Diwan: A Wind: prisoners here of our own device

(via thefreedomthree dot blogspot)

"GYPSUM

Maintenance comes to remove flood-damaged walls,
imaginary ears that absorbed my sobbing. I had talked
myself free of leftover disorderliness, and now workers
shred erstwhile parapets. In reprisal for trepidation years,
demolition angels enter to annihilate and ingratiate
always an exhilarated designer's developmental devilry
bent to crush bygone ignominies denied an eloquence
of being small or naive, Podunk, never New York enough.

I live inside a giant dog, rightward-running Dalmatian runt
conditioned to impound the malcontent as if to childmind
the infantilized. Unacknowledged legislators of the suborned
little terrors officated to compare car-theft to Communism
disown people like me, me and the invisible Outernationale
off the books, off the necessary grid, the cage we catcall
being the local news. Here am I, street-side and roiling,
big dreaming robot and zombies disallowed.

To-the-manor-born outcries from well-tempered hearts:
Possess no words, but pass overhead mere ions and clouds
to blush as morning dawns on everyone. I have witnessed
this war. Entire mountains covert in plain but fugitive sight.
Messages conveyed via tin can, cotton string and tin can.
With hammers laborers batter the wall, trash the debris
and go.

I am the ugly weed that persists, soft shoe sole music,
El Camino Street, abandoned autos littering West Dallas,
mecanica cuantica del barrio, open country and bridges
to los insectos chicharra. Will is a yellowed school bus,
cranking engine hauling hostage tramps to the tax-exempt
salvation, stonings by chaplains, warden understudies,
Hell-bound southwestward, beans and rice, Jesus Christ
or the door, cold open maw of the winter dog's breath.

Ask no questions, not here hiding behind field research;
you know too much already. No oracles but punditry utter
like so many peonies--to meditate on the urban wilds.
Condemned as if property, hidebound bag of self-interest,
sans sky, sans horizon, sans prescient present tension,
none but a future's workaday grinding machine, molding
to amenability this unrequested life. Look and become
a pillar of salt.

Now the inner fortifications have reached the dumpster.
Animistic, the eternal now, for we understand the ship
but forget the current. Us, incorporated, disempowered
, decompartmentalized, Nothing equal to zeroes and ones.
Sky blue, wild crow above our heads that circles counter
to the clock reflexively quivers, reacts and gasps,
a gutted fish.

Have we dredged the harbor of the sublime, our graft
festering into sleep itself? Scattered flotsam begs answers
during the surgery. Substrate does not foster black mold
but must appear before the Plaster Board at the Rock Lath,
willing to accept the hearsay criticism. Singular lever
of knowingness I am, stoop-shouldered but standing again
near the white piano John Lennon perpetually cottons."

--Gordon Hilgers, 2013

"At this point, roughly in parallel with fundamentalism and the New Age, the environmental movement is having to come face to face with the total failure of its hopes."