"Hope and Healing"

"The simplicity of a this": either you strip the words away, or you accrete them. The trail led to two copulating snails in the rain; they were invasives, but taking care of business. These are the snails that other snails were brought in to kill, but the newest invaders preferred indigenous ones. Our hike leader ground her heel into them. I misplaced my book on extinction.


My photograph of a Samsung washing machine in front of the Ko`olau seems too easy. The only exoticism is a confrontation of ancient with contemporary: the Xian wall with a KFC, Stonehenge and a fleet of buses. (I picked that idea up somewhere.) Contrast is either painful or it is absurd. And.


A disturbance of tone: shama thrushes and trucks. One of the maintenance guys has never heard of headphones. It's an education in 80s rock at high decibel. Doves. Water dropping on concrete.


You have found the wrong guy, though clearly he's also done something awful. Someone is organizing murders throughout the city. The city, our Dante professor tells us, is a body, and it is desire. Politics and desire come together in an inverse cone (he makes the gesture). Students come in late and sit in the back-breaking wooden chairs. There are two forms of allegory, one poetic and the other theological. Theology, in this case, is history, while poetry is a fiction. Fake news would make one masquerade for the other.


I googled "trauma and theft." Not as synonyms, which they are, but as cause and effect mechanisms. Or try "nepotism" and "corruption." A kind of flarf that yields no yucks. Not a search for Chanel and Fallujah or Huggies and Gitmo. Children will be moved from the US mainland to Guantanamo Bay, where no members of the press or of Congress can lay eyes on them. We don't just imprison terrorists, we make them.


Where "industry" no longer means work, but warp, a slow orthodontics of despair. Children as young as ten are caring for babies who have no clean diapers. We have out-sourced mothering to child laborers. Trauma is more effective that way, a disassembly line.


The humane society took in 100 kittens recently, of which dozens were malnourished and sick. Those they "put down." At Petco, cats sit in cages, their names and histories displayed in plastic sleeves. In the camps that are not camps, kids huddle under blankets inside rooms made of fencing.


I worry about the loss of disjunction, of parataxis. Nothing seems without its smooth transition now, or lacks a gorgeous photo opp. Kim and Trump standing on two sides of a concrete curb, shaking hands. Nothing jars us. The avant-garde has suffered a cure by television.


If you cure the poem, you erase it.


Notes: "Hope and Healing" was found by googling "Chanel and Fallujah," though I do not see "Chanel" in the text.

"The simplicity of a this": from Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible.