going out at dawn to listen to the machinery -

wearing logos - walking ads - a willing surrender to that which crushes us not only ecnomically, but environmentally and mentally - we become that which only exists to exploit us

we become the product the product
of our own exploitation

well
anyway it's evident

and then we are encouraged to think of shopping as patriotic - going out to do our duty in a war against that which might distract us from the tawdry garbage forced down our throats

consumption we have become omnivorous

best to get out there and eat beef - mad cows as well become simply

unpatriotic
hamburger

hamburgers arrive to liberate us from all our greatest fears

I am bored by this desire to be middle class and all it represents as
a means of transportation

where are we going

the best thing about Christmas (other than the early morning silence, the
mechanical pause) is having it behind
me
or rather a reminder

I am worn out by machinery
the real war is waged constantly against the planet under our feet
ways to make it suffer

the seasons turn - is it
winter - I call it anything
but the days which quicken
distant, and darkness
drags
deep into dawn - what
was it she said, spare,
sparse, corporeal, sensate,
and close, a pervasive absence of
heat, we are driven inward not
a lot unlike plants, thoughtless
with a desire for light

I found some pieces broken loose from language,
Laura (Riding) Jackson's interesting Dickinson-like "Christmas, 1937"
and Charles Olson's "Christmas" i.e.:

Christmas, 1937

What shall the feast be called this year
That a long merry holy name had
But now comes nameless to its time?

'Jesus is born!' Undated moment
To close the vanished year, uncounted,
Of those who live in denial of death.

Then, having lived because not died,
They say, (next year), 'Christ died but did not!'
Then, Christmas: Jesus succeeds Jehovah.

Until the Christian art, that changed
The eternal Semite frown
Into a coloured yearly smile,

Cannot but paint the looming voice
Under the smile, behind the frown:
There hangs the word for this year's birth-feast.

We read what seemed too terrible for sound,
Year upon year, in seeming endless
Thund'rous unrelenting death - 'THE END!'

But soft the word: shaped on sealed lips
For utterance on our many own
According to the smile each can

When death has killed the corpse of time -
Even to the Merry Christmas grin
That gave the Happy New Year ghost.

How shall the feast be called?
Who dare be after Jesus now
And meet Jehovah's honest face

As the dark substance of their own,
By whose forbidding look to form
The permitted smiles of transgression?

Who dare no more to rise now,
From heaven's ages to float down
With feet of Jew, folding the Cross

Into a compact miracle -
Outstretching souls returning
For birth at last, the escaped END?

Jehovah was continent to madness;
Christ's father, loving to foolishness.
But the same man were they, by Jesus.

And one the Woman and the Virgin -
Who in immaculate parturition
Bestowed a natal death at birth

On whom the Woman could not smile on
As names of peace between Herself
And that suspicious Angry Man.

The original smile is Hers -
Which, smiled in slow discretion,
He took for frowning: and so frowned.

These things are not yet tellable
In the tone of long-ago I would wish:
Christmas again counfounds my mouth.

I speak as if in recent knowledge.
Perhaps that is right: the tale is young,
Though the matter old. Christmas still!

Less merry, but Jesus still the cause:
He was born - signing his name
To a tale by us to be written.

Less deathly; as the signature becomes
Our own, and crucifying hazard
Foreshortens to the death-trimmed END.

Christmas

dirty Christmas
which Origen
and Clement
both showed up

for the junk it
is - as though,
sd, O, he was a
mere Pharaoh. Or,

says Clement, do
we have here some
child baptism to
go gew-gaw over?

in long favorably
embroidered gown,
a boy? instead of
a man standing

in desire in the
Jordan, with green
banks on either
side, a naked man

treated by another
adult man who also
has found out that
to be as harmless

as a dove is what
a man gets as wise
as a serpent for,
the river,

of life?