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.

A Thousand Cuts

Jesse S. Mitchell

There is probably still a Maoist insurgency in Jharkhand.
Rising global temperatures are still probably reducing the world’s green forests to desert by the thousands of acres a day.
There is probably some fatal accident on some Colorado highway, big rig jack knifed, diesel spewing everywhere.
There is probably insurmountable sufferings in every corner of every land.
There is probably someone in Croydon still living some impossible dream.
There is probably no end to it all. 

Dieu de Assassiner (from the Fomorian)

Jesse S. Mitchell

Dieu de Assassiner
On the High line near Gansevoort street I dreamt I saw the black Madonna of Czestochowa appear to me in the rippled dark bark of a tree stump.  I pretended to believe in miracles.
Death Avenue.
There was thick multitudes of birds in the air and in the tree canopies and whole wide expansive tribes of men and beast a’ throng on the boulevard.  I pretended to care about strangers.
Chelsea Historic.
Little clouds of steam that roll under my feet, the buzz of taxis stalled in the street.  Minidress ghosts flutter and appear in the breeze, reflect in the passing panes of glass.  I pretended to believe in god.
West 23rd.
We all wish the stars would come out.  We all wish the sun would drop away.  The sky is too bright and the glare is too much.  We all wish together.  A desire in unison.  I pretended to believe in convergence.
Chelsea Park.
Our skin just gets thicker and thicker and our senses dull dull dull, black-eye the moon, bloody the sun, the sunset, the sunset red.  Until you can’t sleep anymore, burning up from stars and from want of stars and from what of burning.  Roll over.  Pull the curtains.  Dreaming.  

as hieroglyphic as the last (a section from Regnum Machina)

Jesse S. Mitchell

And it isn’t that I am afraid the sky is empty.  Afraid that there are no gods behind the sun and moon, that no angels or demons hide behind the curtain-night lighting and snuffing out the candle-stars of the broad firmament, that the mechanical whirlings, the pulley ropes and sawdust bags, are not manned and meted out, ecclesiastically.
But instead I am worried that all of it is illusionary.  That everything of it is nothing but chemicals and gas, all rising and descending based on weight and density and relative gravities and all just reflecting and distorting light back to my eyes based on angles and exposure to sunlight and starlight, wavering off into cynical night.
No sky at all, not empty, not filled, just gone.

Plato says we are all just staring madly at the works of shadows upon walls.
The continued plausibility of which is dependent on the skill of those who fan the fires.

And wide-mouthed winds howl through the trees and feed further the flicker flames
And make the distorted-shades dance even stranger still
And the more bizarre and more bizarre until the senses are never to be trusted but except for the thick chill all over the skin and the wailing noise that traps the ears.
The eyes.  The eyes.  Are all but lost orbits prismed in by every kind of dishonesty, they pull the mind this way and that way and control the lust of the groping hands but never settle any desire, any doubting doubting doubting…

The shadows on the walls.

And every word that leaves the lips as hieroglyphic as the last, hard and geometric, finding their ways difficult along the curved elliptical lines of comprehension.  Some code.  Some translation that is thought, taken to heart, understood, standing back waiting, approaching the magic that is the communication between two diverse oceans, each lapping at the others shores.  Trouble.  Trying.  A word in edgeways before dying, the breath so dry and labored, every step and every utterance a mystery. Souls. Peeling.  Things. Feeling.  Odd sensations brought about through long enough lives to begin to cobble together sentences out of lost or certainly misplaced words along the way.  Grunts. Moans.  Sighs.  Sighs. A whole life seething in sighs, that the calm is wretched and mistrusted, probably a seedstone of hurricane.  Hum.  Sing.  Sugarcane typhoon.  Nothing else to make much sense.  Nothing more coming through, static, ambiguous the reception.  The ménage a trois that plays silently on the muted television set as memento mori and the housecats curls themselves effortlessly around the houseplants and the blinds were never opened this morning, so there is a dreary cool.
And few shadows on the walls.
It is the hobgoblins in the hemoglobin, the flushes to the cheeks that remember for us that we remain human after all, a swollen tongue and epileptic, a shaken tree with shallow roots.  The kind of thing that soon finds itself out of ground, pushed up and storm-shattered among all the wreckage that makes up history, but to be a ruin or part of a ruin is to be forever if not necessary.  We cut our teeth on that.  Amen.

(a first section of this poem is included in Altpoetics End of Summer Edition 2015 part 1.  altpoetics.wordpress.com)