Crumpacker's poetry

Looking for the New State

The edges of domesticity

are policed
by an unreliable narration

meaning the waters

run with fish,
the fish run with excrement.

This is the age of the Ganges,
the Rhine, the Yangtze,

This is the Nile,
the dark, dank green lagoon.

This is the age of new peoples
meaning niche
and factory,

meaning

the hapless concrete of over-estimation.

The sky burns with expansion.
The land burns with

production

. This is the age of the boss

as a tired source

of irony.

There are no bosses here,

only language
performing its usual choreographies.

That rocky gulch,
that stretch of desert
exist beyond discursive ability
and with modest indeterminacy.

And yet, the mood is guaranteed.

Wherever you are, the mood
can be guaranteed.
That mood is

the riddle of consumption.
That mood is the relational spasm
between the self and a new nation

but what?

What could be forsaken?

What could be accomplished?

Is knowledge an accomplishment?

Is love?

Charletans of a solitary nature
would have us read the words
almost as images. Almost as moods.

This is the new nationhood.
It is a form of loss,

but it is also a loss of form

- the precise relationship

between form and knowledge

is a mood

and we are in it.

This is the new age:

No one tells you your back will be against

the wall.

The court is neither humorous

nor just.

Abandonment as a form of abundance.

Operative as a form of distrust.

This is the new people.

And this erasure is our anthem.

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