For Rootlake. Lost Punk Piece (fragment) by The Shuteye Train, Still at Large


Wiki Says…

Buildings are tall
And squared and cubed
No child of clumsy avalanche
But shaped pressed pushed erected arched spired vaulted

To force the windows higher.

What did Lewis see and when did he see it?

What did he see when no one else saw it?

Wiki says he wrote two books
About a little girl lost
In rhymes most girls don't know.
Why Wiki views with snarky looks
The nonsense king
of Jabberwocks.

Wiki says
Wiki says
Wiki wiki wiki wiki knows.

Wiki knows its nonsense well
Wiki dings its post-modern bell
And writes the truth of human hell
And rings its echo of the nonsense knell

What did Lewis know and when did he know it?

What did Lewis know and when did he know it?

Wiki says the Nonsense King was a teacher of math
And a deacon
On the side.
You can find it in the footnote
Where Lewis is laughing.

What did Lewis know when no one was looking?
That big doors close with a jolt
When the coefficient of maidenly frictions
Jams the lock and shoots the bolt
lowers the bar on fertile fictions
bends the mind to sad subduction.
The integral a child reduced from throne to drone with no revolt.

What did Lewis know and how did he show it?

He knew the numbers
By heart and by rules
He knew the slumbers
Of subtracted souls
The rolling role of unbounded pi
The empty set of a sob and a sigh
The Rubik cube of a rubric lie
The remaindering wheels
Of zeroing tumbrils
In the Limit to die.

What did Lewis know?
The arc tangent of
The Golden Section
Which spirals out of reach
Of smothering nest and speech.
Think and live, hide and die.

Which he showed us with a windowing mirror
and a climbing spiral of
nth-powering dreams galore
With laughter and lore and, yes, war.

Why he is still laughing,
And JabberWiki's not learning.

Shammadamma The Shuteye Train

The Shuteye Train
The Shuteye Train
We're the ones who write with guns.

So Shuteye Train
To Shuteye Town
To Shuteye Town
To Shuteye Town

We wrote with our guns
We fought for Man
And along the way
We lost our queen
And four brave kings
Who led the way
To where we are today.

We're here
The Shuteye Train
For you, for all you
lost unmanned
And here we are arrived
In Underland
Which is where you live
In No Man's Land.

Underland...
Underland...
Underland...

Comments

  1. Punk lyrics, pure poetry, were the keys to flip the switches in my mind at just the right time, just as my elastic teenage brain was starting to set back in 1996. All these years later, it's good to see new work can still give me chills, put some fire in my blood, and get my mind whirring as I try to get the right allusions and re-board the Shuteye Train. I'll be back with more, but I caught this free moment and wanted to catch up.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Readers also liked…

A Near-Perfect Microcosm of “The Swamp”

The Best Book on the Trump Phenomenon

A Reclamation Project Begun

Manuscript Submission, The Boomer Bible

The CHYOS Superscript

The impenetrable NYC Bubble