THE ANTHROPOCENE AGE

THE ANTHROPOCENE AGE

So much language is lost in the labyrinth of the throat. 

The face you see in sleep, iridescent in the air 

like the memoirs of ghosts at a banquet, 

recording the remembered past. But your face 

is a map of sorrow packed in a carry-on suitcase. 

Did the mouth lead you too far astray? 

We are all drinking from the same ancestral river, 

dissipating the dream, waiting to be named. 

The indigenous women of the desert held stones 

at the back of the throat to belay their thirst. 

The poetry of negligence lays down its burden at the gates 

of the old cathedral, prays for divine intercession. 

I swallowed small stones and tried to hide 

the obligatory ephemera of my mind from everyone. 

Who shattered the 4th wall, a 2-way mirror staring into the sun?

What is riding whitewater on the river of memory? 

What about the storyline, the cast of characters? 

Who will be last one standing with one foot in the void? 

The clock is hungry but the numbers of darkness 

are always too late to see the the precipice or the void.

We are counting down the days and the nights 

marching towards the harvest of death. 

Solar flares reach into the darkness 

disabling all the motherboards. The alpha 

and the omega of the Anthropocene Age. 

7/12/23 Write On! with Susie Terence (take two).
The Anthropocene epoch epicenter, Lake Crawford, Ontario, in Canada. Also see Wiki which explains it better.

Thinking there was nothing there, except gibberish, I was surprised to find this poem embedded in the freewrite collage. I think it works better as a poem than a prose poem. (See below).

Freewrite collage piece from Michael Torres’ Writing Prompt

So much language is lost in the labyrinth of the throat. The face you see in sleep, iridescent in the air like the memoirs of ghosts at a banquet, is recording the remembered past. But your face is a map of sorrow packed in a carry-on suitcase. Did the mouth lead you astray? We are all drinking from the same ancestral river, dissipating the dream, waiting to be named. The indigenous women of the desert held stones in the back of the throat to belay their thirst. The poetry of negligence lays down its burden at the gates of the old cathedral and prays for divine intercession. I swallowed the stones and tried to hide the obligatory ephemera of my mind from everyone at school. We have broken the fourth wall. Two-way mirror. What is riding whitewater on the river of memory? What about the storyline, the cast of characters? Who will be last one standing with one foot in the void? The clock is hungry but the numbers of darkness are always too late. We are counting down the days and the nights marching towards the harvest of death. Solar flares reach into the darkness disabling all the motherboards. The alpha and the omega of the Anthropocene Age.

7/12/23 Write On! with Susie Terence

NB I doubt if I’ll be able to glean much from either of these freewrites. Since Michael Torres’ Writing Prompt was pretty much a word salad, I decided to out-salad him by creating images and lines as the Write On! poets read their responses to his poem prompts. The first piece below was in direct response to his lines. This one is in response to my fellow writers responding to Michael. It’s sort of a degree of separation—my failsafe. If I don’t get any decent writing from the first prompt, maybe I’ll salvage something by listening to my colleagues. Or maybe not.

As they read their poems aloud, I collaged images and ideas. It’s sort of like a found poem, but the rule of thumb: steal no more than three words in a row. Not quite recombinant AI, but, close. Funny how the space theme carries through in both pieces. Ah, well, it is Pablo Neruda’s birthday, and these are unanswerable questions arise as if taken from his Book of Questions. 

Weirdly, after writing this piece, I dreamed of a poetry exercise where you freewrite, then embolden only the words that carry the meaning—like stepping stones. Maybe I should try it with this piece. But I am still flipping sentences, trying to find an organic order that may never come. The fact that I’m still flipping sentences suggests I must think there’s something to be gleaned from this chaos. A rather bleak dystopian future.

Then I found this quote: “We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society…Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body. Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules.” —Alan Watts, from The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Does this idea make all of our own creative writing null and void? This, as I downloaded ChatGPT, and then immediately deleted it. Keep that monster in its own box.