Litany of Questions Like a Play By Play Broadcast
Posted: October 5th, 2016, 3:52 pm
Is the soul more a myth
than the perfect body?
Is the preoccupation
with the afterlife
stronger than the sex drive?
Is philosophy more important
than poetry?
Is rubbing your forehead in the mud
more vital than pressing its emptiness
to a book?
Is strict order, Catholic, academic, political
greater than the ad lib wilderness
of unknowing?
Is the roar of the self
mightier than the self whimpering
alone, at night,
only starlight tapping
a life on the shoulder?
Are the questions worth examining
or is it better to be drunk, stoned,
high on an AK 47 or a 401K?
Is it responsible to be adding
to the mystery
writing the intimate nonsense of poetry
like a duck feather dipped in ink
quacking for crackers
or is that duck a parrot,
everything learned by rote?
Is it anarchic to make a litany
of all your wishes, gripes, scores,
defeats, injuries, absurdities?
Is it better to waste youth
on the flesh
while it still hums and fires up
and races to the inevitable Wall,
or is it better to be ascetic
and dry like a plum into a prune
and scowl at fun,
or is it better to put a board
on a barrel and wear those roller-skates
called enzymes
and move through your own private history
like Janus,
part Genghis Khan, part Aristotle,
but deep inside just a guy
getting by,
getting a little attention
with his absurd acrobatic act,
until he looks at himself too deeply
and crashes into that Wall?
How sharp are the tines of the personalities
of the Triune God?
How much athleticism is left
to a 60 year old man
who inhabits libraries
and past hallucinations?
How wondrous is the cement
of memory
that holds the illusion of the self
to its own conceptual conceit?
How much poetry does one listen to
before he or she starts talking in tongues?
How bright is the dim light bulb of truth,
which is a manufacturing of myth
with a different label?
How awful is the feeling
that the earth is not the center
of even the known universe,
much less the main tune
of string theory?
How can history be such a circus
of vicious little greedy people
with big feet that trample everyone,
the milk spilled out from the smashed mannequins,
the Giant Clown with a pulsating light
in his red rubber nose,
his big flat feet,
chomping and squeezing like a wine press
the cartoons of our immortal hopes?
Why and how much longer
can the questions survive,
the answers water balloons
popping
with each generation?
The perfect body
is like the perfect flame
something that lasts not eternally
except as a figure of speech, desire, illumination,
to all that is real,
but why?
Have I come full circle or
do I just want to end this
with the dangling questions
that are like filaments of galaxies
or threads of dust,
or the ever mirrored chips
in a kaleidoscope?
Are abstractions eating away
at my poetry,
at the very dirt I chew,
like an earthworm,
transforming the powdered brown stuff,
oh so excrement like,
into the silk of a communicable imagination?
Are all my shotgun pellet words
making dents in the tin
somewhere or are they just
beebees rolling across
a hardwood floor,
the newspaper on the dining room table folded,
the hands in a semblance of prayer,
the mind in gridlock
trafficking illicit avowals
that I will be who I am not,
and like any fiction writer
recreate the universe
in a post-modern existentialist
phenomenologist artistic autistic
way?
than the perfect body?
Is the preoccupation
with the afterlife
stronger than the sex drive?
Is philosophy more important
than poetry?
Is rubbing your forehead in the mud
more vital than pressing its emptiness
to a book?
Is strict order, Catholic, academic, political
greater than the ad lib wilderness
of unknowing?
Is the roar of the self
mightier than the self whimpering
alone, at night,
only starlight tapping
a life on the shoulder?
Are the questions worth examining
or is it better to be drunk, stoned,
high on an AK 47 or a 401K?
Is it responsible to be adding
to the mystery
writing the intimate nonsense of poetry
like a duck feather dipped in ink
quacking for crackers
or is that duck a parrot,
everything learned by rote?
Is it anarchic to make a litany
of all your wishes, gripes, scores,
defeats, injuries, absurdities?
Is it better to waste youth
on the flesh
while it still hums and fires up
and races to the inevitable Wall,
or is it better to be ascetic
and dry like a plum into a prune
and scowl at fun,
or is it better to put a board
on a barrel and wear those roller-skates
called enzymes
and move through your own private history
like Janus,
part Genghis Khan, part Aristotle,
but deep inside just a guy
getting by,
getting a little attention
with his absurd acrobatic act,
until he looks at himself too deeply
and crashes into that Wall?
How sharp are the tines of the personalities
of the Triune God?
How much athleticism is left
to a 60 year old man
who inhabits libraries
and past hallucinations?
How wondrous is the cement
of memory
that holds the illusion of the self
to its own conceptual conceit?
How much poetry does one listen to
before he or she starts talking in tongues?
How bright is the dim light bulb of truth,
which is a manufacturing of myth
with a different label?
How awful is the feeling
that the earth is not the center
of even the known universe,
much less the main tune
of string theory?
How can history be such a circus
of vicious little greedy people
with big feet that trample everyone,
the milk spilled out from the smashed mannequins,
the Giant Clown with a pulsating light
in his red rubber nose,
his big flat feet,
chomping and squeezing like a wine press
the cartoons of our immortal hopes?
Why and how much longer
can the questions survive,
the answers water balloons
popping
with each generation?
The perfect body
is like the perfect flame
something that lasts not eternally
except as a figure of speech, desire, illumination,
to all that is real,
but why?
Have I come full circle or
do I just want to end this
with the dangling questions
that are like filaments of galaxies
or threads of dust,
or the ever mirrored chips
in a kaleidoscope?
Are abstractions eating away
at my poetry,
at the very dirt I chew,
like an earthworm,
transforming the powdered brown stuff,
oh so excrement like,
into the silk of a communicable imagination?
Are all my shotgun pellet words
making dents in the tin
somewhere or are they just
beebees rolling across
a hardwood floor,
the newspaper on the dining room table folded,
the hands in a semblance of prayer,
the mind in gridlock
trafficking illicit avowals
that I will be who I am not,
and like any fiction writer
recreate the universe
in a post-modern existentialist
phenomenologist artistic autistic
way?
