We can easily drown

Jesse S. Mitchell

Blistering
       As is its wont, spring comes through and consumes all the world.
And effort
       Just like when Crane jumped in the Caribbean and swallowed it whole.
Exhausted
        but surely it was just Daedalus diving after that melted wax.            

Epilogue (from Pink Lions)

Jesse S. Mitchell

 novel available  here

Epilogue (five years later)

Sitting on the dark stained red cedar back porch, watching the tiny flicks of snow falling gently down, like a million staticy TV screens, mixing with the gauzy smoke, angelic wings, escaping her cigarette hanging from her lips like the end of the world. Hippocampus straining, mind clear but aching, never again yearning but still trying to keep from burning. Or pouring completely out. Deluge. But now it is all brand new.   And lately and forever and ever more, it will be getting always better.  Poetry.  Living is poetry and sometimes fiction but the fiction is the frictioness part, heavy and grinding.  Recently everything has been gliding, smooth.  Her and Lindsay, a cat named Ziggy, and a cat named Hitchcock. No earbuds in her ears, but she still listens, all the sounds around her and nothing at all that she is afraid to hear.  No hiding away.  There is a cornflower blue truck that rusts in the driveway and heaves and chugs when it starts, which it almost always does even on the coldest mornings. They make art and work the earth and sell produce they grow on their farm patch miles outside of Chattanooga (but half a universe away). And as far as she knows, no one even lives in New York City anymore or even Ft. Lee.
Not so angry anymore but a deferential bloke who sings songs to the few birds left in winter, to the birds, of the birds, probably from the birds and for the birds.  The web around everything is extraordinary.  

https://www.createspace.com/6036435

2nd part of Gottlieb is Burning

2.
The robot gods, the automatons, the clockwork strike the lightning around the sky, the thunder bolt and my bursting eyes, flood, flood and fire, and the traffic jams that we call the soul around the Kyoto temple square.   The quivering that does not quiver anymore or shake or wake and nothing but burned down and burned out lights, the numbed by the cold, the fist-fights against the sky.  But we, we are still alive, twisting turning, the rubbing burning of the arms, the shoulders sore, tugging up and the dredged river floors.  Wars.  All the slamming doors, the summer heat and the humidity-humanity, we will put on the big shoes, the tall ones with the thick socks and pick the locks and wade through the tidal rushes.
Because Gottlieb is burning.  Burning down.  Burning down again.  Crawling through the wave and wave and wave again.  The heat will split and warp the plastic, melt the metal and char up the wood, nothing but a forest of skeletal bones, a family of gutted out buildings, the paint stripped.  Get undressed.  The clothes breathe in the ash same as lungs, and we don’t even belong.  
And the bleating of undiscovered solitudes, the debts of always eternal desire, imprisoned, circling, in four walls of steel and glass.  Vulture-eyed, following every scent of burning.
And more burning.
Combustion.          

from "Gottlieb is Burning"

Jesse S. Mitchell

1.
And knowing
The secret ruination of everything, the moving, the shaking, the minor key always playing, the down strum, the upstroke, the heart pounding silences in the centers of the days.  The tick tock, the behavior downstream, the updraft, the impeccable mess, the random dancing of the tongue lashing flickers of the flames, the eyes darting back and forth.
And knowing
That there is oxygen in this air, still oxygen enough to breathe and  oxygen enough to burn.  The noble gases, the sideways glances, the awkward passes, the minutes, soft and fragile, of glass.  Time that shatters and scatters and can never be lived again, ameliorate the rag-tugging miseries, gin-soaked as all the sounds everywhere forever swell and crash, the pitch as wild as any ocean.  We remember. We remember the tide, the rush, the life in the shallow pools.
And knowing
Beyond movement and movement, a cascading plunge of total stillness, the crystal immersion, dispersal, gone.  But back where we belong, we can’t even touch flesh to flesh without dust and metal, and metal just all steel and iron, and comes to nothing but rust and when the rust rusts away, nothing but more dust.  Handfuls of barely audible sound in each fist, pumping for volume, drying out the well, drying out the land, wastes, wastes and rocks.          

