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When No Stars Appear

from Evocations: Cyclical Wordplay by Rusty Kjarvik

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about

After hearing many songs and stories of the dramatic sights seen by survivors of the great natural disasters of the early 21st century; the tsunamis and earthquakes that buckled cities and civilizations to their knees, I have heard many refer to the reversion to a clear sky. The clarity of sky is an enduring metaphor for the wildly obscuring potency of modern technological electro-civilization. What has been more subtle, and more dramatic a transition, is how the skies under our human settlements have become opaque and starless over the past century. In my mind, this is more traumatic and in need of reflection.

The stars and constellations are being called into the blinding stretches of the ephemeral; of human memory, abstracted through an archaic imagination. Beginning with the wealth of ecological terror that might strike any human being living in a modern Western city, who looks up to see that not only have they left the stars, but the stars have left them. We are without higher purpose, the signs directing us to a sense of greater belonging in the universe have since faded into the mindless wash of electro-magnetic consumerism and the ecological disturbance of human egotism; a symptom of our technological worldview.

The voicing, "When No Stars Appear" is an excursion through the faded mind, a search for meaning in the depths of human language, abstracted and diluted by the hotbed movement of inorganic noise, and the harmonious serendipity that emerges with the simple act of listening; the inception of self-knowledge, wherefrom the fog clears to reveal novel human experience, metaphorically illustrated by the final lines in the voicing. At the narrative resolution, a fugitive of modernity emerges from a waterfall consciousness of humility, as a child in a traditional Mayan home, looking up into the vast network of a more universal light. And the sounds of the starlit sky become a nightly renewing gift clarity, humility and strength.

"When No Stars Appear" was originally published online by PressBoardPress in September, 2012.

lyrics

When no stars appear to welcome the scent of leaves,
no pride is released,
the empiric beat within goes to sleep,
dreary rain pressures the snoring gruel of worldly morning,
children hear the weird angst of their father serpent learning a new spell

in the livid pull of train wreck desire
the followers’ sneering crimes become awake
to the rush of the wading horror
that thrives innocently on beer and hate,
while our nonplussed singing escapes into the cruel, driven spines of the wicked slink of fame
that shines like hosts in a steaming ballroom of creative play
and shaved rasping throats blunder over towers of hypocrisy,
engraved mores of hunger and celebration link together within insane, aesthetic duality
to please the entranced few,

in a skinny pathway across ever-shrinking pores of history
wearing narcotic bracelets and shaming our alien tours with priceless need
in the random chores of spurious fornication
on bedside hordes that tame the blue African skies to dried jungles
that feel free with deserted lies in the political waves of a corporate, shark-ruled tribe,
swearing and leaning into the hounds of biblical law

at the foot of copied royalty,
images of a curse emanate clearly from the anxious gore of the Queen’s swollen photographic paste
that fires the furious majority corpse-woven emotion,
against the greed and force of a colonial tour
that imagines caves of settlement prized in the outdoorsman’s weed,
to be bought and traded for the value of life
toward a compromising, swift vulnerability
and still we fear corn/maize,
as the sacred ear of landlocked peace
and relief, from the pain of English greed

damming waterfalls in the didgeridoo light of a fugitive
from the muscular breast of musical moods
blended in a spastic trust and unblinking tomb of a bedroom at noon
that thing lounges immobile in a downtown moat of antagonistic blame,
the weak time order ensues in a blistered, flat dome of wind
rousing us to walk in sleep and dream the East
away

sense wishing
in her Mayan home
that rings with such personal truth,
unknown

Love’s apartment, downtown Calgary, January 2010

credits

from Evocations: Cyclical Wordplay, released March 12, 2013

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Rusty Kjarvik Brooklyn, New York

My ancestors are from the lands in and around what is now Norway, Poland, Germany and Greece. They lived above the Arctic Circle, spoke Yiddish, were Romaniote Greek, English settlers during the revolutionary war of America, and from Germany pioneered in 19th century Alberta, Canada where they also took Blackfoot names. They were buried in religious fame; and so I also go by Menachem ben Asser. ... more

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