Published Winter 2005
 
The Millenium Ball
As the millennium approaches, my family goes incrementally crazy.
My brother has sex all the time. And my sisters dig furiously
for the saint my mother has buried in her backyard.
Believe me when I say this: I am writing like there's no tomorrow.
At the New Year's celebration everyone wears name tags: Hi, My name
is John Apocalypse. Have a nice day. Hi, I am the Whore of Babylon.
Can I get you anything? The media are compiling lists: the 100 most significant
inventions; 100 most important women; 100 greatest events.
Mentally disturbed Millennium Pilgrims, convinced they are characters
from the bible, have flocked to the Holy Land.
I'm compiling my own lists: The 100 worst atrocities; the 100 craziest
people of the century; the 100 best Biblical names no one uses anymore.
America distracts me with its music and its mess. It is always as if somebody
has to say something. This was the Age of Annihilation. The age of the pink eraser.
30 million people killed in war; 170 million civilians massacred by states. All on prime
time. The century is awash in victims who carry their own lists through
the Unclear Age. My sisters are getting more desperate for something holy to rescue
us. Their eyes are solemn. They dig all day and night with their sad mud hearts.
Hi, I'm the hole in the ozone layer. Hi, I'm a commodity.
Hi, my name is pornography. My name is Joseph Goebbels. I'm in advertising.
Hi, I'm late capitalist America. I'm the Age of Irony and rolled eyes.
My sisters believe in the hole they are digging—create a field guide of the backyard.
My brother is composing a poem to all the women he is making love to.
He is using the word hope as if it is where he puts his penis.
Heraclitus used the term enantiodramia to describe
the moment a condition reaches its zenith and collapses into its opposite.
Hi, I'm Rwanda. I'm Cambodia. I'm Stalin. I'm pesticide. I'm Vietnam.
I'm World, Inc. I'm Nagasaki, I'm Chernobyl. Have a nice century.
My sisters are finding more bottles than bones. I'm afraid they will
not give up before they find something terrible. A monumental ache.
A colossal stain. A dark spreading dye. An ominous blot inside
a whiskey colored bottle. The following is a list of my 100 best lists:
100 best excuses; 100 most efficient diseases;100 greatest things made ofplastic.
Time is a skin—bruised and stitched and branded. What is before us
is not yet inhabited. Hi, I'm the million tribes you've tried to shatter.
Hi, I'm what Rilke calls the "ancient terrors." I'm the patron saint
of Apartheid. One of my sisters believes the antichrist is in a rock band
called Mehelhteb—which is Bethlehem spelled backwards.
Because this is America, land of fabulous cash and prizes, land of prime time,
it will all eventually come down to my ability to hit a buzzer quickly.
I've given you a list of my 100 favorite time saving devices;
the 100 favorite sexual positions from a variety of species.
Hi, I'm Endtime. I am the Disappeared. I am the Killing Fields.
I'm Aids, I'm famine, I'm East Timor, I'm Self-absorption.
.
How many of the fake biblical characters are atheists? They must be
exhausted, their visions like rocky water bumping out of them all the time.
Ultimately we would be better off if we were composing a field guide
to the Sixth Extinction. We need desperately to understand what will be missing;
we need to be able to recognize the huge holes we've left behind. We've vacuumed
the oceans, vacuumed the forests, vacuumed the sky. Did I mention what we did
to our brains. Hi, I'm the third world; I'm hunger; I'm an assassin's bullet,
a terrorist's bomb. Hi, I'm Belsen, I'm Treblinka, I'm the Gulag, I'm My Lai.
I'm Tiananmen Square. Eventually through cosmetic surgery, Botox, collagen,
and injectable fillers, we will look alike—either John the Baptist or Mary Magdalene.
Goodbye, sweet Hiroshima. Goodbye, sweet ozone. Goodbye, sad rainforest.
When will we hang our going out of business sign on the door of the 20th century?
My mother prays to Saint Anthony that he will help us find the lost saint.
My brother is searching for the patron saint of female ejaculation.
Hi, I'm the save button. Hi, I'm rapture, I'm ravage, I'm ache.
I'm the Balkans, I'm Kristallnacht. Hi, I'm Easy Street. Hi, I'm Dead End.
Sometimes I pray that we will not run out of room on our TV's for all
the things we need to see: the soon to be extinct.
Goodbye Emma Goldman and Carl Jung and Bob Dylan and Mohammed Ali.
Armageddon is for sale. Angel wings clog up the sky. Mr. Heraclitus was right.
Hope touches despair. Particle becomes wave. Male merges into female. My sisters
move through roots and mud—their fingers gnarled in the hollow dirt house.
They sink an icehole into the soul of the saint—an archive, a bomb shelter.
Each word is a time capsule. Every sperm and egg is a time capsule.
Hi, I'm DNA. My brother staggers—stunned by the interludes of beauty.
I've decided to have another mouth. The old mouth just isn't adequate
for what I have to say. It is the hole my sisters have dug.
We sit trembling inside our concrete tents. Time takes the shape of its container.
I am an experiment with this poem as an exit wound. Dreams make sounds
inside the head: the tiny bell, the tiny horse with its tinny clopclop like rain falling.
Sweet wreckage. Mr. Heraclitus, let me introduce you. Hi, I am Time and Space.
Hi, I am Birth and Death. Eros makes love to Thanatos while Freud
wantonly watches. In the Holy Land they are running out of space in their asylums.
Just suppose the Millennium Pilgrims aren't crazy. Suppose those who say
they are Moses and Ruth and Abraham are really Moses and Ruth and Abraham—
though heavily medicated, strapped in chairs, rocking away to some sinister
celestial music that sounds more like the theme song for a Game Show
whose ultimate prize is your soul. And no one ever wins.
My brother lives in a condition of awe. I'm making a list of the 100 best elegies.
I write a field guide for the seventh extinction—the one where we vanish.
Time is held by tongs. We are the exhaust of the 20th century.
Hi, I'm Thomas Hardy. Hi, I'm the hole my sisters dig. Forgive us.
Hi, I'm Heraclitus. The end of the road is the beginning of time.
The sky sizzles with fear and celebration. Hi, I am my brother. Hi, I am my sisters.
Hi, I am the last poem of the century, and I swallowed everything up. Sorry.
We wear party hats and blow incredibly large golden trumpets.
In the Holy Land they are running out of time—so immersed in the present,
they forget to ask: Who is coming after us?
Believe me when I say this: I'm writing like there's a tomorrow.
Goodbye, sweet Whore of Babylon. I'll see you in another 100 years. |
