under the creaking shifting weight of a hundred billion words

Performed at Poet's Corner - Pages Cafe at the WA State Library, February 16, 2008

under the creaking shifting weight
of a hundred billion words: we sit we sip

in this central aromatic structure
this giggling monastic carbonated room
this carpeted annexe of caffeine
ink and sugar and cream and pages

all the roads and rails lead here
to this ambrosial concrete space
a footpath prayer to the lactose
and storage of lipids
those ceramic word separators
those little packets of essential carbohydrate

we sip under the histrionic canister
of shelves of shelves of shelves
we sit n stare through the temporal utterings
of this - the cultural light

a drooling echo of blanket willingness
a fractured window filled with educated pedestrians
unable to consume all meanings at once
like a hallucinogenic crystalline title
like a solidified footnoted poem
a reader, a writer, a speaker, an etching
an unspoken convergence of us
a realtime advertisement for watches

a psilocybinistic celebration
oh monomythic word
ohm ohm ohm
we sit we sip we sit we sip

stand and deliver
he said, in public reflection:
all hail ye to the angels
of post-structuralist textual expression
nay this thy ego disintegration, dude
these thousand words for you
oh gangs of nouns and figures and graphs
and adverbial connotation
the corporeal assonance
oh hear the contextual summoning, mate

author: can you feel it
the paper, the plastic, the binding, the edges
the petro-chemical electronic hum of us here
the chronic history of these telekinetic wordscapes
wrapped in epic rock stance
this swagger and thrust
of academic lust
and technique
and diction
and dust

oh collection of leaves
hurtling through bitter freeways of veins
our esoteric ramblings
bending, heaving westward
to the coastal forest of words

and books and books and books and books
we sit we sip we sit we sip
under the creaking shifting weight of a hundred billion words

some denying the ancients stories
the crimson fettered massacres, an ochre river
of black skin and white ideological forms
ignored as a holocaust fabrication
a little aussie culture battler
a violent synesthesia of history war
a fair dinkum blackened armband version

that these sun-burnt broken station fences
need not reveal a truth
that these tomes breed us - all here
under this scripted boomtown ceiling

and we burn the ones who disagree with ease
in piles of flames and disease
yet these leaves, this sheet, this page
a rustle of bibliophilic rage

yes we sit we sip we sit we sip
under the creaking shifting weight of a hundred billion words

aware the frozen block-universe
a single pre-existing
ever-existing future is wearing thin
and sacred sites are rarely random
she wrote of vivid nourishing terrains

under the creaking shifting weight of a hundred billion words
we sit we sip we sit we sip

our vacant obese skeletal bodies
hurling sentence after sodden sentence
of brazen self-aggrandisement
tearing strips of busted, bloody
brutish english language

that queens not mine, she said
not bloody legal, she said
of our glassy, robust limbs
and wrinkling skin and signs
a challenge here
our lips and tongues and ears
failing to resolve these fragments

all manufactured trees
the reverberating bark
of understanding
of signifiers
this barren semiotic orgasm

under the creaking shifting weight of a hundred billion words
we sit we sip we sit we sip

a calculation of deliberate misreadings,
without form or function
we breathe the air-conditioned reality
the bing-dinging whisperers
the foyer security never trusting a bag
as the fossil fuel collapse gets beyond grasp
a suicidal mother, bleeding of this
a battered social institution
a glacial redundancy
a cap-rocked cult
of global ecological ignorance

under the creaking shifting weight of a hundred billion words
we sit we sip we sit we sip

and the bibliomaniacal capital groupthink creeps in
a cabinet spilling street-fighter consoles
a lighthouse of ideas
like a formaldehyde dreaming
a chloroform kansas
hey dorothy our brothers are bitumen deserts
white lines of you cut up
and hammered til pulp and injected spaces
rendering a speed-reader dull
yr busted hand littered with paper-cuts

and then you are this:
a crack pipe renaissance
a credit-driven existence
a crumpled chapter
a battered pamphlet
a crushed stone petroglyph
of answers without questions
a dead ledger
a novel product
a manual of abstract clarification

until the word stops
the back cover looms
the lights fail

and we sit we sip

under the creaking shifting weight of a hundred billion words

we sit we sip we sip
we sit we sip we sip

----

allan boyd (antipoet) - written and performed february 16, 2008
poets corner - pages café, state library wa

allan boyd
heathridge, wa
0402 573 580
antipoet@radicalhack.com
www.antipoet.blogspot.com