World War

Thinking is my fighting, 
said Virginia Woolf, in the middle 
of war 

Are we in the middle of war
A war with the sea
A war with the air

Who will wear what
the world wore 

Lucid and wetly speaking 

There’s no war you idiots
learn the language
hot pink sex
you don’t need money

***

I don’t believe we can save our civilization;
I do, I do believe it. I don’t want this poem to be beautiful. I do.

In vibratory consequence
to the sea 

I fall into the dimensions of an hour

The orcas are ‘done’ Karen told me last night over dinner

On oceanic anoxic tide of unfulfolded brain sadness

Done to in space encircle the earth in loops as lived undulations done 
bodies singing voluminous extensions into the sawn off oceans done
breathing out the tops of their heads

Along the same paths the soul blasts at death / out the top of your head 

Sphincter through which eject spumes of feral joy, or fearful 

       fearful because my kind       is cruel

For nearness to be whales 
must be 

and we’ll continue? Bleaching our wealth, our fame?
Dismantling worlds for new utopias of death

        and    aren’t I of that kind?

At Noba’s last night, in her partly built house with a feverish child 
and dad with dementia angling for wine 
she said, Time is a school
she said, You can use that 

Earlier she said there’s this thing I always forget to do –

Which is to breathe in through the top of my head
and exhale out my chest, filling the room 
with stars. Noba is a politician. 
Noba built the house we’re standing in. 
Noba’s name spells Not Only But Also

Whales have very sensitive ears, like those of human genitals
Whales have a magnetic sense
Whales grieve

In no tent 
lives the deer 

(Titles & italics by Alice Notley)

***

Can you take something out of this world, yes or no.

Tanya is pruning the roses. Yes. 

Poetry is access to information. Yes.

Is a rose an archive, no 
a memory yes
of silky sense, yes 
A garment? No
Many garments, yes

Yes fresh
the dress
of the mind so

I know I know I know 

I court a form yes
windward
on the processual 
rosebuds, yes   

or no, how I came to yes
in the arboretum 
of sexual flowers yes and
bite this kumquat and live

in the woveness
streaming yes infloresce 
petroleum ghost parts, yes
in the glossy vocal yes 
powers, the bird yells of
power, the rotations of 
softness, all this 

I remember 
happening, yes, coming to 
pass away a spell, to be
come glossy, yes and furred 
touting instruments yes 
of not-death nor shortage nor no

(Title by Sara Hamming, italics by Alice Notley)

***

Portals and Holes 

A portal is open and things flow in and out or they stop flowing

Less about content and more this flow of content – is our aphrodisiac

Today I read about how corals spawn – 

once a year, after the first full moon of summer

reefs pulse in pink weathers of jellies, spurts, spumes 

a blizzard of group sex –

and can also asexually bud, anytime

To be greens like hotpinks, erotic purples lined with shouting yellow nipples

sexually-asexual flower animals of feel

wave moods of medicine branching into buoyant pleasure gardens

who bring the creature out of the hole

into the riotous excess plosions 

I sit at my desk in my apartmenthole reading Suely Rolnik who says –

Art is thus an ecological reserve for the invisible species that populate our animal body 
in its generous germinative life; a wellspring of courage for confronting the tragic.

The moods of waves, the medicines of 

sensate hole-dwelling

lives we haven’t yet invented in our very

large selves as we dissolve utopias in acid 

for our dying ways 

***

Anenome

eye of the sea

portals, orifices 

mouths that see 

turquoise anus flowering

cosmic vaginas

give birth through the mouth 

of the sea.

This is the situation–
This is the situation–

Esther says it’s not that the climate depends on what we do or don’t do–
                                      it’s that we depend entirely on climate

to travel into reality with 
to think

with anenomes, lavishly 
and without money 

through cracks in existence
named Bezos Gates Buffett Arnault Ortego Slim Zuckerberg Walton Koch 
Bloomberg

who offer such drab death 
to everyone

Will you buy this water, this air, this chemo
Will you accept manmade apocalypse with no men to answer
                                              to cosmic generosity–

or pleasure from the sun
while pleasuring the moon?