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: airplanes, AJB, anachronism, books, cliffs, films, God, His pipesmoke, my mother, the ocean, the Old Testament, the stars, the sun, Thomas Pynchon, traffic, trees
I can depend on my mother’s charity
and the stupidity of mankind…
Relying on the tides to rise and recede
and the birds to chirp
and the squirrels to nibble noisily on things
sitting in the branches of some tree
is infrequently rewarded with the opposite.
Even counting on the improbable
to occur
is safest, sometimes;
and most things tried are true;
and most lying words do
nothing but strike at reality’s flint
in futility and are doused by their own
unshakable impossibility.
Traffic will always mean dominoes of flaring taillights,
muttered curses and blaring horns
like kites of weathered strings and polymers
that carry the fumes and the din
and any doubts as to Man’s lot
up into the maw of the sky,
to float alongside God’s pipesmoke
and be returned to the earth
by great silver birds
that can be expected to land
but never on time.
These are things I can predict;
causes and effects with no affection
for quantum physics.
The short straw will always poke its head out above the others for us.
First breaths shall have their last breaths,
and good things their ends,
and millions of tiny absurdities shall assert their common nature
and shall certainly nibble noisily on certainties
dangling from our ears like great silver talismans
that can be expected to land at our feet
but only when least expected to.
I know that footsteps
can only lead to a corpse or a cliff
if they are followed to their good ends,
and I can tell you that if a screaming comes across the sky
it’s unlikely we’ll hear the sound when its great silver tip parts our skulls
like the Red Sea.
These are things I can safely predict
because I have read about them in books,
because I have watched them,
because I have induced them into forming patterns,
and made them into sensible accounts, and dependable things,
kites on strings
and great silver wings
and the years of a tree
spelled out in rings
and plain on the face of a tenth-generation squirrel
nibbling noisily on some things he stole off the abacus
I use to count off the animals I’ve seen on the backs of clouds,
the probabilities,
things I expect that never arrive on time,
the good endings of movies, the cliffhangers,
all our short straws,
all the patterns picked out from amongst storms of uncertainties,
and all the things I hate but know to be true.
And I count here on these fingers what I’m sure of:
the sun,
the stars,
and you.
