Poetry in Search of the Way

At retail counters everywhere
medical and cosmetic
intellectual and prophetic
people want to know
“What is wrong with me?”

In answer come the
counterfeit coinages of a dying empire
whose very merchants would rather receive
money from somewhere else
because tin has taken the place of silver
and the platitudes give no lift
to the wings of inner destiny
that wants only to overlap
the outer world.

Self-help in a vibrating universe
intoned from the Nothing
like a sacred Vedic mantra?

Listening to the collisions,
dust and waves crashing over
a foreign fruit, bitter and complete,
or a punch
catching you in the teeth,

inundated with private maladies
belonging to you and everyone,
an influenza of the soul,
convalescence acted out
on a curtainless stage with props and poison,
the fountains of human life, the impossible
spiderweb of voices in the ears of the mind:
how a lover should feel and move
how a friend should listen and talk,
the painted hierarchies
of gentrified cavemen
strung like beads on an abacus
of  social rewards,
a frightening calculus,
a mathematics of violence
using only imaginary numbers,

could we find a place there
among the decadent equations,
a settling of weight without gravity,
exiting the cave as ones in full recollection,
no longer troglodyte criminals
but thieves of fire,
dancers to crystalline music,
an internal conductor conducting
smithereens of heavenly jazz
floating, bulging, proud,
like sea spray or soap bubbles
their prismatic surfaces
holding nothing but air
fragrant as it is with the cries of dying
whales?

The players pick the tune up,
its soft middle draping like a cat
over their hands playing,
feet marching, improvising an eternal
return

knowing this too
is a lie.