PASSING THROUGH
I would construct
From simplicity
A tight net to ensnare
The Moon, a seagull swoop,
The sprinkle spread
Of golden dandelions on green lawns.
Time gobbles
Color, sound, scent
And love.
It’s trail of melting memories,
The felt breeze
From passing wings
Of delight
Are ephemeral.
My tight folded hands
Clutch nothingness.
Herding words to perform tricks,
Acrobatics into ballads, rhymes
That twinkle into good times
Or vocal thunders of the wonders
Out of an angry psyche, or perhaps
Chagrin of a grin of consonants that spin
The lacks of linguistic qualities into
What cracks of frustrations of the tongue,
Can meander through the thistles of epistles
That declaim and blame and shame the world
Which, might avail to twitch its tail or rail
Against the commonplace of not to face
The obvious insanities of the human race.
The error to displace fundamental thought
With fanatical grammatical enticements barely
Face that thinking is not a parade of alphabetics.
The universe of mind entails qualities where language fails,
A place to trace great overtones of sight and sound, feelings
That slip like snakes into the underbrush of all sensation
Where fails the consciousness to follow secret trails.
You cannot catch a color such as red which can bleed
Or roar with fire tornadoes in the Sun or suppose a rose.
Language languishes in weak frustration faced with furious reality.
Language might faintly reflect an astounding effect but never, never
Never contain the torrents gushing moment to moment out of time.
Dance with the butterflies
Dance with the Moon
For the music stops
All too soon.
The arms and legs
That touch the sky
Rake the stars
Make them fly.
Years with flowers
Turn to dust,
Windswept hours
In cold gust.
Nights and days
Have gone their ways
With grumbled thunder,
Lightning displays.
When the music yields to silence
And the dying sparks expire,
Dance again with the smoke
In memory of the fire.
We age, we rage, nothing sage.
Now is then and then is when.
The past and future has this suture
Where we are and never far.
Time and space always lace.
Relax. The facts wane and wax.
Just read today and turn the page
I have used this blog to a large extent for my own amusement to play with the elementary formalities of poetry as someone entirely untrained in the medium and thereby stumbling through an alien terrain in naive explorations. But this is a public display and, as someone who has experienced a somewhat extended life, I am driven to look both backward and ahead to make sense of some personal kind in it all. As Chomsky has repeatedly indicated, this current era of human domination and power has progressed to a point of disrupting the natural complex of life on the planet so that much of civilization and all other life is being driven towards extinction within a few decades and there is little if any powerful effort to deter that finality or even accept that it is occurring.
I cannot but have a viewpoint of humility in this examination since rationality within these last couple of centuries has disposed of the millenniums of self congratulatory nonsense that previous cultures have used to elevate the egos of ancient philosophers and theologists. Humankind is now firmly placed in the animal kingdom on a small planet which is an inconsequential fleck of dust in an unimaginably huge universe.
After the planet had formed and cooled sufficiently to permit liquid water, the first particles of life formed in conditions lethal to current life, but probably elementary anaerobic cultures began and the generation of free oxygen changed the atmosphere so that the current life forms could arise. No doubt volcanic action produced enough CO2 for the first plants to prosper and develop the type of reactions that chlorophyll performs today.
Sites on the net often get involved in discussions of the meaning of life which generally ignores any life beyond humans as if those others were of no or very little consequence. A great deal of theology and metaphysics materializes in these matters. Since no one in my immediate family had anything theological in their thinking and I had no indoctrination in that area and much of my education rests in scientific understandings I must rely on what I understand for this type of exploration.
