THE SKY BUCKLES
The physics Professor
cabled the poet, said
you writers have no insight
into the nature of things
(once the great Lucretius passed
that great understanding gone
sadly lacking)
told him off sharply for his deployment
of preposterous verb after preposterous verb
dragging the no sense
down into nonsense
dim place
without true knowledge of processes
(“the sky buckles
the Earth speaks
what nonsense is
this”)
such false pride, devious ego assumptions,
same as with the climbers who
stumble in the death zone descent
die like flies
(not that flies can reach them
or decay ever
the minus sign that withholds
the fair redistribution of their atoms
so great an outlay on
the right to die without real dignity
whilst I can (here we go with these verbs again)
sink into the soft demolishment of self
the loosening, untethering of all memories
that the
winds might take them blow
them from the summit like
freshly-fallen snow
subtract me from that consciousness
that is little more than
delusion of matter, philosophical
abstraction
deploying to this end all
your verbs rigidly Newtonian, constitutionally-approved,
there to
beat all the sympathy, empathy
out of me
hard Nature in
that the course you have charted (calculating
mass as opposed to energy)
might bring me to
the mirror of the truth that
governs all
seemingly evolving
get those selfish, time-denying atoms, to speak
only when
spoken to
adamant in their madness
that they
are here (voicing as collective)
to
speak what
needs to be spoken
and so will,
must speak
perforce express
(and if the sky buckle fearing the
fake power of this medium
let these verbs have
their way
let each
do its worst)
