09-29-2015, 06:17 AM
My Life is the Pity We Now Call Freedom
As love of music
is a typical
glitch in pattern recognition
and religion,
though it dons whatever clothes—
Even Christmas isn't what it used to be—,
was only a standard meeting
of recurring dreams and children's stories,
men's lives are less a heroic quest
than a freedom first from a jungle
then a zoo;
and into a junglegym-zoo,
of games, of course,
and pity reaches refinement
for the losers;
and happiness is never far away.
Or far enough in the future
to have to stand at the train station
waving everytime
someone special goes away;
there are guarantees—there are guarantees
in life,
even when the last ounce of hope is gone
that life will go on,
and somehow include us.
Include us,
even our insistence that no such inclusion
exists.—For the stoic declaration
of independence from childish beliefs
is pointless other than a sudden demand in the present,
a crucial present acceptance
of the never-ending limbo,
a bottomless—heightless present.
With or without us, but already containing us.
Sometime, or another, in the life of
even the stoutest unimaginative, independent individual,
he and a group of his peers
will gather around a monster,
whether washed in from the sea, or from space, or
some other dimension or universe:
And—there, in the corkscrew of an hour,
his life will not change and the world will be changed forever;
that present will live on
in the deaths and births of others:
He will remain the same;
for there is a hell for unbelievers—
It is called Life Eternal.
And we have that freedom of belief.
As love of music
is a typical
glitch in pattern recognition
and religion,
though it dons whatever clothes—
Even Christmas isn't what it used to be—,
was only a standard meeting
of recurring dreams and children's stories,
men's lives are less a heroic quest
than a freedom first from a jungle
then a zoo;
and into a junglegym-zoo,
of games, of course,
and pity reaches refinement
for the losers;
and happiness is never far away.
Or far enough in the future
to have to stand at the train station
waving everytime
someone special goes away;
there are guarantees—there are guarantees
in life,
even when the last ounce of hope is gone
that life will go on,
and somehow include us.
Include us,
even our insistence that no such inclusion
exists.—For the stoic declaration
of independence from childish beliefs
is pointless other than a sudden demand in the present,
a crucial present acceptance
of the never-ending limbo,
a bottomless—heightless present.
With or without us, but already containing us.
Sometime, or another, in the life of
even the stoutest unimaginative, independent individual,
he and a group of his peers
will gather around a monster,
whether washed in from the sea, or from space, or
some other dimension or universe:
And—there, in the corkscrew of an hour,
his life will not change and the world will be changed forever;
that present will live on
in the deaths and births of others:
He will remain the same;
for there is a hell for unbelievers—
It is called Life Eternal.
And we have that freedom of belief.