The development of plant life on the planet seems to me to be primary but plants are overwhelmingly sessile and if there is some underlying logic to whatever life that proliferates, perhaps the inherent function of motile animals is to consume plants and other animals and, because they can move around, their basic functional utility is to distribute their waste matter to new infertile areas where it can encourage the growth of plants and thereby spread life in all its forms to gain new territories on the entire planet. I realize that this accords very little value to the astounding reach of human knowledge in areas far beyond all other life on the planet, but this fount of arcane understanding exclusively human has frightful effects on basic life processes. By this logic human excrement is the most valuable contribution to life on the planet and current civilization exerts great powers to see to it that it rarely meets its fundamental purpose of fertilizing the planet. I fully acknowledge that human waste disposal has the destructive potential of spreading diseases but control of that is well within industrial capability.
Current human civilization has developed massive amounts of waste materials that are not only beyond and outside the functional life processes, such as plastics and waste fossil fuels and radioactivity, but also the atmospheric pollutions and extreme productions of methane and CO2 that wildly distorts atmospheric conditions are damaging our life systems that will take thousands of years to restore themselves, if ever.
I do not attribute intellect to the dynamics of life on this planet but cannot deny that the joint effects of those processes that produced and maintain living creatures are automatic in their operation. Control of violent weather conditions or the acidification of the ocean are still well beyond human control and the science fiction of terraforming even our own planet is undoubtedly far in the possible future if it is there at all.
I cannot suppress my complete astonishment that the level of intellect attributed to my species seems to have wiped away completely those fundamental instincts in all other animals to preserve their lives and those of their children. That Doom Clock is very likely past midnight and almost nothing is being done to push that lethal minute hand back.
There’s really something missing
In the manner that we’re pissing.
The freedom with this act is all with dogs.
They can piss against the trees,
They can piss across your knees,
They can even piss on top of other dogs.
But when my need arises
There are never enterprises
That welcome deposition of your juice.
You are looked upon with frowns
When the places out of bounds
Are searched for a convenient sluice.
You may jump or you may wiggle
In a pornographic wriggle
But hard denial meets your every plea.
All the freedoms under law
Must be fought for tooth and claw
But where’s the basic one to simply pee?
This ubiquitous denial
Is a horrid modern style
With my bladder getting madder to degree
That we must demand solution
Or we start a revolution
For the freedoms when we need ‘em just to pee!
Broccoli and Chinese cabbage
May, perhaps, repair the ravage
That thunders out of time
To savage all the riches
Of my life’s store.
This is the crime
Of living more,
Thus with salads, vegetarian,
I bolster this nonagenarian,
Select my bodyguards of consumption
With bold hopes and wild presumption
Fight for life tooth and nail,
To preserve its twisted trail
Of life and love and fascination
And postpone its final destination.
Poetry is a landscape, strange,
Where wild colors flash
To glow in brilliance, fertilized
By random rubble, powdered ash
Of burnt out hope, energies beguiled
By ideals, loved and hates never realized.
No man can decide that this terrain
Shall not support this or that inflorescence.
Word and thought intertwine in random clasp
To erect growths of permanence or evanescence.
Gods and ghouls stumble, somewhat insane
Through this world no single mind can grasp.
What joy is there in being dead?
What delight can accrue
To a corpse floating
Into a famous
Eternity on a stream
Of words?
For the corpse,
Only decay.
Dissolution into the dust of molecules.
The words
Like that mindless teddy bear
Beats its tin drum
On and on and on
Like the wind through the trees
Or the gurgle of a brook
Until,
Like a disease
It infects
Another mind.
The birds are dying,
Also frogs.
Coral’s soon all gone.
Fish are surely soon
All fished out
Shall we join the mastodon?
Humans are, no doubt, smart.
Our gadgets tell us so.
Cleverly, we’re phasing out
All things that make life go.
The air is bad,
The water’s worse.
Temperature
Will be a curse.
And humans work to make it so.
We each do our part.
If history testifies
To humanity’s behavior,
The total scope
Gives little hope
Of an emergent savior.
Humans have a tendency
To environmental smashing.
So, hi-ho, off we go
To environmenticide
Nor do we care nor are aware
Of our own suicide.
Jan Sand here 