At the beginning of the month, Mike gave Terry four prompts. She engaged in fevered writing with each of them and gave the results to Mike. He used the words from that fevered writing to create this dis•articulations poem.
Where Do We Go Once We’ve Been Erased?
We live in a nether world.
The sides were picked so long ago.
It’s a violent collision between matter
and the infinite. We don’t give up easily.
You have to live somewhere
and even then the ego holds on.
Where do we go
once we’ve been erased?
I can only keep track of things
in front of my face.
This makes for a chaotic landscape.
It takes a train crash or the invasion
of cancer to the brain to make us cry.
We make it brutal through our resistance.
It doesn’t matter who we are
or what we’ve done.
Even a flowerpot on the porch
can trigger it.
The pecking order was established
in the last millennium.
We have a carbon footprint.
I can feel my molecules dissolving,
still the Earth turns tenderly.
It was just here a minute ago.
There’s no escaping it, being alive leaves
its mark on the Earth,
it’s always been so.
Those gold-colored glasses they wear shape
a vision in which so many of us
are airbrushed out.
We have the fingerprints of money
like a row of bruises. The body will dissolve
until even the memory is gone.
Did I put it someplace safe?
Was it mislaid like my glasses or my keys?
Hold on, I still have more to do today.
I forgot my pendulum. Wasn’t it
tucked into a drawer?
The minute everything is put away
you can’t afford it anymore.
We lost track of real happiness
way before we got here.
dis•articulations 2015 