Pina Piccolo
Narrative Arc—1968-2025
What is the narrative arc
of the moral universe
in our place and time?
The start- middle- end
story of our here and now
the plot the omniscient narrator
may be too embarrassed
to own and unravel?
Is it long,
and does it bend
toward justice?
Or does it bend
backwards
sometimes
and
towards madness?
Towards
re-inscribing
past fallacies
and resurrecting
their symbols?
Does it bend
toward the goose step
and the AR 15?
Does it
bring into plain sight
what we have removed
in denial
because we made it happen
far away
and thought
it wouldn’t come back
to bite us?
August Doldrums
Going out in a whimper
Paralyzed by the basilisk ‘s stare
As the earth revolves around itself
And the blue moon sheds its Blu-rays
Unequipped to adapt
We couldn’t focus our vision away
from Cold Wars and New World Orders
We persevered in our accustomed ways
We put our faith in reality as narration
We couldn’t get our afterlives sorted
As ancestors wrung their hands in disbelief
And the entangled whole turned into movies
As carnage stared us in the face
We simply apportioned blame
With a divining rod
And voiceless screams in the wilderness
As palaces and institutions shook
We turned into spectators of Games of Thrones
Sought old alliances and avoided the stares
Of magpies, creeks, mountain tops and weasels
And because things didn’t go out in a bang
We strolled with our eyes peeled to the ground
Avoiding to tread on the cracks, like camels
Groping for the void in the eye of the needle.
In Praise of those who Refuse to Suspend Disbelief
Not that they ever asked us
whether we agreed
to suspend our disbelief
they assumed that having done it
for so long
it had become our second skin
Not that they ever asked us
whether we might have second thoughts
about us and our offspring
and the seven generations
staying in that scaly chrysalis
wrapped in our spit
and theirs
our wings never breaking free
condemned to the cramped-ness
of a still birth
The Hanged Woman Dispatches
Today as fate would have it
the Major Arcana turned
the Hanged Woman card
as I lay low
—pain cursing through the bones—
waiting for a dispatch
authenticating that
geopolitical peristalsis
had moved reality forward
As of now, a ballast
of coiled contradictions
lay ready to spring
and blindly strike
as Neumann probes
from long decayed civilizations
—some instead think of them as galactic tourists—
pointlessly snap and
send picture home
and on their back
with incredulity
they comment on the scenes
Let the Fossil Record Show
Let the fossil record show that:
We were enveloped by amber
that fell in thick sheets from the sky
Unbeknownst to us, or so we liked to believe,
we stepped into the dark woods of danger
The Event and the Re-Revelation lurked
and the Epiphany mocked us with Bison
Let the fossil record show that:
Fake news and false, for-profit Prophets
drove merchants of a certain stripe from a Temple
Allegory wept in a corner
as fire spluttered expiation
Tempered by the thirst of volcanoes
she stepped through it, dancerly
and became enshrined in Time.
October Dream of Gathering
And we gathered darkness by the basketful
Plucking the twisted fruit from fatigued branches
We were caught with our snouts rooting for tubers
As destruction besieged the canopy
When the elements, at long last, turned against us
We couldn’t use words as shields
Nor could our tools expand
Our neural net fast enough.
All we could do was stare
the bear in the eye
hoping for a truce
a trace of mercy.
IRL
A delivery of embalmed flowers
Shimmering delta water at high tide
Plastic particulate in mothers’ milk
The sun splicing through a redwood forest
Drones buzzing bears from habitat
A sister’s hand steadying you as you slip
Algorithm at the helm
A secret wound slowly closing
The ground beneath your feet shaking
Ancestral voices heard through a conch
The stench of an era rotting
The ylang ylang tree blooming, regardless
Whales led astray by sonar
A new life cracking the egg
Dread paving the way to paralysis
Humans rediscovering that nothing lies still
At this juncture everything falters and shifts
Ask for nimbleness, the path flows from your feet