Zachary Bos
The Storm

the storm
from skies
but darkly
like irises
and softly
like owls
the clouds
are cats
and they
jump quick
in white
stripes often
into water
the river
is broken
into slivers
they cut
at shores
carry waves
and shake
under rain.

Making

I am the uncurled expression
Of a billion years of selfishness
Pushing back before I and time
Molecules mixed in primordial swells
Coordinated their alchemical balance
Based on nothing more than themselves
It is the nature of the thing to be the thing
It-is-it identity our crucible for the unraveling of minds

The float and spark, charging the darkness
With self-complexities
Build chains of ichor and gel into skins and sacs
Bulging, pulsing, with molecular weights
The thrusting pressures of molarities
Thick and viscous like semen
And potential-bound like egg

The swamp-sea condenses into discretion,
                  dividing this-me from that-you
The wigglings of smallest creatures
                 in the slipping tides of physics.
Competition abounds among the fish,
                 among the mud-eaters and the slick-tunnelers
The weakest shrivel, evaporate into fertile shelves,
                 deposit their bones in stone

The stronger churn the oceans,
                 chop the wave into the banks and the banks into trails
Beat down paths through the rock and lay down their bodies
                 for the soils of their children
The sun now sees them
                 and boils them in their scales
They exhale steams that were once seas,
                 they devour underbrush that was once stars
Into the dark they strike their teeth
                  against the throbbing heat of other blood
And out of the dark they stagger two-legged,
                 still bloody, still hot, their primordial tissues
Bbound up in twists of neophyte cerebrus

Their shriekings become songs, their fires become eyes
They extend their slender limbs build lightning out of corpses
They speak after ten billion deaths and eons of sleep,

We are the words written in electrons,
We are the ends of spinning cosmic strings,
We are the unbound fortunes of the molecular prophecies

And I am alive, uncurled, selfish and shivering, fundamentally moist
I inhale death and I excrete as briefly as the spins of stars,
                 and educate my loins to dig their claws into tomorrow's meats

I am man and mainly acids, and uncurling is all that I am.

Ivy Walls and Off We Fall

We all went to the akademy
To expand horizons and set our minds free
We learned that podiums are for ped-an-try,
That's what we learned, at the akademy.

We bought it all on margin, cheap
We stayed up studying instead of sleep
They fed us lies and we ate it all
At the akademy

We woke up students -- by night we were scholars!
On our self-polished pedestals
We stood a little taller...
With our expensive, western, educations
We built our castles, we laid foundations;
Hung our pediments
On pillars of purple prose
We wrapped ourselves in manuscripts
Wore laurel garlands instead of clothes
And when we went to classes...
-- IF we went to classes...
We only paid attention if we chose.

See, they taught us we were perfect
We abandoned adolescence to become firm academics
WE were true to ourselves, we worked very hard,
So they taught us to stack up books and stand above stars.

That is what they taught
But not exactly what they wrought.
Their audience didn't hear
What they intended -- nowhere near.

What we learned was quite different
That they were foolish liars.
They said they were intelligent, successful...
But we found they were just triers.
They escaped from the world into ivory towers
Became pedants and pundits, isolated minds and opinionated powers.

They didn't know shit, that was all, that was it...

They gave us the books and their spectacled looks,
All WE could see though was the Siamese twins there
Of False Hoping, False Helping, attached at the hip.
With all of their cold degrees, they always thought...but did they care?
A Ph.D. doesn't make you a captain,
It makes you a bit more like the rats on the ship.

People are starving, stupid, and dying....
The professors have answers, but the professors ain't trying
We, the Youth, want it to Stop,
So we went to the top.

"Herr Direktor, Herr Direktor,
Why do not we get together? Hold Hands, and sing songs and everybody get along?
Herr Direktor, Good Professor, why do not we come together? And sing songs, and hold hands, And everybody try to understand?
We've got funding, we've got brains
We can salve the planet's pains.
Give us all our A's so we can make aims,
Take time to Find A Way!"

But the old men, they just laughed
"Sure on paper it sounds so fine,
But all this effort spent in protest,
Foolish Youth! a waste of time."

Freshmen, we went in wanting answers
When we got there, we had to question
The legitimacy and the worth of au-tho-ri-ty
When we tried to make our coup
When we did what we could do
They threw us out on our ears
With a C-, and four wasted years.

At the akademy of higher thinking
We learned the world is stinking
With men in upper positions
Who never make improvements?
Only "Suggestions," "Requisitions."

So we stepped up the fight
And got promoted outside the ring
We let go of each other's hands,
After graduation, we forgot how to sing.
Authority jaded us, adulthood wore and faded us
We put down our posters and picked up our purses, our pinstripes, our pens.
We wrote checks for future students,
At alma mater akademy
After years of defiance
We became authority like them
We are lawyers
We are doctors
Businessmen and
Proctors
Presidents and architects of mental institutions
We forgo all activism, our moral constitutions,
And accept without dissent the myths of middle age
We forget all our defiance
And remember only keggers, coeds, never optimism.
What we tried to be
At the akademy,
We all forget, forever.

<< Back to Issue 4, 2002