Also Sets Where Emperors Do Not Know

There are problems with his anger management.

Those days, like sunsets at sea, everything mirrored

into prismatic caesuras of sharded denials,

hovering at the hem of orange, red, blue, purple

like it saunters at the skirt of deny, offend, boil, repel.

Every generation dissects its descendants

to better understand itself;

it is our way of asking, ‘What went wrong?’,

asking what instead of how because history

allows that there is no fix,

no cure,

and none of Plato’s fancy pharmakon 

to reinsure

our fears of the poison.

We are had, one and all, in the seam

between the ceiling

and the floor,

no matter how hard you wish

to gently expend

the metaphor.

Look at the monsters we create,

the words we fabricate

to explain our calamitous engagement:

            sweep      diorama           melody

            reach        engineer         potpourri

            reap          aggregate       vista

            view         malignant        semester

            range       perspective     wiffle

            scene       onstruction    mental

            mop         degenerative  design

            type         rhetorical         piffle

            pad          esoteric           transcendental

            tool          episteme         benign

These are the empty letters and scratches of our moments,

our fight to save our own souls from passing –

our syllables do not hold.

We have had a misunderstanding about his mother and I

and the why of him, and the how of us two:

I knew this day would come, where his age would begin

to ask the questions of origin

that we all suffer:  why am I here? what is my purpose? 

but because of the accident

of him, of his dasein, there is no Cartesian

rationale in his immediate future.

He has come to the place where his I am

is not therefored by his I think, 

and there is little that I can savagely explain

that will change or circumvent

his now rapidly approaching conclusion,

whether loved or not, held or beheld,

the coming into being was a scarred accident.

Here is a momentary place where love does not speak,

and where justify becomes rationalize or worse,

acclimate.

Undeniably so, the world is everything that is the case,

and I am left to persuade him, in my way,

that the limits of my language mean the limits of my

world:  and so persuasion:

teach me something new, to replace

hollow hunger sadness loss

loss lonely sadness thirst

He will think this is another instance

of the distance our roads take between us;

He will think that I’ve let him go, let him go,

and he will never know, never know

© 2006 – Mark A. Douglas – All rights reserved