expressionist relief of mythic proportions.
Travelers who venture this trek witness
these mutations and are soon transfixed.
Denied hopes coalesce, enrapture the weary.
Anguished women cradle the luminous souls
of dead babies and old friends half forgotten
in this swirling meccano of empires and loves.
the wasted alternatives of life are unveiled.
Though indios and neobiologists urge them
to flee the hypnotic force of such coercions,
these errant pilgrims prostrate themselves in
a mad chorus of wails and call the forest wall
Mural del Dios Verde, Mural of the Green God.
Sur
Along the avaricious trail of the forest south,
to the steep windswept cliffs of Patagonia
that rise ragged above rock-strewn beaches,
the emerald hunger stretches farther still
to taint the freezing waters off Cape Horn.
The winds that rake these seas now blow
from the north, warm, fragrant with pollen,
as if the forest could root on the icy cap.
Glassine flounder and neon frogs rain down
to pummel the decks of passing steamers.
But the gun-crack calving of melting bergs
and the slow thaw that extends the sea’s reach
expose no sure foothold for the forest to claim.
Even the shapeshifting woohli has yet to adapt
to the rough hibernal currents of this ocean.
The polar mariners who sail this route watch
the skies, cross themselves, shake their heads,
wonder if the next storm will be even stranger.
Beneath their breaths they curse the forest as
El Diluvio del Diablo, The Deluge of the Devil.
Este
Along the clawing tendrils of the forest east
that cloak the Amazon and its serpentine
tributaries—Madeira, Jacunda, Japurá—
once thriving passages for trade and travel,
only the most bestial of tribes now survive.
At dusk from the hills of Macapá and Belém
you can see the flicker of their campfires
against the gravid green of a dark horizon.
In less than a generation they have morphed
with the forest and are no longer human.
Forging a symbiosis with the force that
rules their world, some are viridescent,
mimicking the foliage that surrounds them.
Others, covered with bony plates, often
prey on all fours like porcine armadillos.
From Caracas in the North to the ramshackle
slums of Rio and Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires,
those who remain in the coastal enclaves call
the forest Creación Oscura, Dark Creation,
El Enfermo, Diseased One, Salvaje, Savage.
Oeste
Along the sweltering frontiers of the forest west,
striping the Andean foothills with wide shadows
and blanketing their no longer snowy heights,
the spikes of thousand-meter bromeliads sway
like the minarets of an organic metropolis.
The great reaches of flora that line these
slopes seem to roar in their rushing before
opening the cores of their inflorescence and
clasping entire settlements in a snap embrace.
A tenderizing mucilage bathes their spoils.
Those who flee this furious onslaught take
refuge in the lightless swamplands below and
return to pay homage, seeing these carnivorous
plants as rampant evolution running in reverse,
mankind succoring and serving the landscape.
The pathetic pageantry of their stark display
culminates in a sacramental sharing of pulcre,
an hallucinogen brewed from this succulent.
Stray revelers whisper the forest’s name as
La Bestia Caprichosa, The Capricious Beast.
Profundidades
In the impermeable fortress of the forest depths,
where each generation of growth destroys the last,
where each generation of fauna devours the last,
a sentience amoral and earthly dreams that the
only word for forest is el Mundo, the World.
THE MUSIC OF THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST
Boston
is a completely natural music
born of transformation,
a thoroughly mutated music
born from corruption.
The Mutant Rain Forest
comes alive at night,
and that is when
its orchestra tunes up
in a wild cacophony
of unnatural selection:
the hissing baritone
of a millipede python
the hypnotic drone
of the blood orchid,
drawing predators
that become prey,
the rising falling hum
of insect swarms
as they live and die
and evolve into
twilight dawn,
the raucous squeak
of the parrot hawk,
a ravenous bird,
a shadow bird
except when it feeds
and a feathered ruff
rises in garish
rainbow array
around its neck,
the hard bone click
of horned tapirs
clashing by night
for control of the herd,
the roars that
rake their throats,
and always
the sudden intermittent
sounds of death and feeding,
the cries of the conquest
and of those eaten.
And intertwined and echoing
within and beyond it all,
the sibilant and husky
language of the cat people,
a constant refrain,
whispering yet insistent
in its seductive complexity.
For no rational reason
you wait for them to finish,
but they go on and on,
this endlessly tuning up
You wait for the
conductor to appear
in his tie and tails
with baton in hand,
tapping the stand
for attention
and silence.
