Days since the hypocritical plutocrat Pam Omidyar became aware she could save all the world’s whales from an agonizing death by exploding harpoon, backward dragging to drown, rifle shots to the head, and flensing with heated knives, and has done dick about it
June 22nd, 2010
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How exuberant the rally cap is.
Do you know the rally cap?
The rally cap is a baseball cap turned inside out
and placed on your head when your team is losing.
The idea is that change, any change, might presto a change
in your team.
So you look silly and it earns a home run.
So you lean one hand against the other and frame your voice
between the rafters of stars.
Prayer and the rally cap presume ears, the listening of God
or atomic structures.
You must do something, anything.
Say it’s the ninth inning and you’re down a passel of runs.
Say planes have flown into buildings and killed
how tall they were.
Say a storm has washed the color of a city away.
How do we ask the morning into our rooms?
Should we drop a fist into every conversation?
Does your bombing, sir, scold the catastrophes?
I love the rally cap.
It is the strangest verb I’ve ever seen on the head, a language
of please.
You must do something, anything.
Say you’re being chased by a train.
All you have to throw at the train is your breath.
You would throw your breath at the train, your embrace.
Flying breath and embraces
would fill this world of rabid locomotion.
It would do no good unless the train is afraid of this complicated air.
It would do no good unless you have an explosive embrace, a breath
that can speak to the train and ask it, why are you chasing him?
A grenade embrace, a reasonable breath are rare.
Yet you’d throw them because everything changes the world.
Waking up does, the cardigan did, and these flowers of stitching
among the crowd, the simple turning of the inside
to the outside, this willingness to become a symbol
of want, of desire for a thing: I admire this use of flesh.
There is an end, and how we get to the end is all that matters.
You must do something, anything.
Say it is possible that I hate you.
Say it is possible that I love you.
Say that we’re going to vanish and we know we’re going to vanish
but we haven’t vanished yet and we know we haven’t vanished yet.
What this leaves is time—another inning, a near infinity
of generations, of fucking things up
and fucking toward knowing more than we know now.
How to advance the runner without swinging the bat.
How to suture the wound with our lips.
How to take the scraps of touching the sky and touch the sky again.
The universe doesn’t know we exist.
So we tell it.
