BRAVE NEW WORLD
I will try to write a poem, though I am running out of time. Time waits for no one but God and the dead – someone told me that, long ago, and I knew that, long ago, but I was a child and forgot it as one tends to forget childish things.
I saw it all in my mind’s eye, that which belongs to the tawny owl that led me to my grandmother in last year’s vivid dream. La bohème, the lightning striking, the farm and the barn from nowhere, the snowy field from Stephen King’s short story. All That You Love Will Be Carried Away. Snowy field. Suicide. Distance.
The wrapped presents and the red meat disguised as fish, but we could not eat it even if we wanted to.
Plié, over-dubbed, incorrectly, anorexic babies and bright green lights, hidden pits of barbed wire. Germany. In the rain.
My father has German blood, did you know? That means I have German blood, too. I hope that the Nazi ghosts won’t tell me where they hid the bones.
Harmony Korine made an AI movie about killer babies and the dark web, and he’s a racist in his sleep. Kids isn’t a strike of common genius, but the result of a 19-year-old rapist who takes pleasure in spreading HIV. The virus that killed the angels.
There are no angels left anymore; they froze in Alphabet City and Amsterdam and Berlin under the guise of self-inflicted shame, ash to ash, father to son.
I have shame. Do you? Don’t lie when you’re speaking to no one.
THIS IS THE WAR OF OUR LIFETIME.
“From your lips she drew the hallelujah.” Enchant me. I want sensuality. I want to exist on a plane higher than Earth, and you can take me there, only you, because I’ve entrusted you with my ne’er-to-clot blood and you can never ever take that back.
Knock on wood. Stay alive, never stop loving me. Don’t stab your eyes with forks, like grapes; put them on your palms like the Pale Man instead. When I look at you I’d prefer that you look back.
I haven’t got much that can be said, but I have too much that I want to say.
It’s not real. Shut the fuck up. Liposuction and Ozempic and filler and BBL and other fiction. Fiction, fiction. In Alberta, the capital city of Edmonton has banned The Handmaid’s Tale and 1984 in all public schools. Fiction, just fiction, but not so fictional anymore, or ever before.
THIS IS THE WAR OF OUR LIFETIME, AND THE LIFETIMES BEFORE IT.
I may as well stop doing my nails now, nail-less fingers being all the better for scrapping and fighting and scooping water from the great Canadian lakes where I will hide.
I will portage and canoe across the small lakes that become ponds and then marshes and almost grassland. Fallen trees become floating logs and gentle barricades. The croak of a toad or a smaller frog caught in my hands. He is frightened so I let him go.
Dusk is a long journey from light to dark. In northern Ontario, a love letter of a land, the almost-night is pale blue, almost violet, for what feels like an hour but is really only minutes. The orange before the purple, the setting of the sun: it silhouettes the wooded shore.
The spines of pine trees and oak trees illuminate, dark figures with heads and arms and legs, their black shadows across clear water that is as still as a grave.
I will return when the drill stops outside my window and I wake to silence, again able to breathe. Such is the war of Earth, greater than her brothers. The planet of great misgivings: this brave new world.
