The dogs of war are slipping. The ropes they are a ripping. The palms they are a bleeding, as citizens are reading of risks that led to slippage: of quips and of equipage, and how it wasn't expected, and courses were corrected, but still it all goes wrong.
Climbing a mountain, I feel like I've escaped Plato's cave. My senses reel as though they're a crew of newly freed slaves. The sky is bluer, rivers green, each grit granule is clear. And even at the very edge, there's ease in feeling fear. By "ease" I mean not frozen stiff, but like a friend so dear that one can take one's grand peril, a gift received with cheer. Take me to the mountains, I say, where it's serene and real, and I can open up my sight to a world that's ideal.
I've seen in ordinary eyes a special twinkling glow. In rough and sinewy muscle I've seen a grace in throe. From rotund torsos, I have seen a lithesome prance or strut. I've seen a thing called character, in schnozzes that kink or jut. If beauty below the surface, it finds you splendor-blind. Then defect 's not in the object but in the viewer's mind.
We were classed: Consumer.
And that became our task.
The stores grew like tumors,
and in stuff piles we basked.
The flawless deep green melon rind
houses a pink, bland flesh.
The rind - pitted, yellowed, lumpy -
hides fruit: red, sweet, & fresh.
I know nothing
of the sea-bottom,
or of the darkest void.
I know nothing
of the ancients' lives
or how most are employed.
I know nothing
of an atom's look,
or how works, gravity.
I know nothing
inside my organs
or nasal cavity.
I can but know
these simple truths
that live within my mind.
That it's better
being together, and
to err toward being kind.
I stand upon the cobbled walk as scooters whiz on by, and think this world 's too fast for me, and tilt my face to sky. But there's a contrail gash up there made by a hurtling sky-tube that jets its way to who knows where - while I'm the slack-jawed rube. To match the world to my breath's pace, and watch the blur lines form, and hear each note of music played... We'd sync to my waveform.
What will be your master,
and what will be your slave?
Will you court disaster
to be perceived as brave?
Will you call your pastor
to hide that which you crave,
or be your own ringmaster
and own how you behave?
And will you choose virtue,
or live in fear of vice?
Will you choose to be true,
or default to being nice?
And when there's much ado
will you jet their paradise?
Or just defer your view,
as act some men and mice?
I pause in woods one winter day when leaves stick to the ground, and twigs and trunks stand stiff & straight - a breeze the only sound. It's a world without walls or bounds, but one can't see a mile. One's sightline is obscured by trees -- their trunks not single file. A world, at once, open & shut to eyes and ears and mind. But I've never felt so at home, for i'm no lonesome pine.
Around the corner, down the street who knows just what you'll find. I often head on down that way when I wish to unwind. A vendor might set up a cart, selling divine munchies, or philosophers might hold court: wannabe Socrates. Or there are those days of muggers, or when painted girls flirt, or when the somnambulist roams in sleep, sans a nightshirt. The city never lacks chaos: always something to see. Sometimes it pulls one forward; sometimes it makes one flee.
