Filing Away at the Crypts

...for john shirley

I'm concerned about this widespread proliferation of subscribing online to a succession of descending platforms which, as only a few of us seem to know (or succeed at remembering), at least for now, is really just an unfolding series of folders, blossoming out like petals in an endlessly generated forest of pixilated flora blooming into the black of the deep dark web.

For that is where we've found ourselves all this time wondering while logging away online to ourselves what's this deep web I keep hearing about well stop wondering today kid cuz it's the oceanic tomb we've already adapted ourselves to breathe in quite well the question remains are we prepared to lie down in it and sleep forever I mean this deep down bed we've made.

Trying to keep my free flow thinking contained within the strictures of four line stanzas I hope that breaks it up more or less evenly so that anyone reading this might follow along with me so help us out and sing this song together its a spell bound to break their hold on us after we couldn't stand the weather long enough to revolt outside so try to remember just one thing.

The web they spin a snare a trap of silken digital threads enwrapped about us each and every day a glittery cocoon in which we gladly lay and think that while we're hooked in line and sinker we can spread our message to the world all the while quite blind to the fact the world itself is not online the world still howls and bites and thrives and holds no more memory than you or I.

And all that data cached in the cloud remains a blurred reflection whispered loud inside a cellar locked up tight where sleepless zombies dream overnight in fitful starts and silent ends where no one notices or pretends to even remember you once were friends it's like stumbling inside one of your own bad dreams and getting lost in it entirely and not waking up.

I wrote this just for you my friend [john shirley] you got smart and minnow-slipped out through an eyelet in the netting now I'm left behind temporarily trying to find a footing in the ever shifting multiplex of the online book of visages each and every page the stretched out skin of someone's face you used to know a mummified leaf in the wailing-wall vortex of a shutting tomb.

Seventh League

Into the seventh storm
Beyond a pale ordinary morning
Stretched into the indigo of the day
Belonging in this new continuum
A part of us sunken deeper into chasms
While the rest of our body ascends on the way
Up toward the stratosphere's neighboring layers
Of varying electromagnetic signatures beckoning
The clouds to get underway and permit silent passage
To further escalate up to the exosphere into the stratum
Of satellites, thin hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, helium, etc.
These leagues may be counted from both directions in the
Same manner as planet Earth might be considered the sixth
Planet inward from Neptune (as classically the outermost

world as the E-string on an acoustic guitar) far out enough
To balance the scale of octaves from the music of the spheres
That's been emanating from our rather youthful parent star
For as long as we've been humming around these grounds
Stretched out beneath the Northern Lights with our worn
Out memories that will never fade only brighten like the
Tryst rings on our fingers that will linger in our minds
After turning all the pages in the book of poems
Of our stories having nourished us with astral
Light from the beginning of our lives
In this ancient substratum we are
Extended into the orange dusk
Before a bright odd evening
After the seventh storm