"...I
the phalanx of
urgency
being form who imbibes
fire from lianas
who shatters barren
weight of unsealed discovery
having emerged from
death
I've been suspended
over eons
surviving 'three mass
extinction'
surviving each degree
of early mountain building okay that's cool we doing
to the terrestrial
gaze I am famished
I seem inflated with
mercury
yet the light of my
phonemes hail from above
the Black Sea
with its original
slate of telepathy gone awry
its intrinsic arcana
damaged
its pike-perch
its sturgeon
missing
its sprays
its whitings
its mullets
garrish with decline
I
& the Lima Ocean
polluted *
the Pacific
intrinsically altered
by tailings from Andean mining
from unfit sewage
pouring from Esmaraldas*
then the San Vincente
Gulf *
the Bay of
Valparaiso*
'the Guyas River in
Ecuador'
alive with perpetual
waste
with raw exterior
sewage
dialectically
there exists 'The Blas
lslands*
with their 'waters
clear as glass'
full of coral &
trout & groupers
unlike the mining
scars evinced in New Caledonia *
these scars
rife
with nickel &
copper
with lead zinc &
chrome
my original death
condoned by cold
by ethers from the
mines
to those with blurred
intetnal optics
I could be a lorikeet
from eastern Tasmania
or a golden pheasant
from the mountains of China
or a failed
murmur
or a dulled civilian
riddle
certainly not
instinctual precision
but a finely wrought
chariot purblind with dioxins
I have not arisen from
asphysia
to share in
legislation
or to battle over
various levels of dysfunction
of course
the politics of
de-thronement & solitary acquisition
being no more than a
flaw in the fort of transition
no
I do not seek power
adorned by quotidian bribery
awash in niggling
mental capture
but of the higher
range of cobalt
of a solar furnace of
rays
with my alchemical
ratios
with my semantics
which splinters into spectrums
extending
beyond visible
calibration
beyond its attendant
neural focus
with visual degree
developed beyond blank neutrino blizzards
being by no barometer
related to deficient Gothic embranglement
but in keeping with an
alternating blizzard of trigonomic pontoons
an electromagnetic
reasoning bluish with alterity
with tension to
re-exist
to blaze again
immersed in electrical
imminence
certainly
not flight as
electrical enfeeblement
as deleterious
enclosure
but as sunquake
as biological
abstentia
with strange hormonal
phosphenes
bereft of
pharmaceutical depravity
this being
neither submission nor
error
nor that which
ignites
a mirror within
starving python's water
one could call this
moisture
filled with ashen
reptile meridians
condensed by seeming
fractious defeat
this amounts to
hypnopompic warrens
in ungainfull
braille
sullied by hesitation
like balletic
nullification
related to
subconscious inklings
that periodically
arise
in the partial reunion
of sleepless Satan monkeys
now being the era of
fauna
as the Sun explodes
inside itself
provoking caustic
vertigo in the realm
so that general living
is constrained
by stony unhealable
quanta
so that the pythons
mentioned
the lorikeets
the squid
the micro-foundations
that fulminate in krill
blighted
scarred with
retrogression
this silent
in-sonorous struggle
full of sodium
unleashing its ratios by fatigue
by dioxins harbored in
blasphemous testing ground
the fauna of Earth
consumed by disruption
& land being no
more than smoke
being a fissure of
black diamonds
cracking
under ill-gotten
methane..."
Glossary
Lima Ocean- The
Pacific Ocean off the coast of Lima
Esmaraldas- Coastal
city of Ecuador with inadequate infrastructure whose sewer is designed to
accommodate no more than 30,000 people while it's current population is just
under 200,000.
San Vincente Gulf- Gulf
in Chile contaminated "by pesticide residues."
Valparaiso-
Chilean bay spoiled by sewage.
San Blas Islands- On
the Caribbean side of Panama "halfway to the coast of Colombia inhabited
by 35,000 Kuna Indians, a paradise with clear glass waters" , yet
"threatened by the Panamanian National guard" attempting to
"annex some of their coastal lands" , with the Panamanian government
seeking to log the watershed for cattle ranching, as well as threats from
foreign fishing incursion.
New Caledonia- French
territory in the South Pacific that "remains one of the world's largest
producers of laterite. It represents " about 97% of the total value of
exports."
A note on the text: This is an excerpt from
Concerning The Henbane Bird. It is channeled through the voice of an Andean
Hillstar the 2nd largest hummingbird on Earth. It is a shamanic bird that
empowers the poem that extends over 300 pages. There are 2 other poems that go
with The Henbane Bird, the other 2 are entitled On Solar Physiology and The
Ganges. The 3 poems combine and climb over 600 pages in length. The whole is
entitled The Combustion Cycle, concerned with shamanism as lingual
transmutation.
Will Alexander- Poet,
novelist, playwright, essayist, philosopher, visual artist, pianist, who has
authored over 30 books and chapbooks. He has read at venues stretching from
Rotterdam to Los Angeles and is currently poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque
Poetry Center in Venice California. In addition to this he is a Whiting Fellow,
a California Arts Council Fellow, a Pen Oakland winner, an American Book Award
winner, as well being both a recipient of the Jackson Prize for poetry in 2016,
and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in 2018. He
resides in Los Angeles.
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