Eschatology, // Parthenogenesis, & // A Theogony
(A serial poem
(A serial poem
for the end of the world and
whatever comes next.)
In the beginning,
there was the creation of
things called beginnings.
Things also had ends
unintentionally, a
kind of side effect.
The Creator said,
"Oop," and then the syllable
was created, too.
For the Creator,
things had gotten out of hand
rather early on.
Now saying nothing,
He stared at the Creation
and hoped for the best.
He stared for a while,
hoping it would fix itself;
awkwardness was born.
It didn't take long
for that omnipotent Guy
to give up and leave,
Throwing his hands up
in exasperation, he
begat several things:
Hands, apathy, up,
commitment (and fear of it,)
exasperation,
walking, distance (and
thus cardinal directions,)
and repetition,
and bluster and guilt trips,
impatience and impotence,
absence and parents.
He gave one last gift,
too, as he was walking off,
whispering, "Well, shit."
Subsequently, these
items begat other things,
like up crafting down.
And so was born
recklessness and pity and
failure and pushing
and subsequently
pulling and doubt and gravestones
and cartography
and fear of snakes and
alcoholic beverages
and dying wishes.
It bears mentioning
that, apropos of nothing,
submarines showed up
and, by happenstance,
the collective unconscious,
both unexpected.
(n.b. the items
listed above procluded
other Creations,
such as afterwood,
flybringing, once-knobs, sin grease,
thistleries, toll cabbage,
pointlers, steam clampers,
hollow mountain churchgoers,
soul throes, and trim-traps.)
Everything begat more
things, until the begatting
had filled the circle
and the firmament
became three-dimensional,
now a sphere, floating
in a space instead
of reclining in a plane.
Creation kept on.
Little consonants
struggled, vied for dominance,
evolving dipthongs,
forming still-larger
bonds with primordial vowels,
growing and growing.
A syllable, long
ago conceived but only
now in existence,
crawled onto the sand
as morphological ooze
dripped from its serifs.
Here, time inches by,
but cosmically, begattings
continued outward,
Meanings turned to
relationships, almost but
not quite the same as
relativistic
speeds--though both applied--spreading
exponentially
through the galaxy
(just a place for keeping things,)
Von Neumann concepts.
But on a small stone,
Doomed to eventually
crash into the sun
(eventually,)
time was still crawling along,
as if onto sand.
The syllables had
formed words that could stand upright
and work together.
There were grunts before,
but those were only noises;
context sprang to life.
The tribe-sentences
that had traits better-suited
to surviving lived,
continuing on
to breed more words, each more
complex than the last.
Those words that were less
skilled at forming sentences
became archaic
(a fate not so different
from extinction, but for
syllabic lifeforms.)
Some words turned out strange
and some just got unlucky,
dead for some reason.
Words that should live, too.
Caliger should have made it,
as should have hursten,
and others besides.
Wordless, they now settle for
circumlocution.
Some syllables failed
even to crawl from the muck,
forever swimming
the laconic sea;
onomatopeia and
simple sound effects.
They could not use tools
or work in groups or wield
a semicolon,
but they succeeded
still, likely because they could
transcend languages.
Loquaciousness thrived -
at first, anyway, until
it overtook words,
swelling too fast, making
words before they were needed;
anything to grow.
Smaller sentences,
still scribbling themselves on walls,
were smothered outright,
or subsumed, sometimes.
Loquaciousness so threatened
the very fabric
of all language-kind
that The Beginnings & Ends
(an impromptu god,
standing in for the
Creator, his- or her-self
being occupied,)
took drastic action.
As the grandiloquent beast
straddled the globe,
Beginnings & Ends,
with heavy hearts, invoked the
dreaded square-cube law.
The carnage was great,
world-spanning, loud, verbose, and
inconceivable.
Sentences that large
would never walk abovegrounds
again, if at all.
(Though it is rumored
some still roam the sea, eating
miniscule dipthongs
in massive doses,
simply trolling the oceans,
yappy mouths open.)
*****||*******||*****
You could just barely
see the Creator--crouching
behind bushes he'd
accidentally
made--hiding, curious, and
a little jealous.
© 2011 John Dowda via MyOWs.com. All rights reserved, except where noted otherwise.
[editorial: This is part of what I've been working on for this last week and change. EP&T is an epic serial haiku presenting an absurdist Grand Unified Guesstimate of Everything. Brecht's uploaded consciousness is spinning--well, more so than usual, anyway--in its hard drive.
Sorry for bringing even more haiku - been on a bit of a kick lately, for some reason. If I can get this into columns or something less phallic, it'll happen as soon as I figure it out. Until then (and presumably regardless of the shape,) enjoy.
Give me a shout if I boffed any of the syllable counts.]
No comments:
Post a Comment