The Engine of a Moment

Blistering, from a nightmare in which I’d been crying, shaken
I rewoke to find before me the shattered LCD Mirror

Pursuant to this cause, hidden in subaltern subclauses
Was the realization of the recalibration of those things.
And by those things, you understand, I mean
That very thing

I mean Newton’s clunky clearness
I mean the hard weight of commodity
The thing now bought, a pulsing diamond necklace.

I mean the understanding, you see, of a reunion
Of things once separate in the price-tag alb of
An IPhone Ikon

I mean the realization, you know, of differánce as
E pluribell Unum, as the verdant serial codes
Of paper sigils

But strobing larval and syrupy
The mirror flashed the ground pulpy horror
Back into the unconscionable concealments
Of Marx’s masquerading maladjusted.

And, a Medusa cast in anamorphic amber,
The wretched worthleness of wealth
In a moment quick as clear glaciality
Sped into its own gaze
And burned itself with the fire it could not help
But create.
A shivering auto-prometheus.

And yet, death was not total
And ashes, after all,
Do not fall from here
Into the there which
Is yet nothing more
But, with fractal knowledge,
Let the shedding of an iron corset
Free the malleable aether
That beating heart which must kill itself
To expand.

And, I, and with me them all
The John of Revelations
The Buddha
Ginsberg & his Sunflower Sutra
Grant Morrison On Kathmandu
and a staggering John Berryman
Watched ten thousand muted horns
Find Voice.

And we watched Narcissus break free
from his circuitous adulation

And we watched Tantalus and Sisyphus
With hipster jackets and PBRs laugh at
Their misunderstanding of
Their unending striving.

And Icarus, a blonde boy in blue
Reached the sun and wept.

And through that piercing leak
We saw an entire generation
Create within itself
In an eternal unfolding
The very birth of the world.

And we loosened our shirtcuffs
And walked to Icarus
Patted his shoulder
And wept with him

But this LCD mirror,
It was not so generous
(Nor could it be)
As to let us stay here
And like voyagers before they,
On Some perilous journey,
Venture into the sepia
Oceans of those ancient maps
Where Cerulean beasts
Eat any alien intrusion
Into their aquatic eden
We sat in the narcosis
Of camradarie
And ignored the inevitable
Disbanding and dismantling
Of ourselves

And We finished our last glasses of gin
Smoked our last cigarettes
And walked single-file
For our turn to gaze into the mirror

And, one by one, it swallowed us
And flung us back to the somewhere we
Had always been
The same but somehow different.