You wait for him
to raise his arms
and strike that
hard blow
against the air
with his stick
that starts the concert.
But he never does.
There is
no conductor.
The concert
never begins.
And that arrhythmic
beat keeps changing
with every measure.
You are frightened
yet drawn by
its random oscillations
and savage insinuations.
Then you realize
that you are already
listening to the concert,
this endless tuning up
for a performance
that never occurs
and occurs forever.
IT’S OKAY TO LISTEN TO THE GREEN VOICE
Frazier
& I ask you how many dreams remain when the forest’s
music is held remote
withheld beyond the thought-barrier of the ventricles
how many lost before the demon amphibian god
of stone rhythm
van de graaf’s its white rhisomous capillary antennae
these beams of scalar order can disarm our nerve tree
&nbs
p; massage the deep red tissues of our composure
the infection moves through the fine motors of the wrist
the whorls of a hundred identities hum at our fingertips
st. vitus light leaks from each skin silo
each pavement scar in the blood trailways
down in the mansions of dna the staircases unravel
in the cell camps the soul unstrangles
hammered strings fibrillate mingus pastorius monk
baselines of articulation black and molecular
yeah the milford graves of beat lashes out
brass stops spew ghost notes dolphy notes
and unleashed in a firestorm of heat imaging
chernobyled from the hidden place with no center
we are all blurs of hysteria across the stage
avatars of the least emotion
the music bumps swell on our foreheads
ready to exceed limit
and all this all this mind you
happens in a moment of recognition
when just the right phrase of adrenalin
washes over from the unexpected
from the arpeggio white noise of metal
from the silver throat of a macaw
from the claymore of some mutated throat
from across the tripwires of tomorrow
from the genes of change
you never thought you contained
AERIAL RECONNAISSANCE OF A CONFLAGRATION AT THE HEART OF THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST
Bruce Boston & Robert Frazier
Rainbow flocks whorl in a maelstrom of feathers over the drifting gray incontinence of smoke. Primaried macaws. The blinking of neon toucans. A transparent ibis with lungs visibly pumping. The milky glistening flight of albescent eagles. Dipping its prop into avian shadows upon the haze like a beast testing the ebon acid of the Styx, our craft volplanes across the immense fire site. Ascending hordes of bats and winged toads alight upon the plane’s fuselage, causing the old woman who accompanies us to start back from her view. Their suckered paws are slime pink upon the glass, the scrabbling of their razor claws like hail.
Deep in the heartland of this prodigal wilderness,
carved from massive trunks and structured from
the shaping and rechanneling of living growth,
a biotic metropolis waits on the blackened horizon.
Tapering clouds of doomed insects flume past us, darkling twisters that surge with disparate energy and often explode in tempests of chitinous flak. More subtle are the flickering tendrils of flame that flare up and die, flare up and die, beckoning like the arms of demons urging us to join them below. Our compass is set on the heart of the conflagration. The plane banks, and the old woman begins to speak of the tribe she claims to have discovered there. She cries for a lover who stayed behind to study and learn, to help build a mecca in green hell. Her rumored madness surfaces in hoarse whispers of another lover “who tamed my soul, who plundered my senses, whose acrid feline touch left my womb fused and barren as the sand of a nuclear range.”
Deep in the prodigal heartland of the mutant forest,
their city offers a symbiosis of fauna and flora,
an architectonic pastiche of budding vegetation
that changes even as we record its singularity.
As we navigate the high walls of particulate gloom, our passage delivers us into a clearer air space, dotted by wispy plumes and whirlwinds of ash. The terrain beneath is etched in startling contrasts. An altered plain stretches ahead toward further haze. The evidence of past burnings outlines rugged byways. Rectangular viridian patches have survived everywhere, now peppered with a thickening coat of cinder falls and edged in solarized yellow from the extreme heat. As the stench of organic incineration fills the cabin, fumbling in her flight jacket the old woman extracts the crudely wrought crucifix of an impaled panther, a religious symbol outlawed in the Northern Cities. Her parchment hands caress the graven image tenderly.
Deep in this prodigal land of endless greening
we have encountered a consciousness phenomenal
in its swift ascent from animal origins,
uncanny in the delineations of its perspective.
