Carrying capacity
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Carrying capacity
So runs the maxim
never evacuate where you masticate,
but we have long since run afoul
of our mandate:
having occupied and fouled,
at an exponential clip,
every holt and heath,
every combe and cliff.
The number of extant humans
on my digital counter
ascends faster
than I can discern:
and wherever there is man,
there is manifestation of man,
given how scarcely fond we are
of making ourselves scarce.
If from this multiplying hoard
we should have sufficient intelligence
to have conferred
with tolerable expedience
on the acceleration of the purification
of all we have excreted,
having long ago exceeded
the capacities of groundwater filtration,
wetlands, the ocean –
to conduct it all to wastewater plants
and append enough constructed wetlands –
one hopes the planet just might sustain
itself. But should our vassals
the microbes exhaust themselves
once we have superheated them
to inflate their productivity so as
to faster convey us compost
for our corn and potatoes?
It is no doubt so tough to buttonhole
billions of posterior apertures
we will be lucky not to have to ruminate
our cud wading in rivers of dross.
Surely not what our mothers
had in mind when they carried us
in the nook of their arms
and poured the elements
into the mouth-end
of the alimentary wend,
later premasticating our fare
where called for, sharing drool,
inhaling snot from an occluded nasal vestibule,
being on the receiving share
of the odd urine stream to the eye,
solicitously mopping
the evacuation pipe
of our still-apprenticing
Escherichia coli ecosystem.
How fantastic that something
departing one end of us
can so menace the very end
it once was so warmly welcomed,
how something so long and safely stoked
so deep inside us, can be so treacherous
once liberated from us.
never evacuate where you masticate,
but we have long since run afoul
of our mandate:
having occupied and fouled,
at an exponential clip,
every holt and heath,
every combe and cliff.
The number of extant humans
on my digital counter
ascends faster
than I can discern:
and wherever there is man,
there is manifestation of man,
given how scarcely fond we are
of making ourselves scarce.
If from this multiplying hoard
we should have sufficient intelligence
to have conferred
with tolerable expedience
on the acceleration of the purification
of all we have excreted,
having long ago exceeded
the capacities of groundwater filtration,
wetlands, the ocean –
to conduct it all to wastewater plants
and append enough constructed wetlands –
one hopes the planet just might sustain
itself. But should our vassals
the microbes exhaust themselves
once we have superheated them
to inflate their productivity so as
to faster convey us compost
for our corn and potatoes?
It is no doubt so tough to buttonhole
billions of posterior apertures
we will be lucky not to have to ruminate
our cud wading in rivers of dross.
Surely not what our mothers
had in mind when they carried us
in the nook of their arms
and poured the elements
into the mouth-end
of the alimentary wend,
later premasticating our fare
where called for, sharing drool,
inhaling snot from an occluded nasal vestibule,
being on the receiving share
of the odd urine stream to the eye,
solicitously mopping
the evacuation pipe
of our still-apprenticing
Escherichia coli ecosystem.
How fantastic that something
departing one end of us
can so menace the very end
it once was so warmly welcomed,
how something so long and safely stoked
so deep inside us, can be so treacherous
once liberated from us.
The mechanism of humor
So there’s this guy perched on a chasm
and someone comes along
and feints the oblivion thrust, causing him
to recoil and emit a careening vociferation.
Then there’s this obscure figure in the dark
who lurches toward the oblivious traveler
and with this chiaroscuro sight triggers
her to bare her fangs and bark.
In remonstration of the unexpected,
you see, our congenital inclination
to violence is thereby obviated
by making its channel subterranean.
and someone comes along
and feints the oblivion thrust, causing him
to recoil and emit a careening vociferation.
Then there’s this obscure figure in the dark
who lurches toward the oblivious traveler
and with this chiaroscuro sight triggers
her to bare her fangs and bark.
In remonstration of the unexpected,
you see, our congenital inclination
to violence is thereby obviated
by making its channel subterranean.
Planned obsolescence
As they grow older, the muscles
in our intestine stiffen,
which engenders incontinence.
That difficulty keeping the waste,
waste solely by virtue of the body’s
sudden and fickle desire to be
divorced of it, in.
The waste like continents,
those protean masses,
against the tide.
It’s how it all hangs together.
It’s how it’s all contained.
