good bye my sky
For the last couple of days I've been making my own clipart. Using free images I've found I have been cutting + pasting and making this:
… and this:
… and now this:
It's not the images I worry about. You can always make new images (to be truthful I love the concept of “psychedelia” far more than I love the actual psychedelic poster and drawings of my childhood). No, it is the words I worry about. It is a curious thing to use certain words and realize they have little or no effect anymore because they have been used so often. What is the point of writing the word “Rapture” or “Genocide” or “Holocaust” in a poem to stand for something BIG when they are happening every single day and we no longer pay attention? Our egos tell us they still should hold some importance, they still should shock us to action, but we look back to periods of dim histories we never lived through and make much out of them and by doing so we ignore what is happening now. I say “we” but I really mean “I” but it sounds better as a group option. That is one of the problems with nostalgia. The other problem is nostalgia is just plain boring.
I.
Mark a red cut, from ear
to chin, in the snow and the day's
weight shrinks with the birdsong
because there is always a bird
song and a cigarette at an execution
or doorway or a cup of
hot tea isn't there genocide?II.
Bathos is a word you don't
hear much these days but
maybe you should there will
come a time when our children
will learn it looking back at all
this all our cardboard all
our cheese (I used velveeta, it
doesn't actually rot under
distress) the slamming trees,
the cars sucked up into
the sky and the sky all dirty and
airless sucking hard all this sucks
hard and loneliness we are always
lonely you could have got out
more they'll say you could have
volunteered, had an affair, gone to
war, killed your best friend like
in the movies done anything but feel
guilty at the rapture god that's been
done so often in every way we're all
thinking you had all the time in
the world to say something profound,
one meaningful thing, just one.You should have said it.
Fantasized about one perfect ending.
It was the endings we couldn't explain.
Like in the movies the millionaire spends
eternity with Julia Roberts even though
she spent her whole adult life as
a prostitute and our children still
have no idea who she is and
the herpes run amok among
them every single time and still
we claim we are satisfied
with this end every single time.III.
Let it start in 1943 because no
nostalgia is complete with treacle
on our fingers and getting pistol
whipped for your memories is
all the same thing Detroit and Dresden
will always remain
just like this: the big H
of the apocalypse and
the scream of the pilot
as the wings fly apart.