1

We called it an “earth-shattering”
We brought hammers and axes
and every manner of destruction
Guns and cannons pointed downward
We dropped cars from cranes
Pushed mountains off of mountains
Spiked volcanoes with sugar and gunpowder

The earth maintained

This is stupid, someone said
It’s mind-blowingly stupid

That gives me an idea, someone else said

Instead of an earth-shattering
let’s do a mind-blowing

And everyone enjoyed that
We took turns
blowing one another’s minds
It got messy but the scenery adjusted
It smelled lotion into faultlines, industrialized solitude
stitched faces into halo shapes

The halo became obsolete
This is good, thought the thoughts
The earth would not shatter
but the mind could be blown
Like a candle
Like a tire
Like a scene from a teen movie

And now
I get high, salute manhood
My mind is still blown
I throw it all against a cloud
The world’s mind is still blown
It hangs like a halo on a coat rack
drips down the spine of night and day
The world’s mind
The earth’s retina leaking like yolk

Oh, how shattering

And everyone takes it up
into their senses
We dig our fingers into earth
I tell myself
(the world bends you)
(bend it back)
but I know
(I am here now)
(I evade heaven on a tightrope)
and I forget myself

So we shatter or hope to
shatter what is left of the earth: all of it
Every continent. Every ocean
Even the dirt upon which we slam
clouds apart like unvacuumed prayer rugs
We believe ourselves strong
I believe myself strong
I have fought and vanquished millions
on a cliff ’s edge, dusted them off into the ravine
Yet when I kick through it
I dust nothing, break nothing, blow nothing
cake dirt on my clothes and then vomit
in the heat, explore the beefy mystery
of our self-guided cataclysm
our wintering sun
 

2

Off the shore somewhere a plastic galleon anchors
Its crew sprays aerosol bible verses onto the crust of the waves

When you find a hole in the earth, thrust your fist
fearlessly into it
In the presence of mystery, prevent revelation

Or be the contradiction you wish to see in the world
Let clarity of thought obscure what surrounds you

A god violently shaking a person-shaped abacus

Or a child shaking a god-shaped abacus

Two giant, broken robots float through space
One says, We are flotsam and jetsam
They twist at a slow rate
They look into the distance in search of planets to scour for fuel
The second robot says who is which
The first one says, I’m jetsam
And tries to activate his palm jet
Our lives ignite upon the shores of here and there
And our existence depends upon it
Exists against us
A tomb filled with disgraced emperors flows through
the vein of our own personal cosmos
Rocks break against the waves for once
Wait upon the waves for once
Another space at once

How the sun and rain sustain
without question
The flora emancipated the fauna
Loaded words guide themselves
like missiles into the clouds
The unsustainable sun and FMLA
The weight of an acorn vs. the storm
Walking into hell as who I’ve always been
and walking out as who I could never
And purchasing monarch butterflies and growing them inside
the hollow part of the cloud or the unclaimed chambers of myself
de-winged upon the profane altar of now
The atoms shaped like everyone attacking
the atoms shaped like everyone else

In joy, I am worthless
In purchase, I am a known entity
I worked hard for the soil of my body
to become this hospitable
I will work even harder to become
a beautiful garden into which
our dying star can be interred
 

3

The mountain climbs itself
and offshore
the galleon is gutted by the reef
The water cripples the shore
The shore is torn open
Who is in there but you and I
in civil combat
The water fills what has been
ripped of the shore
The wreckage continues upon us
The mountaintop grinds into sky

We howl through the top of the water
Classic rock, we pray against the surface
Let us be a skipped sea shell too light for the task
swallowed by the breast of the wave

Oh, my cloud evaporating
I chug the cloud while I can
Someone says, can I waterfall off of that
and I say, what? They say, nevermind
but they steal my juice anyway
It is regular time. It is just a season
The water and the air have temperatures
One must read them to know the temperatures
Lord knows the clouds

And robots grow ever knowing
We must know them as they know us
Our tantrums obvious against those we know as us
too empowered to even be real among the other
I hail into the city above which I shadow
I give hail to the canopy that shadows all below me
I’ve been baptized in leaves
Lord help me
I’ve been baptized enough to know
that the spirit evaporates
I am air-dried and ready
to fall again
 

4

And now on the Wednesday night of this afternoon
up the river that dumps into the ocean
I am here
I just sit and think
Me and the old men who might also be me
though they look nothing like me
listen to the muddy churn
become disoriented by the contrast
of the swift current
to the line of the shore
We attract flies with our decay
our bodies and minds so poisoned into the need
to sit by the river and think
100 yards downshore from one another
All of us beautiful gardens
future hosts of dying suns

And everything downstream will feel this later
I affix my gaze or I stumble upon a molecule
of water that has yet to be there
in its prime
But then again it is water’s supposed purity
that we hope to embody
Or the futility of it
this crashing through space
or of denying the mosquito it’s taste

 

And as the singer dangles
from the moon so dangles
the song from the self
Amplified for all and walloped into interpretation
And interpretation given chuckles
the show itself not its self
but what I mean to myself
A language as a starter pack to understanding
sung unintelligibly, blasted into everyone
Everyone shrieks out their stigmata
A fecal solar system in short blasts
The spirit evaporates on Fridays
falls back to earth on Monday
when it must endure the ambitions of others
Society daydreams upon us
We wake up inside the daydream not ourselves
not in love but of the fleshy lousing of living
what we wish to exist within and not upon
But in the daydream we are worked upon, given nightmares
We are the fear of the other: humanity’s
headwound sunk with cleats
The song ends; the singer still dangles
The game ends in order
that we look to the next one
arranged into Purinas of ascension
and the wonder of being here
in the ill-fitting future with everything to heal
a blown mind, a shattered earth, the repetition of us