2025-10-07 Note: Not one of the better poems, and undoubtedly overblown. This represents me in my Notes from the Underground mode: attempting to cast despair at the modern city while also partaking in it like a great natural wonder. Mostly retained, here, because it shows some early variations of tricks that later more dominated my poetry. Words split in the middle. Clashing contrasts where happy words are sad words and sad words are happier words.
This one might win as the most damned mdashes I have ever included in a poem. Knowing the current, as of this writing, critique of Generative AI's use of mdashes, I worry they allowed the poor LLMs to read some of my stupid writing.
Deep I breathe burning modernity— My ethos, this Gomorrah— With its asphalt and white lines, neon Glow, yellowed signs, lack of stars, Purple sky like a cloud, constant sand— Bleeding out inside—feel it While I choose not to feel, need while I Choose not to need, heed it whi Le I choose not to heed, understand it Soulfully. I name it like It was me. The stream, if you call it Such, trucks its way down sewer Lines, whatever their call, drainage things Behind and beyond the homes In a line, white and faded and green Where the unknown lives are lived, Just maybe, finding purchase in the Cliff-crags of sensibil Ity, awash in a sense of falling. The stream in its tubes—concrete Ravines—Down some untenable slope, Through the sounds of some child's shouts & the louder sound of radio Gods playing out MANA to Peasant kings— through and through these empty scenes until under a bus y street, once hearth-lined, now commercial, as though it were sin to not profit, a sin to inhabit it with something not air and beggars in clerk clothing. "Please sir. Please. You buy such things..." The stream smashes and drips under the Street then it fades. The railroad Tracks keep going, on to some other Place. No one ever wonders Proper at such things. Maybe small towns In the West, maybe further. Isn't it fun to dream some other Place which is really no place? How close to the coastline in the East? Does it go on and on and Or does it die, like us, unexpected? Another street, bigger still, What in vernacular of such things Is a freeway, great noisy snake. These three transits, water dirt metal, Ignored in the way full things Are famished, the way weighty things light. The hurt face smell of parched lines Announces the summer heat. Cyrus Is high, his flames blue and white, The gasp and cry of Pleiades, drowned Seaweed sighed. The quickened eye, Alight, and somewhere the grey is green. This fire, the heat, quieting day, The unlivable light, another Route, a transit forth. The heat of earth in space. [The smell of wilted Flowers, a quick breeze, pollen's Ghost aided by the lack of rain. The tempermental siren In the distance, wailing out to sail- Ors that it is Wednesday at Noon and had this NOT been a mere test, Assuredly for sure, some Nearer sirens heading north north-west, To another wreck. One of Many just today, just another.] & All these power lines, all Those long roads of wood, the fifth transit. Hewn points coming together, Shattered apart, amiss tomorrow, Future found, these cathedrals, The horizon lit up with many Obelisks, the great ceme- Taries to progress, the speed in which We run to stay together. Each and all overhear the silence, As if one. The moon passes. The infinite, back where it began.