I sit on a rock and ponder,
and skip pebbles across the lake,
and try to ignore how cold it is getting
as the sun wanes in the west.
Everything here is peaceful, still,
the trees waving their autumn branches in the growing dark,
a dingy gull dragging its dinner to shore,
and skittish deer racing through the yellow grass
too far away to see, but I sense them.
All nature is in conversation with itself,
and sometimes I can eavesdrop,
catch a sentence or three.
Lately I haven’t liked what I hear.
It’s like snatches of Eliot and Pound,
random, violent, strange and incohere;
on nights such as this
it is more Borges, Bataille and Baudelaire.
I struggle with writing this;
I have three other books in the works,
but I keep coming back to this one,
this place, this pregnant moment.
I know why, and that worries me more.
How much of what I’ve seen and dreamed
am I permitted to put on the page?
All, and they’ll consider me a liar and worse. I mean,
this isn’t just a glow in the dark duck we’re talking about here.
If I report clear and true, it won’t matter
what side I’m on, or how I feel about it all
– they’ll blame the messenger,
and come with pitchforks and torches aplenty.
Fascist, misogynist, transphobe, Islamaphobe,
and whatever new slur they’ve concocted
to silence those they’ve judged guilty of wrongthink.
But I don’t care; that fight is not mine to fight.
The punishment will be having to live in the world they create.
There’s a greater war upon the horizon,
and Dionysos is marshalling his troops.
Like a latter-day Nonnos I’ve been tasked
with making a record, in case there’s anything left
after the Giants fall.
“Shit’s about to get mighty weird,” I say,
getting up from the rock, where I’ve sat too long
trying to put off the inevitable. I strip down to my tattoos
and take a running leap into the lake, shouting
“Io evohe, motherfuckers! The Game is on!”
