2K Relief
(a poem composed with notes taken New Year’s moment 2000)
It’s like a glimmering bar relief, end-time scenario,
the world reduced to an instrumental ghost-dance,
a rose bouquet, aerial spectacle, hi-ho scenario.
Do I need to remember the voice that goes"...for in blossoms lie seeds of decay,
a promise of rapture and misery"
What severely depressed guy said that?Unlike some of you, I want to remember my unpleasant life,
my tea-cup tempest or a peasant tale
expressed in music, book mold, poisonous plants,
the crushed beer cans of jumbled seasons,
words more dark and vast than theory,
somewhat like the distant days when
a man’s last defining moment was his hat,
or the number of lines it took to get him laid.Black and white teen memories haunt
my recollected poems like a patio band.
Can you rate my outfit one to ten, my style of exit,
how dramatic, how obscure?
Gather up my notes and books,
get out your guitars and hoot the best of me.
Sing more memory than a pot of blueberry jam.The man of the century serenades you,
as he staggers down from Stepford hills,
and every noodling street musician now left standing,
every crooning millennial waterhole poet,
his rainy blonde and their infant laid in cardboard.Every symbol that can make your cosmic yes,
defines your century, paints your crock of time.So gear the night for music and speech.
Save yourself from a voice of despair.
Forget the why-two-drunks careening off a balcony,
no alien messiah waits in a comet behind the moon,
forget that long ago date-set redemption dance,
the near death solar eclipse, blood test lunar display,
give up your deeply weird whackos with mystical names;
It’s only the end as we know it, not the end we want it to be.
You won’t miss a thing, not one digital, vid gone mobile
missing downlink, fully backpacked, one-man bandwidth,
out about, Seiko masochistic, laser fishing the non-event horizon.We struggle to survive a much older chaos
than the water rose at the end of the pool,
the silent design of the blood,
where beauty pumps through it.The longest air and water and least being of all,
are swept here by tides and peculiar compasses
too bizarre to reckon, too strange of quark to calculate,
too blue of moon to sing or wild of transit to howl,
and way too unclear of path to tune and color in.We all want to get results, stare at fire blossoms,
feast on poetic arts, quiet as gobbled fruit,
enjoy the parlor mounting, give ourselves liberties.Evening gathers cliffs and shadows, roiling masses
of heavenly form with all its starswept answers
while the weasel of meaning slinks back to his attributes.Let’s resume our head-tripped E-mail amour,
the normal discordant themes, the usual,
the brand name analogies and high shine-o-la,
registers ringing to the tune of an never-played piano,
submissive ideas, surrender implied.Look, there stands another angel in his Elian Gonzalez T-shirt
breaking yet another seal of the apocalypse. How many now?Yes, it’s time.
It’s always the right time, now, never better.
My inner voices waited, thorns and leaves,
who caused this rose to come out, revived
flaming with God, sweet within me.The wind played each of us, both crying out.
Strange to hear so many, so much gut-bent relief
a laundry list of everything alive,
wanting to do things before old age.
Look how we chink away at chisel cuts
within our Roman lettered vanity dot-coms.My innocence, flesh, sense of touch, were scattered,
bleeding to death at an after school band rehearsal,
rippling with blue static voltage and jasmine sparks,
but, now, I am back, self-powered, all seeing,no nutmeg or scrying needed,
no fist of rays or metallic sea-green themes,
no orphan of pearl, no lover’s reflex
no trance of life or generation to conceive,web cool, rose hot, jewel free,
breathing street air alone,
just wake me as I leave ...but save me from my picture tube wisdom,
darkflowing, neon light whose boundless
electric circuits once danced openly.That little voice might’ve delayed my venture
or swelled my head with knowledge I found
along the winding, endless sidewalk night.
ŠJimmy Warner Design, 2001