Through the train window
Flashing eternity
Rolling, rolling, rolling
The hillsides by.
Later, I’ll say
I’ve been there,
Traveled through that place
Convinced and mystified.
Later still, I’ll return
And say
That’s not how it was
All skewed and modified
By isolation from memory
Disappointed
By lack of congruity
Deflated
By the irrefutable
The unexamined life is not worth living. ~ Socrates
So, I’m waiting for this horseman,
Windows barred, doors flung shut
In a vast pretense
Of indifference.
Only, I see roaches,
Resigned, driven by doom
Under cracks, seared by dim
Flashes of light, some blue,
Some red, not just unaware,
But irrelevant
Like distant quaking nuclei
Star struck long, long ago.
This means little,
For now not only exists,
But does not exist.
Light streams in, cold as stars
At midnight
You feel the deepest humming
Of the universe
The unguessed throb of its
Unraveling
A star collapses
A photon flies into a black hole
A moon pulls itself apart
Planets spin and collide
And our lives stream outward
To unknown ends
Did they sing to us, too,
These poets of the young and wistful,
Of the just discovered?
Were we, too, so fast conjoined
In giddy possibility?
Are we now consigned to a coarser reality?
Because a thing becomes familiar
Must it become less beautiful?
Time is a joke poorly told.
An old color photograph,
Its blazing reds and excruciating blues
Reduced to jaundiced dim browns,
Still cuts deep
Through all fog and wishing,
Blinding in its fierceness.
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.
exiles child 