Take me back to the start
When the world had a heart.
Let the subdivisions
Fall to oblivion
As kings wait patiently
For the public buses.
The dizzy drunkenness
Of the lioness cub
Shocks the perched bald eagle
As he swallows the world

RUSH
"SUBDIVISIONS"
Words by Neil Peart, Music by Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson

The Trees
There is unrest in the forest,
There is trouble with the trees,
For the maples want more sunlight
And the oaks ignore their pleas.
The trouble with the maples,
(And they're quite convinced the're right)
They say the oaks are just too lofty
And they grab up all the light.
But the oaks can't help their feelings
If they like the way they're made.
And they wonder why the maples
Can't be happy in their shade?
There is trouble in the Forest
And the creatures all have fled
As the Maples scream 'Oppression!'
And the Oaks, just shake their heads
So the maples formed a union
And demanded equal rights.
'These oaks are just too greedy;
We will make them give us light.'
Now there's no more oak oppression,
For they passed a noble law,
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet,
Axe,
And saw.
by Rush

This was once all that we knew.

A world in parts before we knew

     it

as such subdivisions as this, that and

more beneath that still: there was

once good and evil, god and them,

the rest of us, and

Jesus, simply looking upwards after

he flung himself forth from the dust

to the sky and the light was bleached

off and the colours leaked from our

eyes to our canvases. What more

can I say before we take more

of ourselves away from each other? What more

before you implant me into some other's

body, and the prayer completed,

and I am finally a computer? In

the meanwhile my eyes will look and

my neck will strain as the sun sets and

so does my little life: how long have I

wanted to see you again, o lord, since

my first scream of myself all so long

ago when I left my mother's salt

and was flashed into the flood of your

      world?

How long, o lord, will you have me here

to see your work through these ceiling

songs, such sonorous ringings, fleshy

twists and turns of paint as muscle

and what's that behind the cloud?

     Your finger

appareled in such golden rays?

Endless. When your ships brought such

dark skin as mine across these

times and spaces, what?, where you

surprised of my dreams to see it,

     this,

all engulfed in flames?  And

yet here you are and here I am and

here is the quiet my birth your

glory your joy the brushstrokes

the colours and the full fleshy taste

of my non-belief, leaking into my fingers,

sticky, frisk, and always.


    When I leave these, they will fall

and crumble. It will all go. In the hallways,

as I walk away: several big windows:

     Rome, sunset.

    When I leave these, they will go

and disappear. Into salt. Those large windows:

blue-shadowed branches begin some small slow dance.

     When I leave these temples they will dust

and return to dust the soil of our hands.

And the trees remain beautiful.

i am lost in the wisp of your faltering
the fluttering of concrete entrenched
into stoic rigmarole

to reach out layer by layer
peeling unearthing
a catatonic subdivision of disjoint subdivisions
a limit ordinal
between touch and feeling

where we kiss on the cusp of that silent ocean on the edge of sound
drowned in the nebulous familiarity of
a distant melody
a tired resolve
re  solve the old puzzle  muscle memory's misted amnesia
half the pieces falling out the warn tinderbox

inarticulate drowned severed isomorphisms over
brea(d)thless infinities
self adjoint matted topologies
nestled snugly in the amniotic absolution
of form before being

      hands of matted ice
contorted into perfection
by the sculpting propensities
  of undulations of estrangement,

where we touch in the cusp of self reflections thousand mirrors inverted propensities
                        infinite infinitesimals
  nestled meromorphic partitions
hidden corners in the brevity of dusk
multiplicities fragmenting behind empty veils
(  to be seen is to be made discrete
   to be discrete is to flicker
                                     and disappear
  (inevitably invariable
          inevitable invariability))

we
       stand in a waterfall of gravel
   and drown our voices in the choke of our cellophane hearts

caked
             into fillets of aphasic tundra


  where we whisper our nothings in the desert on the boundary of silence

our words
                         escape us
           like rats from shipwreck


                                      we are
                       disembowelled catharsis
                           intentional and fatuous
                                   retching upon itself

       severed
and free
       and dead

FLAT lands on the end of town where real estate men are crying new subdivisions,
The sunsets pour blood and fire over you hundreds and hundreds of nights, flat lands-blood and fire of sunsets thousands of years have been pouring over you.
And the stars follow the sunsets. One gold star. A shower of blue stars. Blurs of white and gray stars. Vast marching processions of stars arching over you flat lands where frogs sob this April night.
"Lots for Sale-Easy Terms" run letters painted on a board-and the stars wheel onward, the frogs sob this April night.

