baby jane

[Alan Sondheim]

baby jane

it's all over now. we've waited for some
change; we've known all along we can't control
ourselves. our best intentions led to
definitions; definitions collapsed, one after
another, as if eternity melted away, as if
language slipped through our hands. structures
became ghosts; words no longer mean in uneasy
parades. we wait for votes, decisions,
absolutes, that are lies before their forming
in/formation. all time is borrowed; our
environment hardly recognizes the continuous
countdown of species, subspecies, whole orders
of life. radiation bears harder beneath the
onslaught of primates out of savanna, out of
control. everything centers around control, the
application of a function across a domain,
already useless, porous, close to damaged
memory. in the reversed world, suicide is the
proclamation of bravery, as is cowardice, a
creature crawling just a bit longer towards the
future. the only absolute is the absence of
god, spirit, soul; the hedge around the torah
is wilderness itself, and the flames of the
letters proclaim only another tired delusion.
the human race is exhausted of itself; some of
us pray for the end, for a temporary armageddon
in the flux of things where the surface is
cleansed of all humanity, other things lining
up for choice and conceivable tomorrows. don't
misunderstand, the wilderness itself is the
aegis and nadir of pain, self-warning control
systems without regard to the registration of
injury. what we have is less than nothing; only
our despair is our own; only our despair is
memory of despair. the play of cyber-crypto
xmen xplay is already the play of the dead; the
joystick hardly moves, and the dream of
implants takes nothing to an equivalent level.
our reality is one of fracture. there's no
turning back, because there was no progress, no
travelled road, in the first place. we're
living in the burned-out case of the world, the
burned-out shell of existence. distraught
survivors, we dream of other planets, other
stars, erosions. we stumble through ourselves,
in self-defined pathos; we've always stumbled,
but nothing was ever due. now islands disappear
as well, there is shuddering at our own
ineptitude. but whose shuddering, whose final
corrosion, the corrosion of finality itself?

_