Tom Clark: Truth Game at BlazeVOX

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Truth Game

 
The words having given up on them,
not the words but the meanings

hiding behind the trees
at the side of the road,

the people said
"We can't find the words"

The people sounded like lost children then
"The words have given up on us"

"We can't explain"
The words having been hiding away all those years

in the hide and seek truth game
not wanting to be found

Children playing by road near school house, Kansas [?]: photo by John Vachon, c. 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Network

The world gradually draws into
a global unit, knitted
together by the networks stitched
into everyone's private
arrangements.
There is increasingly the threat
of an objective penalty
for being excluded 
from the game,
from these networked arrangements.

At the same time
seeing these arrangements
clearly and objectively from the inside
is impossible.
Only by being cut adrift,
stranded
on the outside,
does one begin
to make out the workings
of the game -- 
to make out that it is a game
and not a "natural" state of things.

A "natural" state of things
may or may not
ever have obtained.
That no longer matters. 
The thought of a "natural"
state of things troubles
and distracts.
The time of nature has passed 
like the dinosaurs.
All that is left,
effectively, is the present
drawing toward it
as a magnet attracts
iron filings
the mechanical regime
of a future
from which the players of the game,
enclosed
as in bubbles
by their socially enforced subscription
to what is perceived
as an inevitable
and necessary
condition,
would not be able to escape
even if the inchoate impulse to escape
were to become a conscious motive. 

 

An abandoned "Giant Slide" at Coney Island: photo by Arthur Tress, May 1973 for the Environmental Protexction Agency's Documerica project (US National Archives)

Tom Clark: Truth Game (BlazeVOX, 2013). Now available here