Anne Waldman
Fossil Fuel
now represent your representations in the symbolic code of language:
"manatee/ humanity"
& run your hand along a restless spine
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it = was = time = of = fossil = fuel = priorities = of = precious = business = time
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that's what they'll say about us centuries hence it was a busy get on with it
business time so better-get-on-with-it-time, they fucked us ail over in their
greedy get-over-it time
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that's what they'll say about us: what were they thinking? stupid fuckers
it was commodification fun-hog time, time-modification time, got on
with time we killed time they fucked us over in our future time we'll
be surely more stressed in time that's what they'll be saying that's what
they'll say: they got on with it, saying about us, going nowhere but going
down & us ail with them, what were they thinking in their selfish minds,
us, us
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that's what they'll say about us generations hence (how living then hence
without so many animals then?) they fucked the world over in their sweet
avaricious time frame that's what they'll say, about us, those stupid fuckers,
they let the animals die, they let the plants die, they killed the air, they
killed the water, they killed each other, they killed language
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humdrum Paleolithic where we would talk in sweet time notches well that's
over where the fuck did that ever evolve to?
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then along 20,000 years of "keeping" time once keeping it for all & moving
it, time, forward, & it, the art, forward, & it, humanity, forward, & now
they want to kill it really they killed it
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then along rim of Babylonian, rim of Egyptian, 5,000 years once, ago, such
"progress" they kill all that too, stupid fuckers
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then but now my solar day my lunar month my solar year, my speed I
inherited from them, what time is it now?
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& we resumed our talk—after these excessive outbreaks—discussing the
nature of calibration
how different times give the peculiarities & particulars of people & praxis & place &
thought systems, & become their own "zones" in this
we spoke of lustrations & the architectures of spiritual places, of constructing
mandalas with colored sands & the women who dance on the precipice of
eclipses . . . performance & ritual under arches, pillars that delineate the way
to move as a chorus might, open atriums, they are moving into the augur's space,
the place of frequent animal sacrifice . . .
we're mere sidereal time—two passages of the mean sun time, he cautioned,
& that is relative . . .
both, both, he cautioned further, it's quite unconscionably relative
(that doesn't explain I protested the way we brutalize time)