Borges, El Revolutionario! (poem)

Preface: I have not written much in the last 2 months (since my last poem was posted) because I have been in constant motion, trying to barely scrape by financially, wanting to settle in somewhere, not knowing where or for what reason or how to begin. I was living on a farm in Mendocino County, California when I wrote this. It was inspired by a poem of Borges' that was used as the epitaph to my friend Kiran Desai's book, The Inheritance of Loss (which I recommend as an amazing portrait of the ghosts of colonialism in contemporary India, which I'm now looking at as an inspiration for my work in progress Continental Divide). It was also inspired by the restless, somewhat paranoid stirrings I've found rampant in Northern California. There seems to be a cultural split about the near future of America: either we're headed for the great Cosmic Consciousness Awakening that all spiritual beings have been praying for since the beginning of prayer...or we're headed toward something closer to the anarchic free-for-all perpetual civil war of Ciudad Juarez, a time defined by shortages of all necessities, perpetual drought and blight, rampant gun violence and a perpetual night of fear and suspicion. Which way we're headed, only time will tell. This poem addresses my feelings towards the current state of affairs.

Borges, El Revolutionario!

Walking gradually towards uncertain apocalypse

occasionally shedding nonessentials:

          old clothes, books I’ve already read, shoes.

the sound is disconcerting:

          ten thousand revolutionaries screaming

          to somehow get their platforms slipped in edgewise

                    the economy will collapse

                    ecosystems will collapse

the things we rely on like hinges in a door will one by one or all at once, all together, 

         collapse.

Or maybe not. 

Maybe it’s all just fine

        and this doomsday prophesy is just middleclass anxiety

        about identity and all of its unmentioned peripheral strings;

the seeping panic of a simple question,

the answer to which is either cosmological or arbitrary:

        given time and strength, what?

So I walk a nameless anybody with a voice now hoarse

        from declaring too many selves to unhearing, uncaring ears

with too many edits and hesitant reversals:

        a jerryrigged persona, whose day has finally come to be cashed;

the time of the body has passed 

the time of footprints in the snow is come

one pair

        trampled amidst ten thousand pairs

when every set of lips is a prophet in a world of one

and every action urgent

every ending imminent

within the long, 

         and lulling, 

                     meandering flow 

     of time.

9/18/2012 6:45 PM

Mendocino County, California