Amidst the tide of roiling black
suits and gray streets
teeming with the breathlessness
of exhausted tail pipes,
the din of apes' hoots,
stock market drama
and bright, glittering lights
that vehemently demand
purchase
lest you fail to support our progress:
the signs are all around you,
lusty talk of sex and seduction,
the leading practical remedy
for chaste market behavior;
the landscape is vivid with tall order fortune,
the ground is cold,
inhospitable to life and sitting,
the pavement was made for spitting,
a splitting of the walker from the driver,
both heading toward the impossible dream,
the quest for immortality.
See your ephemeral face
in the dark maw
of a tall french roast coffee, black,
rippling a promise of communion.
The gusto of your speech
lasts as long as the pinnacle trembles,
and crashing we fall for another cup.
Roasted beans and speed dreams,
the demands for adrenaline
increases through age and time;
your needs, and mine, are squandered to
eventual heart attacks
in lonely homes
in neighborhoods where nobody knows your name.
Pick pockets and prostitutes
are reminders from the gutters
of where our true aims lie--
and lest I lie to you,
find our religious sentiment
on the green bill we barter our lives for:
'In God we trust'
to sort it all out for us in the end.
While we practice petty royalty,
our kingdoms and feifs our due,
twin lives are at stake:
our present and future.
Longing we, for the darker clutches of comfort without conscience,
our slaves toil supplying
our low-priced merchandise
and our exotic, ripe food-fare:
but what of the soil?
Brown is the color of life,
black speaks the richness of the earth.
Somewhere between our White House
and pale marble monuments
our souls froze and forgot
how to take our shoes off
and test the water for ourselves
with our own big toe.
Smoke and sickness signify
our own land is fast-becoming a war-zone:
displaced propriety and ancient conventions
shunted aside harbinger the tide is turning
to the 'cide of our own genesis.
What, with liquid lavender eyeliner
for 2 bucks--
what a steal!
Close your eyes and obsess about
the omnipotent nature of consumption:
converting beauty into commodity,
manufactured, priced, and discounted,
bargain-binned, blown out, and tossed
into the garbage as worth-less.
It is worth less than a moment of time
to dream and realize
the impoverished integrity of our ability to commune.
We are a people divided, and conquered,
ever competing for resources
and sources of compliment.
Look to the harsh realities of fools
who flout the decent, hard-work ethic of career-retire-and-die:
no legal recourse for them to sleep and eat,
thrown off and away as chaff is from grain.
How can we trust in God to deliver us
from the treachery of our present demise?
God laughs at our prayers for rest and--
demands from us
--something better?
How shall we enrich God's life?
What deeds may we engage
to escape the paradox
of princely slavery?
What beautiful utopian vision may we all hark toward
as the bright temple of our most treasured will?
What is freedom?
Significant advances in the technocratic autocracy
have furthered our understanding
of our inherent capacity
to Love
And yet
we are ingrained with the thirst for blood
by the religion of war we make:
not on the national scale,
(politicians playing games)
the war is present in our
conversational notions of conquering doubt,
winning the argument:
sparring.
A joke can maim, looks can kill-
we are a ruthless race of petty, incompetent
heart squabblers.
Perhaps instead we could rejoice
in the union of shared presence,
school ourselves away from
accumulating points,
listen with reverence,
and applaud the well-said.
These I offer as seeds, only,
for the discriminating gardener in you.
Technically, I love a good fight,
the high, the fire, the battle between wits
evenly matched, neither giving an inch
and hopelessly clenched in the clash:
but I will die trying to be cognizant
of the divine spark in you,
in your dubious 'rightness',
in the fact that we are both blessed to be alive
and meeting in this moment.
A probable reality, my fellows,
is that we will all die if we do not learn
to truly love
for when we love, it is not just a mixing of fluids:
when we love we unify with that
which is divine;
we dissolve and reassemble to our own peculiar essence.
Die to that which is forbidden
and be born again
as a temple of the source of all creation.
So forget the petty observations and smile:
people like it.