Inspiration...Sadness...and whatever life takes
Friday, December 03, 2010
 

Canis

Episodes of A Dog

In The Global Village

Book 1

I.

In the utter conspiracy of our existence,

The mind sputters to life:

Beginnings,” I howl in the rusty country midnights. “They must spring

forward from somewhere.” From which, towards which,

From the urgent belly of a hungry mind, only conjectures.

From the feral priest, to his pitiful deities.

From the amorous father, to his mindless sons.

To his living progeny. Only intellection.

In the name of explication: “His duty, our honor to receive.”

For once, there is universal agreement.

A: Although we still do not see eye to eye.

B: That's because you are shorter than I am!

A: Here we go again.

B: Size Queen.

A: Will it kill you to swallow the olive fig?

B: My urine-soaked teddy bear will slaughter me.

A: What are you? Five?

B: I have a formidable imagination.

A: And I have the last word.

B: (Picks Up The Kitchen Cleaver) Yes, you do.

Of a vague, overarching notion.

Of an inchoate strand of an idea that goes on.

Serendipity, coincidence, a nacreous master plan.

Or a motley crew of nothing and everything.

Yet it stands so clearly: That there is a starting point.

Like an overture to the symphony,

It stands so clearly: There is a beginning.

(But in the weal of our discovery.)

But oh, But oh, Look.

Even

The Logical Sense, tells me that there is an end.

What must begin, it must finish. Cruel adage,

Stocked in the supermarket of our modern rotting living,

Along the pristine shelves, “Near The Detergent Section,”

She said, as she moved away nonchalantly to

Fulfill her hourly commitment to Minimum Wage.

“An excellent choice for a God,” I offered.

She never smiled, as she lugged her cartons of cartons away.

And I continued to sniff for it.

Before finding the cruel adage in an ordered mess – designed in such a way so we can spend our money better. “It is good for us,”

A situation for our mutual victory. The advertisement had proclaimed.

So Buy It. And it CONVEYED nothing more essential.

Footnote: But you can live your wealth on

this contagious Earth.

Then leave it here.

Yes, it spreads nowhere but here. Peculiar disease,” Doctor Williams had said.

“Peculiar, indeed.”

“Mom, is there sodium in here,” I asked a long time ago,

a paw in my mouth.

My virgin experience with the product of human living.

CHECK THE LABEL.

“Why can't you just tell me if -”

BECAUSE YOU NEED TO LEARN HOW TO READ.

“Really now? Two infinitives in one sentence, Mom?”

JUST TRY. OKAY?

“Okay.”

OH YES, I FORGOT TO MENTION.

“Mention what, Mom?”

TAKE IT WITH AN EXTRA BUCKET OF SALT.

Cruel Adage: 240 Calories. Go Towards The End.

It Will Further Read: Wise Words of Wisdom.

Manufactured in The Cathay.

Produced by The Inductive, dragging the darkness into our

ashen eyes, frail bodies. “Beginnings,” I howl.

“Why do we seek finality for them?”

When there is none an answer,

My nose becomes a curious organ:

The crackling sky skulks in the clouds,

The rustling streak of blue in the horizon.

The pitter-patter of autumn rain,

Gravity, it brings the heavens down here.

The smells titillate me, excite me,

And hurl me into a complete frenzy.

The answer is here in my soil. So,

I am digging for a musty bone, musty,

Till I find one.

But no sane

master would lay my bone in

the unfinished world - -

merely to gawk at

the travails of our search.

If it is meant to be,

it will be in nature, it will

be in an obvious nature. But,

there is none an answer.

For now.

Yet

My

world is as fresh as my awakening – my four paws

pacing into the quotidian sunrise. It is still new,

It is motivated,

It is our poetry, and it will endure. The world is many things,

and it begins as I begin. Like the fire ignites,

When the match is fiercely struck against restless rocks,

when lightning lashes at the

random tree, when my thoughts are flying-by, careening against my beautiful skull - -

a spark, a spark, ahoy!

