Monument to the Revolution

by Joshua Pollock





I.

Though nuclear fission allows

humans to invade the depths of

time like saboteurs with

geological pretensions, you still

talk about goals and deadlines as

if your lifespan was longer than

a single frame in a sustained film

playing out before hoards of

bored plutonium. Of course there

are forces that police our days

and nights, but throughout the

universe teleportation is more

common than careers or

landlords or elections or masters

of fine art.

The real is a rootbound houseplant abandoned in a

forest. An arbitrary rule inscribed into the soft flesh

of brief bodies.





II.

The sun gives me chills while I

walk across the tops of fallen

buildings. The future: viral owl

active shooter beluga spook. Our

most imminent eschatology is

scatological.





III.

Here despair pierces all inner space

riding the oscillations of cell signals

irradiating atmospheres with irritation.

Would it be better to have died a young

deity or continue to crawl the earth,

assuming you knew better? Some

bastards want it all. I’ll have to content

myself with the lick of May’s lewd rain

and an ephemeral hallucination of

uncontrolled fight. I’ll have to be okay

with one soggy cigarette and zero

understanding of how time passes,

consoled by the call of a raven on a

telephone wire, with loose maneuvers to

avoid expectations. Imagine being so

heavy that you think credit ratings exist

but levitation doesn’t.

Everything up in the air

I move around with my mind.

A passport, like money, is only given

symbolic meaning through the exclusion

of others by military enforcement and I

want to convulse with you as tall grass

billows in wind, as supernovas expel

molten elements, as a frenzy of swifts

emerges from a smokestack at dawn.

What a waste of a body—to be so empty

of desire you would make plans for the

future. No judge can judge me,

civilization is headless fowl, and the law

a fading superstition. When we break the

glass of our embrace, ghosts, realer than

speed limits, will drift to an old continent

of vapor and lava where everything

happens by accident.





IV.

The skull is packed with

coils of temporal ropes,

knotted and frayed,

looping through eyeholes

and fastening a nervous

system before dropping

slack out of a hanging jaw

or pulling marionette

fingers across electric

scrolls. A life is not lived

in just three dimensions.

Rhythms converge and

depart, a halo can be holy

or can burn your hair off,

held down, kicked in a

vacant lot, the night sky

doesn’t care.





V.

My torso is dark inside when the thought knifes

through opaque bone and allows waves of light to

penetrate a cardiac mass, like a blue scarab, its

copper legs poke into pink, twitch. I clothe myself in

paper and fern fronds so no one will notice the

aperture, but new objects keep finding their way in. I

try to sweep out purple dahlia petals, dry leaves,

opium poppies, pen caps and cryptic notes written

on liquor store receipts, plastic bags and cigarette

butts, it keeps going. Mostly loose, unconnected to

each other or my daily life, which is the only one I

have. I’ve let enough go that I can pause and feel

the evening light like expanding spinal vertebrae.

The cemetery feels fresher than the shopping center.

How thin a stratum will all this concrete press into?

I hear a voice in my head that

sings

the language of yellow street lights on wet

asphalt to the click of dog paws on tiled floor

and I wonder why it feels so still on a

planet reeling through space.





VI.

Out of riparian miasma comes a drone, low and, bird

song. There are no wrong notes if you let go of the

demands of the market. Is that true? Noise— elastic,

spiked or curving, a fabric, and even the air is

crowded with optics and intelligent weapons.

Repetition can be comforting, a plush casket, or

uncanny. What I desire is imperceptible, often

clipped with highs and lows, the intrusion of vertigo.

It’s sad but apt that the monument to the revolution

is immobile, sandstone monolith, its fake flame an

orange plastic bag stuck on an upturned fan, or

uncanny. The casino across the street rotates at the

same exact speed. Church bell dongs and his

orbital broke in one blow. The clatter of raining

spoons on rooftops or the staccato tap of running

wingtips. It just takes one tiny fraction of a

Tiananmen in your hometown to know what’s what.

The disenchantment of the world looks dazzling, but

still, after a violent epiphany emerges there’s no

unseeing, its ripples frame a reassessment of what

life entails and should.





VII.

There is that dust that rides in

on springtime winds and

catches in lung, clotted eye,

frothing nose. It comes from

nowhere communicable and

coats the city in matte tedium.

Cracks, fractures, and

camouflaged seams exposed

with soot and the world is a

patient ruin with no shine to

hide behind. Below there are

sunken cities where hidden

configurations thaw towards

rebirth, above there is nebulous

cloud and an ocean of tar that

will consume time with its

violent tide.



               Drift, rogue planet,

               there is nowhere else

               to go.





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