a return of Poetry (XII)

into the chasm of time that is my life's commute i drip my words, in obscure piece-driven slow pursuit of meaning eked from these blank, mounding minutes. for years i've missed my deep soul-patrons, they having left me high ashore (or i left them: i'm never sure), but seldom do i miss them more than here.


once or twice i've dreamt the brush of Poetry, shrouded in a gentle face jostled about by the train's foul mob and sway--and i admit she might have been: though always, in the end, i find she's lost amid the crowd.


then again: i've seen her, too, in the dust-shone light of a train coming in underground where we wait for it, we wait for it, checking our watches in a bump-up fight for place against the space-drop down to the tracks below. she's there, in the open volume where the ceiling accomodates the platform above us we rode in--despite the screech and rush, i find her peace in that glowing air. the light belongs to her, as she to all.


--then through the hole. the train plunges out and towards us, a narrow miss, and promises us home. we're carried forth, to the mundane life, poetry in that moment of light left behind: and yet--


at dinner i subdue the imaginations of my day to favor thoughts of the less ideal. i take my meals alone, now, at a mirrored table whose reflections of my face betray the cheap resentment of my frozen loneliness. i never sat alone like this before to eat.


what differences divide, like desolated platform stops, the tracks that string together this exile and entombment? some few, i think: but not decay (which binds the soul before the body starts to go), not idleness, not the dull morbidity of an empty face. we are quite closely dead, we many who are alone.


and yet, we're thus in temperament more than truth. this solitude is a counter-preference, sociality deferred to times that we control. our species does abound, after all: it is my hesitance to meet my neighbors, to greet a woman on the train, that so exiles. this, and theirs to do the same. we live in angles of self-and-else resistance: and so, crowded all alone.


and so at length to sleep, although each passing night i ask the dark what more composes History than time's untiring, vectral thrust. we pile on these many evenings, then find a year is gone; then a decade, then a life; what's more to History, then? yet echoed against the walls i hear the answer spoken in my own voice, and Poetry close beside.








may '11

a more beautiful hour

In an evening where a cloud-damped sun descends behind the storm-grim ceiling sky, there waits an unknown hour far more beautiful than her brothers. From a thundercoil luminescence, the Earth glows nude--stretching lean her raw elegance, her naked true nobility, disrobed of all less worthy lights. Within her atmospheric lust we open infant eyes to find ourselves enfogged and more than men: we must be gods: for only such could see her thus and live.








May '11

knowing

i write the same few words in an ever slightly changing cycle of response; then, in a moment, i'll break and write what i don't mean. momentarily popular by extension and reflection of quite public demands, i then recede to write again the few words i really mean.


we are, after all, quite simple and similar: by examining myself i know many things about everyone before ever taking the time to meet them. it saves energy, as i sit alone on a bench that starts on a metro train and slowly becomes my empty apartment's darkened porch. saves talking and trouble of us ever meeting because, as i shall never tire of pointing out: i already know you.--there, the tripe i write in a hundred only imaginarily different ways, writ once more. in which regard, you already know me, too, i suppose. touché.








may '11

pure

______

i believe in trains--trains and moving things that bind us in a stench, a crush, a tossed together cacophony of human limbs and heads. it beats our sterilized obnoxion, our childhood terror of the deep-brow stranger...

i believe in filth, i take it on as the most monumental of all human creations. after all, it is: why disown what we made (except, says the sour-faced agnostic: perhaps we were made in that image). perhaps you were; not i. wherever you find humans you find filth: i, honoring humans, drink deep the cup of our disease. no wallowing, for gluttons perish first--but drink the unwashed cup, eat the uncooked meal, smell the evidence of our staggering survival.


not out of pride: only history has taught we ever drank and ate and smelled the same. i'll not be fancied more than purer bloods in such a cheapened age.








may '11

riots in the spring

in the fall they built their houses thin and elegant; they stood immediately upon the tall track embankments so we hapless train-bound souls could see their wealth and long for better things. then it was not our own impoverishment, but their great luck and luxury, what drove us on to riots in the spring. we gained nothing through our violence, except a narrowed scale: had we known these neighbors ranked upon the social stair much closer to ourselves than their own betters, we might have stayed our hands--but mobs are never easy once the murmurs start to boil. thus they paid for building palaces next to rails.


by the end you could say i got through it fairly well: no major scars or marks upon me, only an incessantly ironic face. but i've found that typical of my generation, so you could say i really escaped it all for free.


or nearly so. men tell of losing innocence, or childhood, though by then i'd much of neither left. what i lost was a freckle rage in beauty, a violent cleverness in the gills--i saw her in nearly everything, from the wrinkled eyes and rheumy face to the newborn's knowing grin. but after we burned those houses i turned to grimmer thoughts and worries in the hand--the thought of what to eat and how to budget poverty. it seemed so frail, our everlong resistance: so frail and un-believed. the true Oppressed will never strike, for they are starving, nearly dead--what makes us, then, such bitter malcontents?


so then i staggered forth unscathed in form, but not in use! deprived of even bitterness by logic's mocking irony, i left my comrades, abandoned all my bright riots, and in that silence faced the bitter, sleepless foe of solitude.




may '11