Civilization

The peaceful family,
Community,
Nation,
Are soon washed away,
Depending, as they do,
Not on human nature
But on culture,
History.

Eons of experiment, discovery and reflection—
Gone in a thousand days!
It can happen here,
It is happening here.
The sands collapse beneath our feet,
The very sands that Abraham walked,
Because we have not communicated our values,
Have not embodied them.

Civilization is risible,
The father of all jokes,
Until you lose it.
It is injustice piled upon injustice,
Until a greater injustice comes along.
Jeremiah,
Confucius,
Aristotle,
Francis.
We mock them all.
We are hopeless without them,
Children unparented.

Oh Zeus,
Don’t take it all away just yet!
Give us one more chance
To teach kindness and humility,
Respect for facts,
Wisdom.
Compelled to start again,
We might not get this far.
Perhaps this was the only chance.

Oh, to return to the old days
When we felt safe enough
To put a torch to it all!
But we were only cartoon characters then,
Sawing the branch that we sat on.
We must grow up now.

The Children Who Fell Through the Cracks

Here come the children who fell through the cracks;
Here come the whiz kids who went off the tracks,
In between sitters and saccharine snacks.
How will they pay us for being so lax,
Now they’ve come out to play?

Here come the babes that we lost in the wood,
Missing and miserable, misunderstood;
We did what we had to but not what we could;
It’s no use to say that we meant it for good.
Look at them, my how they’ve grown!

We are the pilgrims who went the wrong way,
Faithless and spent at the end of the day,
All of our visions befuddled and gray,
Plenty of learning and nothing to say,
Shining our light from the mud.

Here come the children who fell through the cracks,
Brooding in solitude, hunting in packs,
Showing up just when we’ve all turned our backs:
So many angles for launching attacks!
Now they’ve come out to play.

Our Heaven

Here in America,
We’re all going to Heaven
Not because we deserve it,
But because we are entitled to it;
Such is our creed.
Heaven must be within reach of the majority,
Appeal to the median voter,
The average citizen,
Carrying an average burden,
Making the average number of complaints,
Being cruel only rarely,
And kind only superficially.
Heaven sanctifies moderation.
If saints do exist,
In our Heaven they will live a marginalized existence,
As despised eccentrics;
The exception and not the rule.

You might think our Heaven a humdrum sort of place,
But it isn’t,
Because the amenities
And the service
Are extraordinary:
The pillows are that soft,
The music is adorable,
And you can fly,
Without even a jetpack,
Simply by willing it--
Whoosh!
It’s like living in the best possible hotel,
In the best possible amusement park,
Surrounded by people who, inexplicably, think you're awesome.
Heaven is Vegas on steroids,
And who wouldn’t want that?
Heaven is like being stupendously rich,
But without being miserable,
Like so many of the wealthy on earth are.
Otherwise, why have a God at all?
You can see Vegas from Calvary.
And we are all going.
Gee whiz, what fun!

New Roses

In bars,
Factories,
Forgotten villages;
Through rain,
Wind,
Snow;
Standing at stoplights;
Or going from car to car,
Trying not to get hit,
I have hustled many roses
Down the avenues of the dead.

I sold my roses to young men,
Who gave them to their sweethearts;
I sold my roses to married men,
Who handed them to prostitutes;
I sold my roses to little girls,
Who presented them to their mothers.

Sometimes the dead were gracious and thanked me for my roses;
More often they were hostile,
Or the roses themselves perished,
And joined them.
The blood of the dead
Reddened my roses;
Their thorns
Pierced the living.
I kept up the hustle.

I used to sell my roses for God.
I have new roses now,
But no God to sell them for;
I park them in a cheap corner of the market,
And wait.


“I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.”
Charles Bukowski, Consummation of Grief

For the Aliens

This one’s for the aliens,
So far away,
Who have so few poems written about them,
Though I’d like to think that they’d be cultured enough
To appreciate it
If we bothered.
So far away
That we can probably never reach them,
Nor they us;
But we can think of each other,
Like sailors on different oceans whose routes never cross.
Perhaps the aliens have more of a handle on it all,
Or at least some of them do,
Since there must be billions of races of them,
Unless none at all,
In which case,
They will not be wondering about our poems.
We can still wonder about theirs though,
Because they’re that far away
That the ones they haven’t written
Are just as interesting as the ones they have.

God Who Cannot Be

A God dwells within me—
The God who cannot be.
He offers no eternal life
But only a palpable sense
Of solidarity with all people,
All conscious beings.
He watches over my shoulder,
The God who cannot be;
He knows my inmost dreams.
He is imagination,
Like steel and rock,
But He cheers me on,
And gives me wisdom,
Assurance,
Grace,
Sometimes correction too.
Here he is,
The God who cannot be,
Ignoring all evidence to the contrary—
Not even offended by it.
He is unmoved,
Unaffected even by His own nonexistence;
He has no inclination help my unbelief,
Or otherwise cross my palm with silver.
We wait it out:
Me here,
Him here—
God who cannot be,
Till death us do part,
In preposterous equilibrium.

The Young Man’s Reply

Dear Will, these pretty sonnets that you sent
Were ordered and created all in vain;
I’m of a downcast, melancholy bent—
All thoughts of procreation I disdain.
Though some do say I’m blessed with looks and wit,
The dullest blade might bear a burnished hilt;
Within me, there’s a gloom I can’t remit,
That swamps the praise of those who prize mere gilt.
I’ll not supply another girl or boy
To brave life’s ceaseless turmoils and deceits,
To struggle in a world I don’t enjoy,
Whose fruits are shallow triumphs, deep defeats.
Let’s leave the risks and toils of screeching birth
To those more prone to nurture hope and mirth.

Children of Darkness, Children of Light

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Children of one cryptic womb;
Dancing together,
Concealing the spite,
Furtively watching the room.

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Glances won’t tell who is who;
Follow the fiddle,
And have some more wine,
Everyone’s looking at you.

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Waltzing in endless dispute:
Which is the parasite,
Virtue or guile?
The benefactor or the brute?

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Everyone toeing the line.
How will the balance
Be broken at last?
Will it be chance or design?

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Speaking their piece to the court:
Light gets the blessing
And solemn acclaim,
But darkness wins all the support.

Knock Me Down With a Feather

You could knock me back down with a feather,
Or shrivel me up with a glance;
I feel a bit under the weather,
But people still want me to dance.
So, just let me know what your wish is,
Enough with the hullabaloo;
Or send me to sleep with the fishes,
I really don’t mind if I do.

Just grind me to dust with your pestle,
Then blow me away with one breath,
Or lead me where rattlesnakes nestle,
Below in the valley of death.
I haven’t a reason for crowing,
Or even a wing for my prayer;
Today, I don’t know where I’m going,
Tomorrow, I won’t even care.

My body is clumsy, not agile,
My mind gets more spongy, less crisp;
The life that we lead is so fragile,
We waft in the will-o'-the-wisp.
But though I’m all hat and no cattle,
I do what I can, by and large,
So, prop me back up for the battle:
The enemy’s ready to charge.

Corridors

Corridors are tunnels
That we build above the ground,
Between the present and the future,
The known and the unknown.
Corridors are rooms to which Time has been added:
They must be passed through, endured.
In dreams, we find ourselves inside them,
Panicked;
Running against the clock;
Trapped between the observable and the hidden;
Bewildered by constantly shifting connections,
While striving desperately to reach some crucial goal.
Time is always of the essence—
Time that lurks in corridors,
Clutching its silver baseball bat.

Awakened,
We have clocks to remind us
That we are late for something,
But not what we are late for.
The second hands move too fast for us;
The hours too slow.
The satanic, black minute hand is the worst,
With its tantalizing, almost perceptible movements,
Which seem to say that Time is barely out of our grasp,
Like water in a nightmare of thirst.
The brutal Time that persecutes us in our dreams
Is the deranged henchman
Of this dull time that regulates
The monotonous tick-tock of our days.

Yes, all clocks say only one thing:
“You are late!”
But there’s ultimately nothing to be late for,
Except the clock itself,
With its circular reasoning.
The Earth turns and makes its way around the Sun:
There is no late in Astronomy.
Clocks lie to us.
What tyrannizes us is not Nature’s time but civilization’s.

Another dream.
Now we are in a mineshaft—
A different kind of corridor.
We trudge into pitch black,
Toward gold, or disaster.
We see a light:
Is it daylight,
Or something massive hurtling toward us?
What we really want it to be is a lantern,
Swung by a friend.
Miners withstand corridors far worse than ours.
Why is it that they do not all go mad?
Camaraderie.
Brotherhood.
Fellowship.
Those who walk gentler corridors—
The air-conditioned, well-lit, antiseptic
Corridors of power—
Lose their minds quite often,
For want of the same.

Corridors are rooms
In Halloween dress up.
Are we going to let them frighten us,
Or are we going to party?

Walking on the Sun

If you and I were to hike around the perimeter of the Sun,
Covering thirty miles a day,
It would take us 250 years;
By the time we returned to our starting point,
Everything would have changed.
We can never really know the Sun.

A photographer out on the sea
Records only fragmentary glimpses.
Observing his photos, he might imagine that he knows the ocean,
But that would be foolish:
It is too vast.

With a powerful enough microscope,
You could spend your whole life
Studying a single dust mite
And never be finished.
Even the tiniest things are too big for us.

The brain collects snapshots of the self,
Which it tapes together,
And declares, “This is me!”
It isn’t.

Our mind cannot fully apprehend itself—
It is too small,
And too big!
We are bigger than the Sun,
Bigger than the ocean.
We are infinite.
You can never know yourself
Because you are too big for yourself.
The oracle lied.

It’s well known that we only experience reality indirectly,
As our consciousness recreates it.
Go to the Grand Canyon and what do you see?
Only you.
Look up at the night sky—
That’s you out there.
Under that microscope—
More of you than you could ever explore.
The Sun?
You too, every mile of it.

The smell of fresh bread,
The taste of honey,
The softness of cotton,
The notes of the scale,
The colors of the rainbow,
Are all you—
The legacy of millions of years of evolution.

Just as you can never see anything on TV except the TV’s own light,
You can never experience anything in your mind except the activity of that same mind.

Yet, we intersect with others,
Whose senses derive from the same origins.
On different screens,
We can all watch the same events;
In different minds,
We all see the same stars.
Your Sun is my Sun.
The waters of mighty oceans mingle.

We can never know ourselves,
But we can spark others,
Who are also infinite,
Igniting flames of mutual recognition and celebration.

Peace of Mind

Though peace of mind is everyone’s desire,
With calm and cool reflection it would seem
That hope of its attainment must require
A basis of sufficient self-esteem,
And this in turn on character must rest—
On wisdom, kindness, fortitude, restraint—
So, those who view contentment as their quest,
Should try to keep their conduct free of taint.
Wherever in this lifetime you might go,
There’s just one simple precept to employ:
The honest life’s the only way we know
Of nurturing a lasting sense of joy.
At any cost, stay faithful to your virtue—
Your dignity, in that case, can’t desert you.