It singes, it burns. It is sustained, as it is began. The world is as new as I am. For I howl, I howl, to the morning of my song.

To the wilderness out there. I am coming for you,

I am coming for you. For,

There is a whistle in the wind,

And an electric upon my tail,

There is a danger in the night,

And the road is long, I must trot along.

I will chew on the leaves of grass,

And the road is long, I must stray along.

From the concrete pavements of our one-way streets,

From the caramel sand dunes of our wastelands,

From the redbrick rooftops upon suburbia,

From the seaweed upon our seashores,

From the sturdy fiberglass of our monumental skyscrapers sweeping through our diseased cities - -

From the precious dwindling air of my remarkable tree friends rushing through our forests - -

Not to somewhere, someplace, some destination,

Not to somewhere, someplace, some destination,

Where there is none but here and everywhere.

So breathe it in now, wise sage.

There is more recklessness I can bear,

Here, there is no cruel adage,

It is an infinite sky, I dare say.

For there is an ineffable ullage,

Which spills eternal,

And it tastes better as it ages.

The world is here and now.

For if the world is tremendous enough for you,

it will spring forward and never halt.

I am a dog in the global village.

It shall always begins with a whimper,

But it is hitherto: A Terrific Bang ahead

A yawp into the abstract unknown.

II.

I sniffed, I sniffed.

I looked to the decrepit signs on the roads,

in the blunt expirations of physical life,

in the wordless distances,

in the cosmological humdrum of turbulence,

in the mechanical solutions to woe,

I sniffed, I sniffed.

strangely hoping that these omens would

thrill me enough to gallop towards

where they would all converge.

I sniffed, I sniffed.

And my insurmountable lust for wandering

lured me along, like a raging bull to the scarlet cloth.

A: But he's a dog!

B: No, he insisted that he was a bull.

A: Four legs.

B: A metaphor. The magical haze of our language.

A: What is that? Like your urine-soaked teddy bear?

B: Can we be objective here?

A: No.

B: Didn't think so, either.

A: Tedious cliche, though.

B: (Takes Out The Arsenic Pill) Yeah.

As I strode into town, I heard the wry voices

of apocopated human life once more. These fools

raze themselves, starve themselves

work themselves to certain death - -

so that others could live better,

and celebrate profusely in the tare.

Altruism has never been so self-destructive.

Alms in the hands of Avarice.

Yet it is so noble a self-sacrifice.

“Deserves a standing ovation,” J.S muttered, A quiet finger to his broken lips.

Before fishing for a pencil and eraser,

And another actionless cheque for charity,

Salvage the poor dogs in blunt photographs.

It is the system of our sterilized world,

It is the mark of our gilded civilization.

One man poorer, is another brother richer,

One hound satiated, is another gone hungry.

A soul-less pyramid in the flux of noise.

Vox! Vox! You must rise against it.

Formulate another system in its place!

What have you become, Henry?

Tell them you are enceinte, and ask for food,”

The midget husband told his homeless wife,

We are not dying yet, Henry.

Just do as I say, just do as I say.”

But why must I, a woman of suffrage?

Because I have a bulging part of me in you.”

Cut me loose, please.

The puppet never retorts, now come closer.”

Cut me loose, please.

Lupae! The attic for you now!”

The screeching argument of ancient origins

reverberate in the air.

Fortunately and fortunately so,

I have a heuristic ear for conversations.

And I leaned in closer to listen. But,

The haggardly man waved me away,

As he finally pounced on his wife.

I snarled at him,

with a ferocity in my breath.

Why won't you let me hear you speak?”

with a ferocity in my breath.

Oh Tell Our Children:

Forget It, Throw some money to the sleeping dogs,

It's another foggy day in London town,

Where the tiresome streets are slippery,

And its mendicants forage the sidewalks.

And The Government! The Government. Surely,

They will put a silver spoon in your mouth

Send your brats to college on a crutch,

And resist the petty strikes of you Commoners,

When they eradicate the crown,

And its knack for regal ostentation.

