Berryman’s off the bridge and floating, Mr Bones
gonna swim with the fishes for these thirty odd
years hence. No Housman sings his loss; Delmore
still in the hotel room, unclaimed, takes no notice
of what amounts to another lonely jumper fending
off mania’s despair. Too late, by the way, he screams
in some fonted agony at the twang of gravity: “Arial!
Garamond! Courier! Verdana! Helvetica! Serif! Serif!”
and continues his partnered trace through the waft
of revered breath, he and his Henry gonna bounce a melody
off the wave, see if that dream really sings. “Bembo!
Bodoni! Grotesque!” taking the child off the hurly-burly
of Achilles at the gate, said our Socrates (with no Plato
to sing his guise), but sings of childermass any-whee:
here’s a bayonet: sit! These heights above the Mississippi
just another Smith gone down. Delmore’s tug at the sleeve
another compelling kinter-garden king or sedemary lord
to place up to, to compare one’s failings to: they are numbered
in infinity and crooked displays of weight or orientation
that smell of burnt Century or Gothic ex-haltations.
Dissatisfied with every flower, what an unholy slop
we’ve created. Our fugitive zephyrs pilfer even the gasps
of the onlookers, bystanders all, while yet another flop
makes an unnoticed splash on the corporeality’s brass
tacks at heaven’s gate. Locked, should you wonder.
With no dark voice to mirror our ‘America! America!’
now (no, not a candidate one);
I humbly apply for the job.
And promise to when I leap make the cry of parched mobs
everywhere, the slobs that have no verse, the peons without poesy,
to descry their hurried ennui, that smelted, dieseled apathy
of dusted beaches and dammed canyons, empurpled mountains
travesty gridlocked with humvees and humdubyas and exes and whys
and all the wasted zeds that foreshadow our noughts, our noughts.
I’ll bedeck this time and perception (aped to mimic a depth of thought)
in a quilt of harmony, where borders aren’t defined by guards or lines
of labor drawn in the dust, where by the people actually points to signs
of constituency, and for the people remembers the huddled the poor
the masses at the door, where this pipelined smack of crystal and whore
becomes a building ground instead of a killing floor or a glass ceiling,
where bit by tiny bit we reclaim the concessions of revealing
the poet the artist the canvas the pen the singer the rhyme the song
of sea to sinning sea. Mucky oiled sea, terns a-flight, turns a-fright
at our loss, and moans. Not the agony of the dyspeptic escape film
but the true groans and wails at loss at given away at the sacrificed
lives to dream. These phonological graphemes we scribble in our haste
to say too much with too little ability, to paint our new shattered state
of gain on peace (which can’t withstand the market’s scrutiny),
I still heart New York as much as the next guy, morning hungry
at the door, and I, asleep, naked, in bed in Plato’s cave with Delmore
count the clinks and clicks of bottles and capital proceeding apace,
unabated. Some rough carpenter pounds at the barred wooden door
to which, angered at the vigil, Delmore, “Enough! you horse’s face
and ass! You’ll have wood enough soon enough, enough to tie
your own crosses together, to drag your own streets of dilletantism
in the name of your daddy! Let me be, I’ve stillness to define
and slumber to keep, your two thousand years of absenteeism
has been recorded on your permanent record! Now away!” and we,
D. and I, giggling at the shuffling sound of feet turned around,
nestle in our smoke and blankets, a bottle of Jameson’s between us,
and tell stories of girls we wished we knew, the whisps we bound
together in our distended hopes and losses. A giant placebo
in lieu of the real thing, we dream our responsibilites
mean something, we dream we matter, that the placenta
choking us is a life-vein, an artery of accountabilities
that will bear fruit eventually. We also lie to ourselves ‘bout
charm and looks, about deeds of derring-do or diligence that get
the girl. ‘Tis what it comes down to: where most of all our wit
will fail, (wit don’t get dick where no dick avail), and without
the dignity of a graceful no, we are left to stand, humored, better
I know than the bloat of John, still afloat, drifting out to sea,
working on his own daddy’s legacy in his time and place, but still:
take no solace in that at this late date, not alone in this monastery
of voiced hymn to the missing and the forlorn, this broken hymen
between time and realization. This is the voice of the lost, the broken
heart of the land, this scirocco that blows a furtive pipe’s psalm
across the dissatisfied, the pilfered, and the woefully bespoken.
You do not enter quietly, this vestige of a home, you do not go
slow; you might call them out, “Calisto! Centaur! Lucida! Trebuchet!“
for what comfort they provide, one and all, but shy, pale John will rage
to time’s drain, and I, supplicant, will only look on, and say ”…”!
© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved
No comments:
Post a Comment