The Heart of Darkness
Sometimes I want to write, "What's on your mind Meg" as if farcebook wants a real answer to the intricacies of an intellect. Mine or someone else's. The devil is in the details you know and certainly farcebook has little actual interest in "What's on your mind" and a voracious appetite for who you connect with.
I've an inkling, which is merely the tiny spawn of a squid (circa 1400 C. E.) that my connections on farcebook make little sense. Nor should they matter a whole lot to a Super Power like farcebook that blindly uses our freedom of speech to manufacture consent to everything from State Terrorism to human trafficking to gambling.
Atelectasis is an old poem and no doubt it can be understood by anyone who can read it. Atelectasis on the other hand might require at minimum a brief description of the word coined relatively recently (early 1800s). Atelectasis is a condition in which your lungs behave like a wetted and deflated balloon and fail to operate as designed. Our lungs generate a hell of a lot more than just breath. The lungs generate everything from whispers to screams:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
Just before the war, the infamous war of '06, I'd had a slight 'accident' of the vehicular variety resulting in some atelectasis and further on down the road, a courtesy ride on a boat called the USS Trenton. It led to this and that and the other thing because life is like that however, there are strands of 'it' this thing which we call life but really, it should be called something else alot less bland. Life is interesting more than the word itself and for me as a poet (which I am embarrassed to say such a thing), poems are like miniature versions of novels, great big episodes with chapters and pages but written in my own personal code. Once in a while I provide an illustration. I'd say Atelectasis is an illustration.
The poem Atelectasis is full on angry, hostile, desperate and mean. It is downright mean. Which I can be. I suppose we all can but in some people I find it difficult to imagine that they are ever mean. That is, until I find them on farcebook exhibiting their mean core, their alter ego that they either wish would go away or wish they could summon to defend themself when mired in human conflicts. On farcebook it is almost as if some are exorcising the devils within them, airing out their grievances as if that was how it is done. Reminds me of one Sister Josepha of the St. Patrick's Church convent.
Sister Josepha told us a story once. I was sitting in the first seat of the row and had to pee really bad as she launched into her horrorifying tyrade against the devil. Back then, we couldn't just go to the bathroom as a child does now. Oh no no no. You had to wait.
Sister Josepha related a story about her brother, a Jesuit priest of some sort. The Catholic Church used to have entire families of priests and nuns, dynasties of divinity so to speak. Her brother worked saving souls in some remote place in the jungle. He was summoned to give last rites to a man of particularly diabolical character. She told the tale in graphic detail and we looked with eyes wide open, ready to tip over in our seats as he took his entourage up a winding jungle road, dense and humid, into the home of said diabolical non-believer who was wasting away in some hut or another, of terminal cancer. Sister Josepha glared at us as she spoke of the odors emanating from the hut, odors that were virutually intolerable, disgusting, repulsive and beyond our barely emerging and so precious, intellectual imaginations (sixth graders). I imagined it must have been like the smell of fried cow liver which I hate and watching my mother savor it haunts me to this day.
As her brother lifted the crucifix to his lips and instructed him to kiss the cross she described a scene right out of The Exorcist (I hope we all are familiar with that episode in time). The man stuck his tongue out to wantonly lick the darn thing and it became fused with the metal, so much so that it had to be cut off after he died. Let me repeat: after he died. By that time of course I was ready to wet my pants and perhaps I even did. It is the stanza in the poem Ode to Seven:
St. Pat's let out at three
no one moved until
Sister Josepha left with her
cross-kissing Judas stories
hanging around her ankles
like worn out socks on a poor kid,
no one dared.
She was mean and luckily, farcebook had not been invented yet. At this point one asks, "I wonder what happened to her?" No profile pic, not a shred of evidence that she ever existed perhaps except to a few of us who remember her absolutely terrifying role in our lives traipsing back and forth through rain and shine to sit there and be terrorized by a nun. I assure you, she existed and is remembered. I digressed. Not even sure how I got this far down that road and through a jungle and into that hut.
"Mistah Kurtz—he dead"
Atelectasis
between winter &
watermelon
a
chequering bottom
pool, swimming
to dream
in castlists
no name
shocks and fevers
hostage dramas.
looking down just like a Pieta then
up
for planes
for birds
for kites
or stars,
airs.
tempt me.
still hurts
to breathe
wondering
wondering
why why why
the corpse
of djinn,
the old families
inside lizards,
which day it was
he got in.
away ago
through an eye
plucked
gutted
a spiritual cousin
name of splinter
stopped
in the meat
of orbits,
lodged
a piece of bramble.
you tiny things.
you tiny societies.
you tiny tin-toothed.
buzzard keepers.
curs. bunch of curs.
no magic
nor curses left.
pockets dry.
amulets useless.
natural causes
might amaze you.
There might
be a stumbling.
a deflation.
No comments:
Post a Comment