Cata Strophes

Cata Strophes

"When egalitarian cooperation is necessary for survival, hoarding and self-aggrandizement are simply not tolerated." - Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies

1.

He is certain about the mess

the frame overturned, spilling

a life in one day. The flick

of a stick & the world

burns. It's nothing to the agonists,

but the lovers? The paragon

of paramours, a thing

not even merely now.

Industrious burrows to await chance

unchecked by chance, not poisoned

chalice or the spider known but the air's own

cushy crushing on the long shore

& leverage too much for the bone loss

2.

Lady Os at the dog show

barely clearing it, as flaming

parody begets giants, Irishmen with

sandpaper under their skin & compulsion

to smooth you out. A ruse for traffic

banner anxiety all down the facade

of a charade of a parade. Wrapped

up in sand, glue, &

green pustulence of Gaussian contempt

is a heart full of pity for those damaged

by fucking the right hole under

the wrong star, but surge from the wrong hole

in daylight & get to be the rub

3.

Parody becomes the pet jumping

through whatever to make do

softening over waistbands, over rice

stick by ale, brick by lager

even his friends don't like him

barm for a tailor

sit on his hands, feet, tongue

but something keeps thrashing

a peristalsis of the black pudding

royalties for the torture song

& new shoes

for the long night

it takes to be a man, or kick one proudly

with a little drip of cheer

4.

The fundamentalist should appreciate

the difficulties of being an institution

and sit on it, but

he takes his stance & mounds move under him

Cocked to the calling, he never marries,

Xeroxing doctrine & currying the files

He would like to love them all

but they must first be free from all opportunity

He would love to like them all

but they must earn it with a prayer and a vote

Charity begins at home with a zygote

generally considered a safe country

reports of weaning from within the womb

5.

Controlled in a matrix of expression and suppression

depending on the wider situation

and inheriting an appetite from S₀

a real, observable, and psychological reduction

stocking the soup of the common good

with real outputs, symbols, and coercion

he paced, hands in pockets, smoking a cigarette

knowledge in action was rigorous as the winter

which warmed as his cancer grew

There was a surplus of necessities distributed

by ramrod, a blind dog in a maze

an anomaly of history, this animal

of structure and control, insistently pleading

its sovereign indecomposability

6.

Them rains fall flatly every day

And the tower slowly rises

Racing the level of uniformity

Arroyos cutting in memory

Swiddening within

& my struggle with the rug & ceiling

Perforated, sodden, and absorbing

A world of continuous falling

Craves the comeback myth

To erect at least a little part of it

Rising as gas in a beached whale

& out the blowhole. Hear

here, that lonesome whistle blow