Phase Shift

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/13366779

LEARNER full text (2024)

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APPRENTI texte integral (2024)

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID GUERRE MONDIALE
Poems, mine and theirs

PHASE SHIFT

Water drips from an open faucet until your turn it up enough,
Then it phase shifts from drip to flow

One day, there is no COVID
The next, beware the world toboggan! 

One day, we were more or less at peace
The next, not so much 

Things change, they grow fade go flat die out
Phase shift is different 

One day, the world was much as it had always been
From then on, things will diverge more and more 

Will grow distant from recalled social mores
Into new folds and terrifying convolutions 

Social structures lose their four-square solidity
Ceilings fray and the ground shifts underfoot 

The world retains its axis of time in common
But the x, y, z axes drift from their bearings 

Things no longer appear as they once seemed
For better or for worse. 

Random phase shift can usually take us
To familiar, often haunted sites

To more and more poverty and injustice
Staging more and more lethal scenes 

The next goose step of the thousand-year Reich
Its dead, its dying and it surviving hostage lovers 

Long suffering, long enduring 
Their children taught long suffering and long endurance. 

Drudges pinned to coal pit classrooms
Never let go to fresh air recess on PeaceWorld. 

Which often leads to reality refusal
Unfocussed dread and denial of common sense 

When the steel deck slides into the sea at your feet
Elegance of thought flees your mind 

The standard revolutionary response leads to
Its maximum effort up front, its easy opposition after 

Counter-revolution almost always wins
It rots the revolution from within or kills it from without  

Despite its sacrifice, party discipline, 
police suppression, religious devotion 

While counter-revolution is simple:
More or less well-shared greed 

The current social construct is pointy side down unstable
Built to tumble down the rapids of war without end 

Revolution just sharpens its urchin spines.
Otherwise, it is just as unstable as before. Whereas, 

Phase shift anchors itself with lead
As hard to pull up as revolutionary straw was easy 

Phase shift takes too much effort to counter
The counter-phase shift actors dissolve in their own illogic 

Nothing and everything to resist: impossible resistance 
No anchor or upside for weightlessness acrobats  

A massive wakeup shared by everyone instead
Of prior dreams poorly held in common 

I foretell the phase shift to PeaceWorld
As powerful as a whisper, as strong as a flood 

No need to wake up to heaven on Earth
More excellence over perfection 

A little bit closer by a whisper and a rush
We smile more often; we grieve per Mencius 

Phase shift takes little effort to set off
Shared sighs of doubt, not the public roar of revolution 

We fall asleep in the last twilight of WeaponWorld
And awaken to the first dawn of PeaceWorld  

EN FRANCAIS
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/11541286

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