Fists on Fire: Poetry from the Heart of the Revolution

THE ETHER ARCANE

by Jack Hirschman

1.

Motion that might,
out of hand, sporadically
yet potentially from any direction,
gather to a tide and become
a movement…

Listen, eyes, this is your first reception in the new ether,
got to by drinking the wine of song through your pupils,
and pouring energy out through your fingers.

I begin at the end and in the middle at the same time,
lift Bradford in my palm, shake it like one of those winter scenes
in a glass ball, and watch the races mingle as they fall
in diverse harmony.

Old world, it’s you now who’re dead.
And this isn’t a submission to a porno site.
Trotsky could be standing
in gangbang space, beside Costner
and Jackson and Hitler,
all with cocks erect
and a bevy of beautiful women be
sucking them off.

I’m in the process
of submission to what makes the clock of this
dielectric tick, this 4th dimensional instrument
of concrete bond and beyonding,

seeing the river Lingasharira
rush up the mountain
with all my different faces that have gazed into it
throughout this life,

showing me the whole of myself
the way I’ve never seen,

anonymizing every icon,
leveling all hierarchies,
taking history by the scruff of its neck
and carrying it to the kennel
of nightmares,
opening the throat of song
behind the eyes,
whispering even to children:

Let’s take a scroll
through the universe

because within each and all
the voice of words
can be seen!

It is ground sky
with waves of light
bowing and raining down

zeroes and ones
charged with magic.

I take from the world
and transfer its energies onto this page
as a poem. But this medium itself takes
from the universe at my touch
and shows me the poem as light.
The ink has been changed to light!

The textured crags and grit of this Yorkshire street.
A child’s tongue screaming with pleasure
as it licks the cheek of ice-cream in a cone.
The etymology of hue.
Values have tumbled to last.

Have tumbled to last. Fallen and enduring
in the loss of the old way of dying
short of attaining the ancient new.

Go to Part 2