Unfinished

Titanomachiopolis



A true journey
of the imagination
into the under-
world of the foundry
a drilling music,
a molding music
for those who hear it:
for those who hear it
are changed.

The song: to hear it is
a crossing of the river
at the level of the river:
without the highstrung
bridge, the tunnel
boring obscurity.
There is no tuning out
the river once heard,
crouched over in all
its cold and tumult.
Your attention
Is fallen in the river,
neither will you be permitted
to return.

“What I saw when I arrived
was not protest songs
but the shadows of empty
factories and in those
factories and in their
shadows were a
whole lot of people struggling.”

On the sullen
bulks of islands—
off the shore of time—
what is being made
has pieces larger than you,
rivets longer than your body,
gears wider than your mind.
This is the song of the machine
that coins machines.
It is larger than your ears;
you must hear in parts.

In the subway car, the bodies,
Barely contained,
emenate in flickers like
the stars in space.
An old biddy
looking for the bingo game
is alone in the back of a church:
our lady of unnamed places.
Tell me mother
is there no way
to get from here
to Brooklyn
without the aid of car
or train? Like the human
fly latched on to the vertical
side of a building,
vulnerable, dizzy,
I feel the boundaries of
my animal body:
the muscle span,
the fragile skin,
the world is dark.

The cars on the bridge
drive on metal tracks.
Latched on to the vertical
side of the city, it seems
purchaseless steele,
an impossibly large
mistake: black grease
in person-sized smears
in places a window-washer
cannot reach,
so this is what it must be like
to be a neuron
with no conception of the brain:
the subway cars
drive themselves
down the nightmare tunnels
screaming in pain.

When the Titans gave birth
to Zeus, when his brothers
and sisters were vomited
onto the earth,
I imagine Cronos felt
helpless.
These children had changed
what it meant to be a god.