I spent some days
considering my origins:
regards to communication.
Thinking back to speech
impediments fixed with effort and
sliding when I am tired
enough to lose self consciousness or
maybe caring
more about their ears or
maybe caring
more about my image
face to face, but
I imagine it this way, and wish
I could spend a month,
constructing the fourteen foot wide mural:
When I started
it was all crayon blocks that grew
into bricks that realized they were better
all one color, and neat, with well timed mortar,
that knew walls of all one color make
well received and understood buildings that make
neighborhoods easy to navigate that hide
meaning in their streets
if you raise them from the foundations just right.
From there, things grew
more complex, but ordered, and solutions came
that were unorthodox, but visibly
easy to see that A needs B and without C
there is no need for D, but A and D
are joined beautifully through the bridge and
the beam iron and braided cables,
the letters in between.
How extravagant could it, would it go?
An engineer has to know. I built and I built,
and not for methods sake, but to grid,
web, and prick sky with unbelievable,
physically defiant, and somehow ear sound,
distance crossing and tremulous shapes
that gave way in time to a year of boredom and
a slip to elliptical wormholing scapes. A graduation
from land and matter to space and time,
in the scale of my life, a blink of an eye.
The challenge of mimicry of natures complex
fading in the rearview of the suggestion of space.
From the empty gaps begged and impressionistic
bless the elliptical view collapsed and compressed,
but the bricks and mortar and steel works
that held it all together before it fell
into the sky was never replaced and my eye
remained disconnected from the stuff
that connected it to the parts
inside that put it all to words.
Slash and grab, burn and go,
spectacle for spectacles show.
Years ahead, years behind.
Trapped and burned. Everything fragment.
No one ever tells you that whimsy
is flammable as skin. And then my words turned
to the span of stars within when
I could not touch my surface
without feeling it finger fuck
other hells and then
the slash and grab slowed
while my head burned down and
like tires we smoldered and killed
everything that breathed
within arms reach and then
as things dimmed and the moon came high again
the words became deliberate and
precipitate and then
the klaxon still rings across the struck down bricks,
footsteps still run, not long, across fire slagged pits,
the elaborate still grows through winter snow branches,
still moves and freezes like spilled liquid glass,
the missing still run, and the found still abandon,
the main stage still rocks, and the characters
still with their stand ins, the seasons still amaze
and the sex still crazes, the drugs still haze,
summer morning fogs still rooftop grazing,
the learning continuing
now, but none of it in phases.