[poetry] in tribute to every day but tomorrow.
(are you there, god? it's me, exasperation.)
tonight i swung atop the highest beam in the drunk tank,
the ever sinking ship, the elusive legato in an ominous etude,
other seemingly excessive metaphors...
and i think it's time for a trade, a barter, dearest Fate;
for you have so much in your ever-growing
clearinghouse of fictional fixatives, and i so little on which to fixate:
offer me epoxies for this broken fishbowl,
slowly draining its contents while its inhabitants float about
as always unaware, wading around for apocalypse;
i will open my mouth and in return tender you bracings,
secrets of the damned, crepuscules of the miniscule
and all sizes and shapes of observance in between.
Fortune, let me be your cheapest eyes!
and to prove my worth, dear Oblivion, i offer a pittance,
a story of the visitation of smoke upon a fire escape
a remnant of a shard of ashen smoldered blight,
that after the bourbon sets in will seem terrifically beautiful:
"from this peak tonight, i counted one hundred sets of headlights
and three sets of televisions, but from my subjective viewpoint
i couldn't decide which flickered brightest."
is that not a fair exchange i propose?
revenge and repair... for remembrance?
we all make that choice when barbs we inflict
outrun the charlie horse of the victim running on fumes;
we care to recollect "the way this all began"
as a mountain of iniquity
when it was our magma shifted the plates beneath.
but even in the dullest glaze of the view
just south of the churning hollywood hills,
in the face of the flood and the earthquake and the airplane
swallowing us whole,
in the stiffness, the arthritis of thought on a rooftop
on which i decide i have neither the will nor need
to divine the future, i must admit to Fate:
"oh, how very little i can see!"
and because Fate cannot weep, i lightly smile and go downstairs.
tonight i swung atop the highest beam in the drunk tank,
the ever sinking ship, the elusive legato in an ominous etude,
other seemingly excessive metaphors...
and i think it's time for a trade, a barter, dearest Fate;
for you have so much in your ever-growing
clearinghouse of fictional fixatives, and i so little on which to fixate:
offer me epoxies for this broken fishbowl,
slowly draining its contents while its inhabitants float about
as always unaware, wading around for apocalypse;
i will open my mouth and in return tender you bracings,
secrets of the damned, crepuscules of the miniscule
and all sizes and shapes of observance in between.
Fortune, let me be your cheapest eyes!
and to prove my worth, dear Oblivion, i offer a pittance,
a story of the visitation of smoke upon a fire escape
a remnant of a shard of ashen smoldered blight,
that after the bourbon sets in will seem terrifically beautiful:
"from this peak tonight, i counted one hundred sets of headlights
and three sets of televisions, but from my subjective viewpoint
i couldn't decide which flickered brightest."
is that not a fair exchange i propose?
revenge and repair... for remembrance?
we all make that choice when barbs we inflict
outrun the charlie horse of the victim running on fumes;
we care to recollect "the way this all began"
as a mountain of iniquity
when it was our magma shifted the plates beneath.
but even in the dullest glaze of the view
just south of the churning hollywood hills,
in the face of the flood and the earthquake and the airplane
swallowing us whole,
in the stiffness, the arthritis of thought on a rooftop
on which i decide i have neither the will nor need
to divine the future, i must admit to Fate:
"oh, how very little i can see!"
and because Fate cannot weep, i lightly smile and go downstairs.