James Grabill


THE PROBLEM WITH THE PYRAMID

There’s the problem of the pyramid
being applied to organizations 
of people, the trouble associated 
with currency, and around private 
belief that contrasts with peer-reviewed 
scientific findings. There’s difficulty 
surrounding oppilations of the father 
saying to his teenaged son, You’re just like 
your mother, and worshipping the graven 
image of people’s identity, including one 
you’ve constructed of yourself, and going 
blind from extraordinary machinations 
of indifference, not to forget being seriously  
ironically pinched by all your possessions 
while they hold you in a state of extortion, 
always needing to pay for their upkeep 
and non-natural added parts. Wherever 
you turn around in the day, automatic 
defenses are interceding, encumbrances 
rearing up with consternation brewing, 
and nothing in your power can return 
the place to its original levels of ambient 
congestion and radiographic interference. 
Pending disincentives may cause obstruction  
along with an embarrassment of detention, 
forbiddance, bafflement, and rank preclusions 
in philosophic objectionism. Unrestrained 
thick-jammed barricades may have come 
with cul-de-sac impedimenta with blockages 
at the bar, arresting hitched high hurdles 
and halted stoppages, balked hamperings, 
flagging bleak moratoria alongside knaggier 
interdictions leading to meticulous, possibly 
inducible, irreducible, with cold renunciation
arguing for you to surrender, then sign up 
for another tour. There’s the old hazard 
of delivering your entire human brain 
ahead of time to a human parts museum
or donating it to acts of an overseas war, 
experiencing a stop-loss of 2 years more.  
To be sure, wherever you look, contravention 
exists around anyone’s keeping of handguns 
in every room, even in a well-oiled, ready
to shoot state in case an invasive stranger 
shows up out of nowhere. There’s the risk 
of nailing a friendly, say the gas meter person, 
or someone with whom you sleep, someone 
who eventually was becoming part of you. 
There are structural weaknesses in a classical 
pyramid. Don’t believe everything you find 
published on the internet. The weaknesses 
can begin roughly halfway up, where complying 
with pressures from the top means being forced 
to distribute them equally to weight-bearing 
beams below, where you’ll have difficulties 
associated with cornerstones and heavier bulk 
that depends on microscopic microorganisms, 
where being’s been possible. Don’t kid yourself: 
real troubles can lock in on what’s below 
to the point the pyramid feels, how do you say?, 
misunderstood or disrespected. Eventually 
you may swear that your pyramid has lost 
its sharpness or its officers are pedaling relics 
for a few bucks, or a husband carrying out
a dalliance changes the game, as the wife holds 
the hand of aspiration. Wherever you end up, 
troubles can erupt, tremors to stress alignment
of what’s stacked up, where a beautiful assault
can appear out of nowhere, pushing a stroller 
of triplets, with a mooling chorus of town boys 
on Harleys serving at the pleasure of innocence.
A quick swallow of aspirin can tie up your time
and grow steadily into a global PR campaign 
with a linen pocket of eschatological devotion 
and belief in unfastening the damn dumb of us, 
summoned as we’ve been before the wisdom 
of tribunal judges in 15th century Florentine caps. 
The story can even undergo a full replacement 
of characters written into the language adjusting 
pitch for acquired tastes in trans-Arctic melting.
A pyramid in sand drifts of a desert must remain 
to be seen, whereas in tropical jungles it can be 
taken over by a hundred thousand wild flora 
and bloody fauna, while everything living
on the Earth soon enough will be protected.



PIECES OF SHATTERED GUITAR

Maybe no one shows up                
to claim possession 
of personalities of the deceased 
waiving their rights to attorney 
around reptilian maw on the radio 
turned up hot from spikes 
of emptiness when sea wings open 
for those born to mothers before 
all this TV army traveling on onerous 
armistice rescinded for control 
of flocks that blast into materialism.

All you need is love all you will not buy 
with negotiations not for sale, not 
until ritualized certainty steps in 
with everybody following to the one 
and only you’ve gotta love, to have love, 
have warm love taking you to the place 
where who knows if you need silent love, 
connected love, connecting so you’re able 
to give love, when finding love, so you hear 
the mind making moves electromagnetic 
like no time before, any place we’ve been, 
now that we’re living in disrupted conditions
and what’s most important is honest love.

So seeing-eye doors scan for exact matches 
in the history of mapped faces, on the road
into emptiness heavy with machinery roaring 
out of unstudied Gnosticism packing austerity 
of the present era when redemption has work 
to bargain over, given the number of sleeping 
embargos flame-high in milks of the mammal 
spectrum stone-serious about ethereal gravitas, 
glass doors splitting open while the eye records 
architecture of the human face, as something 
gargantuan is trying to speak but finds no words 
or reincarnation, just a sense of what could spill 
off the planet, though lamas are saying chants.

