STAND UP, MOUNTAIN!
Stand up, mountain! O mountain alive minus phlegm!
O living molecule lashed to a particle! Absent trucks.
I’m a stander-upper. Not even close to your particle tongue.
We leave Ohio in a Sunshine Bread truck. Hereafter merely
sunshine. Hereafter phlegm and summit. Stand up, trucks!
Sunshine particles lashed to a molecule! Walk up this mountain,
up its bright summit. You too must be a stander-upper! Not even
close to a molecule tongue. Marvel! Uranium particle.
Marvel! Phlegm trucks lashed to a sunshine truck. Marvel!
Marvel! Hear a mountain to its summit. Not even close
to a particle tongue. Blindness? Stand to it! Circling to
and tied up to it! Not even close to a particle tongue!
Stand up! Stand up! Stand up alive with mountains! Stand up
and burn with sunshine trucks! Stand up alive! O mountain,
stand up!
ANNIHILATE OBLITERATE CONSUME
Then a storm cloud opens
spilling blood into the grass,
and all the animals gather round
the lawnmower, growling.
Now sadder than ever,
where they will sleep tonight
is a mystery, or a machine
of pink petals in the darkness
with only half a person driving,
and the other half shredding a gazelle
like a sailboat—canines and mileage
in one fell swoop, death in a garbage can,
laughter in the bushes. Thus,
although one thing flows into the next
(and streams prove it daily into rivers into oceans),
there’s still no consensus on how to train
a parrot. The Shriner on a tricycle
has one idea. The Buddhist monk thinks
nothing else entirely. Is a cat essentially
the same as a lighthouse? Is Batman the same
in Mandarin Chinese? Many people
search a lifetime for the answers to these
and other questions, only to find later
that their teachers were broken many years ago,
alongside their parents in the high school
gymnasium. Of course, you may argue
that it’s the search that eventually
comes to mean the thing one’s searching
for, but this only begs the question:
are we matter with a mind or a spirit that persists?
Are we brilliant supernovas or too much TV?
Even when the brain is cut into chunks
or sliced like roast beef or pounded
into rubble, almost nobody sees it
for the alarmingly beautiful, though
perhaps unintelligible, organ music that it is.
Not even Houdini returned from the dead—
headless or otherwise—
though many have in fact returned
from Las Vegas, strobing and blinking
with all of its light, and some
have even convinced their friends
that it’s a great place to visit, despite
having lost all hope in forever,
not to mention the family dog
in a slot machine.