Darwin never said, “survival of the fittest,” Sagan never said, “billions and billions,” and Marie Antoinette actually said, “Let them eat brioche.” You taught me this, among other things.
In your absence Lady MacBeth damns me to a spot. As lead virus she rules your kingdom of stray viruses searching for new hosts to highjack. These fawning parasites, whom you bread and buttered, are still asking for more.
In the role of Black Swan, is a revenant, her animated corpse performs a reverence to your disembodied face. As she inserts her tiny frame center stage, we're forced to raise our arms in an awkward salute to her in front of you.
As ugly duckling or Cinderella, I inventory folder after folder, search page after page for your script, my hands so dried by debris I wash them several times a day. In a windowless room I type words I’ve never heard:
Intercellular Parisitism,
Methanebacillias Omlianski,
Luminescents Dinoflagellates.
And suddenly the relief of Borges,
"Time is a river which sweeps me along,
but I am the river;
it is a tiger which destroys me,
but I am the tiger;
it is a fire which consumes me,
but I am the fire,”
burned kingdom after toxic kingdom away.
This was pasted as a regular poem but the blog gods have made some sort of executive technological decision and turned it into a prose poem.
ReplyDeleteI'd be curious to see the "poetic" form, but if you hadn't said anything? Given the subject matter, I'd have believed it was meant to be like this. I mean that as a compliment.
ReplyDeleteI love the... distance? in the early parts of this poem, and how how that distance suddenly closes in and after the quotation (is it a quotation?) at the end.
Thanks Pastor Andrew and Happy Easter! This thing needs work (or may just join the trash heap of fragments). I should probably post the original notes so you can see how it got it's title. I was free-writing and it was all over the place. xo
ReplyDeleteI'm with Pastor A. Though it would be interesting to see your intended form, this works as a prose poem. It pushes itself forward that way, has a brisk and breezy sensibility that belies the rage underneath.
ReplyDeleteI like this prose poem - about, I think, leafing through old poems in worn out folders, being like "what the fuck was I thinking?" - though I think more framing would help maybe: the speaker's setting?
ReplyDeleteI like the way the indefinite negatives at the beginning (Darwin never said... Sagan never said...) contrast with the bold identifications later (Time is a river...I am the river), both of which are presented as quotations. And I always love when Borges makes an appearance. And I like it as a prose poem too.
ReplyDelete