Only so much sun and moon exist 
for the psyche of anyone, 
only so much late afternoon 
in which shadows lengthen, raising 
doubt over the shape of the world 
we’re working in. Only so much fresh 
mathematics and advanced celery, 
so many bottles of oil from Greek 
olives, only so many American bison 
grazing on protected federal lands. 
Only so many newly debuted symphonies 
responding to current complexities. 
Only so many Himalayan non-materialists 
chanting to benefit sentient beings.
Only so much heavy rain
falling on a dark country road.



SHE’S LIVED IN A WHALE-EYE WIND  

Her root-raked underground workings 
spike gently around moth antennae
that are otherworldly and seem useful, 
the way they’ve grown from tiny heads 
in the same early forests and remain at alert 
when crossing the same terrain as the mammoth 
money devoured for supper at great banquet halls. 

Her motherly post-partum fiber has been made 
out of solar flares, and her wit red-violet vinegar. 
It’s not clear whether the dancer’s the dance 
or person the persona, so she translates full case 
histories beyond personage into encyclopedic entries 
speaking through mineral progressions familiar 
to more species than human. She reports specific 

previously unheard atonal chords when coupling 
with industry, while mercury rolls across beds 
of rivers by cities like futuristic beads traded 
with trinkets for ancient lands. Her overtones 
have risen until again she’s opening forgotten 
doors to a natural antidote for primitive agnosia, 

a cure that strangely resembles home vegetable 
gardens that keep hounding the more remorseless 
liars and yet vivify modern practitioners of arts, 
while simply touching her hand can lift 
the inner self out of modern materialism.



EVERY DAY THERE’S MORE

Rodin stands strong in the body, as wisdom necessarily turns collective. 

Every day on Earth we know far more about the centering nights 
that come to terms with the corn-yellow present live, the human
                            global populations exponentially expanding, 
bank accounts sinking, the hands in that dream that felt like swimming   
           swearing to laws that may have been misguided, that permit 
ownership of land,             when each person in a community is part of it. 

The community has its factory timeclocks wheeling on teeth of gears.

This wouldn’t be the first time breath’s continued to be 
what all species share, unless they’re gone too high in the atmosphere 
as test pilots without equipment can dive into heat 
going up on the average thermometer 
in spite of denying                               the wildcat shrapnel that bursts out 

         of multiplied directions as the brain remains loyal to the mind
melting where it has been melting as it’s watering         to the bottom 
of the slow motion refrigerator edge                           racing off 
from ice face fronts quicker than the projections of computer models,

with large numbers of North American goldfinches of the new physics 
at home in the open arms of cottonwoods           the scent of loaves 
as 5 a.m. wafts into licking neo-Sumerian breezes off the great ocean. 

For no one wants to hear the exquisite Cetacean name of the last whale 
to spout on carbonic waters in sunlight risking the unknowable future 

where craving in animals is well refined 
as ritual moves, reenacted, sinking a central root                 irreplaceable 
as the air clears and hauls char on its way through swarming concentrations 

as multiple pressures stand in the Sanskrit hum at the foot of plants, 
in ashes of the evening river still pouring over medieval wolves and voles, 
the mule deer consoled to this day 
by St. Francis of Assisi at the calm center 

with transience mollified by insouciance in all nakedness, in numbers 
of thick-branched quark residuals giving shelter, places to live 
in the morning air for the sake of patience      for what it’s taken on

at the philosophic periphery of orbiting inextinguishable alertness
in the wild-haired conscious instant when the next present kicks in, 

inherited sophisticated faculties unfurling at the genetic origin 
adapting to volatility of conditions with scientific understanding
the moss-lit fortress of the rainforest where the air moves in being, 

                    in gusts going about their work of roiling up the long wing 
                           of rainfall raking over the seismic continent 
                                             where archaic women before words 
                                    would have given a long mothering thought.

burning out of electronic communication devices that abandon nature
as if animals in the wild were no longer singing the open song of air,
the miles kicking in sleep lanterns and Tibetan horns out of the mines 
where digging beetles reside in the rod and staff first lessons of air.

For what you’re seeing isn’t necessarily there, here in front of you.
Not with digital blank-slate amnesia for the future in cosmic rays 
quickening operations of the eyes capable of looking past thousands 
of bulldozed parabolic receivers that have gone live with oyster pearl 
vows in carp-throated spring-offs of the past, here on their own volition

thanks to emergency room doors that swung open 
to offer resuscitation                                 in the only moment we may have 
                                  where atoms are forever ticking down on their timeline 
                                     of unfinished sagacity, at times taking the road 

past dairy ants protecting their sweet aphids under softness of mosses 
building in catalytically cracked independence to lightning-spun 
solidness, when what can you do                 if too much hasn’t been done.

For you have your sounds of the expanse out of down-home Ernst
where the atmosphere continues breathing              over the millennia, 
refining its translation, remodeling studios, adjusting to the moment 
a straight-ahead spine swallows with intrinsic newborn nakedness. 



