Listen to a reading of “Let’s Touch Antennae In The Madhouse”:

Let’s touch antennae in the madhouse,
beneath the throes of a dying world
and the growing drums of war,
beneath the din of the cannibal Karens and Covid culture wars
and the miserable late night comedians pushing jokes out
through oceans of pain.

Let’s touch antennae in the madhouse,
where there are more empty homes than homeless
and more jails than universities,
where there is so little scarcity that we have to artificially create it
and so much excess that we ship our garbage overseas.

Where the news is more worried about a French submarine deal
than Yemeni kids starving under Lockheed Martin bomb weather.

Where they harvest our digital information
and push for us all to get digital identifications
while piling used fast food packaging
on top of any part of us that is real.

Where future generations,
if there are future generations,
will scarce believe that there were once whales.

Let’s touch antennae in the madhouse
and remind one another of our uncorrupted essence.

Let’s kneel together
foreheads touching
beneath the gunfire
of ecocide advertisements and Pentagon prayers
of screaming red children and oceans of oil
and be intimate
and be infants
and press into that point of primal innocence
within each other
and let our resistances dissolve
to being at one,
to being at one with each other,
and to being at one
with this whole bloody
screaming
sexy
sacred
mess.

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7 responses to “Let’s Touch Antennae In The Madhouse”

  1. Just a hug with my two daughters, my son and my granddaughter, without the harbinger of the vax would suffice.
    (I get it Caitlin).

  2. you are a good poet, rich in substance. Here is one from me: Goodbye, field of dreams, goodbye/your boys of summer once callow/and brazen stalks, aged and went fallow/ as an ominous haze dimmed the sky./

  3. Western “civilization” is indeed a looney bin.

  4. This somewhat like that:

    A dirty house in a gutted world,
    A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
    Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

    “A Postcard From the Volcano” by Wallace Stevens, from Collected Poems.

    but surely, as Steven Donziger, Craig Murphy, Julian Assange, echoing millions who have stood up, like you, say, “Stay strong.”

  5. Oh Caitlin. You made me cry. But I have been crying a lot lately for the hopelessness of this world. I am old and utterly powerless

  6. Thank you Caitlin

    Heartbreaking and elevating simultaneously.
    The truth painful – such an inadequate adjective –
    Your spirit absolute poetry itself – and a lifting of the deep despair that one does feel looking at the world today

    and Once again I ask to communicate about using your voice for the protagonist of a film I’ve worked on for 20 years for once I started on backstories forits characters 19680-1988 I bumped into:

    The Trilateral Commission

    Wall Street brokers bashing teen protestors with NYPD support as they peacefully demonstrated for the end of war

    Nixon having protestors already corralled far from his nominating convention dumped out of wheelchairs and screamed at to turn over despite being paralysed.

    So very much took some time to ingest – with your voice a gift coming along close to the culmination of my education and radicalization so in sync with my story’s protagonist nicknamed by a news magnate ‘The Buddhist Bomber’
    to take advantage of the fear of the unknown and different, ” and get them all squirrely about that Asian thingy.”.

    I would so love to communicate regarding both the creative and practical sides of making this happen most effectively and well.

    Sincerely once more optimistically reaching out
    Pamela
    Pamela Enz

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