But oh, you have to make up your mind then.

There is no scales of balance here.

You will discover only singularity.

It's either the Free or the Contagious Hospital.

Yet,

You might wager if it will snow on Christmas day,

I yelp to the rabbits running amok. But,

While in China, oh in The Cathay,

It's an old world still,

in spite of, despite, the Evolution

you annunciate. It hasn't changed much.

It hasn't changed much.

In Fuzhou,

For Christmas, they will

incarcerate fellow humans and make them work like

Dogs at the wheel. So the

Cogs can take the congested trains

Home, to far-flung straw-houses in the

Foam of snow-hat mountain ranges

When their new year comes around.

Then must it strike you, that we are

Standing on someone else's ceremony,

Tending to our own.

This is how the world sees China,

Piss-drunk on its yellow cash river

laying comatose in the silt,

and vulnerable to the world.

Yet they are moving fast,

First, Beijing. Then, Shanghai.

The space-cities of our future.

They will light the way forward

and blur our visions ahead.

The fireflies in the dark: Taiwan,

Tibet, Mongolia - a Grand Cathay,

For the people, for the canines.

For our entire community of die-hard Capitalists.

From our rocky satellite, I behold

The dark smog of machines and human waste,

Swivel frivolously through chimneys,

And open toxic lakes and dead oceans,

Slither into the ozone,

Smash its angry fist at the wall,

and holler – Behold the hole

You and I have made.

And the universe stands still,

Ready ground for an infestation,

An invasion of human virtue,

And hear the howler go off.

Dear J.S.,

I suppose I must dispense with my usual diplomacy,

and stab straight at your heart. I wouldn't even

try to commend you here. To begin, I must rail

against your utterly,

Lame and limping language!

You think you can save us from ourselves? You think it is merely another burden that you should carry? What makes you think that it is even a burden in the first place? It is inane – and it very nearly puts a bullet in my brain - that we should perpetuate the ills of our forefathers and their soi disant civilizing mission. What remarkable good does history render us, if we are not to pick the leaves of grass from it? Drivel, my friend. Drivel, you are only capable of. Take your lofty ideals, and scram – there is another sky out there for you. I am indignant – yes – that you would succumb to the naiveté of our time. That one man's problem is everyone's problem. But that is merely the penultimate straw. What makes me so absolutely disappointed with you, is the fact you will use fear to bend our world to your own designs. You know, I actually have an overwhelmingly apposite appellation for what you are. You are an eco-terrorist.

And you might ask, what makes me so qualified to such unflinching disdain for your weltanschuaang? I am merely a dog in the global village. And a young one at that. I have seen much and as much as you have. But in terribly different shades, and perhaps - - and only perhaps - - with a larger scope. I confess, I have yet to experience everything and all - - that is spat from my foul mouth. In fact, I must speak with a difficulty of mind. When I say I know, I know - - I just know with a pang in my heart that your bravery is an exercise in futility.

My suggestion to you, is to let us

destroy it, and be destroyed with it.

Why change anything and everything that has been.

Just let sleeping dogs be.

J.J.C

I am jolted awake,

from the newspaper landscape of a nightmare,

from the breaking news of white noise,

from the stale bread of our nightly news.

In my restless sleep,

There is the tang of blood in my throat,

I have swallowed the liver of desperation,

and tasted the gore of its sinews. It is

a nightmare, it is a nightmare,

that makes a travesty of our existence.

And as I toss around in my blankets,

fur brushing against the warm spread of cotton,

then stretching my paws and my jaw,

I realize in the dawning of hope,

and with an irritated yawn,

That there is nothing new.

N-O-T-H-I-N-G N-E-W.

There is nothing new here.

And even my dreams have said it:

We are doomed, We are doomed.

III.

What lovely weather, to poison pigeons in the beach park

on a tropical Sunday afternoon. The heat is just about

right, and the birds come splatting to the pavement

in a synchronized sing-song fashion.

