I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.
--Ezra Pound
From that brief spark in the infinite dark,
the shadowy chaos of the curious
beginning, quivering atoms, rivers
of molten rock, “the living elements at war
with lifelessness,” the cosmic soup
of our becoming, from a single-cell to
a self-conscious primate, rising from
the primordial seas, the relentless
urge to exist.
And here we are.
Civilized fools on the orb of our
imagined realities, the divine
savage within dressed in the
grandiose garments of suitability
to disguise the shadows of
who we are.
Alive on a cold dreary morning,
I walk out into the misty streets,
a lonesome man with his collar up
and hat pulled low, I grow old,
I grow old, with my trousers rolled,
caught between the death of the old
and the birth of the new, the
streetlamps still aglow in the slow
gloom of dawn, the misery
of history loiters in the chill
of an ancient wind that sweeps
debris and dead leaves
past my boots and
into the eaves.
The friends that I once had have
become a wet rag to my destiny,
my spirit sings a melody no
ear is attuned to hear. Like Rilke,
“I am too alone in the world,
and yet not alone enough."
I listen to the chimes of time and look out
over the dismal city, the abandoned buildings
and old taverns, the spectacle of a peculiar
madness emanating from a destitute
drunkard sitting there, with his tattered
garb and unblessed fate, on a crate
in front of an old diner.
And the whores with crimson lips
and smeared mascara stroll in heels
“down eager avenues of lifelessness,”
the fruits of their seductive labor
tucked tight in their handbags.
I look into the daunted eyes
of beaten faces on the boulevard, a parade
of sorrows and world-weary sighs,
the sheer ache of being, "the
bottomless horror of the world,"
and somehow, I too am here,
an accident out of the infinite,
carrying my despair over shards
of glass and secondhand needles,
flooding my senses with the rank
absurdities of an unpoetic era.
There's an unread poem tacked
to a decrepit light pole in an alley,
I watch as tattooed lovers stroll
hand-in-hand through a graffitied park,
all of us shrouded by hundred
year-old high-rises silhouetted
against the evanescent dark,
the stench of relentless progress
taints the air, the forlorn sight of
a grocery cart lying on its side
in a vacant lot, the sirens still
lingering from the transgressions
of the night.
Are we all just meager marionettes
at the mercy of a cruel fate, doomed
to an inevitable defeat none of
us can escape?
If only we could train our eyes to see through
the veneer of our pretend selves, the masks
we don, the beliefs we cling, our predicaments,
our ostensible realities; if only our ears
could finally hear the subtle sounds
of our essence, the sacred melody
gushing from our blood, the
universal stream flowing into
the impalpable sea; if only…
The city stirs with the cries of desolation,
the cries of a bankrupt civilization, yet
everything
remains holy in its impermanence,
sanctified in its brevity, and I walk on
through the infertile grime,
an iridescent ghost, a brief spark
in the infinite dark, beneath
the false sky of the final
paradigm.
The second hand needles, the tattooed lovers, the overturned grocery cart, the graffitied park, shards of glass, sirens and infertile grime. This is where I live, or just down the street. Vivid and so familiar.
The second hand needles, the tattooed lovers, the overturned grocery cart, the graffitied park, shards of glass, sirens and infertile grime. This is where I live, or just down the street. Vivid and so familiar.
"I grow old,
I grow old, with my trousers rolled"
Shades of Prufrock! Love it.