Filed under: poems | Tags: buildings, city streets, death, Einstein, graveyards, Heidegger, Hemingway, Kierkegaard, philosophy, traffic
What are we paying for?
There is traffic that halves
a man’s life,
that puts a boy in a vise.
There is convenience,
convenience stores of
storied convenience,
inconvenient continental breakfasts
in the lobbies of multi-storied antiseptic hotels.
Expensive motels.
Are we paying for the malls?
Those castles I never enter.
Are we paying for the highways?
That speed us toward the unnecessary,
or at least the nearest
gas station.
I would forfeit them.
I would roll the freeways up
like carpets,
and bury every road sign
in an unmarked grave.
A man on a bicycle kicks
over signs
pointing
to an open house
just over there…
Clap. Clap. Clap.
Every one along the avenue.
Are we paying for the mattress stores?
Are we paying for the car dealerships?
Are we paying
principle
and interest
for these hills like white elephants?
Are we paying for fast food
at every block?
Who gave these things to us?
I can only say
I see Einstein
on the back of a green chair.
Are we paying
for the office buildings
that sit unoccupied?
Or incomplete?
A block’s worth
of gray Swiss cheese
cultured in the sun.
Are we paying for the steel beams
that hold up their heavy backs?
For the concrete that
shuts them off from the world.
Stay a while and listen.
Are we paying for these houses?
Graveyards have more life in them.
Slick city streets seek revenge
for our evils.
We who once laid down the roads
will be laid into our graves by them.
For what are the streets
but the culmination of our travels?
When we may fly a thousand miles
and yet find ourselves home?
We may scream down freeways
and busy boulevards
under overpasses
and over bridges formed like stony
interlaced and arched hands
and see nothing.
Are we living to hurtle ourselves
toward death?
We may drive to escape and to forget,
but the roads are clovers,
curves that inevitably resend us
to the center.
Are we living to die
beneath a metal door,
under the feet of trembling others
looking for a deal to validate
their day?
The cities have killed more than they’ve ever saved.
Filed under: poems | Tags: birds, buildings, city life, city streets, Dante, death, Greek mythology, Huxley, Norse mythology, rebirth, the woods
Ours is not quite a Brave New World;
though we’ve learned to exist upside-down,
and still the blood in our veins,
ultimately we desire grass and ground to step upon,
and though we value
the perks of our city lives
we may pick up stones to throw
and be pleased to find sand beneath them;
and may still be shocked to discover our cities were built with the bones of our ancestors,
and in a panic call back the wardens we had once chased from our windowsills.
We may seek, then, as city birds to live in the wide and wild open spaces,
to carve a slice of Nature’s bounty for ourselves,
but to pack and move there
is to leave behind everything we own
because there is no room for them, there, in the great expanses,
and it allows no burdens
save for the knowledge that a tree grows, as we do,
and transforms itself into something greater,
while a building springs fully-formed from the mind of its creator
and thus cannot be trusted.
To distinguish in this is to know God.
To travel out from the heart of a city is to travel into the heart of man;
to perch upon a branch is to know the heart of man.
If we follow the rivers of man’s blood to their spring,
and find the woods they wind through,
and travel the rivers’ eastern shores,
and drink from them as we need,
and not fear the leopard and the lion,
though they may shadow us on the opposite bank,
and discourage us,
then upon finding the bitter pools of our nature
we are obliged to settle there.
If there we find the seed of man’s heart and bury it beneath a pound of flesh,
and water it with crimson,
then five thousand years on,
when the great cities have become houses of dust for the dead to lay their heads in,
Yggdrassil will grow, again,
and so shall we.
