Distant (De) Construction: What A Strange Noise! Poem by Denis Mair

(This is in response to Martin Winter's posts about the demolition of Shangyuan Art Museum, where I did a poet's residency in 2009. During my years in China, I saw demolitions dotting the suburban terrain; I also saw a whole landscape of construction projects. Sometimes the two overlap in my memory.)
... ... ... ... ... ...
What a strange noise! On either side of structure's line of frangibility,

the diminutive (dis) assemblers are hustling components into or out of place.

Agents of (neg) entropy are making a composite noise:

it sounds like nibbling... like rivet guns or rivet extractors in a shipyard.

In the natural and human worlds, there is a need to manage indeterminacy:

sometimes it is channeled by making layers of structure above it;

sometimes it is dealt with by unraveling the basal structure beneath it.

Slam and pound and nibble... borrow energy slaves to magnify the entropy,

in hopes of providing employment for those who can build and unbuild,

it is necessary to mobilize... to deal with the issue of structure on the scale of a war!

Hurl effort and material into the maw of void, and hope that some of it sticks!

Maybe it's humane to hurl it all into a structural vortex, as an alternative to war.

But the rampant hurling of material goes off in crazy directions,

and what happens when the path of structure begins to look like war?

We are either distant onlookers or we scurry about our tasks of assembly and disassembly,

or we are scrambling about trying to find another way

to braid our energies and not expend them on making and unmaking brittle shapes...

If only we can find a way to hurl more love into the lap of earth!
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[* Photo credit: demolition equipment at Shangyuan Art Museum, posted by Martin Winter.]