1.
Exile is not the word
I want use
so I am inventing songs
with other words--
other ways of checking
overtones against
the tuning note, the A, sonority,
bringing myself back
from X isle.
But is this even true?
If I have to “bring myself back”
perhaps exile is
the word I have to use.
2.
The water goes slosh and then
whisssh, almost silent against the shore.
In muddied sand, I struggle to get inland.
2.5
Even “coming back,” you are
still continuing forward.
What do you mean “return”?
3.
The songs are wobbled,
cobbled
but, say, the job is songs,
songs, maybe untuned, what’s
wrong with that? micro-tonal, or
praise-type, serenades
or maybe jostling
the world so it does not desert us
with the opportunistic disgust it is
currently full on
exfoliating. In death.
Songs as reminders.
Of what?
of an otherwise?
Split the difference
and “just” sing-- (la la)
To “sing”—I had no task but this,
but what came out--
flattish two note hints
strained sounding
discontinuous
fragments. Were toneless.
Songs of exile
then? I huddled down the road I’d got
and wept.
4.
Have to get up.
Get out of this.
Stand quickly, get dizzy,
stumble down, tumble
hard, but only hands and side,
only down on grit.
I roll away from myself as the site of
vertigo,
and found myself graveled at the edge of
verge.
5.
Picked up.
That’s correct. An
adequate “next.”
Balanced?
Checked
slaps, patch,
rips, the head, bone, one.
Blood. Everything even
in its uneven stun.
I could try holding onto? –I don’t know what.
Walking forward—being that fraught?
Now where to? Nothing exactly the same.
Can’t see how different but the feeling
is uncertain,
suspect.
6.
Then looming apparatus–equipment-- this
will never stop-- she said I’d stolen
her internet! she choked me
for it nothing in the story fit
how can I get out of a dream—
I did not choose
(fool!)
this borderland. Connectedness?
Who is this woman, face to whom
I premised to pay, to lay
what--
life? Not yet.
I have not unlearned enough.
7.
Personal Privacy Equipment at issue
in February
how to turn off all those settings
how to monitor people zooming into
your life
Personal Protection Equipment
in March
to monetize untainted air
with any hope of offering any care—
Then broken machinery at full taunt,
Malfeasance gone viral
in May,
the gesture of Washing one’s Hands of it.
7.5
That woman was not the villain that I’d thought.
There’s other factors.
8.
Rolling galumphs of uncertainty spooked with bolts
of curiosity about even more disaster.
“Are you a carrier?
Are you infectable?”
This “Throw of the Die that does not
Stop Chance” billboard
is being featured
in every medium—a broadcast,
some Malware upscale up.
The newspapers offer
DEER IN THE HEADLINES.
There we were, stare out, gapers
in the ice-white glare,
expendable.
9.
As for adding where in a particular
spot in all these “primary elements”—though a small
decision it seemed. But such a thought
precipitated how, who, when
and where to.
What should we continue to do
and what not?
9.5
What assumptions are already fixed
deep in this poem’s infrastructure?
10.
Summary:
Did we just find, right now
right here that our life to date
was suddenly shaped in the form of a coda?
All the rolling and the verge, the stealing,
incomplete not-even singing,
something given to pay up, no cash,
just walking.
Are we living after our life?
Living out life, or after.
The poem whose premises
one viewed and said “eh?”
11.
So it’s Aftermath,
like an earth
that has spun its poles
magnetically, an earth
in the olden numbered-millions
-of-years calculus, but now
(cosmos aside;
back down in tiny time)
there’s no accepted
read-out yet how long
a coda is,
even in plainsong.
What to do then?
Is keep adding on enough codas.
