inside Brian Eno's heart
the first could house jonah
a coquettish cottage residing on
the tongue
of a big blue whale beside
a sepulcher
you can't make it out of a poem
about cathedrals without mentioning
a sepulcher
alabaster certainly
but since it is the first cathedral
in Brian Eno's Heart
its been charred black
indistinguishable from obsidian
but filled with the remains
of weary-eyed popes who mutter
hymns of immortality
and die at the same rate
as the rest of us.
the second cathedral looks
like a mexican city
surrounded by smoke stacks
all the children walk
with a progenerative limp
cough and shit blood
but know how to stand just right
to make every star in the sky
appear in a straight line.
it isn't a mexican city.
this is worth remembering
it simply looks like a mexican city
and tastes like a mexican city
like a chunk of alabaster
charred to appear obsidian.
the third cathedral is a tear-shaped ventricle
warm and inviting like the diagram
of an ear canal
uterine
a sequined beret left behind by a forgotten lover
the perfect distance from a flame
where doom turned on its axis
and voxed modular toward the infinite
Brian Eno
a nullified god upon the crest of outward bounding waves
the third cathedral is a real cathedral
not a metaphorical cathedral like the other two
no
the third cathedral is a hellenistic cathedral
it lies in the dual connotation of fuck
emetic swallowing
far from its source
but full of emulsion.
real rock and hard place shit
thats what the third cathedral in
Brian Eno's heart is
Recitation of the First Great Sutra.
A toothless monk pulls the water from the toilet bowl to rinse your face. You are no longer moving
in concert with the present. You are no longer
amongst the living because there is a phoenix
reborn of water vapor too. His name was Christ.
There are British men on YouTube who will
describe the end of the world if you watch an Orbits commercial first.
There is an empty can of Schwepps you can ash in.
There is the ideal and there is the human
and they are two separate things. You can raise your
mouth skyward and swallow a deity whole if
you can get Him past your teeth. You could erase
the air from the room and the smile
from the monk's toothless grin. You could escape
through every shadow. There is an empty can
of Schwepps you could climb in. There are British men
on YouTube who will recite TS Eliot poems
to you but you must watch a DraftKings commercial first.
Twenty-Twenty-Four feels like it should have some
mathematical significance, right? Like the opposite of
a Prime number. You are no longer living in the present
but pretending to remember the present from some
future vantage point. It's the sort of temporal voyeurism
that the traumatized and passive extol upon their world.
It is escapism masked as diagnosis. It is better than talking
about suicide. This is what the British men say on YouTube
after the ad for Better Help Online Therapy.
Your only duty is to observe, the toothless monk says,
and you can't tell if he is reading it off of his phone. You are
the one put aside. You will never be Faye Wong
in Chungking Express. A life is too long a time to live
when you're sleeping in a bathtub, but you aren't sleeping
in a bathtub. Things could always be worse thus
life's the exact right amount of time to live. That's how it
works in the quantum age: Chaos but the math checks out.
And that makes you so angry but you don't know why
so you take pride in your ugliness because your ugliness
is your holiness and you live in a world that forces
you to write it on your wrists as not to forget it.
Eric Subpar is a poet from Washington State where he lives with his wife and three sons.
