UPHEAVAL
(This poem was inspired by 'Darkness' by Lord Byron)
A malcontented earth will not make room
For the falling leaves anymore
Pine needles retaliate
Slicing straight into the ground
The world buckles
And will not keep the trees anymore
Shaking off the firm hold of their roots
They would gladly fall and rot
But the earth won’t have them
So they stand and teeter in the wind
Dead groundless root enraged.
Rivers seas lakes ponds throw all their life upon the leafless banks
They spit these infestations back onto beaches and banks
And everything would gladly rot
And wonderfully stink
But the earth wants less of flesh
Than it does with the now comically wobbling angry dying trees
So it bends to toss
All these bewildered lumps of life
Back into the worldly fluids
And such stubborn waters catch them
But to fling them back
So a constant hurling back and forth begins.
The planet itself refuses to look at the moon anymore
And whips it off into the sun
But the sun wants less of a dry dead world
Than it does of a wet green icy arrogant stone
So the moon makes for a different world
But none will have it
So in the deaf cold of empty space
The moon somehow rings with a groan and a wail
And wanders away
All the planets with satellites
Dismiss all their moons
And they soundlessly yip and yelp
With the bloodied tones of a dry fleshy bell
And wander away.
And now the sun strains to burn the brightest and hottest of all
To incinerate all the surrounding annoying dying debris
But all the worlds merely wilt a little
Not like flowers but like weeds scrubbed with boiling dew
They back off and off soon freezing solid
Solemnly they crack and quake
Sink back into the shadows of their own crystallized shapes
And wander away.
Even now the stars amidst the galaxy
Rush to meet and clash and fall down
On the hard bottom of the galactic spiral
Like exquisite dinner plates dropped from a mile high
No clatter heard nothing shattering
Only the noiseless spew of ceramic dust
Thus the spray of a stellar mist
Anoints its own desolation.
All dissolving galaxies seek the emptiness at crazy speeds
Completely intolerant of each other
Gassy splashes of crowded heat
Seeking the coolness of dissipation
And at long last stellar extinction.
Such infinite clusters that once chatted
About their own bright nude stars
Now scream over which way to go
And confuse and flustered
Collide and tear each other apart
So the universe once entire of itself
Is now the fragments of its own revulsion
Everything in it is repelled by everything in it
Each quark rebels
The atom is out
Nothing in
To bind is a sin
So everything is useless
The animal of matter and energy declawed
The thrust of the lusty skies above all the iced worlds desexed
Everything's out
Not just dead but out
Gone
Nothing’s around.
Until the thing least allowed
Born of the union of the last thought and the last thoughtless tear
Pulls up once again to the missing curb
Climbs out and spits
And smiles
It is the all
Whore and pimp and john
Ugly and callous and foolish and fat
The most despicable thing least allowed
Has come to make order
And quickly and truly and orderly
It is the death of beauty.
[RICHARD WILSON MOSS]
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