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Poetry by Joseph Cutler

Posted on March 9, 2017 by Sonoma Valley Sun

Author: Joseph Cutler

History Interrupted

Over the once bright land,
The skies turn dark, the coming cyclones
Begin to form
Where government economists once
Painted pretty pictures and showed them on TV
and sang us to sleep with statistics.
Or we sang ourselves to sleep with oxycodone
Or crystal meth or Budweiser.

The darkening sky is sudden
For those of us not on the bottom
Those with no blue tarp covering the roof,
No need for a gun to feel safe from
The senators that could no longer see

Those people had a religion of blindness,
Of insulation, of the gated community,
The entertainment center, and
Seeing mostly the good, the new jobs
At walmart, the low cost television sets
They did not hear
The stoned silence of the middle of
The great continent

The straight arm salute is back, in Michigan,
In Birmingham, in Dallas,
The skies turn dark, the smoky ghosts of
Those who did not leave in time cover the sun,
Song Birds suddenly are nowhere to be found,
Only vultures remain, animals run away from home,
rivers flow upstream, the tides go out
much further than ever, sign of the building tsunami.

Unemployed steel workers begin
Speaking in tongues, clocks stop,
The calendars all show 1939.
The fabric of time is torn
Norse Gods pour in through the holes,
Now Loki, now Wotan, leading the Wild Hunt
The hounds of hell and War trailing behind them.
Economists and doctors can no longer diagnose
Dead brown shirts are emerging from the newsreels
Walking down into the theater
All compasses turn toward Berlin,
And the men who have been ashamed
To look in the mirror for decades
Now carry torches, paint swastikas
On the sides of closed steel mills, coal mines,
They have found their own solution.

No more food stamps,
no more leaking house trailers
No more rusting old cars, no more
Adult children who can’t find work at all,
Who live in the basement with their children.

The torchlight rallies promise greatness again
Pride again. The enemy is narrowed, now
Carried by the other, the goat, from somewhere else
To be driven into the desert, so
As always, all problems will be solved,.

All power to the leader, all obedience
The trance deepens, Loki is on television now,
He glitters of gold and rageful power.

The shape shifting trickster, who lives outside of time
Has taken a body, has found another perfect vehicle
An empty man who would be king
An empty king who promises everything
An empty vessel from whose dark caverns
pour the dreaming depths
Of revenge and dominion, of redemption and pride
Who asks only complete surrender and worship
As gods will do.

History is suspended
The wild hunt is on
War is coming
Loki is ascendant, a genie
Out of the bottle,

Remind me,
How does one trick a genie
To sleep again, return to the cave,
The magic lantern,
To let us sew up
The fabric of time?

Joseph Cutler: “I have been a counselor for many years, and am an aspiring writer. I love to read good poetry. I try to make sense of the world by looking under the surface, as many layers down as I can see.”




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