---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 108-page perfect-bound ISSN#/ISBN# issue/paperback book “Animal Wink” cc&d, v326 (the October 2022 issue) Order the 6"x9" paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Unable To Escape It the cc&d September-December 2022 magazine issues collection book		get the 422-page September-December 2022 cc&d magazine 6" x 9" ISBN# perfect-bound paperback book:

Shock Worker Poets Paleo-Radio Theater Manifesto #2

John Sullivan

You is us is me is we before this goes much further.
Take your flat/dirty whiskey home / we can walk among the newly dead
without cheap poison / without your dull-town buzz.
If you want that rare ticket to nowhere, this is where you should be.
If you want to be everywhere, at once, and everyone does, well ...
that’s our next destination, too.
Justice, Beauty, Compassion have it hard, all the time, down here,
Kindness, too, and Empathy, but so says Lao Tzu: a sleeping
knife runs deep / that’s what keeps the lights on.

Right here is not the hyperspace of a new social ontology, is it?
So what’s that even mean? Is it you, maybe, stumbling / like a cry-baby
in a word-cloud of fog and doubt?
Right here is not the story of a true star, either.
A famine injection of hope into the dead space between us / would be a
good thing, no? / would be a right thing, too? But who knows how to do it?
And what would that mean on its face for we/ me / us / you?

But what makes you / me / us / we think we’ve even got
sufficient smoke to say that / with requisite velocity /
with nuance / &-or maximum punch?
Have we all thrown down in the Big Bad Who’s ugly face yet?
Lately? Even maybe? Have you / me / us / we busted through
the bag & snatch routines we steady tell each other / and we
steady tell each other / while we hunch over, shivering /
and steady stay / steady scared, together?/
Well, that there’s the Big Who’s great big gun / that’s the soft
somatic haze that Who breathes out / upon / and into all of us.
If you / we / me / us don’t burn that haze back to zero right
now, you think our worn-out/woozy ghosts are gonna’ learn
about it later / do it up right later? Why would that ever be?

Stories of Revolution tell us: there’s a clear water/star/nest
in the works, somewhere. The best one / for each one / all
our strands of dreaming woven in together.
But stories don’t leap off the page and go to war
by themselves / on their own / like an AI / “O-most-learned,”
spinning off its own quirks of history by doing/by error/by doing
over-different-better/and so it just spins on and on, forever.

We/ you / me / us have got to give these stories breath/heart/
a place to fly off toward/a Big Why to pack a big up-lift forward.
Else-ways, our brave story, phrased to please, can still
be hard for feet to dance to / all drift, no aim, so’s it
might just get to being / just another keep-on, keep-on
auto-pulse, all the time, bleeding out heat, getting even
more desperate /no brain behind the beat.

A Great War of Storms might play out as nothing
but the flash sorrows of a flea. That’s no revolution for
you / me / us in the dream-space. No creation, just
more convolution in the same-same blinding clash.
That dream wears us down / that dream wears us out.
That’s a raggedy, shifting, damaged dream fracked-loud
awake / still only half-drawn / and hi-jacked,
in mid-conception.

Me / you / us / we see mutations pop like dice
thrown hit and miss against a wall in the alley
by some drunk magician, talking shit: very nuts/very-very
random-robo-babble/burning up – so fine - with a
big/unending/unknown itch.
And conscious mutagenesis ain’t such a straight shot either.
Thing is: it veers less, seems to stay on the highway, more.
But where’s it going, either which / and why / and how to do it?
What’s its habitation? Where’s its place? And time?
So which is which is which, is all? That’s the big Now
Question so it seems. Grabs you by the quarks / it does /
shakes you up by the scruff like a big mama lion / like a
blood-red sunrise / it says, very plain / very right
into your / our / my ear:

A Great Sea of Dreams lives behind that long 4^th wall / look,
you can see it, right? You / I / we can’t buy a ticket in,
can’t even get there by dying, or sneak through/around it
on the back of a suicide gene. My / our fear won’t
help, now, means nothing, we’ve got to try something else.
Maybe, wreck that 4^th wall / it’s not real, anyway, is it?
Maybe, expose the rotten guts of our subjugated political
space. It’s always bad theatre /a crime-glory of hungry ghosts.
When it’s done it leaves us, always, still hungry, too/still
alone/always still addled in the grip of slow-motion action bullet time.
Life wants more from us that that. There’s no rat-line out
of here, no evac-pods coded to reject all genomes and avatars,
not specifically our very own. Just world after tiny, burgeoning,
spreading-out/rhizomatic world returning now into always.
Sometimes unspooling havoc, sometimes, not so much.
But maybe this is where you / I / we all finally get to breathe right.
And we all go or we all don’t, together.

 

Previously published in Harbinger Asylum in 2021.

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...