The Dream of a Poetry of Defense

 

As pendulum. As wind. As an ever-changing mutual voice.
As consciousness, sympathies, chords of speculation.
As to prolong speculation plastic and within. As copious

as infancy. As infrastructure to the most invisible
indestructible flower. And infinite. As infinite as pleasure
apprehended through excess. As cross-fertilization

of intelligence and cloud. And as light, and as energy.
As all related instruments indispensable to choruses.
As being differently indispensable. As being harmonious.

Whatever echo, cadence, or strain from the catalogue
of meaningful music, deep in the midst of its composition:
a proposal for living, an epitome, a permanent spark

through American darkness, barbarous as nightingale
awakened in a laboratory, hidden from the world
in its thousand details. As ancient armor around the body

deformed by protection. As pains against fragments
in an epoch of drama. As danger period, a distorted history.
As dance without music, as passion without capacity.

As exactness equal to any example. As under this thin
guise of circumstance. As if internal Minneapolis.
As enlarged by sorrow, terror, wheresoever I decline.

As against decay of liberties, as against misapplication,
monster propagating and the extinction of softness.
As overzealous as a number. As when the degradation

distributes itself as workforce venom, paralyzing
citizens in vivid architecture. As from the great faculty
an effluence is set forth. As episodes, as footsteps.

Whatever evil agencies will thicken and exacerbate.
Bewildered anomalies. Extraordinary drawbacks.
As convulsions nourishing their course with strength,

and expeditiously. As national vapors. As theatre wrecks.
As at successive intervals the exhausted population
penetrated caverns. At drowse. At impossible to feel.

The full extent of sympathy considered a mistake.
As the dregs in the sensible. As in paradise stamped
in sleepless surveillance and proceedings of state.

But as inmost, a starry flock. As connection, an attaché.
And the still overflowing inextinguishable source.
As Wrst written waters, as burning information.

We can advance the fountain. We can define foundation.
As awakened a shadow, as a vessel of assurance.
Let portions of our being. Let chapter the invention.

We want more brightness than money can imagine.
We want what arises from the passages between
mind management and the exasperation of anatomy.

Yoke evanescent wonder. Reanimate the blunted.
The mind which directs the hand is not vanishing.
Let laundering. Let mechanism turn to potable song

and highest human flight. As illustrious as trumpets
awakening washed garments. As manifestations
of the long electric work. Let gathering a nation.

Let the end of the battle be astonished birth of person.

Aus: Die neue Sicht der Dinge. luxbooks 2008

Timothy Donnelly    12.07.2008