VOLUME 9 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Turn The Ring

Above the din of loudmouth philistines,
a woman in her leopard chair
announces with her ear pressed down
a millennium evening coming on.

With sky high believing the crowd applauds
the voice that rumbles out of distant mauve
proclaiming the age of disaster, time of sorrows.

Welcome highway of clashing placards
teaming with NATO troops, road-kill metaphor,
and cooling tanks of reason gleaming in the ruins.

Introcosmic V-chip censored aberrations
wake me from an X-rated reverie.
Mental shadows thrown on stone
my transcendental travelogue moves
outside the wire charts of my reaction

where my sentience never crossed my mind before
not since the implant techs, electrodes and avoidance.
Excuse me vid phone friends while I dust
my memory’s rat-run maze of current events.

Headline read: Computers fitted,
this one mounts inside your head

So, listen for the tattooed inner darkness
under the skin where your conscious mind
has never learned to listen before
and never measured life with really being.

Poets wait inside their nightshade analog,
turn the ring and charge up language,
twist the dreaming genie’s knob and
taste the tan line tremor of immortals.

Some of us just want to hear them talk
and work out the long aspirin therapy walk
and maybe find the dark gray spider lurking
in the dusty cob web of dried up souls.

Smoke keeps rising from words and names
like a voice in every gray mist where the guide
comes down the path to meet us. And we all
look to the helpful hills, that arm of the way,
where ghost and god shall come in a good mood.

On the word and the name shall come a voice
as they strain to hear the skull, the painted symbols,
and the scratchy sound of ancestors writing.
Trust the message dancing in the naked stone,

the patty-cake god, its quartz gaze set in copper,
sea-shell ears still full of the roar of living things.
Hearing is everywhere, acid gods, metaphor men;
obey the mumble of the glow-eyed command.

With sky high waving crowds bring back
the voice of the poet mountain rumbling.
Desolate blue, enslaved, their captive tongues
affirm mid air the gods of stone and torture,
beg to see that reborn age come blazing down;

a multitude of crazed compassionate
gymnophobic, demon fearing simple folk aware
of powdered lily dust and how the world must end
when men no longer speak, but prattle brain to brain
through plumb duct Internet cyberplasm,

just a dream of course, just
one more out-of-ward experience
where even the totally insane are hip
to the vague movement of all these
little fat lips inside their heads.

 

©Jimmy Warner Design, 2001