If The Scientist by Coldplay was playing I must have missed it.
But how could one miss such a trivial thing?
It had to be the direction the wind
Traveled at the time that influenced
This bizarre decision to approve all
The circumstances leading up to your death,
As if collective mind-swapping could replace single-handed vision.
Come up to meet you
The little judgment that falls at the feet of the conductor,
Who, by all accounts, is winning the show
(If indeed it is a race.) begins showing
Signs of strain in 2 audience members,
Who take out their gloves and whip themselves
Until the diamond flagellation yields pocks and pocks
Of the deepest blood you can look at on a shirt, bar none.
Tell you I’m sorry
While this is going on, the girl in the emblazoned leotard
Looks out upon the stage and corrupts
The youth (5 total) with a middle finger.
Now, given these recent happenings
A boy, 1 such youth, takes out his knife
And carves a statue of the girl lovingly
Into the deep, somehow mahogany chair he called his own
You don’t know how lovely you are
Little Pynchonian vignettes play on a screen that has been dropped
To allow some sort of collective sanity
To return to the greatly vexed premises
(The time and place of a Civil War battle no doubt.)
That begin to take a life of their own.
(Its own?) In any case it allowed for
A distribution, an exchange to take place between the saucy girl
I had to find you
And her soon-to-be lover standing on the opposite side of the carving boy,
Etching a face not his own into a greater sphere
Than even he recognizes, and her paramour
Shoots a rose out of his suitcoat,
The blood dripping down his arms
Until it collects in a pool beside the statuesque
Little composer whose creation is so beautiful it makes the lover cry
Tell you I need you
With a happiness not his own. At least the founding of this nation
Didn’t brook any conflict, as the little sculptor’s
Teacher, now running screaming out of the auditorium,
Was wont to say to the students,
Of which 8 showed up and 5
Were mentioned before, leaving three
Who vanished into such thin air the teacher worried the Rapture had occurred.
Tell you I set you apart
The only true rapture occurring in the glowing chests
Of those who stayed in the building,
As their bodies lift up in unison
Towards the rafters, above the seats
And away from any incipient harm
At the hands of those who came before like checks in little grade boxes.
Questions of science
Now telekinesis had only hit this town recently,
The town being the newest in a spate
Of similar happenstances the news
Harped on about endlessly
Until the only unwieldy personage
At the botched show, the girl
With the shining birdy finger, raised her hands in protest
Science and progress
Against the coming hoard of telekinetics who really became her army.
And some say this very town holds
The keys to an everlasting future where
Secrets are given out freely
Like they cause no harm
And where undying devotion creates itself
Into a million little figurines patiently flipping the world off.
Do not speak as loud as my heart.
Blake Wallin’s poems can be found in Maudlin House, Bitchin’ Kitsch, Solipsist, Prairie Light Review, Kodon, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Otherwise Jesus (Ghost City Press, December 2015), and he tweets @Blake_Wallin.