MARCELLUS

1.) Calling all eco-poets! Your help is urgently needed in the Delaware Water Basin. The shale mining operations there that you may or may not know about are kicking into high gear and the world will be changed. The topic may be large enough to reinvent the meaning of language and poetry. We must explore the realities of the practice and the layers of metaphor embodied in those practices. We must explore the interaction of the realities and the metaphors in the mind space of the affected, which in the final sum is anyone who likes to drink water.

2.) This poem is a dim groping at the beginning of an eco-poetics of shale. True to Butchered Switch form, it also manages to shoe horn in some personal metaphysical-style asides. The poem is a combination of works drawing on a poem-picture which is on display at the bottom. Interesting to note the edits which occurred between the two versions. Poem-pictures are like type writer writing, the choices are irrevocable. Further, their meaning is not contained within the words alone but only in the relation of those words to the space of the page and the shape and style and direction in which they are portrayed.

Enjoy you mother fuckers.

Marcellus

I.

A hem.

Don’t let’s

get into SHALE

FRACKING MAD

MAD SEXUAL

demonstration

a.) the mechanism of the state is peopled

by people convinced they are puppets

enacting only a stage rape

b.) the state is both the bodies

of a laid off investment banker

committing suicide to provide

fiscal surety for his children

and those same children

c.) the state is both Abraham and Isaac

without the presence of God

the act completed in silence

d.) giving out heroin to cure depression

below the aquifer

below the beyond

into the light

beyond yourself

or your rights

shooting a gelatin sludge ‘mud’

in mega (three million gallon) wads

repeatedly down the tube

to break up, or ‘frack,’ the shale

rape theater

relies on always bigger paying draws,

more fantastic rapes

a true 'living theater', a 'total rape economy'

Unacknowledged

a process develops

irony

is metaphor

just what is ?-sexual

crazy.

unholy

cynicism of a paper

law.

Such is fracking

II.

See?

The connection of your minds eye to your anus?

Investure.

the beetle,

scratching on the door

that summer or some frantic night description

taking all the time

up, snatch-w/ your hand

drinking the streets

cede their light

fails

so as the dog

for to bark and to leap from the dark

at you,

to you

the city says.

no it doesn’t.

I only thought it for a second

programmed

to call for language

so momentous to have written