Unknown's avatar

About Mikels Skele

Poet. Explainer. Foreigner-at-large.

The birth of time

My last post may have seemed rather a dismal prospect, so I felt the need to perk things up a bit. Hence this prequel.

Suddenly, there was suddenly
Suddenly one thing could follow the last
A great thumping cosmos hummed itself
Into being, bits of light chased and clumped

Into riots of color. Suddenly,
There could be succession, a rhythm.
There could be change and season
And the songs the winter writes for summer.

Then came memory, and all the love and loathing
To fill it til it spilled bursting
Into spinning clinging helical again
What was became was

How could I not be born?

I strode along Boulevards of grace-rimmed
Wonder, green-eyed raspberry wet
Racing, lapping my feet, my soul
The color of sweet melting kisses.

A swirl of endless life/death enticed about me
How kind to have this path so under me!
How clear to have such rhyming intense otherness
Calling all about!

I have these charts, these vectors,
This swollen ark to take me sailing.
Here comes a grandfather wind
All a-swoon!

The poet who sang at the end of time

The bland design falls, outward bound.
The swilling beast groans with cheap ecstasy,
Sometimes interior,
Sometimes superior.

What is exterior obliterates me
Until my fragile image asserts its wee voice,
Lost in a chorus
Of wee voices.

I know, I know, I am the only me,
The only conjunction of these points,
But how could you have failed to guide me
Through this hidden path?

Was I supposed to intuit mere chance?

As it is, I’m left to glide along
Waste-bound avenues,
Street grime the color of storm clouds,
Tipping into a middling redemption

Unawares, using old navigation charts,
Useless azimuths, discarded distances,
Captain of a bottomless vessel,
An occidental sailor upon oriental shores.

See there, where no destination lies.
A simple ending, no beyond, no before.
Not even a reason for despairing.
We’d mistaken the moon for a song.

Genealogy II

Somehow, a mitochondrion wormed its way
Into our native beast, and, having found shelter,
Settled in.

We have twisted it to our liking,
Harvesting its life energy,
Binding it to ourselves

Like an indentured child
Harvesting the boundless sunlight
For a wizened mole.

Those walls have long since dissolved,
But part of us still seeks
The primitive new,

The strange echo of mutation,
The protean coil,
That entwines alien virtues.

But for every meld there is a sever,
How can I embrace you
If we have become one?

And for every sever there is a mending.
And so we spin and part our helix
Until end becomes beginning.

Regret

Regret nothing? You must be joking.
Regret all of it, wallow in it,
Hate yourself. Feel it searing your heart
Like the barrel of a spent machine gun.

How could you have been such an absolute brick?
How could any organism have survived
Millions of years of primate evolution
Only to humiliate the very worms from which it rose?

An oily spasm of muck would have done better.
A cabal of ooze would recoil from your touch;
Your slime would contaminate the corridors of Hell.
You could not rise to the dignity of a snake fart.

Ichor trails your every step.
A stench rises…

Why are you laughing?

Now

Now I think I’d like
To do something different
Now that I’ve ripped out my heart
And presented it to you on a dinner plate
Now that I’ve stuck out my neck
And left it stripped naked as
A discarded dancing pole
Now that I’ve left my fears flapping
Like so many ragged prayers
Now that I’ve strewn my desires
At your feet like bruised rose petals
Now that my darkest self
is common tattle
I think I’d like to try
Something more personal