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.
We stood in the long line
of centuries
waiting for handouts
from another who supposedly knew
supposedly was new
an endowed agent
of the government of the soul
and we poor citizens
or expats
wanting a ticket home
or a warm meal
we waited in line
for our allotted portion
from the King of the Empty Scepter.
Some would spend it on lottery tickets
called the Tax on Fools
justified, they said,
because one declutched
is a kind of fool.
Others wondered about becoming chosen.
They knew it could not be caused.
One cannot then begin.
Near the front of the line
a man stood still
staring at a dandelion
growing in a crack in the pavement.
“More projection!”
came a voice from the back of the line.
“It is not like that!
Nothing grows there!”
he said gruffly.
“I have seen people see,”
came another voice,
“and that is not it at all.”