10-27-2016, 02:42 AM
The Hurry
There sets a mansion,
inside it, dull reality-tamers
and their friends, enjoying life—
more than we could imagine.
I wasn't much interested in the men who made the money,
instead I eyed their wives,
wives' friends, daughters,
daughters' friends.
I wasn't interested in the plenty,
the reapen,
but blazon seductions, revelry through restaurants and streets,
ghosthunting in the fields.
When I left, I walked along
the long driveway alone.
No one even wanted my money.
And found a bar by a tree
shaped like an owl the size of McDonald's.
Its clocks were all digital.
The manager gave me something for free,
but I had to pay for my drinks:
I couldn't see the dark road for the brightness inside.
One man at the bar has lived through seriousness;
not the pipsqueak video screens we call our wars.
Through my fog of words, his blank face
solemnly mentioned the ban on Lorca,
having met Franco, and the correct pronunciation
of Dostoevsky.
Low on money and Spanish, I mentioned I knew of Pablo Neruda,
and was just as bad at Russian.
He said he tended toward the Right.
The men's room broken,
I stand over a woman's commode
expecting a stream the color of orange flavored Hi-C,
but my health is clearer than my mind.
If I forget to pay I'll be embarrassed,
if I pay I might not make it home;
so I brace the window, looking out
on the black before the road,
all the mustard paraphernalia,
the bated tension, the nerve mixed anger
I turned into jokes.
Clutching a thorny ball of ten or more ones,
I leaned against a tree thinking.
A woman came up,
asked the next time I go to church
would I pray for her.
I said I didn't go to church but I'd pray for her regardless.
Then it was the money,
baloney and milk, the same as always;
I held it out and she grabbed it and ran out through the darkness.
I felt as embarrassed in front of her as
with those at the mansion.
With a stranger's air, I sat on a bench
near the granite fountain that used to be a field.
Its mist and blue and red lights
and the air around
always make me feel I'm in another town.
Too many crescent-closed eyelids, too many tongues warped
in familiar dialects coming from the shadows up street
along with too many thoughts terminate any reveries
worth holding out for.
I went away, not leaving ruins for another time.
But breaking out of my derelict cosmos,
I turned bear and yawned,
I turned wolf and ran, or rather walked
fast through the country road that had become a street,
quickly, across the bridge to the broad lightpost
where the street ended and the main highway
going from east to west walled me in
like a great slit in the earth.
The environment sieved in like a caged oddity,
even fishermen and children aren't seen after certain hours;
the voices dampen and the chatter of dim lightbulbs
lose their moths and gnats to blank early morning.
Some places concede a flat planet.—
Maybe if I scrambled like a lizard up the side of the sky
I could wake up in someone's bedroom and start the whole desire over,
but I just wait exotically, in lieu of a telephone
or guide,
in a city no one comes to know.
There sets a mansion,
inside it, dull reality-tamers
and their friends, enjoying life—
more than we could imagine.
I wasn't much interested in the men who made the money,
instead I eyed their wives,
wives' friends, daughters,
daughters' friends.
I wasn't interested in the plenty,
the reapen,
but blazon seductions, revelry through restaurants and streets,
ghosthunting in the fields.
When I left, I walked along
the long driveway alone.
No one even wanted my money.
And found a bar by a tree
shaped like an owl the size of McDonald's.
Its clocks were all digital.
The manager gave me something for free,
but I had to pay for my drinks:
I couldn't see the dark road for the brightness inside.
One man at the bar has lived through seriousness;
not the pipsqueak video screens we call our wars.
Through my fog of words, his blank face
solemnly mentioned the ban on Lorca,
having met Franco, and the correct pronunciation
of Dostoevsky.
Low on money and Spanish, I mentioned I knew of Pablo Neruda,
and was just as bad at Russian.
He said he tended toward the Right.
The men's room broken,
I stand over a woman's commode
expecting a stream the color of orange flavored Hi-C,
but my health is clearer than my mind.
If I forget to pay I'll be embarrassed,
if I pay I might not make it home;
so I brace the window, looking out
on the black before the road,
all the mustard paraphernalia,
the bated tension, the nerve mixed anger
I turned into jokes.
Clutching a thorny ball of ten or more ones,
I leaned against a tree thinking.
A woman came up,
asked the next time I go to church
would I pray for her.
I said I didn't go to church but I'd pray for her regardless.
Then it was the money,
baloney and milk, the same as always;
I held it out and she grabbed it and ran out through the darkness.
I felt as embarrassed in front of her as
with those at the mansion.
With a stranger's air, I sat on a bench
near the granite fountain that used to be a field.
Its mist and blue and red lights
and the air around
always make me feel I'm in another town.
Too many crescent-closed eyelids, too many tongues warped
in familiar dialects coming from the shadows up street
along with too many thoughts terminate any reveries
worth holding out for.
I went away, not leaving ruins for another time.
But breaking out of my derelict cosmos,
I turned bear and yawned,
I turned wolf and ran, or rather walked
fast through the country road that had become a street,
quickly, across the bridge to the broad lightpost
where the street ended and the main highway
going from east to west walled me in
like a great slit in the earth.
The environment sieved in like a caged oddity,
even fishermen and children aren't seen after certain hours;
the voices dampen and the chatter of dim lightbulbs
lose their moths and gnats to blank early morning.
Some places concede a flat planet.—
Maybe if I scrambled like a lizard up the side of the sky
I could wake up in someone's bedroom and start the whole desire over,
but I just wait exotically, in lieu of a telephone
or guide,
in a city no one comes to know.