I am from my grandmother,who snuck out of the house to smoke camel non-filtered

I am from the middle of nowhere, not far from town.

I am from the pine tree with a water hose tied on it, where I imagined  I was Indiana Jones.

I am from the woods, where the cicadas sang at night.

I am from the kudzu that blanketed the trees and menaced the garden.

I am from the apple trees in the front yard, whose fruit                         never turned red.

I am from the middle of nowhere, not far from town.

I am from my grandfather’s plaid pockets, where he would pull out                     suckers.

I am from my father’s mustang that i crashed into the driveway.

I am from my great-grandfather’s picture, proudly displayed on the              wooden mantle.

I am from my grandmother’s bible stories, in the back bedroom where she read every night.

I am from the middle of nowhere, not far from town.

I am from Highway 494, where the trees were leveled to build subdivisions.

I am from the soft red clay and moist brown earth of the backyard.

I am from the moonlight I could see from the top of my house late at night.

I am from the sweltering heat and uncut grass in the front yard.

I am from the middle of nowhere, not far from town.

I am from the small cemetary past the corner store, where my grandfather      lies next to my grandmother,

and my father next to her.

I am from Uptown New Orleans, where my daughter learns her A.B.C’s in the back bedroom

where she prays every night

I am from the brown bag from the Shell station that i fill with suckers, and sneak to her when her mom isn’t watching.

I am from the picture of us dancing at a music festival, her on my shoulders, displayed proudly on the wooden mantle.

