CANTO 3 Can you trust

 

Can you trust what goes on behind closed eyes?

August 29 and the phrases tumble out:

we need a henchman of friendship to cast out

desultory enigmas flaming in remote regions.

Lost elements of perpendicular destiny swing

over the old insensate cantilever antimony.

Sensitive adjectives pile overland to the hills where

syntactic avalanches corrode improbable detours;

yet any arbitrary sequence informed with protoplasm

eliminates the improbability of misunderstanding chance.

Whole frequencies of irradiated tumescence disappear,

yet fireflies launch insistently

into the only condemnation persistence allows.

 

Anyhoo—tell me what you want—beneath the language

coordinating center limbic paradise proliferates.

DNA and dendrites detonate; the dialogue

is dynamite. It’s all instant. No conceptions

to level charges of preconception rigging.

Word comes of this through channels

that must be held open against the riggers.

Help me. Send no further charity. In case

these sensitive areas show signs of fraying,

contact your superiors immediately. No one

will call. Let me alone. The only cheesecake

is the prodigal of a number. Computational functions

reside elsewhere. There might be a song.

 

Auntie Sarah laughs intensely

about the ordinary thing. Devil take it.

Ancestor worship was never my thing.

As if there was some limbic belly of brain

where the information implosion

sucked your at-last-turning awareness

into a neat clean Einsteinian vacuum

where past lives hold spiral get-togethers.

In such micro-molecular meccas

the information superhighway mushrooms in solecisms

of sub-atomic chatter. Here is the blushing

interface where matter yields all our approximations.

Time, space, and the speed of light plot

warping graphs of verisimilitude. Mockeries,

hypotheses, fictions, and lies swab

these things with soapy dishwater.

 

Left-brain sequential madmen culture tissues of lies

by making their instruments more accurate.

Mark time

with permissible sense perceptions

allotted from an Enlightenment franchise

and supervised by the empiricist wardens

of a diseased realism.

No matter.

Follow sense avenue

until you reach the intersection. There make a loop

and sit, leaning far to one side to void

any noxious existential fumes. Begin!