HOW COULD WE NOT 

We’ve had Bardos rhapsodically return uncorked out of towering joy 
with its billions of miseries that unravel before the latest unafraid 
phrenoglyphia displaying a spectrum of offertory tracts in a long-gone

chance that months itself out through day into night in fresh procreative 
but small acts of altruism and rejection, moves of standing or undoing, 

scenes of interdiction of pitches in a voice from sources to mine-tailings 

as beauteous and petulant as acts of seeing can be, for photographed 

citizens of large cities still being run on their U-Haul trailers and reefer  
while ice-cold dogma falls apart in the caskets of sleep, coming down 
to the long-distance overflow of desire that expands over the root roar 
and inflations of rains, which feather off melts in the saucering galaxy. 

For we’ve heard the scarlet half-future cry of bison herds still exhaling 

fossil breath at the outskirts where unconditional tongues are at work
from before words, departments of operations charging for protection 
from their operations, future archeologists brushing off soil and dust 

from a few white collarbones of ours, where local vegetable gardens are 

thriving in sweetly paranormal topsoil capable of striking deep in people, 
one at a time, in facsimiles of Reagan decades, heavy money racing off 
on expanded loyalties only to end up in trouble, losing what was made 

then being forced underground with the exacting sciences and higher arts, 

the archeology of dynamic inquiry and unattempted doubt on the farmland 
of spiritual incidents capable of giving off a scent of the inextinguishable 
when making eye contact or laboring hard while furious moths are taking 
to the wing in bloodstreams settling back on modern plasticity of the mind 

adjusted for energy efficiency and philosophical tracts nailed to the door 

in the beat of ceremonial drums, when radio reception is breaking up 
in primitive tortoise-crawls through embryonic involuntary recalcitrance 

granted clearance from below psychedelic innocence that’s panthered 
late at night by ruined expectation, before remembered nakedness 
stands in an absence of names, before unsettling faces of global news,  

with penciled-in petroglyphs and the sitar reaching depths in the chest 

through resounding sacramental fluorescence and reverence for the first 
morning when people wake into a fine reverie modified by contemplation 
of wisdom cultures in their equatorial overflow, while the neurological 

Swiss embassy maintains operational neutrality, making its wild bird 
a needle that flies through material fabric within cells creating species,
spreading into old-growth fir forests which communicate benevolence 
before the day’s able to branch out of the impenetrable trunk of night.

But swallowing 500 years of animals an hour becomes nearly impossible 

on a work day when your silhouette still shudders in the front window 
of what a name undertakes, muscular transpiration breaching the gates 
of the stone arena where mammoth atmospheric needs are overflowing,

joining vastness one rivet at a time, emptying neighborhoods all morning 

into mists that drift out of past geologic faults streaming with electricity
where all beings are given form from the way their music would sound.
 
We’ve passed the point that your home can be reached if you head out
in any direction when the steady pour of morning has continued to grow
indivisibly in the capillary expanse replete with inexhaustible mystery 

and vulnerability seen when mineral sweeps interfere with fine reception 
of anyone’s lasts and firsts that inherited ancestral bones of the jaw  

where countlessness remains no greater or lesser than taking a breath.



ON BROADWAY 

Unhedged funds fume from the foundations of high-rises.
Wealth keeps something gargantuan unseen, far behind 
its locked door. Materialism occurs when everyone files 
claims for ownership in the staked-out live surroundings, 
while owning grows to include thought-up strings of words.

A piano player employs her own keyboard ploys, as Marilyn 
Monroe steps across a threshold, addressing the barroom 
with a breathy voice, as a baritone prevaricates on a nearby
front stoop, sipping his Schnapps of an enhanced stupidity 
from a sack, calling it a tonic of the more unabashed stars.

This goes on, as the TV army travels on strength of its arms 
memory to memory, armory to armory, rescinding armistice 
to protect vulnerable materialists reaching for the controls 
of vital resources. Ballistic ministers prepare new treatments 
for contemporaneous flocks readying the senses for blast-off, 

liberally giving of their projectiles to bloody-heart materialism, 
which can in no way stop growing for the heavy days of labor 
and nights of fun and recreation being what the lord provides.
Now agents of local operations ajax the corners of busy streets, 
if you know what I mean, with appositive bovine pastures here 

from the old world pasteurizing more than the little children 
of wind and steady rain need for their small milk campaigns, 
while they’re learning to identify with the owners of big milk.
And yet it’s Broadway, with a broker, a pinstriped New Yorker, 
going broke before the last scene of the play at the end of night. 

James Grabill's poems appear online at Calibanonline, Unlikely Stories, Terrainonline, The Decadent Review, and others. Books: four from Lynx House Press, Sea-Level Nerve: I & II (2014 & 2015, Wordcraft of OR), Branches Shaken by Light & Reverberations of the Genome (2020 & 2021, Cyberwit, India), and others. For years, he taught writing and global issues relative to sustainability.

 
 

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