Deviation Actions
Literature Text
GRAVITY
(or A deal with the Dreemeeters)
Cry wolf;
and drink a toast to ending;
looking long across the
ashes of a freshly ravaged land.
Breath smoke;
and watch the dim stars bending
to it, tattered, tired and
powerless against its broad command.
Bottoms up and see it there,
the melancholy map stripped bare
and white, like chalk-dust on the air
the bands of blank-slate ruin scare
all difference back until the last strange things refuse to stand.
Capacity of Same to swallow
oddities that cannot follow
sad and stretched and dry and hollow
pallid tombs of thought and call: ‘Oh,
let one final unique vein escape the purging sand!’
Fresh-pressed smooth like linen, bleached
the clean gigantic arms then reached
across the sky and, laughing, leached
the brighter colors pale and screeched
the finer music mute and bleak on that offending strand.
The people saw it; massive, gray
and glowing faintly with decay;
they bid it, begged it might obey
their fervent wishes and allay
the wicked white-wash ruination wrought by unseen hand.
So drink;
to careless bargains made:
that theirs would be the country
that was spared until the last.
Salute;
to hasty ransoms paid;
to Forebear's greater weakness;
to the eons that have passed.
Winds around us wither thought;
beneath: the vapid tongues that rot
the Doldrums' neighbors down to nought
while they the same quick barter sought
that they'd be spared from harm and brought to other lives anew.
Take heart and trammel up your fear;
So long away, while still too near,
though you would take the pain to peer
upon an awful void and sear
into your mind a half-blank, tearing universe askew.
They'll come for us, a contract true;
so light 'em up and down a few
for all quick souls; for me; for you.
Open arms and welcome new
adventures when at last they hew
us finer folk and all we've done... and smile when they do!
- Michael Blackwood