended, in oyster
And pearl
To blend in with the fog-frothed mists
And lope our bounds unseen
Hurdling frigid drifts
Where I run wild and free, a member of the pack
And if someday . . .
The huntsmen ever came for me, I’d fight
And die—
And never, ever . . . go back.
What is this:
source.
Evolution descends, a helium balloon
lost in the lens flare of the sun—
Atoms, these basic building blocks
did not evolve.
Six billion years ago
parallelograms didn’t orbit isosceles triangles.
Homo erectus did not slick back his tangled locks
divest himself of his lice-infested itch—
Regress to a zoot suit and gold-buckled briefcase
and . . . catch the 6:38 into the city.
What are these:
stars.
That drift apart and die from afar, yet apace
become suns, create and sustain life.
Scientifically, they are self-gravitating spheres
of plasma in hydrostatic equilibrium—
Generating their own energy through a process
we, in our infinite wisdom, call nuclear fusion.
Light, heat, sound, energy, radiation in a profusion
of winds, particles, fields, waves—
Singing
on all frequencies.
And what are we:
entities.
But a captive audience seated in the dark
a resonant sea lapping up a slow-wheeling stage.
With organs too frail to appreciate
acoustic superstrings and mystical laser-lights.
We imperfect copies,
a transmigrating, transmuting host—
Birthed in darkness, set to dance
and frolic in a world of color and object.
We return, poor sparks
marching blind into welcoming arms of light.
M. Andre enjoyed his "official" publishing debut here on Unlikely 2.0 earlier this year. Recently, a number of his poems have been published both in the US and UK. For more information, please visit his website at www.geocities.com/mandrevancrown.