“I feel a little dizzy,”

You don't say, I have been expurgating for the last thirty minutes.”

A fugue in the fantastic making:

Ca-dunt, Ca-dunt, Ca-dunt, as they collapse,

flesh, and feathers - on the concrete floor.

I edged up closer to the pile of bodies,

and I put my wet nose to the tepid

brush of recent demise.

If you would have any semblance of intelligence, you would stay far and away from them,” the black crow cawed from above, while perched on a balding coconut tree. In response, I circled around the tree. He cawed once more, before muttering under his breath. “Stupid dog, you ought to be leashed.”

I tilted my head to the left, and to the right.

Cowardly creatures – crows – Say it in my face, if you must.

Intelligence isn't quite necessary these days, is it?” I barked back, and laid down below him. On impulse, I scratched the back of my ears with my hind paws, demanding some relief from myself. There was sand still clinging to my flappy ears, and I panted.

“Garung-guni, garang-guni,”

The rag-and-bone man cries

out in the wasteland of

our university, and

the life of the mind is tragic

and trash. Maggots feed

on leftovers in the gaping

cracks of wisdom. There is not

enough, not enough thews

to hold the mental body

no more. Apart,

it falls. Ca-dunt, Ca-dunt,

together into the garbage dump,

ready for the incinerator.

I cry for the whilom

beauty of the institution,

the last kennel of hope

for humankind.

Forget how to think! It is an impractical

trinket to wear around the neck these

days. For why do students of the mind - -

hold these bloody textbooks to their pale faces

and - - cram out the whole wide brain

with useless matter - - if they do not

love philosophy? Noli

Cogitare! Noli!

Just procure

a job, and die. It will occupy your

life, and defy nature's expectation

for you to breathe.

As the locus of the mind comes down,

the refugee tents for our civilization are wrapped up.

We are on our own for now,

we are on our own for now.

Maybe we will come anew from this.

Fortasse.

Ennui: I looked out -

the apertures of my plastic cage.

And there I was, sitting in the Atlanta

airport terminal. Ennui. I started

yelping to the moon, when I beheld the

wheels of the aeroplane spin

and lift from the winter tarmac floor.

Here they go again, these steel birds

soaring to find another chunk of earth,

without me.

I am in transit

in the nexus of the global village.

There is something about the airport - -

not the impermanence of it - - but the - -

clear-sky

notion that we are an inextricable

part of an assimilated mess in the

unpredictable world order of things. “We need to hurry.”

Why?”

Gate change. We need to catch a connection at another terminal building. Twenty minutes before boarding.”

We won't make it, we can't run with a cage in our arms.”

But I am happy here, why should we rush?

Just prop your ears out and listen closely,

listen to the muffled sounds uttered here:

a dog mill of confabulations.

Listen to the English!

In its virgin form - - a bastard's language.

Hear the measures, hear the shuffling feet,

It is alive, dancing! And it is a growing puppy still,

Suckling on the warm milk of strangers who will feed it

When these faraway men pry open their mouths to speak.

In the airport of all places, a sea of: takeaway boxes,

coffee condoms, paper receipts, duffel bags slung on

shoulders, dog-eared bestsellers, flimsy air tickets,

towed luggage, tired hands, waiting passengers.

Come closer, let me lick you,” the language said. “Come closer.”

It is not the terminus - - it is neither the beginning,

that tickle my nose. It is the sprinting surprises of

fleeting destinies at the airstrip: venio ioque.

Yet tonight, we are dragged into the fray,

condemned to love the locus of the transient

before escaping back home.

Do you have flexible travel plans? We are in an oversell situation and we need volunteers who are able to take a later flight.”

My bonnie lies over the air. The air! The air!

Ouranos! Ouranos! It calls out to me,

summoning us home. Ouranos!

