Axes of Alliance
A poem by Daniel Carden Nemo
What spark there is seems to light the scene from either end.
In an interpreted world, you see what appears,
each day more, or less.
The tree shadows on mountaintops are large caterpillars.
The compound eye a vending machine.
The train window a skyway in which an arrow shoots through space.
When the arrow line is active
it creates divisions into imaginary planes--
Yet when moving round a vacuum
you’re hermetically sealed in
not all that much changes…
Nothing happens off the screen.
The layers and the dots are yours.
There’s no other law but the one you yourself have devised.
The initial impulse is extracted from
the new identity assumed [feelings you’re no longer feeling,
stimuli converted and proportioned
to avoid disturbance]
twelve-bar pneumatic reflex
in the condensation chamber
circulating like an echo
mornings when the mind is clumsy
and bumps into things.
Down the mountain
a man and a woman, light and darkness, slowly approach in a canoe.
First published in Dream Catcher