The Internet is a Doo-Dad Kind of Town

Upon that cafe chair,

Creation dropped an oxygen-thieving blond,

her skin so,

her voice so,

her countenance so the very mask of Botticelli's fevered scribbling after Venus, you know.

And I happened to have a bag of 600 poets.

So into the jaws of Beauty, into the gates of Helplessness, wrote the 600.

To crack the playfulness and reveal what is serious, to crack the seriousness and reveal what is playful.

Press the button and the shadows speak:

See that we have cast ourselves upon this bright stone wall.

We lay before you knowledge, riches and protection.

Revel with the honey voices of Shades, with beauty that cannot spurn you, with all that you have been unjustly denied.

Dream upon this cold floor, thou

Identified, dream.

Delight forever in our perfect company.

Right now,

20 Billion pounds of brains,

longing.

Dad handed the seven year old

A huge, dark, greasy war rifle,

Full-stocked, converted to twenty-twos.

Snap and zing it fired in my hands,

Cabin roof to beach mud,

Clods exploding for little boy god's eyes,

Shelling terror onto the lives of clams.

Six decades gone, the Enfield Had not forgotten the trenches:

The bivalves were the German.

Grendel glowers in the hall, keeping faith with capitalism.

It hisses: You will not be missed.

But dead or not, a friend sends a postcard:

"I am in India now, drinking a marijuana smoothie with Hindi monks.

Things are good."

A jolly-fat wren flit

To the sea-cliff Alder:

Cut that and the bark bleeds red.

I found the old mark bright-colored,

Set to trap symbols.

A dog snarled.

The wren perched, relaxing.

Inspiration? You breathe already, Fool.

Food falls from trees.

Time and stuff from a single point arose.

Love tears unbidden through you like gunfire.

Eat these ashes, and sob in wonder.

A woman walks swiftly there.

Photons fly lazily, feathering her image,

Darting in and out of branches,

Eroding my recognition.

April winds take her.

Shoring metal rivers,

Hemmed by asphalt fields,

The white birches stir, First of trees.

Poets chant unconscious to Persephone:

Come home.

Safe inside the interstitial,

The ordinary American speeding,

I am a shade severed wisely from attachment.

But I beheld the Sequoia, praying without faith.

She opens, like perfect diction from silence,

To the man crouching in the stony dolmen.

Charged to sing her radiance,

He shuts his teeth, and folds his hands.

Through three-ring screens sweats a commercial universe,

Training the eyes;

The cherry tree is axed,

Blossoming as lumber.

A glance behind to view what followed-

No footfall, save my own.

And at the crossing of an icy creek:

A high bridge raised of ashen leaves.

Your warm palm presents a small round stone:

a planet of colored crystals, eon-worn, a host of flora.

It wants the study you cannot give.

He stares long at a flat light stone.

An ibex appears, breathing, fleeting, the salvation.

Eyes close and open, his fingers fly,

Soft charcoal trails the vision.

Ceaseless prayer to Mammon: Here is what you want.

Acidic brands dissolve beloved faces;

The mind's garden, paved.

Digital shadows flicker, pallid as a debt.

O for your voice tumbling the air,

breathing wine, eyes gleaming,

a particular tilt of that beloved head.

- From Jamie Bollenbach's Facebook updates. (c) 2009 , just in case.