In the Land of Opaque Realities
Pondering in the land of opaque realities
Where facts are fictionalized
And the aberrant notion of post-truth
Emerges with despicable pomp
Asking the difference between
Fantasy conspiracy and utopia
incessantly on an increasingly
Silent confused bewildered crowd
To distribute due blame and shame
Distinctions among the three shout urgency
Urgent emergency potency now
Distinguish us, they unabashedly shout
Whipping each other to keep each discrete apart
Now, distinguish us to keep salutary distance from
The incipient catastrophe of language meaning
Everything and nothing all at once. One breath.
Strained drained now lethargic mind
Must be summoned this autumn night
When most sleep and some weep and few plot
Mind, distant and cool, leveled and constant
In an multiplying territory of transcending lies
Mind, wake now
From slumber dormant rhythm
of numbing requiems
Heed the towering voices of Brahms’s chorus
In his building German requiem otherwise
Follow the sharps and flats to draw the labyrinthine outside
From
Slumber distraction soul-slashing sameness
Where both the aesthete and philistine perish
Both in the name of unclassified art
Wake mind, emerge from phantom state
Rise susceptible to emanating gradations of
Warm icy lights generating placating
shrill sounds
Inhabiting the raspy silky blankets of skin
Grown parched and sullen gradually
Suddenly
Upon the nocturnal bright concealment
Of truth running frightened away from lies
Excess
Times of a putrid self-inflicted inability to say
. no
enough no more
. have alas arrived. Where has the preference
for just balance scampered to?
Golden teeth through which bolstering lies
jump
like spigots filled with ancient venom
A bewildering taste for
. the monstrous aberrant
conditions preserved conserved pickled for a long howl
in mouths palates once inclined for palette shade regularity
many are the names to call this existential, moral
malaise
even the burden to name has ceased to matter
whatever compass worked last year and the many
before doesn’t anymore
. alarm sirens go off
all night and day: every single instant of the regulated
clock and the insensible mind
what is that?, mounting they ask
… thunderous silence strikes
we have lost the ability to name excess as well
doesn’t matter if you its excreting insides inhabit another word
the broken puncturing shell of another word
its greenish yellow with putrefied odor yanks quick allusion
. . to itself
About the Poet
Eunha Choi is an Adjunct Instructor at Lehman College. Situated where literature, cinema and philosophy meet and fail to meet, her research interrogates realism less as an aesthetic or literary form of representation than as an always in flux theory of the real and a model of critique. Her recent publication appears in Pacific Coast Philology, Confluencia, Ciberletras and Chasqui among others.