A Society of Rough Hewn Stones

Jesse S. Mitchell

Hominids & Homophones
We could all start by building new gods
     And all around, war & the empty sounds of war.
We could all begin by renaming the noise of thunder (the flash of lightning)
     And in the whirlwind, bending, & the motionless movement of blending
We could all start by feeling brand new deep green grass beneath our feet.
     And the endings of the world & all the beginnings of all the crippling endings of the world
We could all start by new occupation, the health of hands.
      And avocation & the great new novelty of original sinning.
We could all start by no more abstractions or no tyranny no more forever
      And drifting away build something strong & never crumble apart forever again.            

Mosquito

Jesse S. Mitchell

The mosquitoes are buzzing, the fire breathing dragons, some blood lust on the lips,
the signal is flickering, codeeating the static.
And all the monster heads, legionnaires, that chatter away Enochian, the language of angels, while the flames rise high.
The double domed head of St. Paul’s mushroomed erection eruption coming up from beneath the city street mud. Because disaster is destruction and destruction is double entendre.  We euphemistically stare.
The long pre-Cambrian  spider legs, spindly suspended for minutes and minutes, frozen in shiver in the cold of the corner.
And while all the dust settles the moonburned ash collects into hours, momentarily, summarily, forever and forever because bullets are morphine, acetylene the torches that weld the war-flesh-aphrodisiac all webbed together.            

Bryn Mawr Students discuss Architecture, and the Ain Soph (from an upcoming collection 'Kingdom Machine')

Jesse S. Mitchell

 It’s the isotope Megiddo, a little burr in our cell walls, makes us the apocalyptic sort
Also gives us eyesight
usually confused for spiritual insight.
But you look up and you get a little glint in your eyes, everything is so gold and so bright.
And things get so easily blurred,  all sorts of lights and halos of light, ringlets.
And you look up
And you look up into the sky and it is like an eagle is the sun,
A big ole bird filled with avian light,
Two big wings, one for morning
And one for night.
And we mistake the dark under shadow of its passing flight
 for something other than a collections of stars and nonwaking hours
So everything is dream, nothing but dust gathered in the seams.
Everything is sleep.

I lived my life, one dumb animal amongst a hundred million other dumb animals. They never noticed me.

So reads the post script of every once living story.

Now let us make careful count of every star in the sky, so to register completely our dwindling, our irrelevance.

Triviality.

I have the taste on my lips.

Let us go, every one of us, over the top of mountains, above the pits of hell, so to comprehend the pitch of the descend.

The fall.

Plunge.

Right before our eyes.

In these cautious ways, warily aware, we may make of ourselves something responsive, weave a fabric around us

Awake

Awake

Aware.

Contemplation of the hollowness, the vacuumness, the Ain Sophness, the nightness, the tiny prick of light in the hyperactive darkness, the pinpoint of significance superimposed over the awful comfortable insignificance.  It is our observation of it, the wavering glow staring backwards at our wavering glow, a blurred brightness in the deep. 

It is the deep, the big blue deep after all, and the unfathomable will put its cold cephalopod arms around you and drown you down or else you will learn to swim but even still you will eventually sink.  That’s just how this ocean world moves.

Awake.

Awake.

In this world they keep rows and rows of old Georgian houses, crumbling grey facades.  In this world they keep lines and lines of perfectly engineered streets, sidewalks and alleyways.  In this world they keep vernaculars and trolley cars that climb the steep sides of  mountain Earth.  They keep aeroplanes and helicopters high in the thin air, they keep cold air conditioning units blowing in the blistering heat of Sonoran Deserts.  In this world they keep alive in the long tentacle arms of municipal sprawls.  In this world they keep awake at night inundated in resource consuming light.

Awake.

Awake.

And everywhere you look, you can see the dinosaurs, the bodies and the bones.  The mastodons, the mammoths, the ice age relics, the fossilized remains, stalk and stem.  Little grimy trilobites from off some dead ocean floor, all dusty dry now.

so let us make a careful count.

Awake.

Awake.

Always awake.