Notes Wishing They Were From the Underground
(Actually Coming From Suburbia)

dejá vu
(eerie, inexplicable, deeply true),
which used to pounce in strange places you’ve never been
– places so different that seem the same –
this feeling is gone
(tamed, explained, now shallowly wrong).

for no, you’ve never been here,
but yes, you know it well, don’t you fear,
because this store is like all the other stores,
– a lot so similar that should be different –
but you know what to expect, nothing’s queer,
and there is nothing new here.

He does chin-ups on the metro… while I simply hold on to the overhead bars to keep from falling and being trampled.

There were once upon a time dragons here, but they are long gone.

When their nests were paved over with strip malls, they circled for hours until their wings ached. Yet they could not find any aeries from which chainstore eyesores were not visible. And they are romantics when it comes to the view.

Enraged, they screamed with foul, belching fire. But only to be sterilized by fire hydrants. The remaining wisps of smoke were quickly protested by furious NIMBYs.

Confused, the beasts were easily manipulated. Their unexpected flight patterns were predicted and rerouted and GPS coordinated. Soon they were captured, emprisoned, tamed, and groomed. Their haphazard, reason-defyingly strong scales were arranged in grocery store aisle uniformity. This last, seemingly superfluous act by the suburbanites in fact allowed for the fatal blow: razor-sharp logic which cut them to pieces. There was to be a great feast, with well-groomed, well-fed families from all the land.

And then the once would-be feasters got distracted, each in their own solitary way, and the meat sat until it rot.

I do not pretend to master my fate

I feel my insides gradually vanish
(leaking slowly into other dimensions)
And my skin become translucent
(as my pores become fully porous)
And my mind become tubular
(a protosensitive, pregnantly empty conduit)
And I am flooded with a rush
that I could never contain
(even if I were still with my formerly solid grasp)
that washes me like my great-great-grandma
washed her daughters’ clothes in the river
(violently, lovingly, deeply)
And I am smoothed and polished like a river stone
(cleansed of consciousness’s claws and burrs)
And I am ready for the world to seize me,
possess me and propel me
(beyond my stagnant state, into a formless shape)

I implored my ancestor for a story.
Okay, okay: I wanted her story.
Okay, okay, okay: she is an unwilling, unwitting ancestor.

But I got it anyways:
although she denies that she ever had a child
or that this supposed child engendered a long line of descendents…
this line ends with me,
and I can gaze back at her
and see the never-cut cord
connecting her with her offspring…
she denies that the bastards even exist,
and so has never cut the ignored connection.

I see some descendents oblivious to their connection,
and yet still an unbroken stream of nutrition reaches me.

There was a time when I was content
To ramble and rhyme at mind’s light whim
Without a thought for what paths life sent
For my slow slip-shod feet to flip-flop in.

Now I grow uneasy with my self-conscious route
As I head from the local towards the global nerve-center
I feel queasy in the night’s shifty streetlight clout
That illuminates only the views that have been sent for

By those with trigger fingers on the power grid.
So now I survey the forgotten, the dark spots
Where the cracks, the joints of the machinery are hid;
I walk with my weight on the dimly shackled lots
of those wed unknowingly to the machine –
which brings me closer to dissolution than I’ve ever willingly been;

my feet are torn by the shifting, caught in the
hinging of mechanical sheen, as I stand
next to those thrown down during society’s surreptitious sifting –
so now my weight falls in the interstices
to be ground like grain (which is dispersed at wind’s blind whim)
into elegant mass, a meal for the marginal.