WORD / WORLD

When dwelling in the dark. The painfulness either of
a bear paw waving over a stuffed hump, or the audio
mixing with the moan of a deceased child
actor whose fearlessness was childish. Terror
not in explosions but hearts
who defend hearts against hate
calling hate a kind of love.
The girl says conspiracy theories make her try not to hate humans
disclosing the limit of her patience, and
a man’s love of bears is revealed as autism,
who can insist upon knowing anything,
how to get up.
I remember giving
up along an axis of origins, a dull planing
of grief that it should be so
difficult to walk through a palate of rot like it’s nothing. How some filters allow
a person to hide from an ugly world and believe in beauty and how beauty
is the result of a long built and painstaking wildness, or neither.
A lightness in atoms
isn’t enough
protection. There are these words like civilization.
People say a word like flag. I pick my teeth
high up in the hills.
A person can rise
through the weight of a smog of words
or exploded oil, where ears
and lungs take the bait.
Steel world, a bolt through my ear.
Asphalt world, cloth in my mouth.

But how uncanny that I should be pressing ‘stop’ on the grizzly bear DVD
just as a grizzly bear documentary is beginning on the BBC.
Our integration left us clueless
about everything except the private miseries of an adventure team,
knowledge subject to the passage of time.  We’re not
together, we know ourselves apart, apartheid of beasts.
Is it animal half interested in food
or a mothering instinct we might share.
Bears get shirty, do whatever, a rising tide of consciousness
is shirty and/or sensitive, the weather and chemicals
flow in. Then someone adds narrative,
tugs away on feelings. Then you die chemically,
someone sees dragons in the sky.
In real life they are divebombed by eagles
and I walk saying I believe
in something beginning with mal
and holding dolor in a pall
when he’s murdered and the justice
only depends.