Planet of the Blind

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

Old photos don’t interest Uncle History
They’re too “newfangled”
He even has trouble
With statues
He likes to get face down
In the mire
Sometimes he prays
But its a naive thing, like wishing for rain
He smells the dirt
Talks to spiders
Has the Zen lonelies
No living thing really loves him
Being an abstraction
Is hard—its like being paint
But he’s OK for now
He’s gotten used to exophony
Since he’s never in the right language

When the 20th century was fresh
Uncle History saw my grandfather
Building automobiles
Progress was in the air
Unless of course
You were Black
Or crippled—
The Ugly Laws
And worse…but
Grandad loved engines
So Uncle
Pretended to like noise too

In the airport
He’s a gruesome space alien
With a xeno-morph’s bloat
But no matter
He has Dante’s missing jaw
And the hoof on an ox
In his suitcase
(Also the souls
Of a dead children
And shards
Of old phonograph records)
Don’t tell him
You know just how he feels
He’s a show stopper
The first performer in the world
Sometimes they let him
Board the plane first