Overculture and the China Whale

This piece was written for a community poetry reading to honor of World Oceans Day.

The overculture’s industrial phallus spikes downward
Penetrating the belly of the Earth.
And sucks out her black amniotic goo.
Man is still embryonic,
In a state of perpetual taking from the mother.

But oil is a Trickster. It is not amniotic. It is not the water of life. Oil is the substance of death, pouring into the womb of the Gulf; filling the oceanic uterus of life with death.

The classic image of the spewing oil well is a backwards male climax
It is a money-gasm – a death-gasm – an orgasm for the overculture.
In the death-black eye of overculture the oilman is more than the child sex slave
In the death-black eye of overculture safety is a prison and progress is destruction.
The death-black eye of overculture is a cock
And big oil a rapist.
The Earth says No. Big oil says Yes.

Being a rape victim is like being an oil spill; you lay lifeless in a vast depressive blackness. No one can reach you till you wash ashore.
Within every tar ball, is a half dead soul, unaware the overculture has raped them.
God walks barefoot along the world’s beaches, scooping up tar balls and tossing them into a kicked bucket.
In the oily residue left behind
Are jagged rainbows – the flimsy marriages, the alienated children, the secrets, the tears, the mad sex, the flickers of doubt, the night dreams, the broken rainbows left behind.

But that is only half the story – overculture’s story.
Soul-culture tells a different version, with different values, and an outcome in which the black viscous tide miraculously brings forth a new world. For soul-culture’s story, let’s turn to dreams. My first remembered dream was a nightmare in which my father blinded me with tar, and it stung. It was the tar of the overculture. This dream from 1998 shows a primal, amniotic blackness overtaking me, overtaking my blindness and returning my sight:

Me and another person try to kill each other for a long time, but we stop when our common enemy becomes this enormous whale. We manage to get to a small island and from there we manage to blow up the whale with a bomb. The whale is dead and we are relieved, but the shock of the bomb has created big waves that heave across our island and they don't subside, but grow stronger. The blown up whale becomes the waves and doesn't want to kill us, it wants to become us. I am still afraid, but I am much more accepting. The whale becomes the island and us along with it. I feel its black warm soft mass taking me.

The happiest, most cohesive and spiritually aligned group of people in the world is a group in northern China who are known for their unusually round eyes. I watch them examining each other's eyes.