Defense of the Revolution

We are being saved,

we are being wakeful against the drag of sleep,

we are lying on a made bed and outside there is a

thunderstorm and we are

looking out the window at the rain

and in the on/off of the floodlights flicking through

the palm fronds

we decide it is the hand of god

moving the particles of our existence

finally

making known what was always ignored.

There are afternoons and evenings where I give in and let the encroaching twilight wraps its warm arms around and around me, creeping in from the edge of my vision and filling up my throat and pores and wringing my guts into stillness, this blessing of calm this treasure of nothingness and think I hope you die I hope we both die.

Where is the comfort in this world,

in this modern world?

Where is the embrace of centuries, the chain going backward and outward?

Sometimes they find men buried in the glaciers

of Switzerland or the Tyrol,

ancient and preserved, withstanding alone the sun coming up

going down

the stars wheeling overhead, the river of milk

moving so imperceptibly it feels permanently in place,

as though the world we know and the skies we search

were the same as his,

even if it is hard to imagine now a shallow, warm sea

covering Nebraska.

After all, even the Grand Canyon started as a raindrop-

-even the cruel English barons of Ireland dream of their grey home when they sleep-

[last night I dreamt of an apple, red and the size of a breast, and when I cut it open the flesh inside was black and sweet, this is the apple of discord, I thought and ate the whole thing, core and seeds and stem, and in the morning I woke up and vomited black bile into a marble sink.]

this panoply of color

the Ishihara test of the human spirit,

the bitter apple ash on the tongue of the race.

We stay up late, all mankind, ekeing out one more moment, one more instance of meaning

before we surrender to sleep, to wash it all away,

the morning finds us all newborn and helpless, motherless, fumbling with heavy lids

for the breast, for the song-filled voice, the blood that is our blood, the last time we were anything but our lonesome selves: someone's son, someone's daughter, someone's everything.

Our culture tells us, shows us in multiple ways, that the weak are left behind,

that a millstone will pull upon all our necks and together into the tar we will sink

singing glory glory glory.

What a miserable world we have made for ourselves, the snapping of human bonds sound like gunshots (otters hold hands in their sleep so they do not drift away from each other)

or a broken femur, which 15,000 years ago was set by unknown caring hands and its owner tended to and healed and so was able to get up and walk out into the mountains of the old world and fall into a glacier and die and see the sun again in this new world unimaginable even to our parents,

and if not for those hands there would be no modern world.

For good and all-

sometimes I laugh for no reason I can recall

sometimes I cry

or sleep and dream of glaciers in my guts, of Catholic peasants cutting turf

and falling into peat bogs

lungs filling, all the colors detonating across the shut eyelids, the pounding of the earth's heart in the ears so loud it cracks the skull and the brain shines out like a diamond in the wastes of Kimberley, gripped by dirty, unpaid hands and wrenched from the claws of continents to settle fine and unjust in the coronet of a far master.

But it is beautiful to live, to live in beauty itself,

to lie on a made bed and think about the grass

drenched and drinking

the soil beneath becoming slurry, the worms writhing in mud,

the roots of palm trees and jacarandas swelling and gorged,

to think of the world without my place in it, because we shall all be forgotten in time

until the day when our glaciers recede

and unrecognizable beings crowd around our fleshed mummies and poke and prod and wonder

why no one set the bone.