Indigo messages
under the headlines
on the front page
suggest that these people
are doing all this
to get you. You look for
their reptile signatures
in the shadows behind
public figures and
the subtext of their
platitudes, refusing to believe
they are human at heart
and incapable of long term
concerted action in the face of
their own greed and clumsy grasp
of the twists of fate. In their hands
fate never twists at all
and they keep a sure grip on its path.
They must be in cahoots
with one another and their
mutual interests must coincide
with their desire to see us caged
or rotten. You track them
from electronic safe houses,
small coffee shops, the corner of
your bedroom. It’s comforting
to have a place to focus
your concern when the world
is collapsing, when you are removed
from agency. Having an agent to fear
makes the fear manageable, and as you post
your own indigo messages to others
who know the partial score you know,
you become one with the reptile overlords:
you’re the disloyal opposition,
the necessary distraction from chaos
and entropy,
as complicit in your own death and decay
as those you claim to despise.
Daily Archives: October 6, 2009
Indigo Messages
The Beautification Of America
Too damn early
for no coffee in the house
and all this heavy equipment
tearing up the street —
although it’ll be smoother
once they’re done, and the snowplows
will glide more quietly over the blacktop
in a month or so with fewer rough patches
in the pavement,
and I’ll be able to come home at night
with fewer teeth shaking loose in my head
every time I hit a pothole,
and in general the whole place will look
and feel more like someone cares
for this neighborhood —
still, this morning I’d trade the future
for two more hours of sleep
in the heart of
the decrepit status quo…
which
of course
is what makes me
an all-American.
The Ghost In The Forest
Things are much more predictable
indoors. Read a book and chuckle
to yourself. Television on, everything else
off. You’ll be happy in a limited way.
Outdoors, there are bugs
and wind and such. My father
used to talk about “the ghost in the forest”
which was his name for two limbs
rubbing together and calling out
in a clear squeak, for instance. Read
or write a book
and slap away mosquitoes, there’s no TV,
no radio, and if you bring a flute
or guitar or something with you
sap may fall on it and you’ll scurry
back to the house to clean it off.
It’s not easy to believe in a spirit out there
asking for your attention, or rather
not asking, simply taking it, or perhaps
it’s doing neither, simply speaking
because it can speak. How contemptuous
it must be of our rich inner lives,
or perhaps it feels nothing at all for us,
notices us not at all, which is worse.
Some years ago I stopped to put out a brush fire
near a state park folks around here call Purgatory.
Someone had likely tossed a cigarette out of a car window
and the banks along the road were red and rolling
so I pulled a blanket from my trunk to snuff it,
but it wouldn’t stay snuffed.
The grass burned and
the fire hissed and snapped alive at the edges
and reignited when I wasn’t looking, or even when I was,
and the grass could have cared less about ideas like “motive,”
or “carelessness,” or “heroic action.” It just burned,
curling and crisping and vanishing into black threads
of itself as the flames passed. The oak leaves
curled up and toasted brown above the fire.
I came home and thought about nothing else
for a few hours, then settled back into my chair
and wrote about it all. It’s fair to say
the grass grew back regardless of my writing,
though I’m sure “fair” is another word
the ghost in the forest
wouldn’t recognize.
I will go back to that place
and see if there’s a trace of any of this having happened,
now that I’ve written of it again from the safety
of the living room,
see if it made a difference, see if
I should bother to keep writing.
Dark Matter 