proximoception

Sometimes looking out the window there's never been anyone in the world.

Others hills behind hills of multitudes staring right back.

We can only proceed assuming both.

One of many impossible thoughts proving oddly workable.

How quickly you don't know anymore.

How suddenly no one waves back when you wave.

Seeing which something goes out of your wave.

And when you wave next they don't even look.

How suddenly it's all bartering again.

And this time you have little left.

And no one wants any of it.

You can know that this too is a show.

One more on the long strip of shows downtown.

You can have seen it before many times.

Have walked away into better as many.

But still you believe in this one.

Its darks fit those that shudder at the bottom of your night.

Put a pail on a stick
Through an eye of a brick
And then paint thick
Tight lines of a frown.

Tie a coat hanger arm
And attach as a charm
Against wishers of harm
Rusting forks hanging down.

Brace it so as to stand
Where it looks overland
And unspeaks a demand
To each passer below.

Then gelid and shaking
Resume your wan waking
Till aimless and aching
Your self lets you go.

The longest night isn't so long.
He liked that it was a cap, a beard, a tee.
That darkness was only a skulker behind things.
But we too are only behind things.
And behind behind isn't in front.
We are a darkness.
Back behind us is what's neither dark nor bright.
Back behind us is so sad there's no non-sad to tell you what's sad.
So sad light took its cap off long ago.
And since then only holds it in its hands.

Deep in the darkest and the strangest jungle
I found at last the first religion's temple.
It was a monkey statue formed from five
Enormous trees they twisted while alive,
Those first ones, with an anger-dripping patience,
Till leaves, wood took on beast configurations.
The roofless head was hollow, so my plane,
Set down inside, stood in for that god's brain.

I leaned out of its eyes into the dim
And took the hand of one outswinging limb
Which set me down in moss that gave like bread
Beneath me to the depth of my own head.
I left into the jungle to explore it,
But found that it was really several forests
At once: the roots of this in fact were branches
Of more beneath, emerging from vast trenches.
Climbing into one of these I found
Its own woods grew from branches further down.
Though thick with moss, these maze descents stayed passable
So that I knew I'd met the not quite possible.
The knowing was like counting out one's teeth
With one's tongue's tip but finding mostly feet.
It grew too black to find the way back out
So out was something I made do without.
The things I did there seldom stood to reason,
Mis or displaced in gaps less street than season:
I'd fight some creature till I'd understand
In horror it had always been my hand,
I married one I neither saw nor met,
Spent years on tasks that later I'd forget,
Decided I was my own eye until
I realized that a lidless eye would spill,
Which made me see that I must be a lid.
I fluttered up and down the day I did.

Tripping on the monkey's tail today
I found I'd somehow finally made my way
Back to something rooted to something else
That wasn't another thing but just itself.
The plane was made of pillows now with clocks
Embroidered on one side of each, but thoughts
Could now be thought without their taking breath
And knives to duel their opposites to death.
A tiny clear spot in an endless green,
The one loose Here in choking-dense Between,
The only view up whence I once arrived,
That avenue of forever separate lights.

We ran the woods - they resolved into trees.
Climbed the trees - they became spreading wood.
Studied the wood - that slow burn through wet carbon.
Messed among molecules - more than a hundred.
Learned about numbers - so many, so meaningless.
Talked about meaning - my blood on your handkerchief.
Stared at each other - but heads became polyps.
Compared poems and woodcuts - the best were beyond us.
Sought arts to arts - just a list list at last.
Broke into our chambering minds - thought eluded.
Put thought in our thoughts - the spoons stacked but ran over.
Chased down the shapes of expression - sans context.
Looked at behavior - glass reblown by time.
Fished in time's current - the carp were dead gold.
Followed the money - it leaked from machines.
Wandered the gears - they were slaves to the rulebook.
Riddled the rules - all the letters were smudged.
Shot shit with rabbis - but how gloss their glossings?
Asked the whole world - but its god only grinned.
Kicked at the small - to ungodly remorse.
Queried our conscience - it didn't make sense.
Babbled maze madness - it seemed repetitious.
Sung up the scale - Mozart under the staircase.
Lingered in ignorance - knew we would change.
Grew to anticipate growth - hit a limit.
Figured our eights - shook out woodsward en masse.

