Tag Archives: irony

Ergo

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I think, I feel, therefore it seems
That the world turns only on

My constant spinning,
Only so far as my senses extend
My poor, mineral body, soft and pliable,
Prone to deflation;

That the universe exists solely
For my engagement, to be ingested
Piece by piece,
Or all a-gulp, wantonly;

That time is just the measure of
My preoccupation with one
Or another of my desires
Churned up in the small turmoil of being;

That all ends where I end,
And that all vastness is but an illusion
Of my impatient hunger,
That meaning stops here.

This, despite my earnest protests;
And all the infinite conscious beings
Of the infinite cosmos, too, protest
In vain.

Free will

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What parts of me lie buried in unstoned ground
Dreams and fears alike leached out
Into the indifferent clay?

What parts of what I am pleased to call
My own invention come down
Through the ancient crossfire of nature and nurture
To the ultimate epi-me,
Striding vainly along memory’s boulevards
Grasping at the heart of things?

Isn’t that, too, some determinate of blood and soil?
Of circumstance stenciled onto a genetic landscape,
Long fixed, long before I thought to uncover it?

Go back far enough, and we are all progeny
Of blind, pointless chemical replication,
Some accident of electromechanical impulse
Upon a sludge.

So long

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…and the sad gypsy sang for his bottle of wine, and I sang along for mine.
-Jose Feliciano

Those days, we were dangerously close to dying,
To the end of all the longing we mistook
For grand poesie.
Lost on the road to anywhere,
We stepped toward no paradise,
Discarded all loving touch
But for human companionship,
Asking too much of the world, unable to grasp
The small treasures.

If there’s something missed, something lost,
It’s only the wide-open sky we saw
Through vinegar eyes,
Our salted wounds as yet unburied.

Come back to me, my own true self,
Come back, and we’ll slip away
To some long, true corner
And watch the setting sun.

Father’s day

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I no longer imagine speaking to him
Explaining what I see of life, alert for the slight
Tremor of the eyelid
Some signal, some connection

Once, in a dream, he called me to join him
Held out a crumbling hand
I kicked him away, catching his chest
Exploding with the dust of dying
Hollow as the years of living

I look at an old photograph,
A young officer, impish gleaming eyes,
A girl on either arm

I think we might have come to terms,
The two of us,
But he died somewhere in the old country
Long before his wraith gave me life

The trouble with desire

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Is the world wearing you down?
I pined for it.
And still, despite long years
Of falling short, I still do.

So easy to sink into bitterness
To collect reasons, to blame
This or that, to stand upon contempt
As if it were a fit foundation

As if it weren’t just envy
Of other lives grasped whole
And lived without restraint
Right or wrong

We’re instruments, finely tuned
To one another
So all our joys and disappointments,
Trials and victories, lapses and vindications

Are funneled willy-nilly
Into dreams of each other
Nothing to be done; it’s what we are
It’s how we see what’s real

How we hold it up to available light
How we learn and unlearn
How we cling to threads
Ever unraveling