Planet of the Blind

Human beings replicate bad thinking
Says “thinking” Aunt history—
“Biological sex” is one of them
“Everyone knows you can be a woman
Trapped in a man’s body…”
She takes a sip of wormwood
Continues: “everyone knows
You can be a lobster
In a man’s body…”
“Ovid understood
And he lived
Two thousand years ago…”
The gods are not always cruel—
“You can be the kind of woman
Or man
You want to be…”
She won’t stop talking
She just won’t stop

Aunt history thinks her husband
Is a cross between a snail
And an ostrich
He leaves glistening trails
All over the house
And in the garden
He puts his head
In the sand—this would be funny
If it weren’t so tragic
Being slow and forgetful
Uncle
Gives dictators room
To clatter around in
Even this
Would be OK
But the statuary—
The carved Stalin heads
And all the ravens
That sit atop them
Are just too much

Like Huck Finn in church
History
Is always scratching himself
He has a toothache
Treaties
Have always been worthless—
Bitter parchment
For the indigenous
He’d like to strangle
The victors
But the itch
Is killing him
The very richest men
Spray graffiti
On his torso
Scratch…

The past was written
For thousands of years
“History”
Culled from air
How smug he was
Uncle
Thinking himself
The word inside the word
But cytosine
Guanine, adenine
And thymine
What a disaster!
Nature
Writing secretly
Without mentation
With the power
That comes from drifting
He should drift more
That’s it, he thinks

Uncle history’s favorite book
Is Moby Dick
He understands
Nature is the father
Of everything
And also the undertaker—
Rise into the light
Sink back to the depths
The song is the same
He knows
You can’t get around this
Like Melville
He understands
True places
Are never on the map
Lands where
You’re birthed
Then eaten alive

No one’s meant to last forever
And history personified
Is no exception
Uncle H thinks of how dying
Is an opportunity of sorts
But it never comes
Dinky humans keep doing shit
So he sticks around
And keeps awake
It would be alright
If only the endless juvenilia
Of poets would stop—
T.S. Eliot
Notes that Sartre
Rhymes with fart

He has to eat himself
That’s how history works
His pinky, right hand
Is the French revolution
He gnaws at it for weeks
Until it snaps off
He chews to know he
Does and doesn’t exist—
Its like anorexia
But worse
Uncle history’s mouth
Is the first vacuum
Of the forgotten
Tant Pis

How would you feel watching war after war
Knowing they’ll never stop
Knowing people die so easily
Many in the early morning
What would you do
The Savior
Like a blue jay
Goes about his business
Talking to no one in particular
Uncle history writes notes
Jefferson: “History, in general,
Only informs us
What bad government is.”
Lenin: “Despair is typical
Of those
Who do not understand
The causes of evil,
See no way out,
And are incapable of struggle.”
But uncle understands everything
And still feels like shit

He hates the word “noetic”
And despises fuzzy socks
Things just happen
No matter how you think
Happy feet won’t change it
You might say he doesn’t like
Sentimentality
But its not true
He loves the baby octopus
He loves other things
But has trouble remembering
Its because fate has him
By the neck
And his neck
Is very long
But even this
He forgets

Like a dog Uncle History
Solves certain problems
Imagine France has vanished
He’ll find it
He also knows
What box
Your father is in
Sure he’s a poodle
Of sorts—athletic
Smart
Crazed by ducks
But sometimes
He separates reason
From instinct
And finds the missing cheese