The wish to push is not itself a push.
A knowledge when it's gained you lose all others.
And take your seat in what's just slower rain.
You feel a crackle somewhere in your cushion.
A happy magazine for troubled mothers.
You muster half a crackle of disdain.

We rain into the plain somewhere in Kansas.
Unwrecked, eject, a crowdborn crowd push fans us
Through rectangle tangles blue and grey
And nightblack where the shines push night away.
Men's room. Hate your face till all are gone.
Walk the angles till you come upon
Brushed steel pick-a-card-fan baggage claim.
Spiral up the circle into aim.

Upon discovering my body was a time machine I began to take notes on the changing behaviors of the peoples of the different years, the more of which passed the stranger these became. Ways a group of nomads settling an empty city would never be, never dream of being are followed without question by their descendants of the fortieth generation. Itself now a city, the world's strangeness curls it tight beneath a chemical menagerie.

In my thirty-second year it was decided that there was no north. All compasses and compass roses were destroyed as bad influences. Maps and globes were dismounted, stuck to wheels, spun, remounted oriented the way they came to rest. The axes of the globes were not changed - this was not an anti-intellectual year - but they emerged from long stems bent like straws. Most looked like single-ornament mobiles.

The awkwardness of the latter led to mass burnings before I turned thirty three. That year we all walked north in protest. No one remembered which direction north was, and for a few days there was confusion. Accreted subliminal course corrections based on the behavior of others soon gathered us into larger and larger marching unisons, until all had melted into two great tribes which clashed disastrously in Brazil at nearly opposite angles.

The survivors declared individuality on my 34th birthday. North, it was decided, was within, and speaking of your conception of it to another was considered as bad an influence on your own as it was on theirs. Vibrating in the outside air as scream and symbol was unhealthy for a north. Silence about other matters became the custom as we forgot what might not entail to the north. Suspicious silence, maintained by lonely lurkers in shacks eating from cans piled up in the canning craze of my twenty-ninth autumn. Only at night did their eyes glitter with love of seven billion distinct sets of northern lights.

As the new year started and my hair fell out, a common sickly weariness settled in and a spontaneous gathering in Cape Town followed. A frowning child became our prophetess by speaking first, proposing each paint their conception of north. North no longer meant a direction, but the hidden integral truth to things, outside of which nothing could matter. Despite this conviction there were no arguments as the fingerpaintings were passed about and discussed.

One showed a hole deepening down through absolute black and past context in which bright entities half fish and half firefly half flew, half swam, slowly, never seen but suggested through a mixture of the intolerability of their not existing and subtle inequalities among different total darks.

One showed a wooden staircase falling to pieces, through the cracks and holes of which a second staircase was observed, parallel, stone. A descending fluid sheeted the inner stair, reflected in which were the great clouds that rained it, shaped like hands and arms stretched toward one another in yearning, layers on layers of them, overlapping but never touching, pink and green. The spiders on the outer stair had everything, cared nothing, least of all for the clouds they spun then kicked absently into the holes.

One showed a great crowd painting with their fingers, but each hand of fingers was stylized as hatches of four thick lines, and larger than both painting and person, and the various disparately directed fingers, focused on, formed another picture, of another set of stylized, paint-smeared fingers gesturing out toward the face of the viewer.

One showed a globe with a stack of tiny chairs emerging from a pole - identified by a barbershop helix discarded to the side. The chairs, of all types, climbed up high, through the clouds, reappeared through a gap and seemed to encircle the moon, became too far away but then back into view to end near the opposite pole, where a headless figure seated on the topmost reached up to just barely touch earth with its thumb.

Everyone agreed that all were true, however inane or impossible. Everyone except me. I painted, using the set of logical symbols then in fashion, a simple proof that a proposition and its opposite cannot both be true. This too was held to be true. I tore most of the hair from my machine in rage. They danced a happy hair-tearing dance around me, mimicking my expressions of fury but delighted.

This year we're weaving the fallen hair in with our own, all into a great, single mat of live unity. I'm sewing it to my armpits in protest. I am no longer fashionable so the gesture will not be imitated, but my hope is that the scorn will be noted, will weave itself in with the stuff of the next.

