That castle had a dark passage.
Winding minefields lined the passage.
Each step called for a memory —
an ancient memory scored deeply
in the DNA of man.
But those who rose to temple tops
lacked the instinct and the courage.
So, they chanted each line loudly,
but it didn’t save them from the fall.
I sit amid ruins,
on a pile of rubble,
seeking out the moment
when we burst our bubble.
***
the fuse is cut for a fast burn
pot-bellied keg too big around
leaking powder from every seam
all’s well ’til metal sparks aground
***
There was a young man who played bass,
he was quite hideous in his face.
But, still, he got paid,
and nightly was laid.
Last laugh to the player of the bass.
The snow fell everyday,
fell slowly and softly.
It piled into hills high,
making mountains lofty.
And avalanches slid
in rumbling certainty,
collapsing like poems
that grew too wordily.
Metainformation is information about information [or, sometimes, about metainformational information,] and it colors the insanity.
Humanity was infected by a viral strain.
It spread.
It mutated,
becoming more virulent & more truculent.
Ideas itched inside brains —
where they couldn’t be scratched.
The itch could only morph into a burn
that morphed into dopamine-drip madness.
Beamed memes until meaninglessness became meaningful,
the phone-wielding Zombies shambled in a trance dance.
They bumped into people they couldn’t recognize the humanity of
in the absence of the screen’s reassuring confirmation.
If there is a cure. Perhaps, it lies in the metainformation.
Find it.
fragile herd,
living in the space between
Kilimanjaro’s broad shoulders
[too broad to see without a panning view]
on an oasis of glacial melt
runoff that grows a plume of vivid green
amid the red-brown savannah lands
where dust devils daily form
below the equatorial belt
and when the runoff runs out
there’ll be no time to run
possibility
keeps one trudging, breathless,
to the top
ridge tree
now seems much bigger,
but no nearer
looking out
from a hilltop, the view —
and I — changed
i’m free —
because i know not of what i need to be freed.
Is it a god?
Is it a program?
Is it meaninglessness?
Is it a make-believe conception of self?
Order?
Chaos?
Alien overlords?
i don’t know what game i’m playing,
and thus feel no compunction to play it well.
So, i surrender to the god of my own ignorance,
making mystery my higher power.
i searched the earth for a source of perfect truth, and found none.
No perfect scripture.
No perfect science.
No perfection in personal experience.
No perfect teacher.
But i’ve known bliss in the act of floundering through this dance of darkness,
and so,
i’ve got no complaints.
Hate scuttles down a wire.
It was sent hatefully,
and received angrily.
But wire knows neither hate nor love —
nor does circuitry.
Electrons don’t.
Hardware doesn’t,
software doesn’t —
only wetware.
What passes down that line?
rum-dumb sailor,
bobbing in the horse latitudes —
dying dryly —
parched, in a fluid universe
he prays to the holy mother of Time —
prays that she have the courtesy to exist,
but she’s as silent as the wind,
and as invisible as the shore
What creates more and bigger monsters…
fear or drink?
boredom or loneliness?
Hell or High Water?
And when the Captain points the way…
How does one know that one has put the monster to the fore?
What lurks in the shadowed archway, behind?
Who charges forward to the tune of,
“Lead onward, oh ye of the pointy stick!”
And why does yonder illuminated woman carry a chicken?
It’s a snack too raw for the Night Watch,
but too small to distract a monster.
