08-08-2018, 05:30 AM
Border Land
From birth till death here
is the Middle Ages.
We turn from somersaults to fierce
industrial cages. Prisons made of intangible walls.
It's barely worse to be jobless,
and drunk, not like bright Dionysus,
but fat like Bacchus on the sidewalk
by the plastic seventy-five cents merrygoround
outside a closing Rose's.
Our family has a house, but we can hardly
tell the difference
from all the other trailers,
all I can see is the door and one window
in my imagination; like an all that's necessary to be seen
movie set, so's my memory.
Never nature's child or a shirtless Apollo,
a blue-eyed pretty boy.
No, I'm dark
like Rilke;
like Picasso; like Pablo Neruda.
There's always a rage, a sadness in my eyes,
a smile is frightening.
A dark race.
Not dark enough,
it seems
I'm red like the sun
so this piece of land is my own,
and I'm left alone.
In town, all the townfolks say
I got what I wanted,
Now be free.
But not free like them.
Free to roam the land
and not work it.
In their industrial daydreams
is my nightmare,
this broken lantern
where even the witches are rusted over
and all I can see are the rotten stars
trimmed and softened like round coins.
Fireballs lightyears away
hardly serve for ancestors.
I write nor paint nor
stare into the empty sky,
in my cultureless Prague
where the ratty buildings are only mountains
ephemeral as clouds,
and the city
an infernal landfill,
a sooty anthill
the kids would call Purgatorio
if they would learn to read.
But I am getting out;
I'm shanking through the imaginary walls
with the plastic fork that came with the browning salad
my mom brought home from the ancient supermarket
that stands fourteen miles down the highway
like a glimmering and blistering Aztec palace
where the young milkwhite, long-haired Incan princess,
sixteen and too young for me by more than fourteen miles
smiles in her white and darkhaired youth.
I'm getting out,
but it won't be for another year or so
or more.
For now,
these walls are my art.
From birth till death here
is the Middle Ages.
We turn from somersaults to fierce
industrial cages. Prisons made of intangible walls.
It's barely worse to be jobless,
and drunk, not like bright Dionysus,
but fat like Bacchus on the sidewalk
by the plastic seventy-five cents merrygoround
outside a closing Rose's.
Our family has a house, but we can hardly
tell the difference
from all the other trailers,
all I can see is the door and one window
in my imagination; like an all that's necessary to be seen
movie set, so's my memory.
Never nature's child or a shirtless Apollo,
a blue-eyed pretty boy.
No, I'm dark
like Rilke;
like Picasso; like Pablo Neruda.
There's always a rage, a sadness in my eyes,
a smile is frightening.
A dark race.
Not dark enough,
it seems
I'm red like the sun
so this piece of land is my own,
and I'm left alone.
In town, all the townfolks say
I got what I wanted,
Now be free.
But not free like them.
Free to roam the land
and not work it.
In their industrial daydreams
is my nightmare,
this broken lantern
where even the witches are rusted over
and all I can see are the rotten stars
trimmed and softened like round coins.
Fireballs lightyears away
hardly serve for ancestors.
I write nor paint nor
stare into the empty sky,
in my cultureless Prague
where the ratty buildings are only mountains
ephemeral as clouds,
and the city
an infernal landfill,
a sooty anthill
the kids would call Purgatorio
if they would learn to read.
But I am getting out;
I'm shanking through the imaginary walls
with the plastic fork that came with the browning salad
my mom brought home from the ancient supermarket
that stands fourteen miles down the highway
like a glimmering and blistering Aztec palace
where the young milkwhite, long-haired Incan princess,
sixteen and too young for me by more than fourteen miles
smiles in her white and darkhaired youth.
I'm getting out,
but it won't be for another year or so
or more.
For now,
these walls are my art.
