I’ve watched a lot of peers in cartoon t shirts recently (me too). Yesterday’s walk to check the progress of the oaks and acorns found me at the edge of a rainstorm, plugged into a vibrant production of scents and breezes and the tossing of leaves as the cool air sank from the cloud tops to say hello. And, whenever poems bubble up, there’s something I didn’t expect, hidden in the depths. I’m often as surprised as you are.
The knack of opining on current societal trends without sounding preachy and woefully unprepared has eluded me. Maybe I’ve got something in my eye. But, like you, I feel something in the air, and this is my way to sort the thoughts, drifting by like the sage broom seeds on the storm winds.
Part I: Reigned Rained In
The clouds rolled in
Like my friend’s dad returning from work
When I was a boy, running on a fragile beam of sunshine
The giddy bikes and tree climbings must sometime stop for the day sometime.
A mutter of thunder and the trees waved “over here, over here, welcome home!”
Mint and pine rejoiced
The earth sat down to dinner
And the return of Order.
I walked on, and thought.
Part II: King Nothings
We keep crowing like roosters
About our freedom to not get up on time
And go to sleep when we want
The aim of every seven year old
But I’m thirty seven
I keep seeing them
Flying the flag of Irony + Homer Simpson
On grungy black t shirts
Forgetting that he had a job and a family
What a loser
But we’ll win a prize
Of
a
nap.
It’s raining now.
It’s drenching me, unseen.
I can feel it
If I listen.
Part III - A Fistful of Flowers
In the good times made by strong men
I drifted, listless
Raging against the smell of Cinnabun
Baggy pants dragging the brown tiles in the shopping mall
In the latest fashion
Millions of us, having it all, faced with an unexplained echo
Was it the boredom of success, the caterpillar’s scorn for the cocoon, Fydor’s predicted need for us to break something just to see what would happen in the monotony of Utopia? Maybe it was the ache for a missing God, or, the to-do list finished, the big questions looming? Oh, to rage against distant injustices and silence and the long past, to break something, anything.
We hatched.
Instead of butterflies, we flutter around the dark lights, moths in the night, provoking with a hundred thousand tiny flutters.
“Hey, why does this porchlight say 666?”
And madboy grips the microphone with a fistful of steel.
I’m a moth, but I’m trading up for a fistful of flowers. I don’t know what good that’ll do, but I can taste the rumors of alpine meadows and a thing called the Sun.
“Trivial” you say.
But:
If you can smell the blood you seek in steel,
I can smell the creation of time in flowers.
That was a bigger bang
Transcendent
Yes.