Paul Goettlich
21 Sep 2005 Berkeley
Born in a field and onward
To distant emotions and time
Boundless bicycle feet carried me
Through corn and hay
We fished at a pond
It lasted all day
Bare-assed trestle-diving
River below, sky above
Creosote, rust and mud
Fractal light arrows
Sky screaming down
Petrified swirls of wood and steel
Trudging through seasons
Pollywogs in spring swamps
Ice sledding in winter.
Old man in fall
Axe chopping wood
Like a nutcracker boy
Summer of grandmother’s red roses
Pin oaks and chestnuts
Blue birds and robins
After schooling years numbered in hundreds
Or so it seemed
On to a shit job and life unruly
Of gas stations and banks
Sky scrapers and toll booths
Schools, courthouses and pools
But none would compare
To the last that I dared
Cookie-cutter cops and bucket brigades
Passing system time
As I squat near the bed
Is easier said but nothing has changed
And I know now
That I know nothing now
But where next do we go?
Manacled and muffled, yet I see
Saturated in Hermes’ brilliant humor
A Doppler vision theatre of absurdity
Salvador Dolly the sheep dip cuspidor
Is sacrificed on the altar
Of commercial values
Our heart’s putrefied vulnerability
Is filled with methane maggots
Our eyes glistening with uranium oxides
Coming with one hand and pumping his load
He promised to please,
Until the entrance of chapter 11 fleas
The monkey’s tin cup extended thusly. . .
(reader pauses, unfolding arm…)
Hammers upon my coconut head
With a pinging dissonance . . .
dinging pissonance
To Berkeley I came
Seeking radical love understanding
And found no one standing
But on all fours, barking, pissing and
Scratching the chalkboard of reason
Down to the bone of the porcelain throne
Electrified shadow people
Wallowing in the devil’s excrement
Antimatter pushed into blue plastic bags
And a chorus of digitized dummies
Regurgitating the anthem
Each in different time
and indifferent to time
Jesus goose-steps across oceans of plastic
Onto the trinity sunset of mushrooms
Rising through the mud we call sky
We’re all still clinging to the third turd
Of liberal life, church and civilization
While life’s dissonance is dying.
Anthropogenic World 