"If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it must be a duck."
~ Dan Rather
~ Dan Rather
The entanglements of the Spider Woman
led me here to tell you of too many things,
but hear me now and keep all a secret:
Only half of what Soutenang spoke
of yesterday is Wormwood true:
Tomorrow it will all be a lie.
The company we keep must shift
from year to year, day to day, hour by hour ...
Shush, my sweet, silence! Everything and nothing
we say can ever be heard or listened to, or, known.
This is the shady place, dark and in smoke
where the paranoids go pop to meet on the street
of the most disowned, dark and unfavored muses.
Networked societies throughout history and herstory,
powered in the puppeteer's mechanized iron arms
are frightening to the uninitiated anxiety angels
of change ... Trust me. And trust me alone!
I like it on top that way ...
Damn you! We've been discovered!
Who talked! Who!
If not for my dragon visage they would not run.
I did not kill the three headless women they speak
of in the shadows of the dying afternoons ...
Now I need a new cave to breathe my fire from!
Fore they will chase me down and kill the truth ...
I weep for them. They do not know what they do.
II
These crystalline stones in the center of the Earth
contain values within values leading to absolute nowhere.
These mountains will tell you nothing, my final secret,
without the keys forged in the four corners of my mind
and if I squint my leaden cold eyes tight enough,
the Sarcosuchus of my dreams held in the sarcophagus
will once again share a dream with the Eddie Allen Poe
ravens tweeking in the deep dark wounds of our dreams ...
These ravens speak just as we do, just as all of the birds
of the world understand in accordance to our mutual
misunderstanding, just as I keep my watch stuck on eleven
to remind me how real the hour is, the day is, near or far:
Your heartbeat will tell me the rest and the black helicopter
is just a fairy tale, a whiff of helicopter blade, echoing
in your circuitous canyons and endless energy fields
of mere rumors repeated, for sales purposes, only to be
maximized in the marketplaces for my profit,
and my profit alone.
III
I saw three ghosts
through the window
and they were posing
as three nude females
as if it were part
of the same damn plan.
I saw them again
in the fanatic swirl
of teenage faces,
happy and light
and forbidden.
Finally, they appeared
as blue topped, short-cropped,
senior citizens who could give
a damn about your generation,
who were around long enough
to catch the last sweet scent
of the wild white roses, caught,
tight in the controlled gardens,
imprisoned, elect, in enlightenment
and mutual decay.
IV
Despite fundamental needs of fear
and the aquamarine teardrop
of your sad eyes,
when my MIB sunglasses
fell into my tortilla soup
my personal cosmic rodeo clown
was kicked out of the bucket
by the Bull, and the cartoon cowboy,
listening to Jefferson Airplane,
fell down the hill with laughter,
because, see, the movies
don't show you their eyes
behind cool black shades
to keep you believing
in the narcolepsy of suspense
about inhuman Blackhawk riders
who quite literally actually really
need to feed and fight and feel and pee
like children, too.
And that Spider? It shudders
to our mutual Sarcosuchus,
running to underground homes
to atomize quick harvests of love,
just as the secret government agent,
quietly, soulfully, somewhere in some
movie theater near you is weeping,
sentimental, quite literally sorry
as he or she watches the slow motion
action of the sequence about the birth
of baby ducks in the spring