I say to you, my companion, that the sky is not

our home. Noli! There is treachery in the particles

of air we gulp in our compounded breaths, they

are colliding against themselves - - the air lies,

the air lies, you cannot see through it - - and it

has no one to answer to - - it is an autonomous

canvas of gray glimmering above us. Where does

its fugue lead us towards? Where. The jagged rocks

are littered among the clouds, the piercing corals

exploding in the nimbus of starlight, a sly flimflam

to draw me into the shores of the troposphere, where Caelus

awaits with his open jaws for the soaring dog.

Begrimed - -

is the nostos, the very idea of it, befouled. So I paddle,

through the sonicboom of the aeroplane, burning to

get away. But the sky calls me home once again.

A large

compact bitch got up, and she growled under her breath.

You are not dead,” Terra said. “Yet, you are not dead.”

No, I'm not. I am in a cage, a safehouse. I cannot be dead”

And therefore, you are not,” Terra said.

Whatever happened to you?” I asked. “You are

in pretty bad shape.”

The Russians had trained Terra in 1940, and she finally saw action in the summer of 1941. She was a prodigy, fearless. Undying loyalty to her human God. She had thought she was loved. Maybe she was. After all, that was the avocation of a God. To love. In return, she had a job to do for her master. And in eleven months, she knew how to do it. Equipped with an exciting knowledge, it was like a game of catching birds in the park. They were strapped to her back, six packs of C4. Tightened with a leather harness, she was ready.

Terra was set loose as the first tanks trundled into the theater at midnight. The smell of diesel rushed into the air, she ran for it. It lies, it lies. Why are you coming at me, bitch? Why are you coming at us, bitch? Look at the colors of the tanks, bitch! Wrong tanks, go for the enemy tanks, bitch. “I have never tasted gasoline before, but those were actually the German tanks I had to take down,” Terra said to me, a tear ramifying from her eyes. “I went chasing down the diesel tanks, the tanks which smelt like home. Panicking, my God pulled out his rifle to shoot me in my chest. A point-blank thrust into my flesh. I think I felt her hand. I yelped, and I cried. And the explosives on my back, they were set off. As a German tank pulverised my spine, my body tore into half, unable to hold together my physical wreck no more.”

The fire cooked her well, she was charred beyond recognition. She

finally died when dawn

broke for her.

The crow continued cawing, it continued cawing in the trees.

I merely gazed at the crow. And it continued cawing.

There was salt in the favonian breeze. The sun was

setting along Jurong Park - - the silence of night

was impending. I could almost hear the stars now.

I moved closer to the fresh bark of an Angsana tree,

and I curled up against it. In fifteen minutes,

the crow made no more noise. A regurgitating

body slammed to the ground beside me.

I sighed.

And I shut my eyes.











 


<< Home
pale as the white breeze, the eye cannot maketh its crease, the trough, the zennith, the power...it speaks...it reeks...Oh! how it piques my curiosity! how it delves into the nebulous truth of reality, how it

ARCHIVES
October 2003 / November 2003 / December 2003 / January 2004 / February 2004 / April 2004 / May 2004 / June 2004 / July 2004 / August 2004 / September 2004 / October 2004 / November 2004 / December 2004 / January 2005 / February 2005 / March 2005 / April 2005 / May 2005 / June 2005 / July 2005 / August 2005 / September 2005 / October 2005 / November 2005 / December 2005 / January 2006 / February 2006 / March 2006 / April 2006 / May 2006 / June 2006 / July 2006 / August 2006 / September 2006 / October 2006 / November 2006 / December 2006 / January 2007 / February 2007 / March 2007 / April 2007 / June 2007 / July 2007 / August 2007 / September 2007 / October 2007 / November 2007 / December 2007 / January 2008 / February 2008 / March 2008 / April 2008 / May 2008 / June 2008 / July 2008 / August 2008 / September 2008 / October 2008 / November 2008 / December 2008 / January 2009 / February 2009 / May 2009 / June 2009 / August 2009 / October 2009 / December 2009 / November 2010 / December 2010 /


Powered by Blogger

HTML code:
adopt your own virtual pet!