effortless (ecogrief anthem)
i.
Our father a pistol, our mother a drought,
We lay there, side to side, in trapezoid
A quartet of gold-plaited rapunzels
Made up and neat in our respective sepulchers
Sick as secrets, assuming that
An ending was in order, as the butterflies had ceased
Their levity of flutter, vaguely plodding on in ennui;
As the nose of each bat became engulfed by fungi;
And as pika after pika kept departing
Flameside, no mountaintop in sight, each starving for its own literal shit
Just before we were to die, eleven silverfish sprang
From the fissures of a stack of letters that lay nearby
Composed upon occasion of the Great Interruption,
They preserved the equanimity of the previous bland century
For the authors alone, who slaked their lips on
Shaved seraphim in sterling cones, all the better with which to toast
Their own disproportionate destinies
Those same missives wrought only misery for the souls who spoke
A different language than what was written.
The papers rotted now in the cellar of our sistren,
A fate appropriate for such notes, which had contemporized the
Fable of scriveners’ sovereignty for an era that risked collapse
Were time itself to be mythologized.
ii.
Curious landlovers, the silverfish scurried over, circled us around.
They whispered:
Build for us a place where we will be worshipped
Arrange a gathering of persons
Who would surrender their smallness of mind to us
Then, together,
Write for us glorious paeans, the melodies of which
Will draw from the recesses:
The cultural hegemons,
who, by surreptitious means,
have contained the minds of children;
The demagogues,
who’ve wielded our vicissitudes.
to their miserly advantage;
The commodity fetishists,
who’ve appraised our bounty
in terms that serve themselves;
The doomsday-sayers,
who’ve marshalled off with our wonders,
misplacing them among their hoards;
The shock indoctrinators,
who’ve usurped our remains
in the wake of our agonies;
The spectacle makers,
who’ve abducted the imagination
we’ve entrusted to the innocent;
The rapists and murderers of our flora and fauna
whose powers of compassion
have grown parched by disuse;
The dilettantes,
who’ve suppressed by vainglorious means
the creativity we freely bestowed;
And the phobics of all stripes,
who would delimit our inspiration
to fit their egoistic confines.
Then, from the recesses,
Let the Great Undoing begin.
iii.
Now, we recognized that there was work left to do.
We arose, fled to the river, dragged our toes through
Tepid algae blooms flecked with sewage
Felt goosebumps on our forearms and, wondering at the cyan sunrise,
We took out our combs and began to clean
The water with whatever we had left.