I've been trying to figure out what's wrong. Have you?
It started well before last Wednesday, but that’s when we’ve all started talking about it here.
Listen – what's that gurgling sound? The creaking, groaning...are those hammer-fells on a chilly breeze?
I've been trying to figure out what's wrong, and the reason it went that way, and what on earth I might do about it.
The clouds keep building in the sky, and I look up from arranging my collection of false idols, worried.
I guess there's two choices: the first is that I've nothing to do with the world, and the second is that I do.
Haven't I kicked at the foundations, dismissed ancient wisdom, failed to apply, come up short, mixed motivations (and metaphors), left all the holy texts on the shelves, and done my part to ungratefully gnaw away the structure, one termite in one little corner, complaining of sawdust?
I hope that's the case. Maybe I can do something about it. The thoughts aren't fully formed, and lurk way down in the thicket where dreams grow, tended by the elves and ghosts that haunt the aisles of childhood grocery stores.
(Poetry, my dear.)
It's the only way I can sort of get out of the way of myself. The essays I try to write on the subject are rubbish, and even make me want to punch me in the face.
I saw a baby yesterday, and she just leveled me. When she grows up, maybe she'll read this.
Have a poem, dude.
Syrup
My thoughts have been sticky
Polluted
Stifling
Smothering
Diabetic
Runny
like syrup at the diner, where I sat and failed again.
I thought the thoughts were good,
Until I tasted them
And agreed with the baby
who looked right through me yesterday
as I followed her and her mother across the parking lot to the gym
and held the door
“What a cute baby”
as she gazed up with a terrible neutrality
and I broke inside
knowing in a flash
The letters obeying me as I played god
Soldiers, ordered thoughts marching along the page
grimly
black and white
came up short in their ways
They were
Suffocating
processed
the Holy boiled right out
But they did us all a favor
and marched right into to the trash
next to the other false idols
and the dead mouse
that had to be killed.
(Because that's the way the world is sometimes.)
Have you ever heard of
Dean and Sal?
They journeyed across America
the land of diners and potential
four times
Until Dean couldn't talk straight, and Sal turned his back
on his friend
to go to a Duke Ellington concert
What a choice
Between gibbering freedom and Duke Ellington
(Don't you know you're supposed to like Duke Ellington and fund your 401(k)?)
Kerouac nailed it, and we've been wrestling with those two choices for seventy years.
But I've been going to diners lately
and wondering if there's a third way forward
On the menu, next to the bacon and eggs and butter substitute: A Good Life.
And then it was today
A Sunday
My tie was novel
I tried to spare it from the syrup
And my thoughts.
I saw a girl
there
Across the way
Who looked like me
In the way her eyes hoped and pleaded and begged
shooting heat rays and lighting, a flash on a promised land of picket fences and non-theoretical valentine's days and all the things.
Please don't swipe left.
The lighting rod would do.
He mumbled, and knocked over a coffee cup, bumping it with his tribal print hoodie, shattering into a thousand failures on the tile
Oops.
The waitress took an eternity to clean it up.
The girl looked at her new man
with the earnestness of an October rose
Maybe today will be the start of Indian summer
There was something wrong with his credit card
so she paid for their lunch
He thanked her
almost too quietly for me to hear
sitting at the corner
But I did
“Of course, baby.”
I watched
out of the corner of my eye
they drove away
in her sensible, mid-grade
clean
white
Volkswagen
Onto a road that was supposed to have arrived a lot sooner
According to her past self
at Hollywood or anywhere else than Madison Heights
When her smoky eyes
Weren't stale
Mirrors
Reflecting mine.
What! Ants?
Oh no, just these buttons again. I'm not used to them on a Sunday.
Who do I think I am? (I haven't a clue.)
Looking
Like one of those guys from the Atomic age
Who almost killed us with their crushing order
Warnings to brace for impact
In a static crackle of black and white
Nothing to see here, folks
Because a neutron is invisible
And a mushroom cloud blinds.
Plutonium platitudes decay to chaos
The half-life of a civilization
Now the man on the label
Hysterically tries to be pretty
He's almost a woman
It's almost a beer
RealityLite
In high definition
Dontcha know colors are like Truth?
Fleeting
Changing
Constructed
Unlike anyone's feelings
(Those are always infallible, from what I gather.)
Oh brother, I'm so sorry.
We could all stop it now if we wanted
Couldn't we?
The war is brewing
Some prescribe it
a medicinal bleeding
I straightened my tie
Sunday after Church
laughed with a kid as he delighted in his Bowser toy
And walked into the southern Sun
Tomorrow is Monday
There are babies to answer to
And I'm trying to figure out
What to do about it.