We note how the fire has traveled Hydra-like up trunk valleys and along the course of rivers, scaling mountains for a foothold in farther realms, as if colonizing the landscape with its fiery brand yet sparing the main clumps of forest for another fate. Our pilot calls it unnatural and crosses himself twice. The old woman follows suit, clutching the hideous icon to her withered breasts, and begins to chant an incantation in a voice no longer recognizable as human, a crescendo of gutturals, hisses, and glottal stops which culminates in a soprano animal screech that sets my teeth on edge. At last we admit that we are in the presence of one, regardless of her sanity, who understands far more of the world below than we may ever be able to fathom.
Deep within our prodigal thoughts we speculate
and worry tomorrow endlessly, we extrapolate
the particulars of some ultimate confrontation
with the denizens of this green heartland.
As we emerge from a churning bank of dark cumuli, seeded by smoke and thickening across the center, we spot an immense tree—no, a score of trees, twining together like vines reaching for the light. Gathered about the circumference of this Ydrigsal, slashing with unbounded energy at its woody tissues, work parties of cats stand, tall and deceptively lean, taming the errant growth into dwellings and streets. Their fur is matte black with a sleek bluish sheen. And beyond their endeavor the burgeoning city waits beneath a sky where smoke and burning ash do not sail, where we can watch the dwindling white circumference of our passenger’s parachute as it drifts earthward past slender ceiba towers and liana-draped terraces, florescent with the bloom of unknown mutant strains.
Deep within our hearts the prodigal past haunts
our imagination, we rue our tainted histories
and the destructions we must claim
as the fire-dampening storm begins to wail.
CONFIRMED BY THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST
Boston
You travel to the Mutant Rain Forest
fleeing the artificial environments
that have formed and framed your life,
seeking fortunes worldly and spiritual,
hoping to rediscover pristine nature
or perhaps merely another sensation
to further tease your jaded palate.
You travel to the Mutant Rain Forest
spurred by hungers you cannot sate,
seeking flavors you have yet to savor.
Here you encounter a terra incognita
where the skills you have mastered
are irrelevant, where ideologies fog
and scatter, where the protracted
evolutionary climb from sea to land,
from fish to beast to civilized man,
provides no shelter, no saving grace.
Here your humanity triggers your fate.
In the heart of the Mutant Rain Forest
where marvelous circumstance abounds,
you must stand naked and begin again.
In the wilds of the Mutant Rain Forest
where protean life stalks and feasts,
your stray passage is such likely prey.
In the dark of the Mutant Rain Forest
phantasmagoric visions fall like rain:
vile apparitions, angelic intimations,
discrepant as the epitaphs you crave.
BROMELIAD BRAIN
Frazier
A 3-pound hub for synaptic grubs
How much fires in the end
We can’t know the extent
But with lime spiders et al and
Their blinding webs as linkage
Maybe it can attain sentience
Naked to the weather
High in the forest canopy
It feeds on everything
Reaching for the sun’s
degrees
Or for the incinerating fields
Of love’s human corona
DESERTED ALTARS IN THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST
Boston
In the deep shadows
of the Mutant Rain Forest,
rough stone altars
shrouded by indigo moss
still bear the stains
of blood ritual.
Mortal sacrifice
did not sate
the gods once
worshipped here,
but the reverence
it reflected did.
Now they wait
in the Mutant Rain Forest,
shadows of their
former selves,
frail as waifs
in their abandonment.
Now they dream
through drowsy decades,
in a hypnagogic state,
dreams red and rich
with ritual slaughter.
Abandoned in the
Mutant Rain Forest,
imprisoned in stone,
draped with indigo moss,
they wait for true believers,
some new transient species,
to evolve out of the wilderness
and worship at their altars
with blood sacrifice
once more.
DAS SENSIBLE CHAOS
Frazier
adapting from natural to global
invading conduits, phone boxes, homes
these mites from the rainy canopies
in fiber optics fine and bright as angel hair
they will generate a shroud for the living
mottled with the colorful husks of their dead
it exudes plasms both luminous & psychoactive
one touch will stagger you
under the color wheel of heaven
Mandelbrot patterns shift in the violence
a Rorschach with infinite possibility
stare too long at the texture & your thoughts
seem suspect in their affect on the weave
illustrations of your failures & futures
emerge with nightmarish detail
yet to rend the work proves fruitless
their networked efforts redouble
while a mask for your last hours gathers
from the broken lightless spokes
SURROUNDED BY THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST
Bruce Boston
A weak December sun falls like a faltering beacon against the shadows that surround us. We enter another vine-choked alley. The red breath of our laser rifles sizzles through the intrusion of leaves, blackening them to ash. The forest is driven back one more time, but we know it will return.
Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest Page 16