Confrontational “Style”

My brain makes uneasy the things my eyes allow in
I think my agenda is my own but my existence
is made both substantial and insubstantial
by community

My mind’s voices
woodwinds ringing
choruses singing with hollow tones
always in united disharmony
but mechanism catches the flare ups
as time moves diagonally

The circles of entanglements
that carry forward through years and days
is the network that describes my involvement
with the word I

someone told me I was like a Stendhal
who preferred indolence to pragmatics
But then I would still be a subject
of another’s expression, another’s hypothesis
Let’s just see here now, says a “they,” if our analysis
is correct
If I may, says the subject, let me be the judge of that

The ritual festival with human sacrifices
and the spirits of Apollo and Dionysus
the fertile mind that Nietzsche lamented as lost
Never was gone
At any time of day but for the grace of chance
some grave selfish evil is committed

It isn’t the spectacle, it’s the mind that’s created
the crowd mind virus that demands pledges of allegiance
because we are all in this together

this thing

this great thing

All the European wars flood the years
extending their fingers up the Mississippi
and in a few centuries the natives are supplanted
by “civilization”

Until here I sit a day child of history
a context that manifests its destiny
when viewed in hindsight

But as usual I digress
because that is what I do
it’s hopeless
I am not the fighter fighting
rejecting things of no use
That is what the animal has become
not what it naturally is
for the artist there is no such thing
as a thing of no use

But for the dreamer
there would be no instruments devised
to measure the things we wish to define
And if I controlled the language
the trick will have appeared to acceded its
authority for the time the master debater
was alive.