The Dry Wake of Orchestrated Illuminated Rounds

The steam of morning is threatened by an insect flying from one branch to another, the ground pauses as a human finger flips the safety off on his weapon. The flick of the safety sounds like waves crashing against a distant shore in the silence. The silence is deafening until the jungle erupts in gunfire and screams. From the trees snake recoils back to a higher branch as bits of human bone is torn from under the skin littering the blood soaked ground. In the distance insects bend a leaf in order to capture the nectar of a flower growing wild. The insects used to the sound of gunfire go about their routine always aware of the movement nearby. Leaves that had an hour ago turned themselves upside down to drink from the light rainfall that fell are now imperceptibly moving ever so slowly unseen by human eye to their original position before being torn to shreds by bullets from a North Vietnamese soldiers weapon as he falls back to the ground after being shot in the neck by a ricochet.

- Chris Mansel

The Iraqi Book of Living and Dying

O son of noble family
Burnt Iraqi children
Separated bone from skin
The American process of democracy moves slowly
As you move through the bardo
Hold close to your soul
As it may soon depart leaving your skin to endure
The acts of degenerates
And commissioned officers

O son of noble family
If you are re-born and are recruited by your children
To join the assault of the free world
Heed the teachings of the Buddha
And not the passions of your heart

O son of noble family
There is love for you on the soil of the United States
If you look for it


- Chris Mansel

The Political Philosophy of a Vengeful Society

Spilt an anthill down the middle and the ants will run downhill both ways. Wipe away the anthill completely with one swipe and they run in all directions on a level plain. Now an anthill may be small to you but to an ant it’s his home. It’s a high rise. What can an ant do to you? Lie down by that anthill and every one of those ants will show you. I never saw the whole as a bunch of ants but then again, I understand the mentality to seek revenge, and I don’t run in any direction, I don’t even notice when my world is swept away. Like that ant I’ll be waiting for you to come back or I’ll bring my anthill to you. Either way, destruction is change and change in this life is but a brief glimpse at the next.

- Chris Mansel

Papacy: The Chemical Wedding

Bearing witness, chronic illness after madness
A voice asking, “What shall you be called..”
Standing vigil, prison fatigues
Blood coursing through a single vein
Inebriants, stimulants, chemically based psychotics
You have become a loose-based orpheum, the voice said
You shall be called polemic, and shall serve on the steps of
The poor and shall disrupt nations with your views

A puff of white smoke followed black
And I began as I ended, a lamb to slaughter
My fur becoming death, my flesh offered as life
Heralding from the windowsill the holy day of Pharmacopoeias

- Chris Mansel

Passing

An epic of transition is death. The body is a vessel of incarceration. There are horrors in the skies that dissent to us a web of illness we are drawn to even as we attempt escape. The disease on the ground, the emaciation of the air draws us inside and therefore closes and seals the process of death. Somewhere between the skies and the earth, somewhere in the bardo do we appear as we really are, clear thoughts amidst a solution of matter both gray and dark. Death always reminds us of where we are going and then we start to think of where we have been. Georges Bataille wrote, “There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.” Either way you look at it death is a continuing process that if captured in a display of DNA would be a round strand that circles endlessly in a poetic path, tragic and ethereal.
- Chris Mansel

From There Outward (for Philip Lamantia and Robert Creeley, liberated)

There was a time
many years ago,
when I was a young child,
I did not write poetry.

In those days
my imagination lived me –
it overtook my body
and shaped it to every delightful and
mysterious purpose it could create.

I was imagination’s living form.
I had no mind, no self
I was motionless
until imagination stirred
some portion to song
(and every word was singing)
or dance
(and every movement was a dance).

Then I felt compelled
to make words.
So I wrote a poem,
then another and another
and people laughed or made pleasant remarks.
And the girls were pleased
when I wrote for them –
those were kisses worth the poems.

But I recognized that
words failed imagination.
They were so carefully
reigned by books and teachers.
I had become imagination’s loss.

So I destroyed myself
and freed the constricted words.
I liberated them to
imagination’s tongue
and they once again
took their natural form
like a tree, or a sun, or a boy.
And people were confused.
they were afraid and turned away.
and I became serious,
a solid man.

I had to destroy myself
again and again
to liberate the words.

and speech was singing
and movement was dancing.

And today,
I hear the great poet’s death
and I think how lucky he is
to be nothing but
free imagination again,
to become pure poetry,
without a world of fools
that make us work
for what we already are.

- Jake Berry 3.30.05,

Jake Berry graciously allowed me to feature this unpublished work and he alone retains the copyright.