I am not from from anywhere, in the middle of town

how sensible it all seems, how crew-cut and with enough
anaesthetic to k.o. an elephant - outside the laboratories
the populists in whatever guise march on - as with any
congregation, atheists also muster up enough social muscle:
they too have their bouncers and other
gob-smackers with knuckle dusters -
as long as science is popularised it pushes
the boundaries of insensible chasms elsewhere -
                             but with so futile popularisation:
shortages in respective sectors: mandatory,
or as suggested: no longer rich bachelors and
         private laboratories - a science of regurgitation -
once they burned heretics, now the subtle
        championing of mingy sedatives - and since
Joan of Arc's heart no longer aspires to passion
and its all consuming fire, it turns into a wet
piece of coal - reining in the crowds of pop culture
zombies - said before, said again - but how
dislodged the feelings not ranging into absurdity
or at least nibbling on the zest of Dionysus;
but how things changed from that year, 2006,
everyone is asking, the poncy pope with glamorous
attire, the stiff-necked scientists - the pendulum
of guilt swinging in both directions - half of
the 20th century prescribed a fear magnanimously:
oddly enough - as implying: we forgive your
puny religious swooning and answering with
the easiest answers possible... here's a bomb -
so who are the sacred ones? they too are human -
the magazine dissected into:
a. what is reality? (can we be sure that the world
  we experience is not just a figment of our
    imagination) by roger penrose
     b. do we have free will? (the more we find
out about the brain works, the less room there
  seems to be for personal choice or responsibility)
     by patricia churchland
c. what is life? (if we encounter alien life,
chances are we wouldn't recognise it - not even
if it was here on earth) by robert hazen
d. is the universe deterministic?
   (however you look at it, the answer seems to be "maybe")
       by vlatko vedral
   e. what is consciousness? ("my soul is a hidden
    orchestra... all i hear is the music" - fernando pessoa)
            by paul brooks
f. will we ever have a theory of everything?
    (2000 years of rational inquiry may be approaching
  their crowning glory. just one more push could
   be enough...)
                            by michio kaku
   g. what happens after you die? (we have all
  wondered if there is an afterlife, but only a few are brave -
or foolish - enough to try and find out)
                                by mary roach
  h. what comes after **** sapiens?
  (all species are fated either to die out or to evolve
  into something else. all except humans, that is)
                   by james hughes -
so there we have it - the respective pillars of science,
whereby science replaces core beliefs into
core questions - to not hold firm, but to constantly
sway - the 8 founding questions - no more,
  no less - but how many people can perpetually sway?
   the supposed 8 universals, i.e. that every human
  being might, might not, will or will not ask -
     and for these 8 universals, exponential functions
of particulars: because that's how it's supposed
to be: chaotically democratic -
thus everyone knows the objectivity standard:
at its core is awe, outside the core pathology and
apathy - or let us say: passions and indifference -
then subdivisions of (+) and (-), and in general:
   however it is you feel: compensated or left starving.
in 2006, they congregated at a round table and
spoke god-this, god-that - no minority report,
  cold evidence never went down with women (or
so i'm told), three questions, question 1:
                 should science do away with religion?
oddly enough R. Dawkins said:
               "no doubt there are many people who do need
religion, and far be it from me to pull the rug from
under their feet." - we know that the bestseller
              the god delusion came out shortly after.
a physicist (S. Weinberg) similarly (c me la ri lee):
   "science can't provide a sense of magic about the world,
or a community of fellow-believers. there's a
religious mentality that yearns for that."
  L. Krauss: the success of science does not encompass
the entirety of human intellectual experience.
on and on this goes - i guess they have to debate for
the sake of debate - as i am sure everyone is aware:
   a debate can overpower the point of prayer -
confessions? i treat it more like poetry - but in saying
that... where is the medical profession in all of this?
we have astronomers, ecologists, biologists,
physicists, astrophysicists, planetary scientists,
cosmologists, philosophers... what's the odd one out?
it's a bit suspicious that this magazine does not
cite any chemists... and that's ****** obvious...
they're the ones making pacts with the devil -
whether Goethe's or Marlowe's Faust -
then at least to the more obscure rendition
of Pan Twardowski (Herr Tvardovsky) -
         but how odd it already is that chemists haven't
joined ranks with other scientists in their little
Friday night debating club meetings - seriously?
are those boffins serious about all of this?
            or as one said it:
i came from learning to write CO for carbon monoxide,
   and FeO for ferric oxide - or drawing electron migration
  diagrams when two compounds interact (a nice
playground of symbols) and went my way into
   some form of linguistics - primarily working on
          the tetragrammaton - i have no major interest
beyond this definition: would i debate the most
difficult metaphysical assumption of the omni-variations
in terms of ascribing the variations to a being?
i'd stumble in the metaphysical world on omnipresence,
meaning i would be a pantheist - meaning god
    would be anything and everything from the moon,
a mouse, an ant colony, my **** and what not -
            the all-in-one: for one thing, that's already much
too hellish to comprehend, let alone make comedy from.
but they haven't told you about the painkilling
saliva that beats morphine - catherine rougeo:
proceedings of the national academy of sciences,
vol. 103, p. 17979) - the compound's name? opiorphin,
or the scourge of Afghanistan. they also didn't
tell you about Saracen sabres - their scimitars contained
carbon nanotubes - forged from Indian steel
called wootz - 17th century examples studied by
P. Paufler (Dresden) found the carbon nanotubes
and even nanowires (nature, vol. 444, p. 286) -
or is this becoming to look very much like traffic
on London's M25 during rush-hour? it certainly is,
as was intended -
                   1950s: age of optimism -
influenza wave from the east, the indestructible transistor,
   television without wires, baby computer the size of
  a piano, rubber windshields, genetic chemistry,
atomic aircraft, the neutrino, sputnik 1, strontium-90
(radioactive ash)  used by manufacturers of woven
and knitted fabrics to overcome fog markings,
the coleopter, polypropylene (the remnants of German
word-compounding revealed in chemistry, and
only in chemistry, elsewhere compounding is
replaced by hyphenation, i.e. hyphenating),
                  and so on and so forth until present day -
passing through Sir, Julian, Huxley, who reinvented
****** with "positive" eugenics - oh sure, it was still
alive and kicking - quark hunters draw a blank -
             i could reference all else that was involved
in making the last 60 years - beyond that people are
call it ancient history - or are Virgil and as Horace,
and as Ovid did - turned their back to the world,
         into their poplar groves and jasmine filled gardens,
and said: ta'oh!           ta'oh!                 Tao!
  but not until then, before embarking i'm already
dreading to embark with something to add, to even
voice this -                                     but i guess i might:
  as ever, the freedom of speech is never as grand a
                                      luxury as the freedom to think.

Do you see what I see?
We have descended into the belly of the beast.

Houses crowd together, their dead eyes staring out.
They’ve sprung up overnight like

Ugly toadstools.
The machines on the hill are busy

Scraping away the old. By that I mean
What was there before,

A forest naturally,
And putting up these monstrosities instead.

It can’t be let well enough alone.
There are too many people and someone’s got to make a buck.

The world burns down to the filter.
We suffer the fevers of the dry needle people,

And are left with what has been
Torn out from under us.

Some privy chair propped us up with potions.
Dutiful pawns, riding the arcs they have fashioned,

They pay us a small ransom
To cull and sell their wares.

Simple sticks and carrots are not enough to wake us.
The damage thus wrought we pay no mind to –

Subdivisions, shopping malls, parking lots.
There are too many people and someone has to pay.