Senescence is but relaxation
accorded a certain scale
but I do not need to live to see
us replacing a bloodless intestine
like we swap silicon chips
for I am fluent in obsolescence:
I am foreign to myself.
When my spit slides
into a glass, the glass
contains me. When I saunter,
my skin cells emanate
general in the room
and I am extended.
But immediately
the one is effluent,
the other dust.
When I touch the sole of my foot
I feel a sensation
in the farthest antipodean cantons
of my body: but when asked
to triangulate the pain in my gut,
I get no further
than ‘entrails’. My identity
is a personal matter
in which I have little say, save
circumscribing my life:
which, since I was occasioned,
at least, has been epiphenomenal
on my identity.
in our intestine stiffen,
which engenders incontinence.
That difficulty keeping the waste,
waste solely by virtue of the body’s
sudden and fickle desire to be
divorced of it, in.
The waste like continents,
those protean masses,
against the tide.
It’s how it all hangs together.
It’s how it’s all contained.
Senescence is but relaxation
accorded a certain scale
but I do not need to live to see
us replacing a bloodless intestine
like we swap silicon chips
for I am fluent in obsolescence:
I am foreign to myself.
When my spit slides
into a glass, the glass
contains me. When I saunter,
my skin cells emanate
general in the room
and I am extended.
But immediately
the one is effluent,
the other dust.
When I touch the sole of my foot
I feel a sensation
in the farthest antipodean cantons
of my body: but when asked
to triangulate the pain in my gut,
I get no further
than ‘entrails’. My identity
is a personal matter
in which I have little say, save
circumscribing my life:
which, since I was occasioned,
at least, has been epiphenomenal
on my identity.
Fleek
So much spotlighting given
to those vestigial apparatus:
tweezed, yanked, pulled, riven,
sculpted, thread thin into bareness
triched out, whittled down in fact
to perfect ineffectualness
for rain barreling the scalp’s
overabundant trickle.
They are right there,
staring us in the face,
so we can sublimate
and cute-aggress
the little fuckers.
Born to these bodies,
what is it we can change?
By the time we are
industriously dismantling
our body’s cilia industry
it is certainly not our dispositions,
the vantage from which we peer
at our peers, or the supercilious
approach we take to our confreres,
an attitude that weathers away
in the blind depths of night
like the glaciers of Greenland,
just as have the evolutionary fields
of primate hair on the human face
until a fragmented landscape remains.
After assailing our own faces,
we barely notice the eyebrows of others –
until we do, and then they are wagging
and wiggling all over the place,
in semaphores across the bow –
of alarm, rage, skepticism,
or the hoisting of the brow
for no other reason
than that a cup of coffee
has alit on our lips,
or a digit has begun
to stroke our glabella
in soothing refrain the way
our mother would in refrain
of the Demodex folliculorum mites
that she gifted us as babies
upon our newly minted,
unalloyed skin,
eyelash to eyelash,
eyebrow to eyebrow.
to those vestigial apparatus:
tweezed, yanked, pulled, riven,
sculpted, thread thin into bareness
triched out, whittled down in fact
to perfect ineffectualness
for rain barreling the scalp’s
overabundant trickle.
They are right there,
staring us in the face,
so we can sublimate
and cute-aggress
the little fuckers.
Born to these bodies,
what is it we can change?
By the time we are
industriously dismantling
our body’s cilia industry
it is certainly not our dispositions,
the vantage from which we peer
at our peers, or the supercilious
approach we take to our confreres,
an attitude that weathers away
in the blind depths of night
like the glaciers of Greenland,
just as have the evolutionary fields
of primate hair on the human face
until a fragmented landscape remains.
After assailing our own faces,
we barely notice the eyebrows of others –
until we do, and then they are wagging
and wiggling all over the place,
in semaphores across the bow –
of alarm, rage, skepticism,
or the hoisting of the brow
for no other reason
than that a cup of coffee
has alit on our lips,
or a digit has begun
to stroke our glabella
in soothing refrain the way
our mother would in refrain
of the Demodex folliculorum mites
that she gifted us as babies
upon our newly minted,
unalloyed skin,
eyelash to eyelash,
eyebrow to eyebrow.
Charles Byrne is a writer and teacher with poems recently published or forthcoming in "Meridian", "New American Writing", and "Notre Dame Review". He has read submissions for "RHINO" poetry journal and Autumn House Press.