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After Entropy​

 

2020

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Like shadows, the slime of the hour collects,

Enwrapping your projects and designs ---

Calling you to this, and to that,

The gradual rip away of you,

Each last bit --- and that’s what happens

With good causes --- or good enough ---

And living for them.

 

Oblivion’s the dream. Sacrifice and right action

Then coast: a pace as smooth as that which the moon kept with your childhood car.

But the stickiness and scum gather,

Spilling almost instantly over, though

Across your clouded sight, they ooze like decades.

Sleep will come, at least trust that,

And it will swallow the interjector.

 

The interjector: ‘Experiment with forgetting you set your alarm,

‘Experiment with letting tomorrow go,

‘Experiment with an endless tomorrow and think:

‘Here’s the end of things and here comes the dull drift of peace,

‘And on the doldrums of tomorrow we’ll --- just --- linger.’

You won’t believe the things the interjector will do to you.

You won’t believe how much you’ll like it. 

 

Isn’t evil evil, so banal, the digestive catastrophes of

Well doneness and gristle, a program that’ll

Bluescreen the subject’s humanity? By definition:

Not to do. Aren’t you otherwise – you ingenious, ticking cyborgs –

Tending too automatic, shedding your special ascendancy,

Your connection to— oh, to what?

Anyway, it’s wrong, sleep will come, it will swallow it.

 

‘We know what breaking is. Shells break, like all things,

‘And then shells don’t exist and never did, nor eggs,

‘Nor the globe of the sun.’

Let the dark hollow it out, and forget about evil ---

Doesn’t and never – and ‘let go of tomorrow, and me with it.’

O the days were longer and richer when they weren’t full of duty I know and could be again ---

Tonight you and I and the bodiless Sibyl will experiment again.

 

Who hasn’t stepped into an endless tomorrow, or

Seen the end of things? She sees it every morning.

It is all she sees. What will remain, after her light and voice,

When even that has rotted through? Nothing but that vision ---

Of the future --- pushing their synchronicity ever back,

The first of that new, paradoxical sort of revelation, inhibiting its own truth.

Why don’t you just lie, Sibyl, ask I and the interjector, and see something else?

 

 

But she and I are voiceless now

And there is only the— the other whose name I have forgotten.

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