Published in The Write Launch Issue 52, Summer, 2021.
The Green Coin
it's happened... we flip through a dark path of product placement and algorithms’ pornography and sound monetary policy where the young disinterestedly wait for the nothing left that’s documented to fall in their laps. born with the spoon of acid rain and rising tides in their mouths, gagging against the wounded air. the pornography takes up their time as policy keeps queues circling the castle of abundance like a moat, while inside the fading elders pull rabbits from silk hats. jeunesse dorée shuffling expired tags and rearranging the deck chairs on this interstellar Ship of Fools.
what i knew no longer has legs. so it storms no barricades, gets filed. i see the neo-communards impatient with my stare of longing and distance and so we both step away. though their weight has primacy over air, the center topples inwardly, a three-dimensional mandala, linguistic circles and holding patterns, and there is no joy in the residual formula of this rabid shelf life of drained desire. the desires of impedance. bloodletting returns and the circuits quit before any number of high noons. rain rusts itself with the long lost promise of Consciousness.
crusty cassandra becomes a welcome paper rolled to slap the dog-blood snout as though discipline itself could raise a new song, hard luck hotels and schools uniformly loosen from the bowels of the city on the hill, the slippery slopes, the shadow under a bushel. the exchanges flattened and made roadkill by the crypto currencies, the zombie digitations and the market arsonists wearing Prada.
regularity where girls cut themselves off and on the arms, pull out their eyebrows and ApplePay, slow pitch, plucky but underemployed in the fried song they lament. lament?
regularity where boys face a jury of fractal peers, upsetting the runaway rejoinders, pushing all the buttons sold them to vanquish the enemies only alive in the screens in their palms, then they rest and press return in gonadal imitation, atavistic, alone and Copyrighted.
my youthful dreams and indiscretions also fell too short. my sense of an ending frankly corrodes. i might have wanted the abraham lincoln brigade, but instead saw trotskyites trash maoists in the late sun at kerkoff…and then studied for finals with the australian criminal in the occupied buildings. sendero oscuro. the choirs of Reason burned liberty like a wax log. we didn’t give in, we gave up.
too old to pivot in this protection you have in your white-gloved hands. too late to count on pinpricks through the syntax and asymmetry. too thick with grievance to track the crossing of the sun, the shadowlands caught in what looks like amber, the Golden Mean pragmatic to say the least. saying the least. stopping speech won’t work either.
what Angel is not a terrible prayer, a matter of timing, a trust pocketed like a magician’s green coin.
eight ignoble promises broken by the supply-side husbandry of the world. particles of broken stars adhered in our mind and in the generous mysteries and we still couldn’t keep track. we tore down the temple walls to find that tease Sophia, but got drunk with our power to destroy. we fell in love with destruction and lost her thread, so hand her absence to you as your birthright. taglit the burning plains, the trees drying from spreadsheets and MBAs, all we leave you is the disease of appetites. the symptom of a season of facts.
the hermit hides peas under walnut shells. the economies, austere or inflationary, skip rope over the human instance, now famulus only to carbon clouds. neither pension nor gold watch sentimentalizes the pocket change. we had fit and filthy lucre and the thousand things Lao Tsu promised, while you face the natural world’s cliffhanger, poised to douse the fake fires of human commerce, interest rates and physiologies. bank on it. bank on it, o bank on it my mistake, my children, my next flipped patisandhi-citta of thumbs and regret
be my silent guests in springs of living silence. let the end of days go viral. logic seeded in the dizziness of hybrids. we left you absolutely nothing, and nothing absolute. the sun really did ask, do you feel lucky Punk? two out of three? what profit it a man to perish on cue. even this jeremiad that wants to apologize, and tell you I love you, wants what can never be wanted…
no ribbons for the third-place finish or honorable mention. it’s in the final air, spinning higher than our hands, opened now with the adorations. Águila o Sol.
