Harness (complete)

Jesse S. Mitchell

 Like elephant poachers, like slave traders, centipeding over the mountain’s back, steady-stampeding through the valleys and passes, the low places, the dry places.  Keep the cold behind you.   the sun comes dawning every morning for no good reason, except that it is good for optimism, for realism.  Keep that in mind.
Good for whatever you need, in the eye-strain, in the freezing rain, good for whatever, whatever…
Safety, whatever…
Like hallucination, like confusion, but like euphoria, hungry ghosts of oxygen starvation.  Marching sores, creeping cranial aches, sleep deprivations, ifriti hell from panic.
But scaffolding is just scaffolding
And that’s all this is, building materials, futurism.
Two planetary systems swinging around each other in gravitational thrall
But separately, and the communication is a bore.
And then the Prussian Junkers run up the bank.
And then the Maoist Peasants run up the bank.
And then the long haul trucker’s son runs up the bank.
Rapid fire grease guns run up the bank.
Spilling paint like catching fire like blood leeching like rune reading all over the twentieth century
Like drop cloth, cut whole cloth, stain-sense tarot carded rotating shadows, discerning.
Logical positivism or existentialism, nihilism or full on quantum mysticism?
Entangled, searching, a bit mechanical.
But scaffolding is just scaffolding.
And that’s what we are doing, punching holes in everything, pragmatism.

 A few miles above Tintern abbey
Fresh out of lucidity, ill-composed, hearts racing,
The grand inquisitor and I making circles around the world, orbits.
Obituary devils, last drops of water in the sink,
We fear no drain, no depletion, no bleeding away.
It is all fade.
Schizoid, histrionic, borderline, Hellenistic
Personality disorder.
Let’s go somewhere nice, trim my beard, shine my boots.  Look real good.
Load up on lorazepam, tanked to the gills, good little fishes.
And we will swim, we will swim around.
Making oblong orbits, orbits, orbits, egg-shaped.
Cracking. Breaking down, descending.
Spiraling around.
Harnessed in, a great big spin.
And all of it is fade.

And dear wunderkind, my baby genius mind, we can help each other, you and I
Be nothing, nothing at all
But the little words at the ends of long silent sentences
That drive the waves and deep cold froth
Born from foam like Aphrodite gold.
But it is all novelty, unrecognizable, and we will approach it slightly
Like contraband, on our toes
Because scapegoat, slit throat, or burning effigy
Leave a wake
Let’s just make it to the lifeboats
And from there terra nova, new rules, new millennium.
All parking garage as ziggurat
Traffic lights as runic stone
Unscripted fellatio as love
Unfiltered light as plague
Cure the blind, miraculous, cure the blind (of desiring sight).
Nouvelle vague bipedal-shot-glass-depression-stained-glass-mammalian
Tired-of-living-paradise, we will stand up on the beach.
Sunlight in our eyes.

But coming up for air is an evolutionary step,
A step up out of…
And l'ignorance
Is the muck, is the gunpowder.

And the back alleys labor their genocidal breath but the boulevards are so broad,
So calm, lulled straight away to sleep.
Suffocated
Like to dream.
Because it’s all Messerschmitt and Metternich while we are digging in our ditches.
And all Messier and Kepler as we finish with the dishes.
But one story by an Alighieri, one little heresy by a Galilei and that’s it, that’s how it all begins,
The bumper cars spark and the real carnivals start.

A ring around the neck,
But this is my knife,
This is my knife,
This is our resnick blade.

And now I believe,
I believe in 16 sound.
I believe Yucca Flats, the beast of Yucca Flat.
I believe in St. Martins college.
I believe in lost aviators.
I believe in movie reels.
I believe in Bollywood bombs
I believe in Ford Mustang
I believe
I believe in blood spilt.
I believe in melody, like drifting humming.
 Because scaffolding is just scaffolding
And all of this is fade.