painting by Borg de Nobel
Yang Without Yin
“Every living creature on earth dies alone.”
--Roberta Sparrow
hey, big guy, yeah you
with those ridiculous long white ears,
Jesus, you must be over six feet tall,
and you have fresh blood on your neck fur
and dried blood on your little pink mouth,
twitching your whiskers and staring kindly
at me here in the dVerse Poet’s Pub, but
behind you in the huge bar mirror,
your actual visage resides,
ghoulish, monstrous, demonic, evil,
like that friend of Donnie Darko’s, Frank;
Donnie: Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit?
Frank: Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
Christ on a crutch, this is not the gentle Harvey
having a couple of beers with Elwood, hell no,
this is Frank, the lepus leper, the mirage,
the grand manipulator, Time’s muckraker,
Beezelbub’s berserker, saying
between jagged broken teeth
with his red eyes shining:
“28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, 12 seconds--that is
when the world ends.”
As they drove around in that aimless convertible,
they began to ask:
Is time travel simply an act of God?
Are extraterrestrials the real angels?
Do we really want to have the answers
to the big gnawing question, why are we here?
Q: Does anyone know who Graham Greene is?
A1: Come on, we have all seen Pa Cartwright on TV.
A2: Yeah, the Indian dude who played Kicking Bird in
DANCES WITH WOLVES.
A3: Some British jerk who wrote the screenplay for a movie
Richard Burton was in.
If we never had accepted the veil of forgetfulness,
if we knew our actual destiny, could see it clearly,
might we choose to betray it?
Frank: I tell you a storm is coming, and it will swallow
all the children.
But young Donnie tuned out the rabbit prophesies
and listened only to his father:
“Don’t listen to them, son. They are all part of this great
big conspiracy of bullshit.”
So Donnie Darko disregarded the prattling
of long-eared soothe-sayers and just went home
completely exhausted, pockets empty of answers,
and flopped onto his kid-sized bed
with its Hopalong Cassidy bedspread,
and immediately
began to dream about that broken off jet engine
hovering at 30,000 feet above his room, watching
it fall, fall, falling like a radio-controlled drone
directly toward his pillow,
as he finally saw the great serpent
preparing to eat its own tail.
Glenn Buttkus
August 2012
Posted over at dVerse Poets-Poetics
Would you like to hear the author read this poem to you?
6 comments:
With this you devour my morning mind in collision of thoughts that express so well
oh dang...what a story glenn...you took such a difficult topic and penned it down in in such a creative way..and ya know...i'm glad he listened to his father...
Golly..from "Harvey" to "Donnie Darko"...know both those films but you took this more to the dark side and all kinds of places in between. I thought for sure you may even throw in there reference to the Killer Rabbit from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"...but, no... Very entertaining!
wow man...stick it in a blender...this flowed image to image really well...i like the bunny as the dark destroyer...are we better for ignoring prophesy or...the world will end in its own time and when it does i will be ready, but unworried...
WOW what an amazing use you've made of it!
It's a real yin without yang- too bad and king of worrying...
These are very thought-provoking, Glenn:
"If we never had accepted the veil of forgetfulness,
if we knew our actual destiny, could see it clearly,
might we choose to betray it?"
"as he finally saw the great serpent
preparing to eat its own tail."
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