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Tract
best written in the shadows of cruel bars:
light’s dark song hissed
not shone through steel teeth.
Here
the past is friend turned enemy,
guerrilla warfare conducted in the silence
of lengthening shadows.
Song
part war-cry,
part lament
for vanquished rhetoric.
The
past rises above the petty compass of aviation,
above distant shrieks of preanesthesia medicine
& engineers' unassembled axles.
Clockmakers are dead
& their constructions deconstruct time’s
compression without compassion.
Excesses of man-made order
are wildernesses of houses, bridges, conveyors
for inhabita becoming automata,
for concrete amphitheater gatherings
of the somnambulated
& their sweet an style="text-decoration: none"achronisms of extinct conscience.
The Wheel
turns through a Luddite whorl
of faith-fervent diversion.
Not revolution. Disarray.
Longed-for
air is innate, irrefutable, Tibetan
yet bel canto capable,
& has until the last moment
to redeem itself with a final loud, clear pitch
a whistle of biosteam
above heaped bone & circuit board,
above prisons from which only music escapes
& once free cannot hear itself sing
& is not desperate.
1996 mark underwood |