How used to it we get,
As though we'd always been here,
As though they had to let
Our sort of something in here.

How lucky we all are,
But not the kind of lucky
That's sponsored by a star
Or numbers gone all fucky.

You tell me it couldn't have gone
Any way but the way it went.
A thought that the more I think upon
I don't think different.
If unstrange what we've done since dawn
It's strange there was a tent.

It's strange that there's a strange,
Strange too the is, the it,
Strange that they both can change,
And that both of them don't, a bit.

And as for going out,
That answering Albeit
To our all-being shout,
It's strange that we can't see it.

We make a sort of cone
Of words that lead unto it.
But it persists alone,
Capped out where none can view it.

But though our words all fail
I think perhaps they're meant to,
As though we made a trail
To lose the thoughts that tend to
That outward. We prevail
When inward things are bent to.

But there we don't prevail,
Since there we're not what's prevalant.
Vague bird, from out-shell quail
And dream your life's benevolent.

We call the whole thing life,
This course and all its contents,
A plea to some authority
That life not be minority,
That live, dead be not knifed
As stark as sense from nonsense.

There is a plan within life,
If none within the other.
But bringing-things that bring life
Are mothers to another,
Not us - it's yet to come,
The daughter-father-brother,
Prince-progeny or king-wife
They want. We're whom it's from.

Be careful not to care
Too much for the cathedral.
They say we'll have a share,
A seat if only we'd re-
Ly upon their word,
Work right, not think, be docile.
And yet I've never heard
Of any turned apostle
That aged to out from older
They didn't just let moulder.

We mortar with these martyrs,
From sod that's mixed with sinners.
But none call us half-hearters
While still we earn our dinners.
It's often easy work and fairly gay,
But know to know the promise from the pay.

I think we know the score.
We know the many places
That we're not at today.
We know the many faces
We can't move from behind.
A kind of parabasis
Has already occurred.
It's only one place more
Will lose us. We will find
One less face speak our word.
We'll be in one less way.

Our luck is that we're us at all.
It's luck because we're just a fall
In our direction, till we're not.
Fall direction's what we've got,
And falling's what we know of joy,
If also pain, doubt, fear, annoy,
But nothing else can feel even these
But us, the people, the creatures and trees,
And not in any future birth
Will you be anybody on any earth
But you that you're now in these feet that you fit
With this past that you're pressed by and all this shit
That you're falling through in your forward fall
Till you unbraid away or stop flat at a wall
Or however it ends. This is you, this is now,
And if there'll be others it's hard to see how.
Dim your sense of the ways you'd be different if only,
Forget how you're listless, belittled and lonely,
See how immense and insane and particular,
Textured and visible, fragrant, auricular,
Blended, descended, retentive, tormentive,
Powerful, towerful, TV's Matt Lauer-ful,
Butter-fried, what-if-I'd, Greater Calcutta-fied,
Rangeable, changeable, People Are Strange-able
All of this youness and newness imbues us,
All of this sameness and plainness constrains us,
All of these everythings, each of these nothings,
All the I-don't-know-just-what-but-it's-a-things
Are. Take a look. Take a second, a breath.
Take a few billion more and forget about death.
It forgets about us, after all, when it's done.
You can say in the end it remembers, but hon,
You could say just as well that we're all it's forgot,
That it's this that's the reason we are and aren't not.
But it's better to say, and to know, 'cause it's true,
That the only rememberer going is you,
Any you, but you too, and we only forget,
And we only can care about credit card debt,
For only for us, here and now (so don't stall),
Is happiness possible, ever, at all.

Our meetings had been awkward and aloof:
I saw what he was doing, but not why.
Just once he waved me out onto the roof,
Led me so close to the edge that how I'd die
If such or so should happen was my one
Preoccupation as his fingers swirled
Before and above the roofworks of the world,
Explaining what they meant and which he'd done.

A point comes when your water level rises,
That share of air too thick to move around in,
However easily others do. This crisis
Hit me like night. The dawntime found me pounding
Nails into beams beside his ghost above,
Low in the sky such work makes attics of.