Poetry

In Passing Water Worship by dancing

Worship by dancing
(for Pete Townshend, Amory, and me)

In this rush of humanity
and noise
and rhythm
and energy
and breath,
I can sense indignation 
of a quiet resignation
that drives the fury
of exuberance unbridled 
into the night.

I understand why we rush together like this
(we need this to be Mecca)
I know why we scream at the indifference of cold air and relentless time
(the injustice of fate is as unspeakable as its wisdom)
I comprehend the self-rightious resentment toward those who refuse to relate
(do they simply forget, or did they ever know?)
I even get why we smile and laugh with each other 
                                                 though we normally walk right on past
(there really is some benevolent spirit in the night)
But why don't we rejoice in the limetless expanse of these moments
as much as we can despise everything that conspires to turn us away from them?

This much is true:
Many of us love to worship by dancing.
But this is no new Athens or Numenor or San Francisco,
just the same Wasteland grown a little older.
Without a vision the people perish.
So why can't we dance
under the stars in the limitless sky
rather than in the fickle light of a dumpster fire?
The world is what you make it
so tonight I think I choose an enigma, 
thunderous, 
glorious, 
irrelevant.

Water

warm mud between my toes
tells me that it must be afternoon
and july
my periphary awash in lush green
t-shirt and a bathing suit
and a fantastic introduction to caffine
in a world resplendent with baseball cards and inner tubes and bicycles.
but nothing else comes back as much 
as that it is summer and I am barfoot 
and very soon I will probably do just about anything.

We have all lost something.
That's what we're told
And what we secretly fear on November afternoons
When the current seems strongest
And the pumkins rot  beneath leaveless trees in the bitter wind.
We want to be resplendent again,
To shout out in exhileration
As we chase after that thing just down the road 
That seems so infinitely more infinite than what lies behind,
To get a kick out of staying up past eleven
And to be struck in sheer awe 
When we wake up on the morning 
Of the day.

So we laugh at our stories,
Tell each other how much space exists,
Rejoice in chemical glories,
Deny the tears on which we really subsist.
Dance in the moonlight without any clothes on
But take care not to think about the life that might have us in its sway
Maybe even get naked in grey candle rooms patiently marching toward the dawn
And keep our visions locked tightly away.

It all feels so irrevicovably back there
                                            (except
                                perhaps on sunday 
                      april mornings
             up in time 
    for breakfast)

In Passing

Cool incalculable forests full of green light
populated by ten thousand giants (but not a million).
Enough to make Twain and Emerson reverent
and to strike me dumb in awe.
I see no one else in these depths,
there are no people, empty-handed or no,
and no water of any purity,
but plenty of silence to drink.
The road goes on
(in fact it fairly well beckons, saying
"Time time time's a-wastin gotta make some time")
to the high blue coasts and then the cities.
But I don't know that yet
because I only know a rumor of those cities.
Let them leave me here a little longer;
I may not pass this way again.

This place I know.
I have known it.
I have come to love it.
Four thousand miles from those titanic ancients.
Here is all streets and fountains.
The streets were dirt when Hale sought to purify them.
They were cobblestone when Hawthorne sought to scour his own soul.
They were first paved when Peabody tried to buy their approval.
They were blacktop by the time Lodge tried to keep our American noses clean.
Now it's just me here, and they are cobblestone again,
but that is mostly for the tourists.
Not that I mind it being like that.
I was here to throw coins in the guitar player's hat
while she sang "papa papa papa papa papa papa papa-san take me home."
I was here to growl along with the human pond
as the cops smashed the shirtless gentleman's nose with a bottle.
I was here to mingle with the rest of the throng, intoxicated, expectant, and as
someone else
just because it was the end of October.
I was here for the first time I ever saw someone get stabbed
and then just lay in the street bleeding.
Go straight to hell boys.

Standing on the eighth floor,
a hundred miles away again.
I like this spot too:  
as some Parisian said,
"The only place in the city where you can't see the damn thing."
Street lights at two a.m.
flatter this town just as well as the sunset.
I have come to love the people I see from this window
even though they're not going anyplace
anymore than I am going someplace.
But let them leave me here a little longer;
I may not pass this way again.